Download or read book Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty written by Vincent A. W. J. Marchau and published by Springer. This book was released on 2019-04-04 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This open access book focuses on both the theory and practice associated with the tools and approaches for decisionmaking in the face of deep uncertainty. It explores approaches and tools supporting the design of strategic plans under deep uncertainty, and their testing in the real world, including barriers and enablers for their use in practice. The book broadens traditional approaches and tools to include the analysis of actors and networks related to the problem at hand. It also shows how lessons learned in the application process can be used to improve the approaches and tools used in the design process. The book offers guidance in identifying and applying appropriate approaches and tools to design plans, as well as advice on implementing these plans in the real world. For decisionmakers and practitioners, the book includes realistic examples and practical guidelines that should help them understand what decisionmaking under deep uncertainty is and how it may be of assistance to them. Decision Making under Deep Uncertainty: From Theory to Practice is divided into four parts. Part I presents five approaches for designing strategic plans under deep uncertainty: Robust Decision Making, Dynamic Adaptive Planning, Dynamic Adaptive Policy Pathways, Info-Gap Decision Theory, and Engineering Options Analysis. Each approach is worked out in terms of its theoretical foundations, methodological steps to follow when using the approach, latest methodological insights, and challenges for improvement. In Part II, applications of each of these approaches are presented. Based on recent case studies, the practical implications of applying each approach are discussed in depth. Part III focuses on using the approaches and tools in real-world contexts, based on insights from real-world cases. Part IV contains conclusions and a synthesis of the lessons that can be drawn for designing, applying, and implementing strategic plans under deep uncertainty, as well as recommendations for future work. The publication of this book has been funded by the Radboud University, the RAND Corporation, Delft University of Technology, and Deltares.

Download or read book Decision Making Under Uncertainty written by Mykel J. Kochenderfer and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-07-24 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introduction to decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective, covering both theory and applications ranging from speech recognition to airborne collision avoidance. Many important problems involve decision making under uncertainty—that is, choosing actions based on often imperfect observations, with unknown outcomes. Designers of automated decision support systems must take into account the various sources of uncertainty while balancing the multiple objectives of the system. This book provides an introduction to the challenges of decision making under uncertainty from a computational perspective. It presents both the theory behind decision making models and algorithms and a collection of example applications that range from speech recognition to aircraft collision avoidance. Focusing on two methods for designing decision agents, planning and reinforcement learning, the book covers probabilistic models, introducing Bayesian networks as a graphical model that captures probabilistic relationships between variables; utility theory as a framework for understanding optimal decision making under uncertainty; Markov decision processes as a method for modeling sequential problems; model uncertainty; state uncertainty; and cooperative decision making involving multiple interacting agents. A series of applications shows how the theoretical concepts can be applied to systems for attribute-based person search, speech applications, collision avoidance, and unmanned aircraft persistent surveillance. Decision Making Under Uncertainty unifies research from different communities using consistent notation, and is accessible to students and researchers across engineering disciplines who have some prior exposure to probability theory and calculus. It can be used as a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in fields including computer science, aerospace and electrical engineering, and management science. It will also be a valuable professional reference for researchers in a variety of disciplines.

Download or read book Radical Uncertainty Decision Making Beyond the Numbers written by John Kay and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Much economic advice is bogus quantification, warn two leading experts in this essential book, now with a preface on COVID-19. Invented numbers offer a false sense of security; we need instead robust narratives that give us the confidence to manage uncertainty. “An elegant and careful guide to thinking about personal and social economics, especially in a time of uncertainty. The timing is impeccable." — Christine Kenneally, New York Times Book Review Some uncertainties are resolvable. The insurance industry’s actuarial tables and the gambler’s roulette wheel both yield to the tools of probability theory. Most situations in life, however, involve a deeper kind of uncertainty, a radical uncertainty for which historical data provide no useful guidance to future outcomes. Radical uncertainty concerns events whose determinants are insufficiently understood for probabilities to be known or forecasting possible. Before President Barack Obama made the fateful decision to send in the Navy Seals, his advisers offered him wildly divergent estimates of the odds that Osama bin Laden would be in the Abbottabad compound. In 2000, no one—not least Steve Jobs—knew what a smartphone was; how could anyone have predicted how many would be sold in 2020? And financial advisers who confidently provide the information required in the standard retirement planning package—what will interest rates, the cost of living, and your state of health be in 2050?—demonstrate only that their advice is worthless. The limits of certainty demonstrate the power of human judgment over artificial intelligence. In most critical decisions there can be no forecasts or probability distributions on which we might sensibly rely. Instead of inventing numbers to fill the gaps in our knowledge, we should adopt business, political, and personal strategies that will be robust to alternative futures and resilient to unpredictable events. Within the security of such a robust and resilient reference narrative, uncertainty can be embraced, because it is the source of creativity, excitement, and profit.

