| Spring 2005 UMASS
Amherst Operations Research / Management Science Seminar Series |
Date: Friday, March 11, 2005 Time: 11:00 AM Location: Isenberg School of Management, Room 112 |
| Speakers: Professors John
Stranlund, Barry Field, and L. Joe Moffitt Department of Resource Economics University of Massachusetts at Amherst |
| Biographies: Professor John Stranlund is an Associate
Professor and Graduate Program Director in the Department of Resource
Economics at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Most of his
research is focused on the theory of environmental policy. Professor
Barry C. Field is a Professor in the Department of Resource Economics
at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. His academic interests
are primarily in environmental economics and institutional economics.
Professor L. Joe Moffitt is a Professor and Outreach Coordinator in the
Department of Resource Economics at the University of Massachusetts at
Amherst. Much of his research is on the economics of crop protection
with particular emphasis on new technology and biosecurity. |
| TITLE: Inspections to Avert Terrorism: Robustness Under Severe Uncertainty |
| Abstract: Protecting against terrorist
attacks requires making decisions in a world in which attack
probabilities are largely unknown. The potential for very large losses
encourages a conservative perspective, in particular toward decisions
that are robust. But robustness, in the sense of assurance against
extreme outcomes, ordinarily is not the only desideratum in uncertain
environments. We adopt Yalov Ben-Haim’s (2001b) model of information
gap decision making to investigate the problem of inspecting a number
of similar targets when one of the targets may be attacked, but with
unknown probability. We apply this to a problem of inspecting a sample
of incoming shipping containers for a terrorist weapon. We show that
robustness against failing to hold the probability of a successful
terrorist attack to no more than some critical failure probability is
increasing in the number of inspected vessels. However, robustness
against the failure of a decision maker with an unknown degree of risk
aversion to guarantee a minimum level of expected utility may not be
monotonic. Indeed, there may be a large range of numbers of inspections
for which more inspections leave the decision maker less secure. |
| This series is organized by the
UMASS Amherst INFORMS Student Chapter. Support for this series is
provided by the Isenberg School of Management, the Department of
Finance and Operations Management, and the John F. Smith Memorial Fund. For questions, please contact the INFORMS Student Chapter President, Ms. Tina Wakolbinger, wakolbinger@som.umass.edu |