This book explains how to develop more effective risk communications using the Carnegie Mellon mental-model approach. Such communications are designed to contain, in readily usable form, the information that people need to make informed decisions about risks to health, safety, and the environment. The approach draws together methods from the natural and social sciences, providing a framework for interdisciplinary collaboration. It is demostrated with varied examples including electromagnetic fields, climate change, radon, and sexually transmitted diseases.

Economists and psychologists have, on the whole, exhibited sharply different perspectives on the elicitation of preferences. Economists, who have made preference the central primitive in their thinking about human behavior, have for the most part rejected elicitation and have instead sought to infer preferences from observations of choice behavior. Psychologists, who have tended to think of preference as a context-determined subjective construct, have embraced elicitation as their dominant approach to measurement.
This volume, based on a symposium organized by Daniel McFadden at the...