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
3 SSRN manuscriptsPricing Contractual Vagueness
This manuscript examines what deliberately imprecise contingency language costs when the triggering event is genuinely unforeseeable. It separates uncertainty about whether a novel disruption occurs from uncertainty about how a court will interpret open-ended language. An alpha-maxmin bargaining model shows how the two parties' ambiguity premia combine into a wedge that reduces certainty-equivalent surplus. It also identifies conditions under which an interior degree of openness is optimal because openness limits exposure to the worst event outcome while creating an interpretive band. The analysis connects these results to Delaware material-adverse-effect doctrine and develops implications for indexed triggers, mandatory renegotiation and ambiguity-aware interpretation.
Moral Design of Algorithmic Governance
This manuscript argues that a government algorithmic enforcement system distributes the cost of official mistakes through its training loss function and deployment threshold. Together these settings form an error-allocation specification. The analysis treats that specification as a policy choice that may constitute a legislative rule under the Administrative Procedure Act and state analogues. It explains the persistence of inherited technical settings through choice-architecture defaults and institutional incentives. The proposed response is a penalty-default framework built around procurement-linked disclosure, legislative error budgets, public impact statements, periodic democratic review and a structured evidentiary presumption.
Legal Governance of Classification Thresholds
This manuscript isolates the operating point, the rule that converts a score, rank or similarity measure into governmental action, as a separate unit of public-law analysis. Documentary records from federal prison risk classification, New Jersey pretrial decision-making and English live facial recognition show that consequential boundaries can be adopted or revised without a record comparing alternatives or stating the resulting allocation of error. The analysis identifies where existing rulemaking, reason-giving and review doctrines already reach this act and where they stop. It then proposes a Threshold Decision Record that links the rule in its native form to an accountable owner, evidence about consequences, revision triggers and an available route for review.
Essays
18 complete articlesSystems 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.
The Price of Wrongful Error in France
Institutions do not optimize for truth, they optimize for the errors that trigger oversight and scandal.
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.
Stochastic Dominance Illuminates the Boundary Between Risk and Ruin
Resilience emerges when decisions favor distributions that limit ruin.
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.