ABSTRACT
Few attempts have been made to place the recently advocated precautionary principle in an analytical framework. If successfully developed, such a framework could prove useful to decisionmakers precisely in situations such as the regulation of Bt corn, including concern for pest resistance, and numerous other decisions involving scientific uncertainty and large or irreversible costs. This chapter (a) summarizes how economic option theories can be used to structure regulatory decisionmaking under uncertainty and irreversibility, (b) links that structure to the precautionary principle, (c) shows how pest resistance development affects the options analysis, and (d) demonstrates the impact of pest resistance development and the option framing for Bt corn.
