Issues ranging from the 2008 financial crisis, to the impact of the Fukushima nuclear disaster on global supply chains, to climate change, highlight that our understanding of risk is often insufficient and our tools for measuring and managing risk are often inadequate. INET Oxford researchers are bringing a cross-disciplinary perspective to these issues. Economists, mathematicians, physicists, engineers, biologists, psychologists are collaborating to develop new tools that can better inform decision making by both policymakers and business leaders. As risk cannot always be predicted or managed, INET Oxford researchers are also researching the properties that make systems resilient and applying those insights to a variety of economic, social and policy issues.
Finally, human behaviour plays a key role in determining the risks we take. INET Oxford in collaboration with Oxford Risk and Oxford's Department of Zoology have been examining data from behavioural economics, studies of risk behaviour in non-human species, and theories from evolutionary psychology to better understand what risk behaviours are unique to humans and likely to be socially determined, versus which are more common across species and likely to have evolutionary roots. These insights may have important implications in the design of regulation and in how firms design their risk management systems.
