Risk Decision Making

This book explores the challenges that confront leaders in government and industry when making decisions in the areas of environmental health and safety. Today, decision making demands transparency, robustness, and resiliency. However thoughtfully they are devised, decisions made by governments and enterprises can often trigger immediate, passionate public response.

Project risk management is regarded as a necessary dimension of effective project delivery. Current practices tend to focus on tangible issues such as late delivery of equipment or the implications of technology. This book introduces a framework to identify emergent behavior-centric intangible risks and the conditions that initiate them.

​​Linear-Quadratic Controls in Risk-Averse Decision Making cuts across control engineering (control feedback and decision optimization) and statistics (post-design performance analysis) with a common theme: reliability increase seen from the responsive angle of incorporating and engineering multi-level performance robustness beyond the long-run average performance into control feedback design and decision making and complex dynamic systems from the start.

This book identifies and systematically confirms the various factors that allow dangerous nuclear power projects to proceed without adequate risk assessment, even as society recognizes the magnitude of risks associated with nuclear power generation. For the first time, it employs a communication game model to explore each factor individually.

This book identifies and systematically confirms the various factors that allow dangerous nuclear power projects to proceed without adequate risk assessment, even as society recognizes the magnitude of risks associated with nuclear power generation. For the first time, it employs a communication game model to explore each factor individually.

This textbook offers a comprehensive analysis of medical decision making under uncertainty by combining Test Information Theory with Expected Utility Theory. The book shows how the parameters of Bayes’ theorem can be combined with a value function of health states to arrive at informed test and treatment decisions. The authors distinguish between risk-neutral, risk-averse and prudent decision makers and demonstrate the effects of risk preferences on physicians’ decisions. They analyze individual tests, multiple tests and endogenous tests where the test outcome is chosen by the decision maker. Moreover, the topic is examined in the context of health economics by introducing a trade-off between enjoying health and consuming other goods, so that the extent of treatment and thus the potential improvement in the patient’s health becomes endogenous. Finally, non-expected utility models of choice under risk and uncertainty (i.e. ambiguity) are presented. While these models can explain observed test and treatment decisions, they are not suitable for normative analyses aimed at providing guidance on medical decision making.

This book identifies and systematically confirms the various factors that allow dangerous nuclear power projects to proceed without adequate risk assessment, even as society recognizes the magnitude of risks associated with nuclear power generation. For the first time, it employs a communication game model to explore each factor individually.