"In many fields, policymakers seem to have an increasing preference for simple, large, non- redundant systems of analysis and governance. To address this question, we examine several arenas in which scholars have studied the costs and benefits of different levels of redundancy, including:...

"Observation and measurement of the ocean's ecosystems is difficult and costly. It makes verification of our theories difficult and forces us to engage in collective action based upon often very imperfect concepts of the dynamics of the system. Once we establish the institutions of collective...

Resources for the Future (RFF), in conjunction with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the Society for Risk Analysis, and the Electric Power Research Institute, held a workshop September 18–20, 2000, at the RFF Conference Center in Washington, D.C. The intent was to discuss how Bayesian...

Regulation of carcinogens in the United States has been based on a "no threshold" policy. This makes the assumption there exists no level of exposure for which the possibility of causing harm is truly zero. The alternative "threshold" policy assumes that there exists some level of exposure at...

This paper reviews the risk assessments prepared by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) in support of regulations implementing the Conservation Reserve Program (CRP) and Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP). These two natural resource conservation programs were authorized as...

How "default options" should be used in health risk assessment divides the risk analysis profession. Some argue that these should be "hard": set by policy, generally biased to be "health protective" and requiring a substantial body of evidence to replace by decision-specific alternatives. Others...

Jansen and Wall suggest a new way of defending hard paternalism in clinical research. They argue that non‐therapeutic research exposing people to more than minimal risk should be banned on egalitarian grounds: in preventing poor decision‐makers from making bad decisions, we will promote...