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Society For Risk Analysis Annual Meeting 2008

Risk Analysis: the Science and the Art

Session Schedule & Abstracts


* Disclaimer: All presentations represent the views of the authors, and not the organizations that support their research. Please apply the standard disclaimer that any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations in abstracts, posters, and presentations at the meeting are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of any other organization or agency. Meeting attendees and authors should be aware that this disclaimer is intended to apply to all abstracts contained in this document. Authors who wish to emphasize this disclaimer should do so in their presentation or poster. In an effort to make the abstracts as concise as possible and easy for meeting participants to read, the abstracts have been formatted such that they exclude references to papers, affiliations, and/or funding sources. Authors who wish to provide attendees with this information should do so in their presentation or poster.

Common abbreviations

Plenary Session Monday

8:30-10:00 AM

Three Models of Games and Risks: Some Challenges in Formulation. Elisabeth Pate-Cornell

Abstract: Game analysis allows assessment of the risk that a system (a country or a spacecraft) is in a deteriorated state at a given time. I will present three such models. The first one is a principal-agent model designed to provide decision support to the manager of a system's development, for example when setting incentives. The result is the risk of failure in operation given that an agent may have taken shortcuts to meet a deadline. The second is a two-step global model of a government's response to terrorist threats, designed to compute the probabilities of different types of attacks scenarios. The third one is an alternate game simulation of counter-insurgency. For a given government strategy, the result is the probability that in the end, the country is below a specified level of economic development or political stability. One of the main challenges is the formulation of these models and the underlying assumptions that they imply.



Managing High Impact Low Probability Disruptions. Yossi Sheffi

Abstract: The talk will extended many of the themes first articulated in professor Sheffi's best selling book "The Resilient Enterprise: Overcoming Vulnerability for Competitive Advantage" (MIT Press, 2005). The presentation will demonstrate that companies' fortunes in the face of business shocks depend more on choices made before the disruption than they do on actions taken in the midst of it. He shows that investments in resilience and flexibility not only reduce risk but create a competitive advantage in the increasingly volatile marketplace. Sheffi provides tools for organizations to reduce the vulnerability of the supply chain they live in. Along the way he tells the stories of dozens of enterprises, large and small, including Toyota, Nokia, General Motors, Zara, British Telecom, Land Rover, Chiquita, Aisin Seiki, Southwest Airlines, UPS, Johnson and Johnson, Intel, the US Navy, and others, from across the globe. Their successes, failures, preparations, and methods provide a rich set of lessons in preparing for and managing disruptions.





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