Download or read book Decision Making Under Uncertainty written by Charles A. Holloway and published by Prentice Hall. This book was released on 1979 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Introduction and basic concepts; Models and probability; Choices and preferences; Preference assessment procedures; Behavioral assumptions and limitations of decision analysis; Risk sharing and incentives; Choices with multiple attributes.

Download or read book Decision Making Under Uncertainty in Electricity Markets written by Antonio J. Conejo and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2010-09-08 with total page 549 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Decision Making Under Uncertainty in Electricity Markets provides models and procedures to be used by electricity market agents to make informed decisions under uncertainty. These procedures rely on well established stochastic programming models, which make them efficient and robust. Particularly, these techniques allow electricity producers to derive offering strategies for the pool and contracting decisions in the futures market. Retailers use these techniques to derive selling prices to clients and energy procurement strategies through the pool, the futures market and bilateral contracting. Using the proposed models, consumers can derive the best energy procurement strategies using the available trading floors. The market operator can use the techniques proposed in this book to clear simultaneously energy and reserve markets promoting efficiency and equity. The techniques described in this book are of interest for professionals working on energy markets, and for graduate students in power engineering, applied mathematics, applied economics, and operations research.

Download or read book Affective Decision Making Under Uncertainty written by Donald J. Brown and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2020-12-18 with total page 88 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is an exploration of the ubiquity of ambiguity in decision-making under uncertainty. It presents various essays on behavioral economics and behavioral finance that draw on the theory of Black Swans (Taleb 2010), which argues for a distinction between unprecedented events in our past and unpredictable events in our future. The defining property of Black Swan random events is that they are unpredictable, i.e., highly unlikely random events. In this text, Mandelbrot’s (1972) operational definition of risky random unpredictable events is extended to Black Swan assets – assets for which the cumulative probability distribution or conditional probability distribution of random future asset returns is a power distribution. Ambiguous assets are assets for which the uncertainties of future returns are not risks. Consequently, there are two disjoint classes of Black Swan assets: Risky Black Swan assets and Ambiguous Black Swan assets, a new class of ambiguous assets with unpredictable random future outcomes. The text is divided into two parts, the first of which focuses on affective moods, introduces affective utility functions and discusses the ambiguity of Black Swans. The second part, which shifts the spotlight to affective equilibrium in asset markets, features chapters on affective portfolio analysis and Walrasian and Gorman Polar Form Equilibrium Inequalities. In order to gain the most from the book, readers should have completed the standard introductory graduate courses on microeconomics, behavioral finance, and convex optimization. The book is intended for advanced undergraduates, graduate students and post docs specializing in economic theory, experimental economics, finance, mathematics, computer science or data analysis.

