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Risk and Design

RISK springs from uncertainty,1 uncertainty invites error, and, since error can be costly, we would prefer to avoid it (provided, of course, that avoidance is not more costly yet). While there is much in the Noll and Krier article2 about judgmental error under conditions of risk and uncertainty, there is little about ways to avoid it. So avoidance-more accurately, minimization-of error costs is the topic I want to address very briefly and partially here. As the discussion in Noll and Krier points out, cognitive psychologists in particular have given us fairly systematic insights into judgmental error, and some commentators have seized on this knowledge as a new kind of "market failure." Law professor Cass Sunstein, for example, uses precisely those words in talking about "the enormous difficulties people face in dealing with low-probability events. People tend to rely on heuristics that lead to systemic errors."3 Psychologist Paul Slovic and his colleagues make explicit what is probably implicit in Sunstein's remarksthat this newfound source of market failure is a good reason for government intervention in risk markets. In a review article on risk regulation, they summarize the research regarding "difficulties people have in thinking intuitively about risk and uncertainty." The results of that research, they observe, "run counter to the traditional presumptions of knowledge and rationality that underlie economic approaches to decisionmaking