Breakthroughs in Decision Science and Risk Analysis

Preface

Decision and risk analysis can be exciting, clarifying, and fairly easy to apply to improve high-stakes policy and management decisions. The field has been undergoing a renaissance in the past decade, with remarkable breakthroughs in the psychology and brain science of risky decisions; mathematical foundations and techniques; integration with learning and pattern recognition methods from computational intelligence; and applications in new areas of financial, health, safety, environmental, business, engineering, and security risk management. These breakthroughs provide dramatic improvements in the potential value and realism of decision science. However, the field has also become increasingly technical and specialized, so that even the most useful advances are not widely known or applied by the general audience of risk managers and decision-makers who could benefit most from them. This book explains key recent breakthroughs in the theory, methods, and applications of decision and risk analysis. Its goal is to explain them in enough detail, but also with a simple and clear enough exposition, so that risk managers and decision-makers can understand and apply them.

There are several target audiences for this book. One is the operations research and management science (OR/MS) community. This overlaps with the audience for the Wiley Encyclopedia of Operations Research and Management Science (EORMS), including OR/MS professionals–academic and industry researchers, government organizations ...