Bounded Rationality

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Overview

Bounded rationality asks how decision-makers choose when they cannot consider every option or compute an ideal answer. Approaches include satisficing and attention-based heuristics, limited-depth simulation and Bayesian learning, level-k models of strategic behavior, and methods that allocate computation according to its expected value. Researchers test these models in settings such as unfamiliar games, consumer choice, information navigation, network coordination, human-robot control, and shared-budget reasoning tasks. A central challenge is capturing realistic limits without losing predictive accuracy, while determining when limited resources should be spent on better reasoning, more information, or simpler decisions.

Latest papers

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16 papers1 paper in the last four weeks, against 2 the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

  1. Mathematics for and by human cognition: A resource-rational search for bottlenecks in problem-solving

    Sep 28, 2026Sneha AenuguMathematical ReasoningBounded Rationality

    Salk Institute of Biological Studies La Jolla, CA

  2. Adaptive Shared Control with Online Bounded-Rational Human Behavior Estimation

    Sep 9, 2026Henry Ascencio Trejo, Roel Pieters, Gokhan AlcanHuman-Robot CollaborationShared Autonomy

    Faculty of Engineering and Natural Sciences, Tampere University, Tampere, Finland

  3. Propose to Learn, Learn to Propose: Evaluability-Aware Assistance under Bounded Rationality

    Sep 2, 2026Yifan Zhu, Sammie Katt, Samuel KaskiActive Preference LearningHuman-AI Interaction

    1ELLIS Institute Finland · Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Finland · Department of Computer Science, University of Manchester, United Kingdom

  4. Evolutionary Recurrent Decision Model in Developing Adaptive and Maladaptive Behaviors

    Aug 25, 2026Andrew HuComputational Cognitive ModelingHuman Behavior Simulation

  5. R3R^3-Bench: LLMs Struggle with Resource-Rational Reasoning under Shared Budgets

    Aug 17, 2026Peisong Wang, Zhiwei Ma, Bowen Liu +6LLM ReasoningAI Agent Benchmarks

    The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) · The University of Hong Kong · Hunyuan Team, Tencent

  6. Artificial collectives of specialists and generalists excel at different tasks

    Jun 18, 2026John Meluso, Laurent Hébert-Dufresne, Christoph Riedl +1Multi-Agent CoordinationMulti-Agent Collaboration

    Cornell University · University of Vermont · Santa Fe Institute +1

  7. Beyond Rational Illusion: Behaviorally Realistic Strategic Classification

    May 19, 2026Xinpeng Lv, Yunxin Mao, Renzhe Xu +11Strategic ClassificationProspect Theory

    College of Computer, National University of Defense Technology, Changsha, China · Institute for Theoretical Computer Science, Shanghai University of Finance and Economics, Shanghai, China · State Key Lab of General AI, School of Intelligence Science and Technology, Peking University, Beijing, China +3

  8. Boundedly Rational Meta-Learning in Sequential Consumer Choice

    May 15, 2026Mehrzad Khosravi, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Hema YoganarasimhanMeta-LearningSequential Decision Making

    University of Washington

  9. Bounded-Rationality, Hedging, and Generalization

    May 14, 2026Pedro A. OrtegaInformation-Theoretic Generalization BoundsBounded Rationality

    Daios Technologies

  10. Modeling Bounded Rationality in Drug Shortage Pharmacists Using Attention-Guided Dynamic Decomposition

    May 13, 2026Yaniv Eliyahu Amiri, Noah Chicoine, Jacqueline Griffin +1Computational Cognitive ModelingClinical Decision-Making

    Khoury College of Computer Sciences, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA · Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA · Department of Psychology, Northeastern University, Boston, MA, USA

  11. A Cognitively Grounded Bayesian Framework for Misinformation Susceptibility

    May 10, 2026Pranava MadhyasthaComputational Cognitive ModelingBayesian Inference

    Dept. of Computer Science, City, University of London · The Alan Turing Institute

  12. Learning to Coordinate over Networks with Bounded Rationality

    Apr 9, 2026Zhewei Wang, Emrah Akyol, Marcos M. VasconcelosMulti-Agent CoordinationBounded Rationality

  13. Support Sufficiency as Consequence-Sensitive Compression in Belief Arbitration

    Apr 6, 2026Mark WalshAdaptive ControlBounded Rationality

  14. Modeling Trial-and-Error Navigation With a Sequential Decision Model of Information Scent

    Mar 12, 2026Xiaofu Jin, Yunpeng Bai, Antti OulasvirtaUser ModelingCognitive Modeling

    Aalto University, Finland · National University of Singapore, Singapore

  15. People use fast and flat simulation to reason about new games

    Oct 13, 2025Katherine M. Collins, Cedegao E. Zhang, Lionel Wong +6Computational Cognitive ModelingHuman Behavior Simulation

    Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, United States · Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, United States · University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom +3

  16. Learning in a Small/Big World

    Sep 24, 2020Benson Tsz Kin LeungDecision-Making under UncertaintyBounded Rationality

    Hong Kong Baptist University.