An approach is proposed that is useful for long term forecasting of market penetration of new technologies, fuel price and availability, business performance, etc. The central idea is to systematically solicit experts' opinion in the form of subjective probability distributions in making future...

Dispersive equity is concerned with the impact of life-threatening risks from alternative policy decisions on homogeneous groups in a population. It is not addressed to the disutility of various numbers of fatalities that might occur, but rather to how fatalities are distributed over the groups....

"Public agencies are very keen on amassing statistics---they collect them, add them, raise them to the nth power, take the cube root and prepare wonderful diagrams. But what you must never forget is that every one of those figures comes in the first instance from the village watchman, who just...

An individual's preference for risky alternatives is influenced by the strength of preference he feels for the consequences and his attitude toward risk taking. Conventional measures of risk attitude confound these two factors. In this paper we formally separate these factors and explore how...

This paper is the second of a two-paper study of fairness issues for decisions that affect the benefits received and the risks encountered by a population. The study examines fairness for individuals and for homogeneous groups within the population. It considers fairness both for population...

In this paper the theory and estimation procedures for several consumer preference models are discussed. Predictive accuracy in the form of internal consistency of these models is compared in an empirical application. Consumer decision situations are classified into two classes: decisions under...

In many decision problems, the consequences of an action may impact several individuals, and the decision may be based on the preferences of those who are affected. The rule for aggregating these individual preferences is called a group preference aggregation rule. In this paper we present a...

A risk assessment model is developed to relate adverse health effects to alternative carbon monoxide standards. The analysis requires information in the form of available data and expert judgments concerning factors such as ambient CO level, human exposure to CO, physiological responses, and...

We consider a decision problem where a group of individuals evaluates multiattribute alternatives. We explore the minimal required agreements that are sufficient to specify the group utility function. A surprising result is that, under some conditions, a bilateral agreement among pairs of...

In this paper we propose a model for decision making under risk that is capable of predicting empirically observed preference patterns that have been found to be incompatible with the expected utility model. The model departs from the classical expected utility model by allowing utilities to...