ABSTRACT
The distress and disruption caused by extreme natural events has stimulated considerable interest in understanding and improving the decision-making processes that determine a manager’s adjustment to natural hazards. Technological solutions to the problem of coping with hazards have typically been justified by a computation of benefits and costs that assume the people involved will behave in what the policy-maker considers to be an economically rational way. However, it has slowly become evident that technological solutions, by themselves, are inadequate without knowledge of how they will affect decision-making. In reviewing the wide range of adjustments to Gangetic floods or Nigerian drought or Norwegian avalanche, it has been observed that attempts to control nature and determine government policy will not succeed without a better understanding of the interplay among psychological, economic and environmental factors as they determine the adjustment process.
