Updating toward the signal

Christopher Chambers and Paul Healy ()

Economic Theory, 2012, vol. 50, issue 3, 765-786

Abstract: Modelers frequently assume (either implicitly or explicitly) that an agent’s posterior expectation of some variable lies between their prior mean and the realization of an unbiased signal of that variable. We call this property updating toward the signal (UTS). We show that if the prior and signal error densities are both symmetric and quasiconcave then UTS will occur. If, for a given prior, UTS occurs for all symmetric and quasiconcave error densities, then in fact the prior must be symmetric and quasiconcave. Similar characterizations are derived for two additional updating requirements that are strictly weaker than UTS. Copyright The Author(s) 2012

Keywords: Signal extraction; Bayes’s rule; Reversion to the mean; Posterior beliefs; Bayesian robustness; C11; D01; D81; D83; D84 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (13)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1007/s00199-010-0588-0 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

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:spr:joecth:v:50:y:2012:i:3:p:765-786

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... eory/journal/199/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s00199-010-0588-0

Access Statistics for this article

Economic Theory is currently edited by Nichoals Yanneils

More articles in Economic Theory from Springer, Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().