A timeless classic of economic theory that remains fascinating and pertinent today, this is Frank Knight's famous explanation of why perfect competition cannot eliminate profits, the important differences between "risk" and "uncertainty," and the vital role of the entrepreneur in profitmaking. Based on Knight's PhD dissertation, this 1921 work, balancing theory with fact to come to stunning insights, is a distinct pleasure to read. FRANK H. KNIGHT (1885-1972) is considered by some the greatest American scholar of economics of the 20th century. An economics professor at the University of Chicago from 1927 until 1955, he was one of the founders of the Chicago school of economics, which influenced Milton Friedman and George Stigler.
The public depends on competent risk assessment from the federal government and the scientific community to grapple with the threat of pollution. When risk reports turn out to be overblownâ€"or when risks are overlookedâ€"public skepticism abounds. This comprehensive and readable book explores how the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) can improve its risk assessment practices, with a focus on implementation of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments. With a wealth of detailed information, pertinent examples, and revealing analysis, the volume explores the "default option" and other basic concepts. It offers two views of EPA operations: The first examines how EPA currently assesses exposure to hazardous air pollutants, evaluates the toxicity of a substance, and characterizes the risk to the public. The second, more holistic, view explores how EPA can improve in several critical areas of risk assessment by focusing on cross-cutting themes and incorporating more scientific judgment. This comprehensive volume will be important to the EPA and other agencies, risk managers, environmental advocates, scientists, faculty, students, and concerned individuals.
In Risk Analysis of Complex and Uncertain Systems acknowledged risk authority Tony Cox shows all risk practitioners how Quantitative Risk Assessment (QRA) can be used to improve risk management decisions and policies. It develops and illustrates QRA methods for complex and uncertain biological, engineering, and social systems – systems that have behaviors that are just too complex to be modeled accurately in detail with high confidence – and shows how they can be applied to applications including assessing and managing risks from chemical carcinogens, antibiotic resistance, mad cow disease, terrorist attacks, and accidental or deliberate failures in telecommunications network infrastructure. This book was written for a broad range of practitioners, including decision risk analysts, operations researchers and management scientists, quantitative policy analysts, economists, health and safety risk assessors, engineers, and modelers.
Both risk and uncertainty are neo-liberal concepts, which can be viewed as complementary techniques for governing diverse aspects of life, rather than natural states of things. This new book examines the way these constructs govern the production of wealth through 'uncertain' speculation and 'calculable' investment formulae. The way in which risk and uncertainty govern the minimisation of harms through insurance and through the uncertain practices of 'reasonable foresight' is discussed, and O Malley looks at the way these same techniques were historically forged out of moral and social beliefs about how to govern properly. In addition, the book analyzes is how, during this process, ideas such as 'contract' and distinctions between insurance and gambling were invented to order to 'properly' govern the risky and uncertain future.
The #1 international bestselling author of The Gray Rhino offers a bold new framework for understanding and re-shaping our relationship with risk and uncertainty to live more productive and successful lives. What drives a sixty-four-year-old woman to hurl herself over Niagara Falls in a barrel? Why do we often create bigger risks than the risks we try to avoid? Why are corporate boards newly worried about risky personal behavior by CEOs? Why are some nations quicker than others to recognize and manage risks like pandemics, technological change, and climate crisis? The answers define each person, organization, and society as distinctively as a fingerprint. Understanding the often-surprising origins of these risk fingerprints can open your eyes, inspire new habits, catalyze innovation and creativity, improve teamwork, and provide a beacon in a world that seems suddenly more uncertain than ever. How you see risk and what you do about it depend on your personality and experiences. How you make these cost-benefit calculations depend on your culture, your values, the people in the room, and even unexpected things like what you’ve eaten recently, the temperature, the music playing, or the fragrance in the air. Being alert to these often-unconscious influences will help you to seize opportunity and avoid danger. You Are What You Risk is a clarion call for an entirely new conversation about our relationship with risk and uncertainty. In this ground-breaking, accessible and eminently timely book, Michele Wucker examines why it’s so important to understand your risk fingerprint and how to make your risk relationship work better in business, life, and the world. Drawing on compelling risk stories around the world and weaving in economics, anthropology, sociology, and psychology research, Wucker bridges the divide between professional and lay risk conversations. She challenges stereotypes about risk attitudes, re-frames how gender and risk are related, and shines new light on generational differences. She shows how the new science of “risk personality” is re-shaping business and finance, how healthy risk ecosystems support economies and societies, and why embracing risk empathy can resolve conflicts. Wucker shares insights, practical tools, and proven strategies that will help you to understand what makes you who you are –and, in turn, to make better choices, both big and small.
Every day, individuals, groups, and organizations make decisions that involve uncertainty and risk - and, often, important consequences for society. Increasingly, our lives are being defined by large-scale organizational decision processes involving governments, businesses and other institutions. This book examines the nature of decisionmaking by organizations confronted with various risks, focusing on choices in which technology and scientific advances play major roles. The contributors also look at the regulatory agencies that set and enforce standards of health and safety. Within the literature on risk analysis this book is unique in its integration of social theory with wide variety of case examples. Theories of rational choice advanced by neoclassical economics and cognitive psychology are critically examined in view of the importance of the context for decisionmaking. Specific avenues for the study of the organizational/institutional contexts of decisionmaking and the process of socially constructing risk objects are proposed as a means of correcting the weaknesses of these theories. The contributors examine the strategies of manufacturing and communications firms, neonatal intensive care units of hospitals, and a major U.S. governmental strategies are given: how energy choices are made in France and how expert advice and formal public involvement are incorporated into risk-related policy decisions in Britain. Field studies of regulatory agencies in Britain at both policymaking and enforcement levels are also included.
