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Epistemic Economics and Organization
Forms of Rationality and Governance for a Wiser Economy
By Anna Grandori
Series: Routledge Studies in Global Competition
To Be Published March 4th 2013 by Routledge
HB: 978-0-415-57565-2: $130.00 – £80.00 Discount Price: $104.00 - £64.00
This book proposes a new approach to economics, management and organization that should help in
making economic organization ‘wise’, ‘innovative’ and ‘robust’ in an uncertain and risky world. Although the
modern economy and society is ‘knowledge intensive’, Anna Grandori argues that the dominant economic,
organizational and behavioural models neglect to a large extent the problem of valid knowledge
construction and effective knowledge governance.
The book integrates inputs from economics and behavioural science with insights from the philosophy of
knowledge to define new micro-foundations: neither a calculative, deductive and omniscient ‘rational actor’;
nor an experiential, adaptive and biased ‘behavioural actor’; but a knowledgeable and imaginative
‘epistemic actor’.
The implications for contracts and organizations, sustained also by insights from law, are shown to be far
reaching, including a new view of the nature of the firm as an entity-establishing agreement under which to
discover uses of resources under uncertainty, and as a democratic institution.
Table of Contents
INDEX
Part I. Micro foundations: from bounded to epistemic rationality
1. ‘Models of man’ and the ‘rationality divide’
2. Savage and Simon revisited: how both ‘maximizing’ and ‘satisficing’ simplify problems
3. Endogeneizing assumptions: contingent rationality
4. The ‘psychology’ versus the ‘logic’ of judgment and discovery
5. The logic of economic discovery: An epistemic decision model
Part II. Contracts and the firm beyond transactions: the governance of knowledge and association
1. Contract incompleteness and the rationality divide
2. How both relational contracting and authority relations have limited capacity of governing uncertainty
3. Contracting without knowing
4. Ten theses on the nature of the firm
5. Relations with extant theories of the firm
PART III. Organization design beyond comparative assessment: the discovery of forms, and forms for
discovery
1. Organization forms and forms of rationality
2. How both markets and hierarchies decompose problems
3. Missing alternatives: non decomposable systems and panarchic governance
4. From ‘discrete institutional alternatives’ to discrete coordination mechanisms
5. Instrumentally and epistemically rational coordination mechanisms
6. Combining mechanisms: complementarity and the design of structural heterogeneity
7. The negotiated discovery of organizational arrangements
8. Properties of robust economic organization in uncertain worlds
Conclusion
Anna Grandori is Professor of Business Organization at Bocconi University, Italy.
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