Opinion Pooling under Asymmetric Information

Franz Dietrich

Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: If each member of a group assigns a certain probability to a hypothesis, what probability should the collective as a whole assign? More generally, how should individual probability functions be merged into a single collective one? I investigate this question in case that the individual probability functions are based on different information sets. Under suitable assumptions, I present a simple solution to this aggregation problem, and a more complex solution that can cope with any overlaps between different persons' information sets. The solutions are derived from an axiomatic system that models the individuals as well as the collective as Bayesian rational agents. Two notable features are that the solutions may be parameter-free, and that they incorporate each individual's information although the individuals need not communicate their (perhaps very complex) information, but rather reveal only the resulting probabilities.

Keywords: opinion pooling; probability aggregation; decision theory; social choice theory; Bayesian rationality; Bayesian aggregation; information (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C11 D70 D71 D80 D81 D82 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 20 pages
Date: 2004-07-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-evo and nep-mic
Note: Type of Document - pdf; pages: 20. prepared from latex-dvi
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
https://econwpa.ub.uni-muenchen.de/econ-wp/pe/papers/0407/0407002.pdf (application/pdf)

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:wpa:wuwppe:0407002

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Public Economics from University Library of Munich, Germany
Bibliographic data for series maintained by EconWPA ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).