On the Treatment of Uncertainty and Variability in Making Decisions About Risk

Much attention has been paid to the treatment of dependence and to the characterization of uncertainty and variability (including the issue of dependence among inputs) in performing risk assessments to avoid misleading results. However, with relatively little progress in communicating about the effe...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Risk analysis 2013-10, Vol.33 (10), p.1899-1907
Main Authors: Bier, Vicki M., Lin, Shi-Woei
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Acceptability
Biological and medical sciences
Decision analysis
Decision Making
Dependence
Dependency theory
Humans
Medical sciences
Monte Carlo Method
Monte Carlo methods
Monte Carlo simulation
Public health. Hygiene-occupational medicine
Risk acceptance
Risk analysis
Risk Assessment
Risk theory
Studies
Two dimensional
Uncertainty
variability
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Much attention has been paid to the treatment of dependence and to the characterization of uncertainty and variability (including the issue of dependence among inputs) in performing risk assessments to avoid misleading results. However, with relatively little progress in communicating about the effects and implications of dependence, the effort involved in performing relatively sophisticated risk analyses (e.g., two‐dimensional Monte Carlo analyses that separate variability from uncertainty) may be largely wasted, if the implications of those analyses are not clearly understood by decisionmakers. This article emphasizes that epistemic uncertainty can introduce dependence among related risks (e.g., risks to different individuals, or at different facilities), and illustrates the potential importance of such dependence in the context of two important types of decisions—evaluations of risk acceptability for a single technology, and comparisons of the risks for two or more technologies. We also present some preliminary ideas on how to communicate the effects of dependence to decisionmakers in a clear and easily comprehensible manner, and suggest future research directions in this area.
ISSN:0272-4332
1539-6924
DOI:10.1111/risa.12071