interest in a simple idea for regulation of risk: In cases of doubt, follow the Precautionary Principle.1 Avoid steps that will create a risk of harm. Until safety is established, be cautious; do not require unambiguous evidence. In a catchphrase: better safe than sorry. In ordinary life, pleas of this kind seem quite sensible, indeed a part of ordinary human rationality. It can be hazardous to...

In Germany, the precautionary principle (PP) is a well-established legal principle in environmental law, especially for regulating agribiotechnology. This article uses the analytical concept of issue-framing to identify different views of the PP and how they have informed changes in the German regulatory arena. In the 1990s Germany’s genetically modified (GM) crop policy was dominated by a disc...

The European Commission has published a Communication on the Precautionary Principle and a White Book on Governance. These provide us (as research civil servants of the Commission) an institutional framework for handling scientific information that is often incomplete, uncertain, and contested. But, although the Precautionary Principle is intuitively straightforward to understand, there is no a...

The precautionary principle, presented as a guide to environmental policy decisions in the presence of uncertainty, has been the subject of vigorous debate. However, the has generally not been discussed in relation to formal theories of choice under uncertainty developed as generalizations of the expected utility model. In this paper, it is argued that a formal basis for the precautionary princ...

The Commission’s recent interpretation of the Precautionary Principle is used as starting point for an analysis of the moral foundation of this principle. The Precautionary Principle is shown to have the ethical status of an amendment to a liberal principle to the effect that a state only may restrict a person’s actions in order to prevent unacceptable harm to others. The amendment allows for r...

We consider precautionary liquidity holding as counter-strategy for the entrant to protect himself from predation. Threat of predation, even if avoided in equilibrium, affects the financial contract to raise precautionary liquidity and the equilibrium outcome in the product market competition. When the incumbent’s strategy is unverifiable, the entrant with small start-up capital cannot raise la...