Revisiting the Logic of Consequences 181
high-reliability systems and most institutions in tightly coupled high-reliability
systems seldom or never experience unlikely events. When they do, they tend
to attribute systems failure to such exogenous forces as weather or acts of God.
Over time, those associated with such systems come to think of their systems as
more reliable than they are; when this happens, they tend to relax decision pro-
tocols and engage in risk-prone behavior (Epstein and O’Halloran 1996).
Th e September 11, 2001, terrorist airplane hijackings, which destroyed the
World Trade Center in New York City, damaged the Pentagon, and crashed
an airplane into the ground in Pennsylvania, illustrate a kind of high-reliability
rationality trap. To be sure, there have been airline accidents and criticisms of
air travel reliability and security. And there have been accidents (Perrow 1999).
But, however tragic these accidents have been, the magnitude of risk associated
with each separate accident, particularly when there were substantial periods be-
tween separate accidents, was not enough to prevent substantial deviation from
air travel security decision protocols. Signifi cant deviations from tightly coupled
high-reliability decision logic included little training of airport security screeners,
poor management of ramp security, extended systems of contracts and subcon-
tracts, lax management of these contracts, and disincentives for contractors to
report error (Commonwealth of Massachusetts 2001). Finally, and most impor-
tantly, because the events of September 11, 2001, were well beyond anyone’s ex-
perience, the possibility of such a tragedy was systematically discounted.
Th e popular literature in public administration in recent years has made
much of the desirability of decisionmakers to be entrepreneurial and willing to
take risks (Osborne and Gaebler 1992). Th e premise upon which risk-taking ad-
vice is based is that public organizations are bureaucratic, slow, wasteful, and
unresponsive. Unsaid in this premise is that most public organizations are sta-
ble, predictable, and reliable—at equilibrium. Greater risk taking as a decision
strategy trades institutional stability, predictability, and attention for the risk
that decisionmakers will make the right guesses regarding how the organization
can be made to change. Very oft en the risk-taking perspective is associated with
calls for reform.
Formal Testing of Bounded Rationality
Th ese bounded rationality generalizations, viewed from the logic of decision con-
sequences, form the basis of testable assertions subject to modeling and to ex-
perimental fi eld testing. Much of this scholarship is based on assumptions-based
institutional models and upon choice-making experiments in controlled settings.
Th is is a robust scholarship and a signifi cant body of research, too large to cover
here (Hirschleifer and Riley 1992; Krause 2003). Perhaps the most common com-
bination of decision modeling and experiments uses the prisoners’ dilemma, a
contrived heuristic, as follows: Two prisoners are accused of the same crime. Th ey
are interviewed separately. Each is rational, rationality defi ned as self-interest,