The Precautionary Principle as a Basis for Decision Making

Science for precautionary decision ‐ making

(1) The author would like to thank Mette Eriksen for conducting the searches on SciFinder. Helpful contributions on earlier versions were made by John Bailar, Carl Cranor, David Gee and David Kriebel. The goals of academic researchers may differ from those of regulatory agencies responsible for protecting the environment. Thus, research must take into account issues such as feasibility, merit a...

Decision-making under scientific uncertainty : The economics of the Precautionary Principle

Implications of the Precautionary Principle in research and policy-making.

The Precautionary Principle (PP) has recently been formally introduced into national and international law. The key element is the justification for acting in the face of uncertainty. The PP is thereby a tool for avoiding possible future harm associated with suspected, but not conclusive, environmental risks. Under the PP, the burden of proof is shifted from demonstrating the presence of risk t...

Patient-specific simulation as a basis for clinical decision-making.

Patient-specific medical simulation holds the promise of determining tailored medical treatment based on the characteristics of an individual patient (for example, using a genotypic assay of a sequence of DNA). Decision-support systems based on patient-specific simulation can potentially revolutionize the way that clinicians plan courses of treatment for various conditions, ranging from viral i...

Fuzzy Rationality as a Basis for Group Decision Making

This paper deals with the group decision making problem, assuming that each individual defines his/her opinion through fuzzy binary preference relations, in parallel to the classical approach due to Prof. Arrow. In particular, it is postulated that the main reason for the discouraging impossibility theorems is neither in the domain of admissible preferences or in the concept of solution (Social...