Scientific Project

Scientific Head : Bertrand Munier

The GRID team within GREGOR is made up of the Research Group on Risk, Information and Decision-making, created in 1990 at the ENS at Cachan, which became the UMR CNRS (1990–2006) then FRE CNRS (2006–2007) and finally the common research groups IAE de Paris-ENSAM-ESTP in 2008. The interest in this collaboration between a university and engineering schools is to foster innovatory research in industrial management and the modelling of markets at the interface of cognitive sciences, economic and management sciences, and engineering sciences, an area that is under-investigated in the great learning institutions because of too rigid disciplinary boundaries.

The scientific objective is to use cognitive psychology and decision-analysis (as formalised by M. Allais, D. Kahneman et A. Tversky, R. Schlaifer, E. Karni, M. Machina, P. Wakker, etc., and in the 'behaviourist' sense of D. Schkade, R. Shiller, etc.) to enrich received models in the following areas :

• Risk manangement in organisations and markets;
• Modelling of markets featuring a high level of uncertainty (agricultural, financial);
• Marketing, between industries and direct to the consumer;
• Human resources in organisations.

While it is understood that each researcher will favour the methodology best suited to his or her enquiries, there are some central methodologies:

• Techniques emerging from experimental economics applied to decision-making;
• Techniques of research/action arising from these disciplines and aspects of sociology (neo-institutionalist).

Activities

The team organises internal seminars with researchers from other teams and laboratories, in France and abroad, and its own doctoral students. In recent times there have been four to five annual half-days (excluding the annual meeting of doctoral students organised by the Graduate School for those in each “year” of their dissertation). The GRID team committee meets informally each week for administrative and update purposes. Scientific news and related events are noted and summarised on the team’s website, which was redesigned and updated at the end of summer 2008 (http://www.grid.ensam.estp.fr). The GRID team also organises one or two international and/or national events, such as closed workshops or open colloquia, about every four years.

In recent years a day has been devoted to the analysis of decision-making and risk management (Paris, April 2007, jointly with EDF R&D and the INERIS), and the colloquium “Les Entretiens du risque 2007” under the aegis of the IMdR, MEDAD (Paris, 13–14 December 2007).

The head of the team, Bertrand Munier, is a member of the editorial committee of several international and national reviews (Theory and Decision/honorary chief editor; Group Decision and Negotiation/associate editor; Risk and Decision Analysis/member of the editorial board) and helps organise many conferences (Colloque FUR XII, Université LUISS, Rome, June 2006; Colloque MOMA sur les marchés agricoles, Sénat, Paris, October 2006; GDN 2007 International Conference, Mount Tremblant, June 2007, Canada; Colloque Lambda Mu, Avignon, IMdR, October 2008). Researchers and doctoral students in the team take part in all of thee and many others.

Bertrand Munier also established the FUR network, whose academic partners include: Doctoral School 471; the Polytechnic University of New York (merged with NYU), notably its Department of Risk and Industrial Engineering; the GIS MR-Genci, whose team co-founded the group in risk-management in civil engineering on behalf of Arts et Métiers-ParisTech; the Analyse des risques Industriels (ARI) bringing together numerous engineering schools (various Ecoles des Mines – including Paris, ENSAM, etc.) It also comprises representatives of companies and learned societies: the Institut de Maîtrise des Risques (dependability, management, cindynics), of which the director of GRID is the administrator, and the public and private companies represented in the institute; EDF R&D (many contracts and CIFRE dissertations, research projects now prepared in common and with others); the INERIS (Bertrand Munier has been chairman of the INERIS’s committee monitoring the implementation of the Charter of Ethics since 2006); the INRS (the team takes part in the research project on analysis and management of blood-related accidents bringing together the INRS, the GRID and the Groupe Hospitalier St-Joseph); the MEDAD, in control of maritime affairs (a member of the team serves as an expert in the French delegation to the International Maritime Organisation on the evaluation of safety and taking into account human factors); and companies supporting the specialist masters programme, The Global Management of Risk.