Satisficing is a decision-making strategy which attempts to meet criteria for adequacy, rather than identify an optimal solution. A satisficing strategy may often, in fact, be (near) optimal if the costs of the decision-making process itself, such as the cost of obtaining complete information, are considered in the outcome calculus.

Economics
In cybernetics, satisficing is optimization where all costs, including the cost of the optimization calculations and the cost of getting information for use in those calculations, are considered.
As a result, the eventual choice is usually sub-optimal as regards the main goal of the optimization, i.e. different from the optimum in the case that the costs of choosing are not taken into account.
Interestingly enough, within science fiction and artificial intelligence, the process of satisficing is traditionally seen as a sign of human behavior as opposed to brute force forms of computation. For example, in the game of chess played by HAL 9000 in the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, HAL adopts a satisficing move to defeat his opponent (Frank Poole).
In real life, during a 1997 game against Deep Blue, Garry Kasparov, after being defeated in a game where his computer opponent adopted a satisficing position, remarked that the computer was "playing like a human." Kasparov later explained that, when playing computers, chess masters could often defeat them by predicting the most "rational" move; however, satisficing made such prediction unreliable.
Reference: Klaus Krippendorff's "A Dictionary of Cybernetics".

Decision Making

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