This discussion paper will briefly examine the concepts of risk and uncertainty, and the relevance of risk to decision making about animal health programs. Various techniques for dealing with uncertain cash flows will then be discussed, with particular emphasis on three extensions to the...

‘Risk’ has become a central theme in 21st-century policy thinking. The fact that individuals and families are vulnerable to a wide range of social, economic and other risks, and that collective action is needed to help reduce and manage these risks, has long been important in social...

Questions relating to the allocation and management of risk have played a central role in the development of the National Water Initiative, particularly as it has applied to the Murray-Darling Basin. The central issues of efficiency and equity in allocations are best understood by considering...

Dual approaches have proved their value in many areas of economic analysis. Until recently, however, they have been virtually ignored in the analysis of choice under uncertainty.In this paper, we present a dual formulation of choice under uncertainty based on a few simple assumptions about...

This report, which follows five earlier discussion papers on cost-benefit analysis (CBA) methods and their application to animal health programs, examines two applied areas of animal health economics in more detail. First, specific categories of costs and benefits of improved animal health are...

We focus on syntactic aspects of di¤erential awareness that give rise to contractual disputes. Boundedly rational parties use a common language, but do not share a common understanding of the world, leading to ambiguity in both syntactic and semantic forms. In contractual relationships,...

This chapter argues that Australia’s labour market – indeed most capitalist labour markets – feature too much unemployment and underemployment and associated forms of labour market insecurity or disadvantage. The later term implies a weak or tenuous connection to the labour force through...

Among economists, discussion of problems involving uncertainty is po­ larised between advocates of formal decision theories, who claim that un­ certainty can be tamed by careful consideration of information and elicita­ tion of preferences, and critics who argue that uncertainty is...

This paper develops a method for estimating the value of additional information to the individual livestock producer. In doing so it considers as part of the decision made by the farmer to vaccinate animals against B. bovis the decision to collect information on the health status of his herd...

This paper has two goals. First, we demonstrate that standard arguments and methods from production and duality analysis can be used to provide a comprehensive and general treatment of the value of information for a risk-averse firm with expected-utility (linear-in-probabilities) preferences and...