Editorial: Transport, Risk, and Individual Choices

摘要

It is surprising that risk and uncertainty have a rather short history in economics. The distinction between risk and uncertainty is still not well accepted, although it was made clear almost a century ago by Frank Knight and John Maynard Keynes, two famous economists who studied probability theory and risk. To quote Frank Knight (1921): The practical difference between the two categories, risk and uncertainty, is that in the former the distribution of the outcome in a group of instances is known, while in the case of uncertainty, this is not true, the reason being in general that it is impossible to form a group of instances, because the situation being dealt with is in high degree unique.