Approaches to acceptable risk: a critical guide

Fischhoff, Baruch; Lichtenstein, Sharman; Slovic, Paul; Keeney, Ralph L.; Derby, S.L.

doi:10.2172/5045395

Cited by 143 publications

(149 citation statements)

References 72 publications

(78 reference statements)

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“…This raises the question of risk acceptance (Fischhoff et al, 1981;Rohrmann, 1998) by individual and society: before 1995, damages were mainly material, and fatal accidents were rare. After the catastrophic year in 1995, efforts were made to mitigate the risk, especially the risk due to snow avalanches, as they are more frequent than debris flows and have caused severe damage in several communities.…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slope processes and related risk appearance within the Icelandic Westfjords during the twentieth century

Decaulne

2005

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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Abstract. In North-western Iceland, records of slope processes were increasing during the twentieth century. Few dramatic events during the last decades highlighted the danger due to slope dynamics, leaving local populations in a risk situation that was merely unknown before 1970. The recent snow-avalanche, debris-flow and rock-fall activity underlined that the most frequent processes are not these with the largest human impact. In fact, the most catastrophic events were the extreme ones, following directly from a low frequency and a high magnitude. The purpose of this paper is to draw a parallel history of natural hazard and residence spatial extension, for an accurate understanding of the present-day risk situation, as the population growth markedly increased during the same time. Different quantitative and qualitative methods are applied. Geomorphological investigations locate the main threaten areas, in the path of slope processes release evidences, i.e. suitable slope morphology and/or inherited/actual forms. By a collection of dating data, as historic records and lichenometrical analysis, the frequency of given magnitude events is known. Climatic analysis clarifies the triggering meteorological conditions of slope processes and offers an overview of climate fluctuation during the investigated period; wind speed and direction is critical to hazardous snow-avalanche departure and snowmelt is crucial for debris-flow release. The findings clearly indicate that a combination of spatial expansion of inhabited areas and a lack of slope processes knowledge at the expansion time led to a recent and progressive risk appearance due to snow avalanches (including slush flows), debris flows and rock fall in most towns and villages of North-western Iceland.

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Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Slope processes and related risk appearance within the Icelandic Westfjords during the twentieth century

Decaulne

2005

Nat. Hazards Earth Syst. Sci.

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“…These differences include generally high levels of training, technical competence and professional ethics; unfortunately, there are also differences that can prove to be more problematic in making values-based decisions about technology. Scientists and engineers, for example, tend to place more emphasis on cost-containment and efficiency than do most citizens, while placing less emphasis on long-term safety (Fischhoff et al, 1981;Nealey and Hebert, 1983;Lynn, 1986;Freudenburg, 1988Freudenburg, , 1993Johnson and Petcovic, 1988;Kraus, 1992;Flynn et al, 1994). These choices, to note the obvious, can fail to provide precisely the kind of extra protection of public health and safety that is often being sought by the citizens who call for a 'more scientific' approach to environmental risk decisions.…”

Section: Broader Lessons: Science and 'The Human Element'mentioning

confidence: 99%

Can we learn from failure? Examining US experiences with nuclear repository siting

Freudenburg

2004

Journal of Risk Research

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The United States may well have spent more money in the effort to develop nuclear waste sites than any other nation on earth, but save for the case of a facility in New Mexico that handles only military wastes, every single effort to site a new repository in the last several decades has ended in failure. Given that the siting efforts to date have generally ignored the advice of social scientists, this track record makes it difficult to know whether that advice could lead to outcomes that affected parties would consider " " " "successes" in the US context, but there are important opportunities to learn from what nearly all parties consider to have been "failures." One particularly telling case involves efforts to develop a repository for lower-level radioactive wastes in New York State. There, as in many other US cases, the relevant officials chose to focus on an arbitrarily narrowed subset of work on socio-economic impacts that the agency considered "credible," ignoring social science findings on stigma, public controversy, and so-called "special" impacts related to the radioactive character of the wastes. The officials also appear to have erred in insisting on a top-down, "technical" approach to screening, and in ignoring the very real impacts created by their own actions. Ultimately, the process led to a degree of outcry that was remarkable even in the context of nuclear waste facilities; the citizen blockades and round-the-clock outposts at the boundaries of the selected areas were sufficiently well-organized to prevent even preliminary on-site analyses, meaning that the socio-economic impacts that were excluded from consideration proved to be not just "credible" but vivid, bringing the entire process to a halt, while none of the "credible" biophysical impacts ever took place. The case suggests that essentially universal patterns should be relatively easy to predict, but that unfortunate choices can make the problems of siting even worse.

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“…Experiments by Phillips and Edwards (1966) A large number of studies have shown a common bias being overestimation of the probability of low frequency events and underestimation of the probability of high frequency events (Fischhoff, Lichtenstein, Slovic, Derby, & Keeney, 1981;Hastie & Dawes, 2001;Viscusi, 1985). For example, Hastie and Dawes (2001) show a graph of the statistical estimate of deaths per year for various causes vs. the judgmental estimates by participants.…”

Section: Conservatismmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Role of Feedback in the Assimilation of Information in Prediction Markets

Jolly

2000

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Leveraging the knowledge of an organization is an ongoing challenge that has given rise to the field of knowledge management. Yet, despite spending enormous sums of organizational resources on Information Technology (IT) systems, executives recognize there is much more knowledge to harvest. Prediction markets are emerging as one tool to help extract this tacit knowledge and make it operational. Yet, prediction markets, like other markets, are subject to pathologies (e.g., bubbles and crashes) which compromise their accuracy and may discourage organizational use.The techniques of experimental economics were used to study the characteristics of prediction markets. Empirical data was gathered from an on-line asynchronous prediction market. Participants allocated tickets based on private information and, depending on the market type, public information indicative of how prior participants had allocated their tickets. The experimental design featured three levels of feedback (nofeedback, percentages of total allocated tickets and frequency of total allocated tickets) presented to the participants.The research supported the hypothesis that information assimilation in feedback markets is composed of two mechanisms -information collection and aggregation. These are defined as:• Collection -The compilation of dispersed information -individuals using their own private information make judgments and act accordingly in the market. ii• Aggregation -The market's judgment on the implications of this gathered information -an inductive process. This effect comes from participants integrating public information with their private information in their decision process.Information collection was studied in isolation in no feedback markets and the hypothesis that markets outperform the average of their participants was supported. The hypothesis that with the addition of feedback, the process of aggregation would be present was also supported. Aggregation was shown to create agreement in markets (as measured by entropy) and drive market results closer to correct values (the known probabilities).However, the research also supported the hypothesis that aggregation can lead to information mirages, creating a market bubble.The research showed that the presence and type of feedback can be used to modulate market performance. Adding feedback, or more informative feedback, increased the market's precision at the expense of accuracy. The research supported the hypotheses that these changes were due to the inductive aggregation process which creates agreement (increasing precision), but also occasionally generates information mirages (which reduces accuracy).The way individual participants use information to make allocations was characterized.In feedback markets the fit of participants' responses to various decision models demonstrated great variety. The decision models ranged from little use of information (e.g., MaxiMin), use of only private information (e.g., allocation in proportion to iii probabilities), use of only public inform...

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Approaches to acceptable risk: a critical guide

Cited by 143 publications

References 72 publications

Slope processes and related risk appearance within the Icelandic Westfjords during the twentieth century

Slope processes and related risk appearance within the Icelandic Westfjords during the twentieth century

Can we learn from failure? Examining US experiences with nuclear repository siting

The Role of Feedback in the Assimilation of Information in Prediction Markets

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