Studying Risk

I found a very interesting post on risk over at Bruce Schneier's blog. Here's a quick snippet:

I've already written about prospect theory, which explains how people approach risk. People tend to be risk averse when it comes to gains, and risk seeking when it comes to losses...... This behavior has been demonstrated in animals as well: "species of insects, birds and mammals range from risk neutral to risk averse when making decisions about amounts of food, but are risk seeking towards delays in receiving food."

As I continue to evaluate strategies of organizations and how they commit their resources (or don't) it's interesting to see how decision making processes can work on the more primeval of levels.