"The Ostrich Paradox boldly addresses a key question of our time: Why are we humans so poor at dealing with disastrous risks, and what can we humans do about it? It is a must-read for everyone who cares about risk."—Daniel Kahneman, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics and author of...

This book explores the dilemma of siting a high-level nuclear waste (HLNW) repository. The authors examine siting conflicts from a variety of perspectives - political, psychological, and sociological - and identify the fundamental determinants of public opposition to waste disposal facilities as...

Two related trends have created novel challenges for managing risk in the United States. The first trend is a series of dramatic changes in liability law as tort law has expanded to assign liability to defendants for reasons other than negligence. The unpredictability of future costs induced by...

I Cleaning Up Inactive Waste Sites -- 1 Risk Assessment Issues Associated with Cleaning Up Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites -- 2 Insurability Issues Associated with Cleaning Up Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites -- 3 Risk Management Issues Associated with Cleaning Up Inactive Hazardous Waste Sites --...

This paper describes the design and analysis of a web-based choice experiment that examines how the demand for earthquake protection in Quebec and British Columbia is influenced by the default option and the structure of the insurance plan. Homeowners in both provinces were given the opportunity...

This article extends the large amount of research on double-oral auction markets to hazards that produce only losses. We report results from a series of experiments in which subjects endowed with low-probability losses can pay a premium for insurance protection. Insurers specify the price at...

This paper explores how people process information on low probability-high consequence negative events and what it will take to get individuals to be sensitive to the likelihood of these types of accidents or disasters. In a set of experiments, information is presented to individuals on the...

We study optimal investment in self-protection of insured individuals when they face interdependencies in the form of potential contamination from others. If individuals cannot coordinate their actions, then the positive externality of investing in self-protection implies that, in equilibrium,...

In an interdependent world the risks faced by any one agent depend not only on its choices but also on those of all others. Expectations about others' choices will influence investments in risk-management, and the outcome can be sub-optimal investment all round. We model this as the Nash...

Do firms have adequate incentives to invest in anti-terrorism mechanisms? This paper develops a framework for addressing this issue when the security choices by one agent affect the risks faced by others. We utilize the airline security problem to illustrate how the incentive by one airline to...