Risk Acceptability Analysis ◾ 225
6.2 Strategic Determination of Risk Acceptability
A number of possible strategies for addressing the questions “How safe is safe
enough?” and “Which risks are acceptable?” have been proposed. ree basic
approaches can be readily identied: e rst is the formal analysis approach.
e principal methods included in this category are cost-benet analysis and
decision analysis. is approach relies heavily on formal logic and optimization
principles. Meanwhile, cost–benet analysis involves the analysis of cost eec-
tiveness of risk reduction, while benet–cost analysis is involved when risk is a
surrogate for social cost.
e next technique is the comparative analysis approach, which is composed
of three distinc