Publication Laka-library:
How versus how often (1991)
| Author | L.Hendrickx |
| Date | 1991 |
| Classification | 6.01.3.70/20 (NUCLEAR SAFETY - RISK ANALYSES / RISK PERCEPTION) |
| Front | 
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From the publication:
CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCI'ION AND OVERVIEW Introduction The term 'risk' refers to the possibility of something going wrong. Societal debates about the riskiness and acceptability of controversial technologies have led scientists, e.g., technicians, mathematicians and social scientists, to propose precise and quantitative definitions of 'risk'. The rationale for defining 'risk' formally is twofold: a quantitative definition of risk would enable investigators to measure and compare the riskiness of different activities; secondly, it could provide decision makers with (more) strict and objective rules for accepting or rejecting specific risky activities. But despite the large number of risk definitions proposed in the literature (in a recent inventory Vlek (1990) distinguishes twenty of them), a formal risk definition which is both generally applicable (e.g., across different task domains) and generally accepted (e.g., in different disciplines, among different interest groups) is still lacking. In most of the suggested definitions risk is defined as some function of the likelihood of possible (negative) consequences and/or the utility (or seriousness) of such consequences. However, controversies exist with regard to two questions: (a) Which probabilities and utilities should be considered, e.g., only those of (one specific) negative outcome(s) or those of all possible outcomes? And (b): How should the relevant probabilities and utilities be combined into an overall risk estimate? A well- known aggregation rule, for instance, is 'expected loss' (i.e., the product of probability and utility summed over all negative consequences), but other, more complex functions have also been proposed.
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