Download or read book Completing the Forecast written by National Research Council and published by National Academies Press. This book was released on 2006-10-09 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncertainty is a fundamental characteristic of weather, seasonal climate, and hydrological prediction, and no forecast is complete without a description of its uncertainty. Effective communication of uncertainty helps people better understand the likelihood of a particular event and improves their ability to make decisions based on the forecast. Nonetheless, for decades, users of these forecasts have been conditioned to receive incomplete information about uncertainty. They have become used to single-valued (deterministic) forecasts (e.g., "the high temperature will be 70 degrees Farenheit 9 days from now") and applied their own experience in determining how much confidence to place in the forecast. Most forecast products from the public and private sectors, including those from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration's National Weather Service, continue this deterministic legacy. Fortunately, the National Weather Service and others in the prediction community have recognized the need to view uncertainty as a fundamental part of forecasts. By partnering with other segments of the community to understand user needs, generate relevant and rich informational products, and utilize effective communication vehicles, the National Weather Service can take a leading role in the transition to widespread, effective incorporation of uncertainty information into predictions. "Completing the Forecast" makes recommendations to the National Weather Service and the broader prediction community on how to make this transition.

Download or read book What Every Engineer Should Know About Decision Making Under Uncertainty written by John X. Wang and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2002-07-01 with total page 342 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Covering the prediction of outcomes for engineering decisions through regression analysis, this succinct and practical reference presents statistical reasoning and interpretational techniques to aid in the decision making process when faced with engineering problems. The author emphasizes the use of spreadsheet simulations and decision trees as important tools in the practical application of decision making analyses and models to improve real-world engineering operations. He offers insight into the realities of high-stakes engineering decision making in the investigative and corporate sectors by optimizing engineering decision variables to maximize payoff.

Download or read book Principles of Risk Analysis written by Charles Yoe and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2016-04-19 with total page 576 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In every decision context there are things we know and things we do not know. Risk analysis uses science and the best available evidence to assess what we know-and it is intentional in the way it addresses the importance of the things we don't know. Principles of Risk Analysis: Decision Making Under Uncertainty lays out the tasks of risk analysis i

Download or read book Decision Making Under Uncertainty written by Claude Greengard and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2012-12-06 with total page 166 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the ideal world, major decisions would be made based on complete and reliable information available to the decision maker. We live in a world of uncertainties, and decisions must be made from information which may be incomplete and may contain uncertainty. The key mathematical question addressed in this volume is "how to make decision in the presence of quantifiable uncertainty." The volume contains articles on model problems of decision making process in the energy and power industry when the available information is noisy and/or incomplete. The major tools used in studying these problems are mathematical modeling and optimization techniques; especially stochastic optimization. These articles are meant to provide an insight into this rapidly developing field, which lies in the intersection of applied statistics, probability, operations research, and economic theory. It is hoped that the present volume will provide entry to newcomers into the field, and stimulation for further research.

Download or read book Advances in Decision Making Under Risk and Uncertainty written by Mohammed Abdellaoui and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2008-08-29 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether we like it or not we all feel that the world is uncertain. From choosing a new technology to selecting a job, we rarely know in advance what outcome will result from our decisions. Unfortunately, the standard theory of choice under uncertainty developed in the early forties and fifties turns out to be too rigid to take many tricky issues of choice under uncertainty into account. The good news is that we have now moved away from the early descriptively inadequate modeling of behavior. This book brings the reader into contact with the accomplished progress in individual decision making through the most recent contributions to uncertainty modeling and behavioral decision making. It also introduces the reader into the many subtle issues to be resolved for rational choice under uncertainty.

Download or read book Uncertainty in Entrepreneurial Decision Making written by Panagiotis E. Petrakis and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 220 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncertainty in Entrepreneurial Decision Making fills an existing gap in understanding three key concepts of business management: entrepreneurship, uncertainty, and strategy. By extending the impact of uncertainty on entrepreneurship and the role of strategy in reducing uncertainty, Petrakis and Konstantakopoulou emphasize that uncertainty can be converted into creative advantage. Given that the business environment is changing both very quickly and very often, any wrong decisions taken can lead to devastation. This exciting new volume explains the reasons why we cannot see the complete the future and our position in it. This uncertainty affects entrepreneurship and how it can be turned into a competitive advantage for businesses sustainability.

