Quotes from “The Origin of Predictable Behavior”

By Ronald Heiner (1983)

• Appropriately structured behavioral rules will not necessarily arise [from selection]. Rather, they will evolve to the extent that selection processes quickly eliminate poorly administered behavior. This will more likely occur when agents are involved in highly competitive interactions that themselves indirectly result from scarcity. However, if weak selection processes are present, relatively vulnerable or dysfunctional behavior may evolve.#
  EvolutionNorms
• In general, further evolution toward social interdependence will require institutions that permit agents to know about successively smaller fractions of the larger social environment. That is, institutions must evolve which enable each agent in the society to know less and less about the behavior of other agents and about the complex interdependencies generated by their interaction.#
  Institutions
• Institutions are regularities in the interaction between agents that arise because of uncertainty in deciphering the complex interdependencies created by these interactions.#
  Institutions
• In general, evolutionary processes will not generate simulations to optimizing behavior. Rather, they will tend to produce rules that systematically restrict the flexibility of behavior compared to that which would be exhibited by a full optimizer in the absence of uncertainty.#
  Evolution
• Allowing flexibility to react to information or to select actions will not necessarily improve performance if there is uncertainty about how to use that information or about when to select particular actions.#
  Psychology
• Fully optimizing agents responding with complete flexibility to every perturbation in their environment would not produce easily recognizable patterns, but rather would be extremely difficult to predict. Thus, it is in the limits to maximizing that we will find the origin of predictable behavior… Evolutionary selection processes will in general not produce approximations to optimizing behavior. Rather, predictable behavior will evolve only to the extent that uncertainty prevents agents from successfully maximizing.#
  Evolution

Axel Leijonhufvud, Information and Coordination (1981)

• General equilibrium theorists have at their command an impressive array of proven techniques for modelling systems that “always work well”. Keynesian economists have experience with modelling systems that “never work”. But, as yet, no one has the recipe for modelling systems that function pretty well most of the time but sometimes work very badly to coordinate economic activities.#
  EconomicsMethodology

Barry Staw, “Threat Rigidity Effects in Organizational Behavior: A Multilevel Analysis” (1981)

• The number of output discriminations of a system (i.e., its behavioral repertoire) is limited by the variety of information inherent in its input.#
  Information