Quotes About Satisficing

Most of us have adopted a strategy to get along called satisficing, a term coined by the Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon, one of the founders of the fields of organization theory and information processing. Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough. For things that don't matter critically, we make a choice that satisfies us and is deemed sufficient.

A recognition of the impossibility of exact perfection lay behind the work of a few economists, such as Herbert Simon's satisficing, Ronald Coase's transaction costs, George Shackle's and Israel Kirzner's reaffirmation of the old Yogi Berra jest: it's hard to predict, especially about the future.

Whereas economic man maximises, selects the best alternative from among all those available to him, his cousin, administrative man, satisfices, looks for a course of action that is satisfactory or 'good enough'.

The alternative to maximizing is to be a satisficer. To satisfice is to settle for something that is good enough and not worry about the possibility that there might be something better. A satisficer has criteria and standards. She searches until she finds an item that meets those standards, and at that point, she stops.

When Nobel Prize–winning economist and psychologist Herbert Simon initially introduced the idea of "satisficing" in the 1950s, he suggested that when all the costs (in time, money, and anguish) involved in getting information about all the options are factored in, satisficing is, in fact, the maximizing strategy.

So, once again, satisficing appears the better way to maintain one's autonomy in the face of an overwhelming array of choices.

In reality, though, most of the time we don't choose the best option—we choose the first reasonable option, a strategy known as satisficing.

Simon wanted a word to describe not getting the very best option but one that was good enough.