Consistent Bayesians Are No More Accurate Than Non-Bayesians: Economists Surveyed About PSA

Nathan Berg, Guido Biele and Gerd Gigerenzer

Review of Behavioral Economics, 2016, vol. 3, issue 2, 189-219

Abstract: This paper looks for, but cannot find, evidence that links belief inconsistency to belief inaccuracy or economic loss. Economists with consistent (i.e., Bayesian) conditional beliefs about the sensitivity and positive predictive value of the Prostate Specific Antigen (PSA) test have unconditional beliefs about the risk of prostate cancer that are, if anything, less accurate than the beliefs of inconsistent non-Bayesians. PSA decisions depend more on the advice of doctors and family members than on beliefs about cancer risks. Men’s beliefs about the pros and cons of PSA testing do not explain self-reported PSA decisions. This absence of evidence that non-Bayesian beliefs lead to economic loss suggests that belief consistency may be relatively unimportant as a normative criterion in high-stakes decision tasks that reward accuracy instead of consistency. A technique is introduced for eliciting measures of both consistency and accuracy of an individual’s probabilistic beliefs.

Keywords: Logical consistency; Predictive accuracy; Elicitation; Non-Bayesian; Ecological rationality; Medical decision making (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A11 C11 D03 D6 D8 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:now:jnlrbe:105.00000034

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