722 research outputs found
Reminiscences of Ludwig M. Lachmann
No full textThe Symposium on “The Legacy of Ludwig Lachmann: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Institutions, Agency and Uncertainty” stood out also because
of a plenary session organized as a roundtable discussion on “Reminiscences
of Lachmann” with the participation of Martin Fransman, Peter Lewin,
Jochen Runde and Christopher Torr, and Giampaolo Garzarelli as moderator.
The text that follows reports the interesting views about Lachmann’s
public as well as private persona that emerged from the roundtable
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Jochen Runde reminisces
No full textThe Symposium on “The Legacy of Ludwig Lachmann: Interdisciplinary
Perspectives on Institutions, Agency and Uncertainty” stood out also because of a plenary session organized as a roundtable discussion on “Reminiscences of Lachmann” with the participation of Martin Fransman, Peter Lewin,
Jochen Runde and Christopher Torr, and Giampaolo Garzarelli as moderator. The text that follows reports the interesting views about Lachmann’s public as well as private persona that emerged from the roundtable
Unknowns, Black Swans and the risk/uncertainty distinction
No full textTony Lawson’s work on probability and uncertainty is both an important contribution to the heterodox canon as well as a notable early strand of his ongoing enquiry into the nature of social reality. In keeping with most mainstream and heterodox discussions of uncertainty in economics, however, Lawson focuses on situations in which the objects of uncertainty are imagined and can be stated in a way that, potentially at least, allows them to be the subject of probability judgments. This focus results in a relative neglect of the kind of uncertainties that flow from the existence of possibilities that do not even enter the imagination and which are therefore ruled out as the subject of probability judgments. This paper explores uncertainties of the latter kind, starting with and building on Donald Rumsfeld’s famous observations about known unknowns and unknown unknowns. Various connections are developed, first with Nassim Taleb’s Black Swan, and then with Lawson’s Keynes-inspired interpretation of uncertainty
Unknowns, black swans, and bounded rationality in public organizations
No full text“Unknowns” and “Black Swans” have become familiar terms in the public administration literature but tend to be used in different and often conflicting ways. This article provides a typology of the two terms, develops a framework for thinking about how their elements relate, and distinguishes four varieties of the Black Swan. Using the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster, 9/11, the recent international withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the trade boycott associated with the Danish cartoon controversy as examples, we examine how these four varieties may arise in public sector organizations. We offer recommendations on how such organizations might reduce psychological and organizational barriers to uncovering unknowns before they can go on to become Black Swans
Borrowing from Keynes' <i>A Treatise on Probability</i> : A non‐probabilistic measure of uncertainty for scenario planning
No full textScenario planning is a tool used to formulate contingent but potentially impactful futures to aid strategic decision-making. A crucial element of many versions of scenario planning is an assessment of levels of uncertainty about the broad drivers of change within the system under consideration. Despite the importance of this element, the scenario planning literature is largely silent on the appropriate conception of uncertainty to use, exactly what it attaches to and how it might be measured. This paper seeks to fill this gap by advancing a non-probabilistic measure of uncertainty based on the concept of evidential weight drawn from the economist John Maynard Keynes' 1921 A Treatise on Probability
De Finetti and Savage on the normative relevance of imprecise reasoning: a reply to Arthmar and Brady
No full textThis paper examines the claim that de Finetti and Savage completely rejected the notion of indeterminate, as distinct from imprecise, probabilities. It argues that their examination of imprecise reasoning refers both to descriptive and normative issues, and that the inability for a decision-maker to commit to a single prior cannot be limited to measurement problems, as argued by Arthmar and Brady in a recent contribution to this Journal. The paper shows that de Finetti and Savage admitted that having an interval of initial probabilities may sometimes have normative relevance, thereby leaving an opening for indeterminate probabilities
F. H. Knight’s Risk, Uncertainty, and Profit and J. M. Keynes’ Treatise on Probability after 100 years
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Uncovering unknown unknowns: Towards a Baconian approach to management decision-making
No full textBayesian decision theory and inference have left a deep and indelible mark on the literature on management decision-making. There is however an important issue that the machinery of classical Bayesianism is ill equipped to deal with, that of “unknown unknowns” or, in the cases in which they are actualised, what are sometimes called “Black Swans”. This issue is closely related to the problems of constructing an appropriate state space under conditions of deficient foresight about what the future might hold, and our aim is to develop a theory and some of the practicalities of state space elaboration that addresses these problems. Building on ideas originally put forward by Bacon (1620), we show how our approach can be used to build and explore the state space, how it may reduce the extent to which organisations are blindsided by Black Swans, and how it ameliorates various well-known cognitive biases
Gene loss and lineage specific restriction-modification systems associated with niche differentiation in the Campylobacter jejuni Sequence Type 403 clonal complex
No full textCampylobacter jejuni is a highly diverse species of bacteria commonly associated with infectious intestinal disease of humans and zoonotic carriage in poultry, cattle, pigs, and other animals. The species contains a large number of distinct clonal complexes that vary from host generalist lineages commonly found in poultry, livestock, and human disease cases to host-adapted specialized lineages primarily associated with livestock or poultry. Here, we present novel data on the ST403 clonal complex of C. jejuni, a lineage that has not been reported in avian hosts. Our data show that the lineage exhibits a distinctive pattern of intralineage recombination that is accompanied by the presence of lineage-specific restriction-modification systems. Furthermore, we show that the ST403 complex has undergone gene decay at a number of loci. Our data provide a putative link between the lack of association with avian hosts of C. jejuni ST403 and both gene gain and gene loss through nonsense mutations in coding sequences of genes, resulting in pseudogene formation
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