His academic career started at the Polytechnic of Turin, continuing at the Faculty of Political Sciences (1965–1986) at the University of Trento (1987–2001), and then at Rome-based Libera Università Internazionale degli Studi Sociali Guido Carli (since 2005).

He is co-chairman with Jean Paul Fitoussi of the Herbert Simon Society and is founder and director, with Axel Leijonhufvud, of the Laboratory of Experimental and Computational Economics (CEEL, Trento).

Following his participation in European debate on the reform of university system ("Bologna process"), he has been the author of publications in the field of Higher Education policies.

[10] A parallel line is represented by the collaboration with Reinhard Selten (Nobel Prize 1994), again on the themes of bounded rationality, and by studies on Behavioural economics carried out in the last decade.

This phenomenon has been previously discovered in a particular setting by Abraham S. Luchins and defined "mechanization of thought",[13] where individuals remain locked into the procedure they have learnt, without reacting to new instances of the problem even when a new and better solution is evidently available.