We could decide that we want to pick the alternative that makes our maximum cost as small as possible, i.e., the one that minimizes our maximum cost. Looking back at Table 1, it's easy to see that (a) the maximum loss associated with each choice occurs when there is high damage and (b) the minimum loss in that column is associated with stringent pollution controls. Therefore, the minimax choice would be to enact stringent pollution controls.
As Polasky et al. [3] point out, the mini-max choice is very conservative.14 It puts all of the weight for the decision on the worst possible outcome.