Ambiguous Aggregation of Expert Opinions: The Case of Optimal R&D Investment

Stergios Athanassoglou, Valentina Bosetti and Gauthier de Maere d'Aertrycke
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Stergios Athanasoglou

No 121719, Climate Change and Sustainable Development from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM)

Abstract: How should a decision-maker allocate R&D funds when a group of experts provides divergent estimates on a technology's potential effectiveness? To address this question, we propose a simple decision-theoretic framework that takes into account ambiguity over the aggregation of expert opinion and a decision-maker's attitude towards it. In line with the paper's focus on R&D investment, decision variables in our model may affect experts' subjective probability distributions of the future potential of a technology. Using results from convex optimization, we are able to establish a number of analytical results including a closed-form expression of our model's value function, as well as a thorough investigation of its differentiability properties. We apply our framework to original data from a recent expert elicitation survey on solar technology. The analysis suggests that more aggressive investment in solar technology R&D is likely to yield significant dividends even, or rather especially, after taking ambiguous aggregation into account.

Keywords: Research; and; Development/Tech; Change/Emerging; Technologies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45
Date: 2012-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/121719/files/NDL2012-004Rev.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Ambiguous Aggregation of Expert Opinions: The Case of Optimal R&D Investment (2012)
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:ags:feemcl:121719

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.121719

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Climate Change and Sustainable Development from Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei (FEEM) Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().