Before the Answer Comes: Risk, Uncertainty and the Time of Decision in WSTiger's Records

The book asks, of risk taken, held or stopped: what must be decided now, and what would make the decision change? Its own question, under that one, is how decision records write down the time between a question and its answer: who decides, on what, who waits and pays while the answer is not in, whether the decision can be undone, and what would make it change. It reads 53 of WSTiger's synthetic decision records, set from a marine insurance book of 1739 to automated trading desks of the 2030s, through a ledger that codes every record on the same six axes, and sets what the ledger shows beside the literatures on risk and uncertainty, organisational accidents, the value of waiting, and judging decisions after the fact. Its argument is about the records and the ideas, not about which option is right: the records give their reasons and, as their form requires, a condition for revisiting, but they rarely name who decides, by when, who bears the waiting, or a condition anyone could observe; that gap is where the time of a decision goes unrecorded, and the book shows what each literature has to say about it.