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The paper presents first results and ideas from an ongoing project dealing with the construction of a private closed-end fund for the municipal area of Hannover, Germany. It is argued that for assessing the economic prospects of the project it is helpful to apply a Monte Carlo (MC) simulation approach. Thereby, it is possible to account for contamination risks. Questions that must be solved are (1) to find probability distributions for the uncertain variables and the correlations among these, (2) to adequately integrate legal and political parameters. Despite its merits with regard to accounting for contamination risks in investment appraisal a MC simulation may not be useful for every kind of risk. Integrating legal and political factors using a solely stochastic approach appears not to be convincing, since this kind of uncertainty results from the strategic interaction of agents. Therefore, the potential value of using game theory and institutional analysis is stressed.

With the increasing use of personality several measurement issues have been raised. The papers included in the special section of this journal, across three issues, address some of these concerns. In this post-script, we summarize some of the major themes and conclusions that appear across papers published in the special issue. Questions around the magnitudes of validity coefficients associated with personality measures, the efforts to enhance usefulness of personality assessments, the strategies on administering, scoring and analyzing personality tests, etc., are addressed. Promising directions for future research are delineated.