The Analysis, Communication, and Perception of Risk

The Analysis, Communication, and Perception of Risk
Author: B.John Garrick
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 696
Release: 2013-11-11
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 1489923705

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The 1989 Annual Meeting of the Society for Risk Analysis dramatically demonstrated one of the most important reasons for having the Society - to bring together people with highly diverse backgrounds and disciplines to assess the common problems of societal and individual risks. The physical scientists emphasized the analytical tools for assessing environmental effects and for modeling risks from engineered systems and other human activities. The health scientists presented numerous methods of analyzing health effects, including the subject of dose-response relationships, especially at low exposure levels - never an easy analysis. The social and political scientists concentrated on issues of risk perception, communication, acceptability, and human touch. Others discussed such issues as cost-benefit analysis and the risk-based approach to decision analysis. Use of risk assessment methods for risk management continued to be a matter of strong opinion and debate. The impacts of state and federal regulations, existing and planned, were assessed in sessions and in luncheon speeches. These impacts show that risk analysis practitioners will have an increasingly important role in the future. They will be challenged to provide clear, easily understood evaluations of risk that are responsive to society's concern for risk, as evidenced in laws and regulations. Of course, the various risk analysis specialties overlapped in domains of interest.

Cost-benefit Analysis

Cost-benefit Analysis
Author: Peter G. Sassone
Publisher:
Total Pages: 204
Release: 1978
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780126193503

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Textbook on the theory and methodology of cost benefit analysis - covers criteria for decision making, shadow pricing, discount rate, etc. Bibliography pp. 175 to 177, graphs and statistical tables.

Applied Methods of Cost-Benefit Analysis in Health Care

Applied Methods of Cost-Benefit Analysis in Health Care
Author: Emma McIntosh
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2010-06-24
Genre: Medical
ISBN: 0191008060

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This book provides the reader with a comprehensive set of instructions and examples of how to perform a cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of a health intervention. Developed out of a course run by Jordan Louviere at the University of Technology, Sydney, entitled An Introduction to Stated Preference Discrete Choice Modelling it has a particular focus on the use of stated preference survey methods to identify consumer preference data, as well as the use of recent developments in cost-effectiveness analysis within a CBA framework. In doing so, the most up to date methodologies for CBA are compiled in a comprehensive manner with the aim of advancing the methodology of CBA in healthcare. ABOUT THE SERIES Series editors Alastair Gray and Andrew Briggs Economic evaluation of health intervention is a growing specialist field, and this series of practical handbooks tackles, in depth, topics superficially addressed in more general economics books. Each volume includes illustrative material, case histories and worked examples to encourage the reader to apply the methods discussed, with supporting material provided online. The series is aimed at health economists in academia, the pharmaceutical industry and the health sector, those on advanced health economics courses, and health researchers in associated fields.

Fear Assessment

Fear Assessment
Author: Matthew D. Adler
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2014
Genre:
ISBN:

