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Assessing risk perception by means of ordinal models Paola Cerchiello, Maria Iannario, and Domenico Piccolo Abstract. This paper presents a discrete mixture model as a suitable approach for the anal- ysis of data concerning risk perception, when they are expressed by means of ordered scores (ratings). The model, which is the result of a personal feeling (risk perception) towards the object and an inherent uncertainty in the choice of the ordinal value of responses, reduces the collective information, synthesising different risk dimensions related to a preselected domain. After a brief introduction to risk management, the presentation of the CUB model and related inferential issues, we illustrate a case study concerning risk perception for the workers of a printing press factory. Key words: risk perception, CUB models, ordinal data 1 Introduction During the past quarter-century, researchers have been intensively studying risk from many perspectives. The field of risk analysis has rapidly grown, focusing on issues of risk assessment and risk management. The former involves the identification, quan- tification and characterisation of threats faced in fields ranging from human health to the environment through a variety of daily-life activities (i.e., bank, insurance, IT- intensive society, etc.). Meanwhile, risk management focuses on processes of com- munication, mitigation and decision making. In normal usage, the notion of “risk” has negative connotations and involves involuntary and random aspects. Moreover, the conceptual analysis of the risk concept wavers from a purely statistical definition (objective) to a notion based on the mind’s representation (subjective). In this con- text, perception of risk plays a prominent role in people’s decision processes, in the sense that different behaviours depend on distinct risk perception evaluation. Both individual and group differences have been shown to be associated with differences in pe