Overview

Risks are an integral part of complex, high-stakes decisions, and decisionmakers are faced with the unavoidable tasks of assessing risks and forming risk preferences. This is true for all decision domains, including financial, environmental, and foreign policy domains, among others. How well decisionmakers deal with risk affects, to a considerable extent, the quality of their decisions. This book provides the most comprehensive analysis available of the elements that influence risk judgments and preferences. The book has two dimensions: theoretical and comparative-historical. The study of risk-taking behavior has been dominated by the rational choice approach. Instead, the author adopts a socio-cognitive approach involving: a multivariate theory integrating contextual, cognitive, motivational, and personality factors that affect an individual decisionmaker s judgment and preferences; the social interaction and structural effects of the decisionmaking group and its organizational setting; and the role of cultural-societal values and norms that sanction or discourage risk taking behavior.

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9780804731683

Table of Contents

Reviews

This brilliant book brings together a wide range of materials from various fields on the dynamics of risk taking and of foreign military interventions. These subjects have been explored before, but never to my knowledge with such thoroughness or creativity. This is a definitive volume that will long withstand the test of time. - James N. Rosenau, George Washington University

'Yaakov Vertzberger's perspicacious and impressively researched Risk Taking and Decisionmaking. He erects a plausible microlevel theoretical framework, synthesizes it with work on bureaucratic and cultural politics, and employs the resulting product to predict and explain risk-taking behaviour and decisionmaking in the arens of foreign military interventions ... Vertzberger certainly succeeds in his aim to offer an argument with the empirical richness and nuance that is absent from most rational choice and neorealist explanations ofstate action ... Also, it will make compelling reading for decisionmakers who wish to avoid the traps and mistakes associated with escalation in the faceof sunk costs and other suboptimal decision strategies.' International Studies Review

Author Information

Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger is Professor of International Relations at the Hebrew University, Jerusalem. He is the author, most recently, of The World in Their Minds: Information Processing, Cognition, and Perception in Foreign Policy Decisionmaking (Stanford, 1990).

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