Expert Judgment Elicitation Protocols

While past data analysis can provide extremely valuable information on past dynamics and technology development, it is paramount to recognize the distorting effect of uncertainty on innovating firms’ behaviors and its determining role on current and future innovation processes. In order to account for uncertainty and to fill the lack of empirical or modeling data, the ICARUS project resorted to experts’ elicitations, which have been successfully used to collect information on future trends of technology costs. Expert judgments are the expressions of informed opinion that experts make based on their knowledge and experience with respect to technical problems (Hogarth, 1987; Morgan and Henrion, 1990; Cooke, 1991). Eliciting experts’ judgements means collecting subjective probabilities that a specific event will take place in the future, through specific methods of verbal or written communication. Experts’ judgements are particularly useful and are often required in probabilistic decision-making and in the evaluation of risks. They can fill the lack of information or complement other available data based on models’ predictions, thus providing an additional source of information. Expert judgement elicitation has been successfully used in the past to inform policy-makers, especially in the field of energy (Apostolakis, 1990). One prominent example in this respect is the study by the European Commission and the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the 1990s focusing on nuclear power plants and the uncertainty surrounding accident consequence codes (Cooke and Goossens, 2004). The literature on decision analysis provides interesting theories on the techniques that should be applied to elicit expert judgments under uncertainty, support risk evaluation and inform a transparent decision-making process, especially if historical data is scarce and cannot inform on future developments, as is the case for energy projections (Morgan and Keith, 2008), nuclear engineering (Cooke and Goossens, 1999), climate change impacts and policy analysis (Morgan and Keith, 1995) and environmental policy in general (Morgan and Henrion, 1990).