Everyday we face decisions that carry an element of risk anduncertainty. The ability to analyze, predict, and prepare for thelevel of risk entailed by these decisions is, therefore, one of themost constant and vital skills needed for analysts, scientists andmanagers. Risk analysis can be defined as a systematic use of informationto identify hazards, threats and opportunities, as well as theircauses and consequences, and then express risk. In order tosuccessfully develop such a systematic use of information, thoseanalyzing the risk need to understand the fundamental concepts ofrisk analysis and be proficient in a variety of methods andtechniques. Risk Analysis adopts a practical, predictiveapproach and guides the reader through a number ofapplications. Risk Analysis: Provides an accessible and concise guide to performing riskanalysis in a wide variety of fields, with minimal prior knowledgerequired. Adopts a broad perspective on risk, with focus on predictionsand highlighting uncertainties beyond expected values andprobabilities, allowing a more flexible approach than traditionalstatistical analysis. Acknowledges that expected values and probabilities couldproduce poor predictions - surprises may occur. Emphasizes the planning and use of risk analyses, rather thanjust the risk analysis methods and techniques, including thestatistical analysis tools. Features many real-life case studies from a variety ofapplications and practical industry problems, including areas suchas security, business and economy, transport, oil & gas and ICT(Information and Communication Technology). Forms an ideal companion volume to Aven’s previous Wileytext Foundations of Risk Analysis. Professor Aven’s previous book Foundations of RiskAnalysis presented and discussed several risk analysisapproaches and recommended a predictive approach. This new textexpands upon this predictive approach, exploring further the riskanalysis principles, concepts, methods and models in an appliedformat. This book provides a useful and practical guide todecision-making, aimed at professionals within the risk analysisand risk management field.
The subject of this volume--uncertainties in risk assessment and management--reflects an important theme in health, safety, and environ mental decision making. MOst technological hazards are characterized by substantial uncertainty. Recent examples include nuclear waste disposal, acid rain, asbestos in schools, carcinogens in food, and hazardous waste. realing with such uncertainty is arguably the most difficult and challeng ing task facing risk assessors and managers today. Four primary sources of uncertainty in risk assessment and management can be identified: (1) uncertainties about definitions; (2) uncertainties about scientific facts; (3) uncertainties about risk perceptions and atti tudes; and (4) uncertainties about values. Uncertainties about definitions derive primarily from disagreements about the meaning and interpretation of key concepts, such as probability. Uncertainties about scientific facts derive primarily from disagreements about failure modes, the probability and magnitude of adverse health or environmental consequences, cause and effect relationships, dose-response relationships, and exposure patterns. Uncertainties about risk perceptions and attitudes derive primarily from disagreements about what constitutes a significant or acceptable level of risk. Uncertainties about values derive primarily from disagreements about the desirability or worth of alternative risk management actions or conse quences. The papers in this volume address each of these sources of uncertainty from a variety of perspectives. Reflecting the broad scope of risk assess ment and risk management research, the papers include contributions from safety engineers, epidemiologists, toxicologists, chemists, biostatisticians, biologists, decision analysts, economists, psychologists, political scien tists, sociologists, ethicists, and lawyers.
This open access book analyzes and seeks to consolidate the use of robust quantitative tools and qualitative methods for the design and assessment of energy and climate policies. In particular, it examines energy and climate policy performance and associated risks, as well as public acceptance and portfolio analysis in climate policy, and presents methods for evaluating the costs and benefits of flexible policy implementation as well as new framings for business and market actors. In turn, it discusses the development of alternative policy pathways and the identification of optimal switching points, drawing on concrete examples to do so. Lastly, it discusses climate change mitigation policies’ implications for the agricultural, food, building, transportation, service and manufacturing sectors.
Explores methods for the representation and treatment of uncertainty in risk assessment In providing guidance for practical decision-making situations concerning high-consequence technologies (e.g., nuclear, oil and gas, transport, etc.), the theories and methods studied in Uncertainty in Risk Assessment have wide-ranging applications from engineering and medicine to environmental impacts and natural disasters, security, and financial risk management. The main focus, however, is on engineering applications. While requiring some fundamental background in risk assessment, as well as a basic knowledge of probability theory and statistics, Uncertainty in Risk Assessment can be read profitably by a broad audience of professionals in the field, including researchers and graduate students on courses within risk analysis, statistics, engineering, and the physical sciences. Uncertainty in Risk Assessment: Illustrates the need for seeing beyond probability to represent uncertainties in risk assessment contexts. Provides simple explanations (supported by straightforward numerical examples) of the meaning of different types of probabilities, including interval probabilities, and the fundamentals of possibility theory and evidence theory. Offers guidance on when to use probability and when to use an alternative representation of uncertainty. Presents and discusses methods for the representation and characterization of uncertainty in risk assessment. Uses examples to clearly illustrate ideas and concepts.