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Risk assessment is now a common feature of regulatory practice, but fear assessment is not. In particular, environmental, health and safety agencies such as EPA, FDA, OSHA, NHTSA, and CPSC, commonly count death, illness and injury as costs for purposes of cost-benefit analysis, but almost never incorporate fear, anxiety or other welfare-reducing mental states into the analysis. This is puzzling, since fear and anxiety are welfare setbacks, and since the very hazards regulated by these agencies - air or water pollutants, toxic waste dumps, food additives and contaminants, workplace toxins and safety threats, automobiles, dangerous consumer products, radiation, and so on - are often the focus of popular fears. Even more puzzling is the virtual absence of economics scholarship on the pricing of fear and anxiety, by contrast with the vast literature in environmental economics on pricing other intangible benefits such as the existence of species, wilderness preservation, the enjoyment of hunters and fishermen, and good visibility, and the large literature in health economics on pricing health states. This Article makes the case for fear assessment, and explains in detail how fear and anxiety should be quantified and monetized as part of a formal, regulatory cost-benefit analysis. I propose, concretely, that the methodology currently used to quantify and monetize light physical morbidities, such as headaches, coughs, sneezes, nausea, or shortness of breath, should be extended to fear. The change in total fear-days resulting from regulatory intervention to remove or mitigate some hazard - like the change in total headache-days, cough-days, etc. - should be predicted and then monetized at a standard dollar cost per fear-day determined using contingent-valuation interviews. Part I of the Article rebuts various objections to fear assessment. Deliberation costs are a worry, but this is not unique to fear, and can be handled through threshold rules specifying when the expected benefits of fear assessment appear to outweigh the incremental deliberation costs of quantifying and monetizing fear. Other objections reduce to the deliberation-cost objection, or are misconceived: irrational as well as rational fears are real harms for those who experience them; fear can be quantified; worries about uncertainty and causality reduce to deliberation costs; the possibility of reducing fear through information rather than prescription means that agencies should look at a wider range of policy options, not that they should evaluate options without considering fear costs; the concern that the very practice of fear assessment will on balance, increase fear by creating stronger incentives for fear entrepreneurs seems overblown; and fear is a welfare setback, whether or not it flows from political views. Part II argues for what I call the unbundled valuation of fear. A given hazard may cause a package of harms for each individual exposed to it: the fear of the hazard, an incremental risk of death, and perhaps other harms. Why not, then, price the harms as a package? In particular, why not predict the deaths caused by a given hazard and avoided by regulatory intervention, and multiply those deaths by a value of statistical life (VOSL) number designed to incorporate a fear premium? For reasons explored in Part II, the bundled valuation of fear and death, through fear premia attached to VOSLs or in other ways, is misguided. Rather, these two kinds of harms should be separately quantified and monetized. Parts III and IV consider how agencies should monetize fear states. How should the price of a fear-day be determined? Part III argues that contingent-valuation techniques are more appropriate, here, than revealed-preference techniques. Part IV discusses the design of contingent-valuation interviews for pricing fear. The instrumental as well as intrinsic costs of fear may need to be accounted for; the respondents to these interviews should, optimally, be calm rather than fearful; and interviews designed to secure a QALY valuation of fear can also be useful, but only if the QALY scale is understood as a welfare scale and calibrated in an inclusive way. In arguing for fear assessment as a component of cost-benefit analysis, this Article contributes to the literature on cost-benefit analysis and also stakes out a novel position in scholarly debates about risk regulation. One standard view (call it the simple technocratic view) argues that popular fear should play no role in determining regulatory choice; instead, regulators should focus on minimizing or achieving technologically feasible or cost-justified reductions in death, illness and injury. A standard opposing view (call it the populist view) is that popular perceptions of the riskiness of hazards, in turn substantially influenced by how feared or dreaded the hazards are, should be determinative. The account presented in this Article is technocratic, not populist; risk regulators should seek to maximize social welfare, and cost-benefit analysis is a technocratic tool for doing just that. Yet technocratic risk regulation need not focus narrowly on mortality and morbidity. It should focus (prima facie) on all constituents of welfare, including fear and anxiety. Although popularly perceived risk should not determine risk regulation, since the fear and anxiety that drives popular risk perception is simply one welfare impact among the multitude of costs and benefits flowing from hazards, neither should risk regulation reduce to counting deaths or injuries - to a crude minimization of physical impacts or a simplistic balancing in which death- and injury-reduction are the sole regulatory benefits that are seen to counterbalance compliance costs.

Cost-Benefit Analysis

Cost-Benefit Analysis
Author: Tevfik F. Nas
Publisher: SAGE
Total Pages: 240
Release: 1996-02-14
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780803971332

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The author introduces "the foundation of relevant economic theory," outlines "the steps involved in a typical cost-benefit analysis," and addresses "topics such as consumer surplus, compensating variation, equivalent variation, shadow pricing, income distribution, and much more."--Cover.

Risk Science

Risk Science
Author: Terje Aven
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 448
Release: 2024-09-12
Genre: Technology & Engineering
ISBN: 1040105882

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Risk science is becoming increasingly important as businesses, policymakers and public sector leaders are tasked with decision-making and investment using varying levels of knowledge and information. Risk Science: An Introduction explores the theory and practice of risk science, providing concepts and tools for understanding and acting under conditions of uncertainty. The chapters in this book cover the fundamental concepts, principles, approaches, methods and models for how to understand, assess, communicate, manage and govern risk. These topics are presented and examined in a way which details how they relate, for example, how to characterize and communicate risk with particular emphasis on reflecting uncertainties; how to distinguish risk perception and professional risk judgments; how to assess risk and guide decision-makers, especially for cases involving large uncertainties and value differences; and how to integrate risk assessment with resilience-based strategies. The text provides a variety of examples and case studies that relate to highly visible and relevant issues facing risk academics, practitioners and non-risk leaders who must make risk-related decisions. This revised and updated second edition features an entirely new chapter on the integrity and quality of risk studies, and dealing with misinformation in the context of risk. Presenting both the foundational and most recent advancements in the subject matter, this work particularly suits students of risk science courses at college and university level. The book also provides broader key reading for students and scholars in other domains, including business, engineering and public health.

Introduction to Cost–Benefit Analysis

Introduction to Cost–Benefit Analysis
Author: Ginés de Rus
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-03-26
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1839103752

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This thoroughly updated second edition incorporates key ideas and discussions on issues such as wider economic impacts, the treatment of risk, and the importance of institutional arrangements in ensuring the correct use of technique. Ginés de Rus considers whether public decisions, such as investing in high-speed rail links, privatizing a public enterprise or protecting a natural area, may improve social welfare.