Expert elicitation on the uncertainties associated with chronic wasting disease

A high degree of uncertainty exists for chronic wasting disease (CWD) transmission factors in farmed and wild cervids. Evaluating the factors is important as it helps to inform future risk management strategies. Expert opinion is often used to assist decision making in a number of health, science, and technology domains where data may be sparse or missing. Using the Classical Model of elicitation, a group of experts was asked to estimate the most likely values for several risk factors affecting CWD transmission. The formalized expert elicitation helped structure the issues and hence provide a rational basis for estimating some transmission risk factors for which evidence is lacking. Considered judgments regarding environmental transmission, latency of CWD transmission, management, and species barrier were provided by the experts. Uncertainties for many items were determined to be large, highlighting areas requiring more research. The elicited values may be used as surrogate values until research evidence becomes available

Implementing Toxicity Testing in the 21st Century: Challenges and Opportunities

The publication of the US National Academy of Sciences report Toxicity Testing in the Twenty-First Century: A Vision and a Strategy (TT21C) has led to the development of new scientific techniques to modernize regulatory toxicity testing. From 2009 to 2010, a series of five international symposia were held to examine challenges, opportunities and policy issues associated with TT21C. Seven key themes emerged based on these meetings; that the TT21C vision and strategy: 1) is not self-implementing; 2) demands new toxicology techniques; 3) has a number of scientific knowledge gaps that need to be filled; 4) requires evaluation of the new tests to determine relevance, reliability, validity and regulatory acceptance by government agencies; 5) can be implemented under TSCA and the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act (FIFRA) as currently written; 6) requires multi-stakeholder input and commitment; 7) should harmonize acceptance of test data and methods on an international level

CEO appointments and the loss of firm-specific knowledge - Putting integrity back into hiring decisions

A rarely studied trend in corporate governance is the increasing tendency to fill CEO openings through external hires rather than through internal promotions: Kevin J. Murphy and Jan Zabojnik (2004) show that the proportion of outside hires has doubled and their pay premium almost quadrupled over the last thirty years. Assuming that general managerial skills are becoming more important relative to firm-specific skills, the authors conclude that competition in the managerial labor market establishes optimal contracts. In our model and our empirical analysis we question this explanation by assuming that over the past decades the dishonesty of the predecessor has become relatively more important for the appointment decisions of firms. We conclude that outside hires are a suboptimal trend because external candidates even step up the regression of integrity in firms: As nobody has an incentive to invest in firm-specific knowledge, not only the performance of firms drops, but also the remaining integrity