Resource-rational analysis formalizes bounded rationality as expected utility minus an explicit compute-cost term, not as a dynamic-programming recursion

The formal core of resource-rational analysis is a penalized objective, stated in the paper's own equations. Classical rational analysis defines optimal behaviour as maximizing expected utility over outcomes (Equation 1, following von Neumann & Morgenstern 1944). Resource-rational analysis replaces this with an objective that scores a heuristic by "the utility of the judgment, decision, or belief update" minus "the total opportunity cost of investing the cognitive resources ... used or blocked by the heuristic ... for the duration of its execution" (Equation 3). Its uncertainty-generalized form (Equation 4) conditions on the limited information i actually available to the agent rather than on the true environment E. The resource-rational heuristic is the one that maximizes this utility-minus-cost quantity.

The five-step method operationalizes the objective: posit a class of feasible algorithms and their resource costs, then derive "the algorithm in this class that optimally trades off resources and approximation accuracy." Bounded rationality is thereby recast not as a departure from optimization but as optimization of a different objective — one with an explicit price on computation.

The shape of this formalism matters for the vault's genealogy question. An expected-utility functional with an additive opportunity-cost penalty is not the Bellman recursion of Werbos's approximate dynamic programming; the two formalize "optimize under limited resources" by different mathematics. This is the formal counterpart to the historiographic finding that the paper cites Horvitz and Russell's bounded optimality, not Werbos, as its antecedent (claim-resource-rational-analysis-descends-from-bounded-optimality-not-werbos-adp), and it feeds the combined verdict in observation-resource-rational-analysis-confirms-anderson-leg-not-werbos-leg. The self-described lineage to Anderson is set out in claim-resource-rational-analysis-extends-andersons-rational-analysis.