At its core, economics is about making decisions. In the history of economic thought, great intellectual prowess has been exerted toward devising exquisite theories of optimal decision making in situations of constraint, risk, and scarcity. Yet not all of our choices are purely logical, and so there is a longstanding tension between those emphasizing the rational and irrational sides of human behavior. One strand develops formal models of rational utility maximizing while the other draws on what behavioral science has shown about our tendency to act irrationally. In Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty, George G. Szpiro offers a new narrative of the three-century history of the study of decision making, tracing how crucial ideas have evolved and telling the stories of the thinkers who shaped the field. Szpiro examines economics from the early days of theories spun from anecdotal evidence to the rise of a discipline built around elegant mathematics through the past half century’s interest in describing how people actually behave. Considering the work of Locke, Bentham, Jevons, Walras, Friedman, Tversky and Kahneman, Thaler, and a range of other thinkers, he sheds light on the vast scope of discovery since Bernoulli first proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox. Presenting fundamental mathematical theories in easy-to-understand language, Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty is a revelatory history for readers seeking to grasp the grand sweep of economic thought.

This book outlines how to conduct a complete environmental risk assessment. The first part documents the psychology and philosophy of risk perception and assessment, introducing a taxonomy of uncertainty and the importance of context. It provides a critical examination of the use and abuse of expert judgement and goes on to outline approaches to hazard identification and subjective ranking that account for uncertainty and context. The second part of the book describes technical tools that can assist risk assessments to be transparent and internally consistent. These include interval arithmetic, ecotoxicological methods, logic trees and Monte Carlo simulation. These methods have an established place in risk assessments in many disciplines and their strengths and weaknesses are explored. The last part of the book outlines some new approaches, including p-bounds and information-gap theory, and describes how quantitative and subjective assessments can be used to make transparent decisions.

Risks are an integral part of complex, high-stakes decisions, and decisionmakers are faced with the unavoidable tasks of assessing risks and forming risk preferences. This is true for all decision domains, including financial, environmental, and foreign policy domains, among others. How well decisionmakers deal with risk affects, to a considerable extent, the quality of their decisions. This book provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the elements that influence risk judgments and preferences. The book has two dimensions: theoretical and comparative-historical. The study of risk-taking behavior has been dominated by the rational choice approach. Instead, the author adopts a socio-cognitive approach involving: a multivariate theory integrating contextual, cognitive, motivational, and personality factors that affect an individual decisionmaker's judgment and preferences; the social interaction and structural effects of the decisionmaking group and its organizational setting; and the role of cultural-societal values and norms that sanction or discourage risk taking behavior. The book's theoretical approach is applied and tested in five historical case studies of foreign military interventions. The richly detailed empirical data on the case studies make them, metaphorically speaking, an ideal laboratory for applying a process-tracing approach in studying judgment and decision processes at varying risk levels. The case studies analyzed are: U.S. interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 (both low risk); Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (moderate risk): U.S. intervention in Vietnam in 1964-68 (high risk); and Israel's intervention in Lebanon in 1982-83 (high risk).

Ellsberg elaborates on "Risk, Ambiguity, and the Savage Axioms" and mounts a powerful challenge to the dominant theory of rational decision in this book.

Risk assessment has become a dominant public policy tool for making choices, based on limited resources, to protect public health and the environment. It has been instrumental to the mission of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as well as other federal agencies in evaluating public health concerns, informing regulatory and technological decisions, prioritizing research needs and funding, and in developing approaches for cost-benefit analysis. However, risk assessment is at a crossroads. Despite advances in the field, risk assessment faces a number of significant challenges including lengthy delays in making complex decisions; lack of data leading to significant uncertainty in risk assessments; and many chemicals in the marketplace that have not been evaluated and emerging agents requiring assessment. Science and Decisions makes practical scientific and technical recommendations to address these challenges. This book is a complement to the widely used 1983 National Academies book, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government (also known as the Red Book). The earlier book established a framework for the concepts and conduct of risk assessment that has been adopted by numerous expert committees, regulatory agencies, and public health institutions. The new book embeds these concepts within a broader framework for risk-based decision-making. Together, these are essential references for those working in the regulatory and public health fields.

Economists, decision analysts, management scientists, and others have long argued that government should take a more scientific approach to decision making. Pointing to various theories for prescribing and rational izing choices, they have maintained that social goals could be achieved more effectively and at lower costs if government decisions were routinely subjected to analysis. Now, government policy makers are putting decision science to the test. Recent government actions encourage and in some cases require government decisions to be evaluated using formally defined principles 01' rationality. Will decision science pass tbis test? The answer depends on whether analysts can quickly and successfully translate their theories into practical approaches and whether these approaches promote the solution of the complex, highly uncertain, and politically sensitive problems that are of greatest concern to government decision makers. The future of decision science, perhaps even the nation's well-being, depends on the outcome. A major difficulty for the analysts who are being called upon by government to apply decision-aiding approaches is that decision science has not yet evolved a universally accepted methodology for analyzing social decisions involving risk. Numerous approaches have been proposed, including variations of cost-benefit analysis, decision analysis, and applied social welfare theory. Each of these, however, has its limitations and deficiencies and none has a proven track record for application to govern ment decisions involving risk. Cost-benefit approaches have been exten sively applied by the government, but most applications have been for decisions that were largely risk-free.

Risk has become one of the main topics in fields as diverse as engineering, medicine and economics, and it is also studied by social scientists, psychologists and legal scholars. But the topic of risk also leads to more fundamental questions such as: What is risk? What can decision theory contribute to the analysis of risk? What does the human perception of risk mean for society? How should we judge whether a risk is morally acceptable or not? Over the last couple of decades questions like these have attracted interest from philosophers and other scholars into risk theory. This handbook provides for an overview into key topics in a major new field of research. It addresses a wide range of topics, ranging from decision theory, risk perception to ethics and social implications of risk, and it also addresses specific case studies. It aims to promote communication and information among all those who are interested in theoetical issues concerning risk and uncertainty. This handbook brings together internationally leading philosophers and scholars from other disciplines who work on risk theory. The contributions are accessibly written and highly relevant to issues that are studied by risk scholars. We hope that the Handbook of Risk Theory will be a helpful starting point for all risk scholars who are interested in broadening and deepening their current perspectives.

Understanding Risk addresses a central dilemma of risk decisionmaking in a democracy: detailed scientific and technical information is essential for making decisions, but the people who make and live with those decisions are not scientists. The key task of risk characterization is to provide needed and appropriate information to decisionmakers and the public. This important new volume illustrates that making risks understandable to the public involves much more than translating scientific knowledge. The volume also draws conclusions about what society should expect from risk characterization and offers clear guidelines and principles for informing the wide variety of risk decisions that face our increasingly technological society. Frames fundamental questions about what risk characterization means. Reviews traditional definitions and explores new conceptual and practical approaches. Explores how risk characterization should inform decisionmakers and the public. Looks at risk characterization in the context of the entire decisionmaking process. Understanding Risk discusses how risk characterization has fallen short in many recent controversial decisions. Throughout the text, examples and case studiesâ€"such as planning for the long-term ecological health of the Everglades or deciding on the operation of a waste incineratorâ€"bring key concepts to life. Understanding Risk will be important to anyone involved in risk issues: federal, state, and local policymakers and regulators; risk managers; scientists; industrialists; researchers; and concerned individuals.

Discusses the way leaders deal with risk in making foreign policy decisions