Teoría general de las decisiones

Abstract

Starting from Simon's (1976) opposition between procedural and substantive rationality, the paper addresses the question whether it is possible to characterize the former in general terms, and discusses the problem of overcoming the aforementioned opposition. It tries to show, by means of the concept of a general decision structure, that even though it is not possible to characterize procedural rationality in an exhaustive and fully general way, at least it is possible to introduce a scheme within which it is possible to pose problems of procedural rationality, or even to postulate sorne axiomatic restrictions for the same, It is not hard to see that substantive rationality is a particular case of this scheme, namely, the case in which it is possible to measure certain theoretical parameters and adopt as rules of decision certain classical principIes grounded upon the concept of expected utility. The paper does not provide, however, the details that show how the special theory is obtained out of the more general one.
[A. G. S.]