Librarians at the Bounds of Rationality: How Bounded Rationality Can Help Us Help Others |
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| Authors: | Samantha Schmehl Hines |
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| Institution: | Mansfield Library , University of Montana , Missoula, Montana |
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| Abstract: | “Bounded rationality” is a concept used in the social sciences to help identify and predict how individuals make decisions. An offshoot of rational choice theory, bounded rationality accounts for the fact that completely rational decisions are not feasible in practice and states that individuals use heuristics, or rules based on past experiences and information, to make decisions. The disciplinary home of bounded rationality is behavioral economics, but this concept is becoming more popular in other branches of the social sciences to help explain and predict human behavior. We can benefit from looking at librarianship from the perspective of bounded rationality, which has been done infrequently in our professional literature. Bounded rationality can explain how our users create heuristic shortcuts to simplify the decision-making process and deal with the multitude of choices and information available. If we can understand and harness these heuristics, we will better understand how our users make decisions and better determine how we can assist them. Moreover, librarians could also be said to make decisions using bounded rationality. Tasks such as collection development and the reference interview involve the use of heuristics on our part to process all the information we have available to us. Becoming aware of this process can provide for a more mindful and efficient way of making choices. This concept article will describe bounded rationality, apply bounded rationality to aspects of library service, and discuss the possible use of the concept as an assessment tool for our services. |
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| Keywords: | bounded rationality rational choice behavior assessment user behavior decision-making |
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