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2005

Physical Sciences and Mathematics

University of Pennsylvania Carey Law School

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Articles 1 - 2 of 2

Full-Text Articles in Law

Against 'Individual Risk': A Sympathetic Critique Of Risk Assessment, Matthew D. Adler Mar 2005

Against 'Individual Risk': A Sympathetic Critique Of Risk Assessment, Matthew D. Adler

All Faculty Scholarship

"Individual risk" currently plays a major role in risk assessment and in the regulatory practices of the health and safety agencies that employ risk assessment, such as EPA, FDA, OSHA, NRC, CPSC, and others. Risk assessors use the term "population risk" to mean the number of deaths caused by some hazard. By contrast, "individual risk" is the incremental probability of death that the hazard imposes on some particular person. Regulatory decision procedures keyed to individual risk are widespread. This is true both for the regulation of toxic chemicals (the heartland of risk assessment), and for other health hazards, such as …


On The Regulation Of Networks As Complex Systems: A Graph Theory Approach, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo Jan 2005

On The Regulation Of Networks As Complex Systems: A Graph Theory Approach, Daniel F. Spulber, Christopher S. Yoo

All Faculty Scholarship

The dominant approach to regulating communications networks treats each network component as if it existed in isolation. In so doing, the current approach fails to capture one of the essential characteristics of networks, which is the complex manner in which components interact with one another when combined into an integrated system. In this Essay, Professors Daniel Spulber and Christopher Yoo propose a new regulatory framework based on the discipline of mathematics known as graph theory, which better captures the extent to which networks represent complex systems. They then apply the insights provided by this framework to a number of current …