Abstract

Among the most relevant factors in economic decision making there are the risk, the way it is perceived by the economic agents and how it influences the managers' behavior. The present paper offers a review of the studies on managers' risk perception. Risk perception is a highly subjective cognitive process that induces people to react to events in a way which is different from the prescriptions drawn by the economic models. For such a reason, beyond the description of the ways managers perceive and react to risky decision, we also presented a few decision biases like loss aversion, the framing of decision, and the escalation of commitment. Such phenomena interact with the way decision makers take action in private and public organizations characterized by an uncertain environment.