IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/bla/jamest/v43y1992i1p1-14.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

When is the probability ranking principle suboptimal?

Author

Listed:
  • Michael D. Gordon
  • Peter Lenk

Abstract

The probability ranking principle retrieves documents in decreasing order of their predictive probabilities of relevance. Gordon and Lenk (1991) demonstrated that this principal is optimal within a signal detection—decision theory framework, and it maximizes the inquirer's expected utility for relevant documents. These results hold under three conditions: calibration, independent assessment of relevance by the inquirer, and certainty about the computed probabilities of relevance. We demonstrate that the probability ranking principle can be suboptimal with respect to expected utility when one of these conditions fails to hold. © 1992 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Suggested Citation

  • Michael D. Gordon & Peter Lenk, 1992. "When is the probability ranking principle suboptimal?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science, Association for Information Science & Technology, vol. 43(1), pages 1-14, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:43:y:1992:i:1:p:1-14
    DOI: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199201)43:13.0.CO;2-5
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199201)43:13.0.CO;2-5
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199201)43:13.0.CO;2-5?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Peter Lenk & Michel Wedel & Ulf Böckenholt, 2006. "Bayesian Estimation of Circumplex Models Subject to Prior Theory Constraints and Scale-Usage Bias," Psychometrika, Springer;The Psychometric Society, vol. 71(1), pages 33-55, March.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:jamest:v:43:y:1992:i:1:p:1-14. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Wiley Content Delivery (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.asis.org .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.