IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/awi/wpaper/0664.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Quantifying subjective oncertainty in survey expectations

Author

Listed:
  • Krüger, Fabian
  • Pavlova, Lora

Abstract

Several recent surveys ask for a person's subjective probabilities that the inflation rate falls into various outcome ranges. We provide a new measure of the uncertainty implicit in such probabilities. The measure has several advantages over existing methods: It is trivial to implement, requires no functional form assumptions, and is well-defined for all logically possible probabilities. From a theoretical viewpoint, the measure can be motivated as the entropy function of a strictly proper scoring rule. We demonstrate the measure's good performance in a simulation study based on empirical data from the Survey of Consumer Expectations.

Suggested Citation

  • Krüger, Fabian & Pavlova, Lora, 2019. "Quantifying subjective oncertainty in survey expectations," Working Papers 0664, University of Heidelberg, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:awi:wpaper:0664
    Note: This paper is part of http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/view/schriftenreihen/sr-3.html
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn/resolver.pl?urn=urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-265072
    File Function: Frontdoor page on HeiDOK
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/26507/3/Krueger_Pavlova_2019_dp664.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Olivier Coibion & Yuriy Gorodnichenko & Saten Kumar, 2018. "How Do Firms Form Their Expectations? New Survey Evidence," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 108(9), pages 2671-2713, September.
    2. Engelberg, Joseph & Manski, Charles F. & Williams, Jared, 2009. "Comparing the Point Predictions and Subjective Probability Distributions of Professional Forecasters," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, American Statistical Association, vol. 27, pages 30-41.
    3. James E. Matheson & Robert L. Winkler, 1976. "Scoring Rules for Continuous Probability Distributions," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 22(10), pages 1087-1096, June.
    4. Werner Ehm & Tilmann Gneiting & Alexander Jordan & Fabian Krüger, 2016. "Of quantiles and expectiles: consistent scoring functions, Choquet representations and forecast rankings," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 78(3), pages 505-562, June.
    5. Andrew Schotter & Isabel Trevino, 2014. "Belief Elicitation in the Laboratory," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 103-128, August.
    6. Boero, Gianna & Smith, Jeremy & Wallis, Kenneth F., 2011. "Scoring rules and survey density forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 27(2), pages 379-393.
    7. Tilmann Gneiting & Fadoua Balabdaoui & Adrian E. Raftery, 2007. "Probabilistic forecasts, calibration and sharpness," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 69(2), pages 243-268, April.
    8. Olivier Armantier & Giorgio Topa & Wilbert Van der Klaauw & Basit Zafar, 2017. "An overview of the Survey of Consumer Expectations," Economic Policy Review, Federal Reserve Bank of New York, issue 23-2, pages 51-72.
    9. Marc-André Gosselin & Mikael Khan, 2015. "A Survey of Consumer Expectations for Canada," Bank of Canada Review, Bank of Canada, vol. 2015(Autumn), pages 14-23.
    10. Gneiting, Tilmann & Raftery, Adrian E., 2007. "Strictly Proper Scoring Rules, Prediction, and Estimation," Journal of the American Statistical Association, American Statistical Association, vol. 102, pages 359-378, March.
    11. Michael P. Clements, 2014. "Forecast Uncertainty- Ex Ante and Ex Post : U.S. Inflation and Output Growth," Journal of Business & Economic Statistics, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 32(2), pages 206-216, April.
    12. Adeline Delavande, 2014. "Probabilistic Expectations in Developing Countries," Annual Review of Economics, Annual Reviews, vol. 6(1), pages 1-20, August.
    13. Robert Rich & Joseph Tracy, 2010. "The Relationships among Expected Inflation, Disagreement, and Uncertainty: Evidence from Matched Point and Density Forecasts," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 92(1), pages 200-207, February.
