Routines, Hierarchies of Problems, Procedural Behaviour: Some Evidence From Experiments

A laboratory experiment was performed as replication of the original one created by M. Cohen and P. Bacdayan at Michigan University. It consists in a twopersons card game played by a large number of pairs, whose actions are stored in a computer’s memory. In order to achieve the final goal each player must discover his sub-goals, and must coordinate his action with the partner’s one. The game therefore involves the division of knowledge and cooperation among players, and gives rise to the emergence of organizational routines. It is suggested that the organizational routines, i.e. the sequences of patterned actions which lead to the realization of the final goal, cannot be fully memorized because of their variety and number. It is shown that players do not possess all the knowledge needed by an hypothetical supervisor to play the best strategy: they generally explore only a limited part of the space of the potential rules, and therefore learn and memorize a simple, bounded set of personal" meta-rules. These meta-rules