TY  - JOUR
A1  - Milkau, Udo
T1  - Risk culture during the last 2000 years - from an aleatory society to the illusion of risk control
T2  - International journal of financial studies
N2  - The culture of risk is 2000 years old, although the term “risk” developed much later. The culture of merchants making decisions under uncertainty and taking the individual responsibility for the uncertain future started with the Roman “Aleatory Society”, continued with medieval sea merchants, who made business “ad risicum et fortunam”, and sustained to the culture of entrepreneurs in times of industrialisation and dynamic economic changes in the 18th and 19th century. For all long-term commercial relationships, the culture of honourable merchants with personal decision-making and individual responsibility worked well. The successful development of sciences, statistics and engineering within the last 100 years led to the conjecture that men can “construct” an economical system with a pre-defined “clockwork” behaviour. Since probability distributions could be calculated ex-post, an illusion to control risk ex-ante became a pattern in business and banking. Based on the recent experiences with the financial crisis, a “risk culture” should understand that human “Strength of Knowledge” is limited and the “unknown unknown” can materialise. As all decisions and all commercial agreements are made under uncertainty, the culture of honourable merchants is key to achieve trust in long-term economic relations with individual responsibility, flexibility to adapt and resilience against the unknown.
KW  - risk culture
KW  - aleartory society
KW  - honourable merchant
KW  - individual responsibility
KW  - disequilibrium
KW  - illusion of control
Y1  - 2017
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/53507
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-535078
SN  - 2227-7072
N1  - This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
VL  - 5
IS  - 31
PB  - MDPI
CY  - Basel
ER  -