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A Practical Approach to Address Uncertainty in Stakeholder Deliberations
Author(s) -
Gregory Robin,
Keeney Ralph L.
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
risk analysis
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.972
H-Index - 130
eISSN - 1539-6924
pISSN - 0272-4332
DOI - 10.1111/risa.12638
Subject(s) - stakeholder , certainty , management science , process (computing) , stakeholder engagement , function (biology) , risk analysis (engineering) , computer science , business , political science , engineering , public relations , philosophy , epistemology , evolutionary biology , biology , operating system
This article addresses the difficulties of incorporating uncertainty about consequence estimates as part of stakeholder deliberations involving multiple alternatives. Although every prediction of future consequences necessarily involves uncertainty, a large gap exists between common practices for addressing uncertainty in stakeholder deliberations and the procedures of prescriptive decision‐aiding models advanced by risk and decision analysts. We review the treatment of uncertainty at four main phases of the deliberative process: with experts asked to describe possible consequences of competing alternatives, with stakeholders who function both as individuals and as members of coalitions, with the stakeholder committee composed of all stakeholders, and with decisionmakers. We develop and recommend a model that uses certainty equivalents as a theoretically robust and practical approach for helping diverse stakeholders to incorporate uncertainties when evaluating multiple‐objective alternatives as part of public policy decisions.