Mining for Unknown Unknowns

As the recent Covid-19 pandemic reminded us, life is filled with unknown unknowns - i.e. contingencies one cannot be aware of ex ante, much less fit into standard risk analysis. In addition to a wealth of examples coming from history and politics, unknown unknowns are now well-documented, and their importance is acknowledged, in many areas of economics and management such as public policy [23], business strategy [5, 11], entrepreneurship [12], contracts and the theory of the firm [40], and security [32]. To be sure, getting hold of such contingencies might allow to achieve significant payoffs or avoid major losses. Substantial research efforts have thus been expended, and notable advances been made, in this direction. To get a rigorous conceptual grasp at the notion of unknown unknowns, one may now draw, notably, from the literatures on Knightian uncertainty (e.g., [4]), undescribable events (e.g., [24]), unforeseen contingencies (e.g., [7, 20]), unawareness (e.g., [35, 34]), and surprises [39, 26]. Yet, for someone who would primarily want to uncover ahead of time the concrete unknown unknowns she might be facing, the task would remain elusive. This paper will now seek to meet this demand.