Substantial evidence indicates that information is distorted during decision making, but very few studies have assessed the distortion of probability and outcome information in risky decisions. In two studies involving six binary decisions (e.g., banning blood donations from people who have...

A decision-analytic model for avoiding a risky activity is presented. The model considers the benefit and cost of avoiding the activity, the probability that the activity is unsafe, and scientific tests or studies that could be conducted to revise the probability that the activity is unsafe. For...

In this paper we compare the results of two different expert elicitation methods: in-person interviews and a self-administered web-based survey. Traditional expert elicitation has been done face to face, with an elicitor meeting with an expert for a few hours to several days, depending on the...

We use expert elicitations of energy penalties and literature-derived estimates of basic cost parameters to model the future costs of 7 types of carbon capture technology applied to coal power plants. We conduct extensive sensitivity analysis to assess the effects of various parameters on...

Most psychometric studies of risk perception have used data that have been averaged over participants prior to analysis. Such aggregation obscures variation among participants and inflates the magnitude of relationships between psychometric dimensions and dependent variables such as overall...

Pittsburgh residents (n=209) reported their preferences for voluntary actions, soft regulations, and hard regulations to (a) limit the number of SUVs and trucks and (b) increase green energy use for household energy consumption. These two goals were presented in one of two motivating frames, as...

People are often more likely to accept risky monetary gambles with positive expected values when the gambles will be played more than once. We investigated whether this distinction between single-play and multiple-play gambles extends to medical treatments for individual patients and groups of...

The emergence of a leading alternative during the course of a decision is known to bias the evaluation of new information in a manner that favors that alternative. We report 3 studies that address the sensitivity of predecisional information distortion and its effects in hypothetical risky...

In four experiments involving choices between apartments, we decomposed predecisional information distortion into positive distortion of information about the tentatively leading alternative and negative distortion of information about the trailing alternative(s). Proleader and antitrailer...

In previous research, a deliberative process for integrating stakeholder perspectives in the ranking of risks was introduced and empirically tested with lay groups composed predominantly of Americans. In this paper, we explore the viability of this process with lay groups of Chinese, because...