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Work-in-progress research presentations from Alex Voorhoeve and Roman Frigg.
Work-in-progress research presentations from Alex Voorhoeve and Roman Frigg.
Find out more »Casey Helgeson (LSE): Climate Uncertainties and Expert Elicitation
This talk will introduce the topic of expert-elicited knowledge as an input to risk management and policy decision making, and survey applications in the field of climate/global change. Topics to include: elicitation methodology, whether to aggregate expert opinions, expert elicitation versus `expert judgment’ in IPCC assessments, and the role of expert elicitation in climate services. The main aim is to…
Find out more »Simon Dietz (LSE Grantham Institute): Spaces for agreement: A theory of Time-Stochastic Dominance and an application to climate change
Abstract: Many investments involve both a long time-horizon and risky returns. Making investment decisions thus requires assumptions about time and risk preferences. Such assumptions are frequently contested, particularly in the public sector, and there is no immediate prospect of universal agreement. Motivated by these observations, we develop a theory and method of finding ‘spaces for agreement’. These are combinations of classes of…
Find out more »Richard Bradley (LSE) and Casey Helgeson (LSE): Decision and Climate Change Assessments
Thursday, 26 February, 2:00 Richard Bradley (LSE) and Casey Helgeson (LSE), presenting work co-authored with Brian Hill (HEC, Paris) Decision and Climate Change Assessments ABSTRACT. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has adopted official guidelines for communicating uncertainties attached to the scientific findings that appear in their assessment reports. One novel feature of their approach is the use of ‘confidence’,…
Find out more »Hykel Hosni (LSE): Symmetric vs asymmetric extensions of classical expected utility – Part 2
Thursday, 12 March, 2:00 Hykel Hosni (LSE) Symmetric vs asymmetric extensions of classical expected utility - PART 2
Find out more »Elizabeth Baldwin (LSE Grantham Institute): Climate Policy with Incomplete Knowledge
Thursday, 19 March, 2:00 Elizabeth Baldwin (LSE Grantham Institute) Climate Policy with Incomplete Knowledge ABSTRACT. The economic effects of climate change, and the costs of any policy response, are very uncertain. Models ought to reflect this. The `minimal' theory for decision-making under Knightian uncertainty is is a model of incomplete beliefs and tastes. I define a `dismal' situation in which different assumptions,…
Find out more »Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné (HEC Montreal) and Pauline Barrieu (LSE CATS): Economic Policy when Models Disagree
Thursday, 30 April, 2:00, LAK 2.06 Bernard Sinclair-Desgagné (HEC Montreal) and Pauline Barrieu (LSE CATS) Economic Policy when Models Disagree ABSTRACT: This paper introduces a general approach to conceive public policy when there is no consensual model of the situation of interest. This approach builds on one basic attribute of rational policymakers -- namely their ability to appraise their experts’…
Find out more »Magda Osman (Queen Mary University): What processes enable us to control uncertainty?
Thursday, 7 May, 2:00, LAK 2.06 Magda Osman (Queen Mary University) What processes enable us to control uncertainty? ABSTRACT: The presentation will start with a round trip of psychological research in the domain of dynamic control. For the most part the literature has focused heavily, and unnecessarily, on weak empirical demonstrations of unconscious processes that are thought to underpin control…
Find out more »Erica Thompson (LSE CATS), Roman Frigg (LSE), and Casey Helgeson (LSE): Expert Judgement for Climate Change Adaptation
Abstract: Climate change adaptation is largely a local matter, and adaptation planning can benefit from local climate change projections. Such projections are typically generated by accepting climate model outputs in a relatively uncritical way. We argue, based on the IPCC’s treatment of model outputs from the CMIP5 ensemble, that this approach is unwarranted and that subjective expert judgment should play…
Find out more »Work-in-progress presentations by (mostly) PhD students (LSE Philosophy) – PART 1: Nicolas Wuethrich, Casey Helgeson
Work-in-progress presentations by (mostly) PhD students (LSE Philosophy) - PART 1: Nicolas Wuethrich, Casey Helgeson Nicolas Wuethrich Conceptualizing uncertainty: An assessment of the latest IPCC’s uncertainty framework We are facing severe uncertainties regarding the phenomenon of climate change. To address these uncertainties, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has introduced a new version of its framework for communicating uncertainty which involves a…
Find out more »Matthew Adler (Duke University): Prioritarianism and Climate Change
Abstract: “Prioritarianism” is an ethical view that has been much discussed in recent normative ethics and theoretical welfare economics, but thus far has had little impact on climate change scholarship. The view gives greater weight to well-being changes affecting those at lower well-being levels. Formalized as a social welfare function (SWF), prioritarianism sums a strictly concave function of individual utilities--by…
Find out more »Decision Making under Severe Uncertainty
This workshop will take place under the joint auspices of the Managing Severe Uncertainty project based at the LSE and the DUSUCA project based at GREGHEC (HEC Paris, CNRS). Further details for this event will be announced soon,
Find out more »Work-in-progress presentations by (mostly) PhD students (LSE Philosophy) – PART 2: Silvia Milano, Thomas Rowe
Work-in-progress presentations by (mostly) PhD students (LSE Philosophy) - PART 2: Silvia Milano, Thomas Rowe Abstract TBC
Find out more »MSU Reading Group: “How Probabilities Reflect the Evidence”
For its first meeting of the term, Managing Severe Uncertainty will hold a reading-group style discussion of the article: James Joyce (2005) "How Probabilities Reflect the Evidence".
Find out more »Casey Helgeson (LSE) and Katie Steele (LSE): “Integrating Theory and Practice in Deep Uncertainty Decision Science”
Abstract: How do applied tools for deep uncertainty decision support (e.g., Robust Decision Making, Decision Scaling, Info-Gap, Adaptive Pathways) relate to the more exact and mathematised decision models of philosophy and economics? And how can theoreticians from the latter tradition best contribute to the development of applied decision support? We discuss possible answers and illustrate with a close look at…
Find out more »Hauke Riesch (Brunel University London): “Levels of Uncertainty”
Abstract: There exist a variety of different understandings, definitions, and classifications of risk, which can make the resulting landscape of academic literature on the topic seem somewhat disjointed and often confusing. In this chapter, I will introduce a map on how to think about risks, and in particular uncertainty, which is arranged along the different questions of what the different…
Find out more »Alessandro Tavoni (LSE Grantham Institute): “Climate change games in the lab: economic experiments on bargaining and mitigation”
Abstract: TBA
Find out more »Kasper Plattner (IPCC Technical Support Unit): “IPCC 2013/2014: Assessing the Science of Climate Change”
Abstract: TBC #ManagingSevereUncertainty
Find out more »Roberto Buizza (European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts): “Signals and noise, hawk-moths and butterflies: Weather prediction in a world of uncertainties”
Abstract: Ensemble-based, probabilistic systems provide (at least up to now) the most effective way to predict the weather taking into account all relevant sources of uncertainty, to extract predictable signals from sometimes noisy single forecasts. They help us living and dealing with both the butterfly effect (sensitive dependence to initial condition errors; see Lorenz 1963 J. Atm. Sci.) and the…
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