Country Risk Assessment; A Behavioural Perspective

Over the last 40 years the concept of judgment and decision making received increasing attention from both scholars and the professional field. It started in the beginning of the ‘70’s of the previous century when Kahneman and Tversky published a number of papers (Tversky and Kahneman, 1971, Kahneman and Tversky, 1972, Kahneman and Tversky, 1973) where they presented their heuristics and biases approach to judgment and decision making under uncertainty. Ever since Kahneman and Tversky published their results in the beginning of the 1970’s “the heuristics and biases program […] spread beyond academic psychology, affecting theory and research across a range of disciplines including economics, law, medicine, and political science” (Gilovich & Griffin, 2002). Although the applicability of the heuristics and biases approach is tested in a number of fields (for instance medicine and law) there are still a lot of disciplines that need to be studied. This book presents the process of judgment and decision making within one specific discipline: country risk assessment when executed by decision makers in small and medium sized enterprises when assessing international business opportunities.