| Environmental intervention is often seen as being high risk and high return. Traditional scientific hypothesis testing provides limited guidance to policy makers unless there is a high level of certainty in the supporting scientific evidence. Traditional cost-benefit analysis under uncertainty has shortcomings when considering high-risk investment, largely due to the choice of how to discount uncertainty outcomes. A corollary is that traditional cost-benefit analysis does not place a value on increased certainty, an important outcome of successful scientific research. A fiducial costbenefit methodology is presented in this paper, which integrates hypothesis testing and traditional cost-benefit analysis. The fiducial approach is one way of objectively... |
