A decision maker tests whether the gradient of the loss function evaluated at a judgmental decision is zero. If the test does not reject, the action is the judgmental decision. If the test rejects, the action sets the gradient equal to the boundary of the rejection region. This statistical...

Policy makers depend on economists, statisticians, and other social scientists to make accurate observations and draw solid conclusions from quantitative analysis. Econometrics, for example, has come a long way in the past century and guides many decisions made today. On the other hand, some...

This paper studies how entrepreneurs form new beliefs after making forecast errors. I use survey-based micro data that are representative of the population of French entrepreneurs, and I find that 21\% of entrepreneurs make optimistic errors, while 36\% make pessimistic errors, suggesting that a...

Who would want to be biased? Bias seems obviously, inherently bad. An example of a biased estimator is one that excludes explanatory variables, such as a model of school dropout rates that excludes science test scores. Another example is a model that restricts the allowed parameter values, such...

This paper aims at clarifying, with the help of a simple formal model and numerical examples, several aspects of the relationship between international investment position (IIP) and balance of payments (BOP) statistics. Exact and approximated relations are compared to analyze the estimation...

Can a group be an orthodox rational agent? This requires the group's aggregate preferences to follow expected utility (static rationality) and to evolve by Bayesian updating (dynamic rationality). Group rationality is possible, but the only preference aggregation rules which achieve it (and are...

We introduce evolutionary dynamics for two-action games where agents with diverse preferences use statistical inference to guide their behavior. In each period, agents are randomly selected to revise actions. They draw a random sample of other agents’ actions, use statistical inference to...

In surveys, non-sampling errors, due to their complex nature, are more challenging to quantify compared to sampling errors. Avoiding the release of these errors, however, results in biased survey estimates. In our previous paper, we devised the best interviewer allocation technique by using a...

Under rotation-equivariant decision theory, sample covariance matrix eigenvalues can be optimally shrunk by recombining sample eigenvectors with a (potentially nonlinear) function of the unobservable population covariance matrix. The optimal shape of this function reflects the loss/risk that is...