Communicating Scientific Uncertainty via Approximate Posteriors

Isaiah Andrews and Jesse Shapiro

No 32038, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We cast the problem of communicating scientific uncertainty as one of reporting a posterior distribution on an unknown parameter to an audience of Bayesian decision-makers. We establish novel bounds on the audience’s regret when the analyst reports an approximation to a posterior that the audience treats as exact. Under a palatable restriction on the audience’s decision problems, the bounds take an especially convenient form. Under a further restriction on the audience’s priors, a bootstrap distribution can be used as a stand-in posterior. We propose a practical recipe for checking whether a conventional statistical report (say, a normal parameterized by a point estimate and standard error) is a good approximation, and for improving the report if it is not. We illustrate our proposals using the articles in the 2021 American Economic Review that use a bootstrap for inference.

JEL-codes: C18 C44 D81 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ecm
Note: TWP
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32038.pdf (application/pdf)
Access to the full text is generally limited to series subscribers, however if the top level domain of the client browser is in a developing country or transition economy free access is provided. More information about subscriptions and free access is available at http://www.nber.org/wwphelp.html. Free access is also available to older working papers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nbr:nberwo:32038

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w32038
The price is Paper copy available by mail.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().