International governance and risk management

Abstract

In this book the authors demonstrate how the economics of insurance, risk reduction, and damage control or limitation can be combined with concepts of collective choice and collective behavior to improve analysis of the escalating threats faced by alliances throughout the world. The book develops a theory of risk management as integrating likelihood of loss, magnitude of loss, and isolation from loss into a consolidated model. It extends existing concepts of individual risk management by a single person to decision theory for an entire country, managed by a government bureaucracy and lodged in a universe of overlapping alliances. The authors uncover a tendency, inherent in any bureaucracy for policy coordination in the realm of risk control to fail because of misunderstanding, disinterest, or perverse incentives. Understanding such incentives is essential to any sort of progress in risk management of proliferating national and global threats.