A prescriptive risk framework for individual health and safety decisions

A conceptual framework is developed for the prescriptive evaluation of health and safety risks to an individual. This framework allows one to compare chronic vs. acute health risks, accidents vs. illness, and physical vs. psychological impacts. To do this, value judgments are necessary to quantify one's health state in terms of both physical and psychological well-being. Probabilities are necessary to describe implications of activities such as skiing or smoking and conditions such as cancer or third-degree burns in terms of these health states. Suggestions are made to operationalize and use the framework to evaluate and compare very different individual health and safety risks. Essentially, all existing measures of individual risk can be derived as special cases of the proposed framework.

Duke Scholars

Author Ralph L. Keeney Fuqua School of Business