Ideas for decisions that resist certainty.
Essays and research explore how decision-makers can structure difficult decisions, weigh competing interests and understand the forces shaping outcomes under uncertainty and institutional pressure.
Research
5 SSRN manuscriptsPricing Contractual Vagueness
Contracts cannot anticipate every disruption. Flexible terms can protect a party from extreme losses, yet leave both sides uncertain about how a court will interpret them. This paper models the balance between wider protection and disputed meaning in force majeure and material-adverse-change clauses. It shows that familiar expected-utility reasoning can explain the main results, then examines what a model of attitudes toward uncertain probabilities adds. Within the type of clause studied, some openness can be optimal. Proposals for measurable triggers and bounded renegotiation remain conditional on practical costs the model does not measure.
Linking Decisions, Duties and Relief in Public Benefits Administration
When a benefits agency discovers an error, correcting a database is only part of the response. Programme law determines who should receive relief, how much is due, the relevant date and what must actually happen. Using Rhode Island SNAP and a Medicaid home-care test, with bounded comparisons to Social Security and Michigan MiDAS, this paper connects those duties to the records and officials needed to fulfil them. It distinguishes an apparent discrepancy from an established loss, and a posted benefit from money a recipient can use. It does not claim that historical records prove households received restoration or that present systems perform better.
Legal Governance of Classification Thresholds
Two people with similar risk scores can face different outcomes because a cutoff falls between them. This paper examines the decision to set that boundary in federal prison classification, New Jersey pretrial decisions and English facial recognition. The records studied identify boundaries without comparing alternatives or explaining how the choices distribute mistakes. The analysis shows where existing law governs that choice and where gaps remain. It proposes a Threshold Decision Record to document who is responsible, the alternatives considered, expected consequences and when the rule should be reviewed.
Components of Automated Decision-Making in Benefit Allocation and Their Legal Status
An automated system helped decide how many hours of home care Arkansas Medicaid recipients could receive. This paper asks which parts of that system counted as legal rules, when the agency adopted them and what was made public. It separates the instruction linking care hours to a group, the logic placing people in groups and the table assigning hours. Using official filings, agency accounts and court records, it shows why those parts need separate legal histories. Some conclusions rely on retrospective evidence; the earlier system's full specifications and its legal effect on particular recipients remain unresolved.
Human Endorsement in Automated Government
Does a human signature make an automated government decision legitimate? This paper examines what the records actually establish about human authorisation in England's Ofqual grading arrangements and Australia's Robodebt scheme. It distinguishes work on calculations, participation in a proposal and endorsement of a decision process. Some evidence supports specific knowledge and actions; other claims about endorsement, deference and reliance remain unresolved. The contribution is a careful account of those evidential limits, rather than a general verdict on all human oversight.
Essays
18 articlesThe Price of Wrongful Error in France
Institutions do not optimize for truth, they optimize for the errors that trigger oversight and scandal.
Stochastic Dominance Illuminates the Boundary Between Risk and Ruin
Resilience emerges when decisions favor distributions that limit ruin.
Systems Thinking and the Logic of Unintended Consequences
Systems thinking is the art of seeing consequence before it appears.
Crystal Ball Tools to Tame Complex Choices
The strategist designs for uncertainty, not against it.
Choosing Third Paths Under Crisis Pressure
Fictitious Play treats reputation as the accumulated record of behavior. Adaptive Learning is what turns that record into expectation.
Why Game Theory Belongs at the Heart of Strategy
Power lasts when strategy is built on interdependence, not control.
Quantifying the Slow Death of Faith
In threshold systems, endurance depends less on strength than on where exit becomes rational.
Designing Treaties with Adversaries
State-contingent payoffs accept partial compliance and build rules that limit loss before trust can fail.
The Agency Cost of Staying Safe
Delegation creates hidden action, and hidden action creates room for drift.
The Paralyzed Empire of Perfect Efficiency
Queueing theory shows why perfect efficiency becomes a bottleneck when uncertainty arrives faster than recovery.
How Roman Chariots Shaped Rocket Design
Path Dependence locks innovation behind legacy constraints, so reform must arrive before standards become infrastructure.
Designing Compliance Beyond Moral Appeals
Enforcement becomes durable when Mechanism Design turns moral appeals into verification and converts opportunism into predictable regret.
Worst Case Scenario Thinking in a Dangerous World
Where probabilities fail, Maxmin Expected Utility becomes the grammar of decision.
Statistical Memory in Decision Making
Plans fail because decision makers believe in uniqueness. Reference classes reveal sameness.
How Brier Scores Quantify the Humility Behind Good Judgment
Calibration is humility quantified. It punishes both false certainty and timid probability.
Using Bayesian Judgment to Reconfigure Credibility
The quality of a decision is measured by the expectations it reshapes, not the confidence that produced it.
Prospect Theory and the Discipline of Wiser Decisions
Rationality is an aspiration. Understanding human psychology makes it achievable.
Decision Theory as a Compass through the Realities of Risk and Uncertainty
Decision theory does not remove uncertainty. It teaches us to face it with structure.