Risk and Theories of Agency
January 21, 2011 - January 22, 2011
Georgia State University
How do risk attitudes manifest themselves at different levels of “the agent”? The term agent here refers to the decision unit. In many theoretical models and policy applications the unit is the individual, but it could also be a group, a household, a village, a corporation, a network, or a political entity. In the other direction, it could be different parts of the brain, or even the gene or meme. And often one agent makes decisions that have consequences for another agent. How do these different levels of agency, and relationships between agents, change our modeling of risk, and how can the analysis at different levels inform each other? This workshop will bring together researchers interested in the implications of modeling risk with explicit attention to the level of agency.