I think that I’m more optimistic about action set restriction than you are. In particular, I view the available action set as a fact about what actions the human is considering and choosing between, rather than a statement of what things are physically possible for the human to do. In this sense, action set restriction seems to me to be a vital part of the story of human bounded rationality, although clearly not the entire story (since we need to know why the action set is restricted in the way that it is).
I agree it’s part of the story, but only a part. And real humans don’t act as if there was a set of actions of size n, and they could consider all of them with equal ease. Sometimes humans have much smaller action sets, sometimes they can produce completely unexpected actions, and most of the time we have a pretty small set of obvious actions and a much larger set of potential actions we might be able to think up at the cost of some effort.
I guess I like the hierarchical planning-type view that our ‘available action sets’ can vary in time, and that one of them can be ‘try to think of more possible actions’. Of course, not only do you need to specify the hierarchical structure here, you also need to model the dynamics of action discovery, which is a pretty daunting task.
I think that I’m more optimistic about action set restriction than you are. In particular, I view the available action set as a fact about what actions the human is considering and choosing between, rather than a statement of what things are physically possible for the human to do. In this sense, action set restriction seems to me to be a vital part of the story of human bounded rationality, although clearly not the entire story (since we need to know why the action set is restricted in the way that it is).
I agree it’s part of the story, but only a part. And real humans don’t act as if there was a set of actions of size n, and they could consider all of them with equal ease. Sometimes humans have much smaller action sets, sometimes they can produce completely unexpected actions, and most of the time we have a pretty small set of obvious actions and a much larger set of potential actions we might be able to think up at the cost of some effort.
I guess I like the hierarchical planning-type view that our ‘available action sets’ can vary in time, and that one of them can be ‘try to think of more possible actions’. Of course, not only do you need to specify the hierarchical structure here, you also need to model the dynamics of action discovery, which is a pretty daunting task.