Abstracts (PDF file, 1.8MB) - Society for Risk Analysis

SRA 2013 Annual Meeting Abstracts
W2-A.4 Fraas, , A*; Lutter, R; Resources for the Future,
Washington D.C.; rwlutter@gmail.com
Analysis of Regulatory Effectiveness: The Case of
Mandatory Information Disclosure
President Obama’s recent Executive Orders on regulation (i.e.,
E.O. 13563, E.O. 13579, and E.O. 13610) have elevated the
importance of systematic retrospective review and analysis of
federal regulations. E.O. 13563 states the regulatory system
“must measure and seek to improve the actual results of
regulatory requirements” and directs agencies to engage in
“periodic review of existing significant regulations”. We
conduct a comprehensive review of all economically significant
final rules mandating the disclosure of information to third
parties, such as consumers or private investors. We test
whether rules issued by executive branch agencies operating
under E.O. 13563 were accompanied by more rigorous analysis
of the effects of information disclosure than rules exempt from
E.O. 13563. Using methods of prior research assessing the
effectiveness of mandatory information disclosure (e.g., Lacko
and Pappalardo, 2010), we measure rigor by several criteria.
These include whether agencies conducted studies of
comprehension by consumers or other target audiences, such
as investors, and whether such studies involved focus groups or
surveys. If such studies involved surveys we assess whether the
surveys involved 1. control groups, 2. alternative types of
information disclosure, and 3. random assignment of alternative
forms of information disclosure to survey respondents. For
rules issued without a survey, we assess whether agencies
issued plans to evaluate in the future the effectiveness of
mandatory information disclosure, and whether such plans
included “periodic review” using controlled surveys with
random assignment. We summarize our results by type of
agency and also discuss their implications for the
administration of the Paperwork Reduction Act by the federal
Office of Management and Budget.
W3-A.1 Francis, RA*; Gray, GM; Tanir, JY; George Washington
University; seed@gwu.edu
Competing Considerations for Making Safer Chemical
Decisions
This paper discusses the opportunities at the intersection of life
cycle impact analysis, risk analysis and exposure assessment,
environmental policy learning, which are becoming the focus of
emerging regulations encouraging alternatives analysis for
selected commercial chemicals. This research takes a
multi-disciplinary view of this problem, growing out of
discussions of the ILSI Health and Environmental Sciences
Institute (HESI) subcommittee on Frameworks for Alternative
Chemical Assessment and Selection of Safer, Sustainable
Alternatives, Subgroup 2, and focusing on the role of risk from
several dimensions. Each of the following topics will be
discussed in greater detail in the companion papers in this
symposium: First, chemical risk should be examined at each
stage of the product life cycle. This requires a life-cycle
informed view of hazard by considering exposures at each unit
process in the production of the chemical or product. Second,
regulatory stakeholders are beginning to introduce mandated
decision processes based on a multi-attribute decision context.
Third, we discuss how regulatory stakeholders are actively
engaged in policy learning to improve environmental and public
health outcomes relative to prevailing approaches to chemical
risk evaluation. Finally, we discuss the potential economic
impacts—both benefits and potential obstacles to
innovation—faced by industrial actors affected by these
emerging regulations.
W3-F.3 Frankel, MJ; Scouras, J*; Ullrich, GW; Johns Hopkins
University, Penn State University, Shafer Corporation;
james.scouras@jhuapl.edu
Assessing the consequences of nuclear weapons use: The
challenge of incomplete knowledge
The considerable body of knowledge on the consequences of
nuclear weapons employment—accumulated through an
extensive, sustained, and costly national investment in both
testing and analysis over two-thirds of a century—underlies all
operational and policy decisions related to U.S. nuclear
planning. We find that even when consideration is restricted to
the physical consequences of nuclear weapon employment,
where our knowledge base on effects of primary importance to
military planners is substantial, there remain very large
uncertainties, in no small part because many questions, such as
the impacts on the infrastructures that sustain society, were
never previously asked or investigated. Other significant
uncertainties in physical consequences exist because important
phenomena were uncovered late in the test program, have been
inadequately studied, are inherently difficult to model, or are
the result of new weapon developments. Even more difficult to
quantify non-physical consequences such as social,
psychological, political, and full economic impacts were never
on any funding agency’s radar screen. As a result, the physical
consequences of a nuclear conflict tend to have been
underestimated and a full spectrum all-effects assessment is
not within anyone’s grasp now or in the foreseeable future. The
continuing brain drain of nuclear scientists and the general
failure to recognize the post-Cold War importance of accurate
and comprehensive nuclear consequence assessments,
especially for scenarios of increasing concern at the lower end
of the scale of catastrophe, do not bode well for improving this
situation.
T1-A.7 Friedman, SM*; Egolf, BP; Lehigh University;
smf6@lehigh.edu
What has Google Reported about Nanotechnology Risks?
Over time, coverage of nanotechnology risks has gradually
disappeared from most traditional newspapers and wire
services. Much of this coverage now appears on the Internet,
and when people want to find out information about
nanotechnology, Google is the first place they will probably
look. Google will direct them to an ever-changing array of
websites, blogs, online newspapers and news releases, all
discussing various aspects of nanotechnology. This presentation
will review Google alerts for nanotechnology risks for 2010 and
2011. These alerts were saved to provide a retrievable and
unchanging set of articles for analysis because tracking
information over time with Google is difficult for technical
reasons. Various types of Google information sources that
included nanotechnology risk news will be categorized to
evaluate which ones were included in Google alerts most often.
Discussions of information about nanotechnology health,
environmental and societal risks in a randomly selected group
of the Google alerts will be compared to coverage of similar
risks that appeared in the New Haven Independent, an online
newspaper that provided dedicated nanotechnology coverage
during the same period. Comparisons also will focus on the
types of nanotechnology materials covered, whether events,
reports or news releases drove the coverage, if uncertainty was
discussed, and whether positive information about
nanotechnology was included in these risk articles. Discussions
of regulation issues, plans and programs also will be compared.
December 8-11, 2013 - Baltimore, MD