Download or read book Risk Choice and Uncertainty written by George G. Szpiro and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2020-01-07 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At its core, economics is about making decisions. In the history of economic thought, great intellectual prowess has been exerted toward devising exquisite theories of optimal decision making in situations of constraint, risk, and scarcity. Yet not all of our choices are purely logical, and so there is a longstanding tension between those emphasizing the rational and irrational sides of human behavior. One strand develops formal models of rational utility maximizing while the other draws on what behavioral science has shown about our tendency to act irrationally. In Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty, George G. Szpiro offers a new narrative of the three-century history of the study of decision making, tracing how crucial ideas have evolved and telling the stories of the thinkers who shaped the field. Szpiro examines economics from the early days of theories spun from anecdotal evidence to the rise of a discipline built around elegant mathematics through the past half century’s interest in describing how people actually behave. Considering the work of Locke, Bentham, Jevons, Walras, Friedman, Tversky and Kahneman, Thaler, and a range of other thinkers, he sheds light on the vast scope of discovery since Bernoulli first proposed a solution to the St. Petersburg Paradox. Presenting fundamental mathematical theories in easy-to-understand language, Risk, Choice, and Uncertainty is a revelatory history for readers seeking to grasp the grand sweep of economic thought.

Download or read book Managing Risk and Uncertainty written by Richard Friberg and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2015-11-13 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive framework for assessing strategies for managing risk and uncertainty, integrating theory and practice and synthesizing insights from many fields. This book offers a framework for making decisions under risk and uncertainty. Synthesizing research from economics, finance, decision theory, management, and other fields, the book provides a set of tools and a way of thinking that determines the relative merits of different strategies. It takes as its premise that we make better decisions if we use the whole toolkit of economics and related fields to inform our decision making. The text explores the distinction between risk and uncertainty and covers standard models of decision making under risk as well as more recent work on decision making under uncertainty, with a particular focus on strategic interaction. It also examines the implications of incomplete markets for managing under uncertainty. It presents four core strategies: a benchmark strategy (proceeding as if risk and uncertainty were low), a financial hedging strategy (valuable if there is much risk), an operational hedging strategy (valuable for conditions of much uncertainty), and a flexible strategy (valuable if there is much risk and/or uncertainty). The book then examines various aspects of these strategies in greater depth, building on empirical work in several different fields. Topics include price-setting, real options and Monte Carlo techniques, organizational structure, and behavioral biases. Many chapters include exercises and appendixes with additional material. The book can be used in graduate or advanced undergraduate courses in risk management, as a guide for researchers, or as a reference for management practitioners.

Download or read book Uncertainty in Policy Making written by Michael Heazle and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-08-21 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Uncertainty in Policy Making explores how uncertainty is interpreted and used by policy makers, experts and politicians. It argues that conventional notions of rational, evidence-based policy making - hailed by governments and organisations across the world as the only way to make good policy - is an impossible aim in highly complex and uncertain environments; the blind pursuit of such a 'rational' goal is in fact irrational in a world of competing values and interests. The book centres around two high-profile and important case studies: the Iraq war and climate change policy in the US, UK and Australia. Based on three years' research, including interviews with experts such as Hans Blix, Paul Pillar, and Brian Jones, these two case studies show that the treatment of uncertainty issues in specialist advice is largely determined by how well the advice fits with or contradicts the policy goals and orientation of the policy elite. Instead of allowing the debates to be side-tracked by arguments over whose science or expert advice is 'more right', we must accept that uncertainty in complex issues is unavoidable and recognise the values and interests that lie at the heart of the issues. The book offers a 'hedging' approach which will enable policy makers to manage rather than eliminate uncertainty.

Download or read book Theory of Decision Under Uncertainty written by Itzhak Gilboa and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2009-03-16 with total page 216 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book describes the classical axiomatic theories of decision under uncertainty, as well as critiques thereof and alternative theories. It focuses on the meaning of probability, discussing some definitions and surveying their scope of applicability. The behavioral definition of subjective probability serves as a way to present the classical theories, culminating in Savage's theorem. The limitations of this result as a definition of probability lead to two directions - first, similar behavioral definitions of more general theories, such as non-additive probabilities and multiple priors, and second, cognitive derivations based on case-based techniques.

Download or read book Radical Uncertainty written by Mervyn King and published by Bridge Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-02 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: