Measurements of risk in fisheries management

An important goal in many fisheries management problems is perceived to be minimization of risk. This paper examines the problem of measuring risk by means of meaningful attributes or surrogate measures, for use in multiple criteria decision support systems. It is found that exponential utility functions, which are associated in this context with geometric discounting of the future, give a poor fit in many cases relative to power functions. The implication is that conventional mean-variance measures of risk may be less appropriate than cumulative probability measures.