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Risk and Decision Making – Fundamental Aspects

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Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education

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Introduction

There are many diverging personal conceptions about risk and it seems difficult to communicate on issues of risk. However, what it is more startling is that the notion of risk does not seem to be well defined. Risk is differently viewed on and used, regardless of any estimation of an actual risk in a situation and the actual decision constituents. Risk even differs – not only by individual perception – within the same situation depending on the role one takes in it. Different stakeholders in the same situation process the same data differently, have different targets to fulfill and different utilities to optimize, using different optimization criteria, and suffer from the decision differently.

There can be no consensus about a specific risk.

Moreover, any judgment of risk is nearly impossible or done with indices that are sophisticated to understand. However, if the risk of various options (decisions) is compared, then the used mathematical concepts are very helpful to...

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, Alps Adria University Klagenfurt, Klagenfurt, Austria

    Manfred Borovcnik

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  1. Manfred Borovcnik
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Correspondence to Manfred Borovcnik .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. South Bank University Centre for Mathematics Education, London, UK

    Steve Lerman

Section Editor information

  1. Department of Mathematical Sciences, The University of Montana, Missoula, MT, USA

    Bharath Sriraman

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Borovcnik, M. (2018). Risk and Decision Making – Fundamental Aspects. In: Lerman, S. (eds) Encyclopedia of Mathematics Education. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77487-9_100006-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77487-9_100006-1

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  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-77487-9

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