Risks are an integral part of complex, high-stakes decisions, and decisionmakers are faced with the unavoidable tasks of assessing risks and forming risk preferences. This is true for all decision domains, including financial, environmental, and foreign policy domains, among others. How well decisionmakers deal with risk affects, to a considerable extent, the quality of their decisions. This book provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the elements that influence risk judgments and preferences. The book has two dimensions: theoretical and comparative-historical. The study of risk-taking behavior has been dominated by the rational choice approach. Instead, the author adopts a socio-cognitive approach involving: a multivariate theory integrating contextual, cognitive, motivational, and personality factors that affect an individual decisionmaker's judgment and preferences; the social interaction and structural effects of the decisionmaking group and its organizational setting; and the role of cultural-societal values and norms that sanction or discourage risk taking behavior. The book's theoretical approach is applied and tested in five historical case studies of foreign military interventions. The richly detailed empirical data on the case studies make them, metaphorically speaking, an ideal laboratory for applying a process-tracing approach in studying judgment and decision processes at varying risk levels. The case studies analyzed are: U.S. interventions in Grenada in 1983 and Panama in 1989 (both low risk); Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 (moderate risk): U.S. intervention in Vietnam in 1964-68 (high risk); and Israel's intervention in Lebanon in 1982-83 (high risk).

Building upon the technical and organizational groundwork presented in the first edition, Risk Assessment and Decision Making in Business and Industry: A Practical Guide, Second Edition addresses the many aspects of risk/uncertainty (R/U) process implementation. This comprehensive volume covers four broad aspects of R/U: general concepts, i

IIE/Joint Publishers Book of the Year Award 2016! Awarded for ‘an outstanding published book that focuses on a facet of industrial engineering, improves education, or furthers the profession’. Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management emphasizes practical issues and examples of decision making with applications in engineering design and management Featuring a blend of theoretical and analytical aspects, this book presents multiple perspectives on decision making to better understand and improve risk management processes and decision-making systems. Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management uniquely presents and discusses three perspectives on decision making: problem solving, the decision-making process, and decision-making systems. The author highlights formal techniques for group decision making and game theory and includes numerical examples to compare and contrast different quantitative techniques. The importance of initially selecting the most appropriate decision-making process is emphasized through practical examples and applications that illustrate a variety of useful processes. Presenting an approach for modeling and improving decision-making systems, Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management also features: Theoretically sound and practical tools for decision making under uncertainty, multi-criteria decision making, group decision making, the value of information, and risk management Practical examples from both historical and current events that illustrate both good and bad decision making and risk management processes End-of-chapter exercises for readers to apply specific learning objectives and practice relevant skills A supplementary website with instructional support material, including worked solutions to the exercises, lesson plans, in-class activities, slides, and spreadsheets An excellent textbook for upper-undergraduate and graduate students, Engineering Decision Making and Risk Management is appropriate for courses on decision analysis, decision making, and risk management within the fields of engineering design, operations research, business and management science, and industrial and systems engineering. The book is also an ideal reference for academics and practitioners in business and management science, operations research, engineering design, systems engineering, applied mathematics, and statistics.

Discusses the way leaders deal with risk in making foreign policy decisions

This book presents innovative theories, methodologies, and techniques in the field of risk management and decision making. It introduces new research developments and provides a comprehensive image of their potential applications to readers interested in the area. The collection includes: computational intelligence applications in decision making, multi-criteria decision making under risk, risk modelling,forecasting and evaluation, public security and community safety, risk management in supply chain and other business decision making, political risk management and disaster response systems. The book is directed to academic and applied researchers working on risk management, decision making, and management information systems.

Classical economic theory assumes that people in risk situations follow a course of action based on a rational, consistent assessment of likely outcomes. But as Zur Shapira demonstrates in Risk Taking, corporate managers consistently stray from the prescribed path into far more subjective territory. Risk Taking offers a critical assessment of the relationship between theory and action in managerial decision making. Shapira offers a definitive account of the classical conception of risky decision making, which derives behavioral prescriptions from a calculation of both the value and the likelihood of possible outcomes. He then demonstrates how theories in this vein have been historically at odds with empirical observations. Risk Taking reports the results of an extensive survey of seven hundred managers that probed their attitudes and beliefs about risk and examined how they had actually made decisions in the face of uncertainty. The picture that emerges is of a dynamic, flexible process in which each manager's personal expertise and perceptions play profound roles. Managerial strategies are continually modified to suit changing circumstances. Rather than formulating probability estimates, executives create potential scenarios based not only on the possible outcomes but also on the many arbitrary factors inherent in their own situations. As Shapira notes, risk taking propensities vary among managers, and the need to maintain control and avoid particularly dangerous results exercises a powerful influence. Shapira also examines the impact of organizational structure, long-term management objectives, and incentives on decision making. With perceptive observations of the cognitive, emotional, and organizational dimensions of corporate decision making, Risk Taking propels the study of managerial risk behavior into new directions. This volume signals the way toward improving managerial decision making by revealing the need for more inclusive choice models that augment classical theory with vital behavioral observations.