Risk Assessment

Individuals and organizations take many actions to reduce risk. However, not all risks can be avoided. To effectively manage risk, people must evaluate and compare risks associated with different threats. But it is frequently difficult to obtain reasonable assessments of these risks. Traditional approaches to risk assessment often produce unsatisfactory results when the probability of failure is low but the costs of failure are high. Informal approaches are unreliable and often contentious. Formal probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) is expensive and difficult to apply and often produces results of uncertain validity. Our research is aimed at investigating the problems associated with risk assessment and developing techniques for overcoming them.

Principal Investigators: Paul Slovic, Joseph Arvai