Using Expert Judgment for Risk Assessment

Expert judgment can be a useful tool for enabling risk assessment for emerging technologies when data is scarce and uncertainty is high. While expert judgment is subject to many biases, methodologic best practices can be employed to minimize their effect. This chapter has identified several best practices for the selection of experts and the design of elicitation protocols to manage biases and reduce uncertainty. Furthermore, several considerations have been outlined for employing expert elicitation when performing risk assessments for emerging nanotechnologies. Given the high level of uncertainty surrounding the potential risks of nanomaterials, it is important to understand the ways in which expert judgment can improve assessments, as well as the challenges and limitations of this approach. The use of expert judgment in early nanotechnology risk research has proved to be conceptually valuable, and continued research utilizing expert judgment is warranted for the case of nanotechnology.