Browsing by Author "Li, Jiawei W."

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    A decision support approach for group decision making under risk and uncertainty
    (2010-12-31T00:00:00Z) Li, Jiawei W.; Kendall, Graham; Pollard, Simon J. T.; Soane, Emma; Davies, Graham; Bai, Ruibin
    Cost-benefit analysis has long been used in decision making about public health and security. Frequently, risk and uncertainty are involved, and benefit and cost are not evenly shared by all stakeholders in the activities where public welfare is concerned. The result of cost-benefit analysis may be controversial because it does not consider the conflict of interest among the stakeholders. In this paper, we propose a decision support approach that allows individual agents to make their own evaluations of benefit, cost and risk over available alternatives. Individual beliefs with respect to the alternatives will then be aggregated to form a group decision. This approach can also be used to integrate the cost benefit analysis into risk assessment. An application to this group decision making, considering the disposal of dead animals, is given.
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    Optimising risk reduction: An expected utility approach for marginal risk reduction during regulatory decision making
    (Elsevier Science B.V., Amsterdam., 2009-11-30T00:00:00Z) Li, Jiawei W.; Pollard, Simon J. T.; Kendall, Graham; Soane, Emma; Davies, Gareth J.
    In practice, risk and uncertainty are essentially unavoidable in many regulation processes. Regulators frequently face a risk-benefit trade-off since zero risk is neither practicable nor affordable. Although it is accepted that cost-benefit analysis is important in many scenarios of risk management, what role it should play in a decision process is still controversial. One criticism of cost-benefit analysis is that decision makers should consider marginal benefits and costs, not present ones, in their decision making. In this paper, we investigate the problem of regulatory decision making under risk by applying expected utility theory and present a new approach of cost-benefit analysis. Directly taking into consideration the reduction of the risks, this approach achieves marginal cost- benefit analysis. By applying this approach, the optimal regulatory decision that maximizes the marginal benefit of risk reduction can be considered. This provides a transparent and reasonable criterion for stakeholders involved in the regulatory activity. An example of evaluating seismic retrofitting alternatives is provided to demonstrate the potential of the proposed approach. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.