What is Risk?
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What is Risk?

The major questions when dealing with risk in science should be: What is risk? And where does it come from? Answering these questions appears to be obvious and straightforward, but in fact, many researchers and practitioners use expressions, such as “uncertainty”, “variability”, “risk”, “probabilities” without correctly understanding what it means to live in a risky world, or to make decisions under uncertainty.

The major findings so far are that risk is a psychological, and thus subjective, phenomenon. This view is contradicting to objective probability understandings, e.g. to the frequentistic approach, which is often used in science when trying to determining the “true” and “objective” state of the world. This objective risk understanding, however, does not reflect the real world, and - theoretically, it is just a special case of Bayesian (subjective) probabilities. This means, that believing in objective probabilities can lead to wrong interpretations of uncertain results, wrong solutions to optimization problems, and wrong decisions in an uncertain world.

My research projects, therefore, aim at getting a deeper understanding on what’s happening when risk is apparent. A second goal is to consider ways how to improve academics’ and practitioners’ uncertain lives by explaining the relationships between scientific approaches on dealing with risk, and a realistic and thus practically useful understanding, in particular in the following research fields:

On this homepage, you will find some insights presented in my publications, and - of course - new ideas will be added when I get hold of them. If you would like learn more about the world of risk and about the ideas’ theoretical foundations, you should have a closer look into my publications.

Dr. Gerald Bode


Gerald[at]Gerald-Bode.de
Fax: +49 (0)721 - 151 - 20 25 53