Expert Judgment, Meta-analysis, and Participatory Risk Analysis

There are three contexts in which one might wish to combine expert judgements of uncertainty: the expert problem, the group decision problem and the textbook problem. Much has been written on the first two, which have the focus of a single decision context, but little on the third. The textbook problem arises when one needs to draw together expert judgements into a decision analysis when their judgements were made originally in a context free manner or perhaps for other decision contexts. In many ways the textbook problem parallels that of performing a meta-analysis of empirical studies. However, there are differences. In this paper , we discuss those difficulties and then focus on two closely related issues: how should expert judgement studies be published so as to facilitate subsequent meta-analyses and how should such meta-analyses be performed?