Winter School - Bounded Rationality, January 09–15 2017, India

About the Winter School

The Max Planck Institute for Human Development in collaboration with the T A Pai Management Institute brings together the Winter School on Bounded Rationality at Manipal, Karnataka, India. The aim is to foster understanding the process and quality of human decisions and to apply this knowledge to the real world, enabling people to make better decisions in a complex world. To this end, it offers a unique forum for decision-making scholars and researchers from various disciplines to share their approaches, discuss their research and applications, and inspire each other.

Organizing Institutions

T A Pai Management Institute (TAPMI)

The TAPMI is among the leading management institutes in India, located in the international university town of Manipal, Karnataka. TAPMI is founded by the visionary, Late Shri. Tonse Ananth Pai (T. A. Pai). TAPMI’s mission is—"to excel in post-graduate management education, research and practice”. With academic rigour and experiential learning at its core, TAPMI’s programmes include Post-Graduate Diploma in Management (PGDM), PGDM-Healthcare, and PGDM-Banking and Financial Services, a Ph. D. programme in management, as well an 18-month joint TAPMI and University of Dubai MBA programme. TAPMI is the second B-School in India to get global accreditation by the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB).

Max Planck Institute for Human Development (MPIB)

The MPIB is an internationally renowned social science research institute located in Berlin, Germany. The MPIB is dedicated to the study of human development and education. Researchers of various disciplines—including psychology, education, sociology, medicine, history, economics, computer science, as well as mathematics—work together on interdisciplinary projects at the institute. The research questions they examine include how people make effective decisions in a complex world, what effects the institution of school has on children's development and learning processes, how the interaction between behaviour and brain function changes over the lifespan, as well as how human emotions change in a historical context and how they have affected the course of history itself.

The TAPMI-MPI Winter School’s Goal

The MPIB conducts a summer institute on bounded rationality every year at Berlin, participated by scholars and students from around the world. In collaboration with TAPMI, MPIB is bringing the concept to India with a Winter School on Bounded Rationality in the second week of January 2017. This is to educate and encourage stronger participation by Asian/Indian scholars and students. The school aims to provide an interdisciplinary platform for sharing knowledge, discussing the importance and applications of simple solutions to complex problems, and fostering research collaborations between participating scholars and students. Participants will be introduced to research from a diverse set of fields organized under the umbrella of bounded rationality. This winter School will organise many activities—such as seminars, talks, panel discussions, workshops, poster sessions, and social events will take place—and allowing participants to learn and develop new ideas in their respective research fields facilitated by frequent interactions with the teaching faculty members.

Bounded Rationality

What do we mean by bounded rationality? In short, it refers to how the mind reasons under limited time, information, and computational power. However, the logic and probability theory assume perfect knowledge about the relevant features of the world, whereas bounded rationality seeks to specify simple step-by-step rules (heuristics) that function well in an uncertain and complex world.

Two terms closely related to bounded rationality are: “social rationality” and “ecological rationality”.

Social Rationality

Human problem-solving may also occur in interaction with others. Decisions may have an interactive nature and what is deemed irrational in isolation might be rational in interaction with others. The study of social rationality examines how judgment and decision processes can adapt to these interconnected social environments. This often involves going out of the lab into the field to study problems that occur whenever multiple people in medicine, law, business, and politics have to make decisions.

Ecological Rationality

Another essential concept, “ecological rationality”, refers to the idea that decision mechanisms are adapted to the ecology of the decision maker. The ecology refers to the informational structure within the environment in which the mind makes a decision. There need not be one all-purpose strategy, but rather a set of decision strategies that are specifically adapted to certain types of ecologies. Therefore, the study of ecological rationality explores how these mechanisms exploit the structure of the information in the environment. Through evolution, learning, and culture, a repertoire of specialized cognitive mechanisms (metaphorically known as the "adaptive toolbox") has emerged. These fast and frugal heuristics generally consist of three building blocks: search rule, stopping rule, and decision making.

Organizers

Shenghua Luan & Kavitha Ranganathan

Keynote Adress 

Gerd Gigerenzer

Director of the "Center for Adaptive Behavior and Cognition" and the "Harding Center for Risk Literacy" at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany.

Financial Assistance & Further Questions

There is no fee thanks to the generous support of our sponsors. Participants’ boarding and lodging shall be taken care of, and their travel costs can be partially reimbursed.

For further questions e-mail us at winterschool@tapmi.edu.in

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