Personal note: I experienced great difficulties in describing a human (inter)action or even finding some occurence where the Rational Actor Model could be applied. It seemed to me that the way people rationalize things tends to always be bounded, either because of lack of information, or lack of computational capabilities to effectively rank alternatives etc. Hence, in light of these thoughts, i decided to represent the natural biome (ecosystems of all levels) as an "organization" with a common goal and a processing of information that approaches the Rational Actor Model. I hope it isn't outside of scope once again..
Natural ecosystems are characterised by high variability of organisms, genetic material, that ultimately forms (bio)diversity. This natural “library” of all available information allows for the systems to overcome disturbances with using that information to either return to their previous state or to progress towards a more advantageous solution (alternative). In ecosystems, selection isn't based only in the right physical or chemical material selected, but in the right “functional” material too. So evolution seems to be goal oriented and coordination on (possibly?) 100% basis is accomplished through objective limiting criteria, like mass balances, laws of thermodynamics etc. So ecosystems, in my opinion, can represent a form of a Rational Actor Model, a kind of ideal situation of (systemic) behaviour.
Natural ecosystems are characterised by high variability of organisms, genetic material, that ultimately forms (bio)diversity. This natural “library” of all available information allows for the systems to overcome disturbances with using that information to either return to their previous state or to progress towards a more advantageous solution (alternative). In ecosystems, selection isn't based only in the right physical or chemical material selected, but in the right “functional” material too. So evolution seems to be goal oriented and coordination on (possibly?) 100% basis is accomplished through objective limiting criteria, like mass balances, laws of thermodynamics etc. So ecosystems, in my opinion, can represent a form of a Rational Actor Model, a kind of ideal situation of (systemic) behaviour.
In societal systems on the other hand, we can observe in many cases, a time shift in reaction to objective criteria, and high dependency to subjective criteria like regulations, politics and policies, market mechanisms, media etc. One very important characteristic of societal systems is apparent in both of those cases, the level of uncertainty in the system. Apart from physical restrictions of the ecosystem, lack of information due to cost, computational capabilities or even cultural and ethical restrictions, makes it possible for disadvantageous, “irrational”, alternatives to be prefered. Also manipulation of the available information is crucial. Marketing techniques can in a great extent decide conflicts between two competing products, focusing more on consumer psychology than enhancing the actual products against the competition.
This bounded rationality in social interactions, is expressed quite well in the triumph of the VHS standar in the 1980's, over the technically superior Betamax standard. A number of reasons leading to this result can be identified, market mechanisms that effectively promoted the standards, lack of information on the organizational level (as Sony wasn't aware of the VHS standard being researched and developed when she signed a deal of information sharing with Matsushita, the company behind VHS), economic criteria (price wars aimed at promoting the products), marketing alliances (the company with the most supported titles would have the upper hand) and lack of (mostly technical) information on the consumer side, which made the objective ranking of the alternatives almost impossible. The fact that even news media surrounding the conflict, had considerable gaps of information in their descriptions of both systems, is indicative of the boundaries human interactions can impose to decision-making.
This bounded rationality in social interactions, is expressed quite well in the triumph of the VHS standar in the 1980's, over the technically superior Betamax standard. A number of reasons leading to this result can be identified, market mechanisms that effectively promoted the standards, lack of information on the organizational level (as Sony wasn't aware of the VHS standard being researched and developed when she signed a deal of information sharing with Matsushita, the company behind VHS), economic criteria (price wars aimed at promoting the products), marketing alliances (the company with the most supported titles would have the upper hand) and lack of (mostly technical) information on the consumer side, which made the objective ranking of the alternatives almost impossible. The fact that even news media surrounding the conflict, had considerable gaps of information in their descriptions of both systems, is indicative of the boundaries human interactions can impose to decision-making.
This behaviour, apparent in societal systems, leads to lack of coordination, which in turn leads to conflicting interests, practices and initiatives, finally creating most of the excessive pressure our society is applying to its environment. It even seems to skew the common (objective) goal, all members of this society, should have when confronted with important decisions concerning sustaining the natural environment.
