POSITIVE FEEDBACK
Risk Management and Decision Making Glossary
Risk Management and Decision Making — Positive feedback
Information on Positive feedback
Positive feedback is a form of circular causality, which acts as a growth-generating mechanism. The state of the system, such as one’s bank balance, grows continually larger as interest payments act as the rate of change. This is sometimes called a virtuous circle, as opposed to a vicious circle, which arises when the balance becomes negative and one gets deeper and deeper into debt as interest is added to the debt. Positive feedback is quite common in managed and may be valuable as an engine of growth. In an engineering system, however, positive feedback is undesirable and is designed out, which is one reason why the mathematical techniques of control engineering are of little help in designing managed systems. For a more detailed explanation of the feedback phenomenon, see Richardson (1991) and Coyle (1996). Also see negative feedback.
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