    14. Andrew Caplin & Mark Dean & John Leahy, 2022. "Rationally Inattentive Behavior: Characterizing and Generalizing Shannon Entropy," Journal of Political Economy, University of Chicago Press, vol. 130(6), pages 1676-1715.
    15. Sims, Christopher A., 2003. "Implications of rational inattention," Journal of Monetary Economics, Elsevier, vol. 50(3), pages 665-690, April.
    16. Reinhard Selten, 1998. "Axiomatic Characterization of the Quadratic Scoring Rule," Experimental Economics, Springer;Economic Science Association, vol. 1(1), pages 43-61, June.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Eyting, Markus & Schmidt, Patrick, 2021. "Belief elicitation with multiple point predictions," European Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 135(C).
    2. Clements, Michael P., 2018. "Are macroeconomic density forecasts informative?," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 34(2), pages 181-198.
    3. Charles F. Manski, 2018. "Survey Measurement of Probabilistic Macroeconomic Expectations: Progress and Promise," NBER Macroeconomics Annual, University of Chicago Press, vol. 32(1), pages 411-471.
    4. Petropoulos, Fotios & Apiletti, Daniele & Assimakopoulos, Vassilios & Babai, Mohamed Zied & Barrow, Devon K. & Ben Taieb, Souhaib & Bergmeir, Christoph & Bessa, Ricardo J. & Bijak, Jakub & Boylan, Joh, 2022. "Forecasting: theory and practice," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 38(3), pages 705-871.
      • Fotios Petropoulos & Daniele Apiletti & Vassilios Assimakopoulos & Mohamed Zied Babai & Devon K. Barrow & Souhaib Ben Taieb & Christoph Bergmeir & Ricardo J. Bessa & Jakub Bijak & John E. Boylan & Jet, 2020. "Forecasting: theory and practice," Papers 2012.03854, arXiv.org, revised Jan 2022.
    5. Markus Eyting & Patrick Schmidt, 2019. "Belief Elicitation with Multiple Point Predictions," Working Papers 1818, Gutenberg School of Management and Economics, Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz, revised 16 Nov 2020.
    6. Geoff Kenny & Thomas Kostka & Federico Masera, 2015. "Density characteristics and density forecast performance: a panel analysis," Empirical Economics, Springer, vol. 48(3), pages 1203-1231, May.
    7. Malte Knüppel & Fabian Krüger, 2022. "Forecast uncertainty, disagreement, and the linear pool," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 37(1), pages 23-41, January.
    8. Christopher Roth & Johannes Wohlfart, 2020. "How Do Expectations about the Macroeconomy Affect Personal Expectations and Behavior?," The Review of Economics and Statistics, MIT Press, vol. 102(4), pages 731-748, October.
    9. Luisa Bisaglia & Matteo Grigoletto, 2021. "A new time-varying model for forecasting long-memory series," Statistical Methods & Applications, Springer;Società Italiana di Statistica, vol. 30(1), pages 139-155, March.
    10. Fissler Tobias & Ziegel Johanna F., 2021. "On the elicitability of range value at risk," Statistics & Risk Modeling, De Gruyter, vol. 38(1-2), pages 25-46, January.
    11. Fabian Kruger & Hendrik Plett, 2022. "Prediction intervals for economic fixed-event forecasts," Papers 2210.13562, arXiv.org, revised Mar 2024.
    12. Clements, Michael P., 2021. "Do survey joiners and leavers differ from regular participants? The US SPF GDP growth and inflation forecasts," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 37(2), pages 634-646.
    13. Krüger, Fabian & Nolte, Ingmar, 2016. "Disagreement versus uncertainty: Evidence from distribution forecasts," Journal of Banking & Finance, Elsevier, vol. 72(S), pages 172-186.
    14. Tommaso Proietti & Martyna Marczak & Gianluigi Mazzi, 2017. "Euromind‐ D : A Density Estimate of Monthly Gross Domestic Product for the Euro Area," Journal of Applied Econometrics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 32(3), pages 683-703, April.
    15. Alexander Henzi & Johanna F. Ziegel & Tilmann Gneiting, 2021. "Isotonic distributional regression," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 83(5), pages 963-993, November.
    16. Giulia Piccillo & Poramapa Poonpakdee, 2021. "Effects of Macro Uncertainty on Mean Expectation and Subjective Uncertainty: Evidence from Households and Professional Forecasters," CESifo Working Paper Series 9486, CESifo.
    17. Werner Ehm & Tilmann Gneiting & Alexander Jordan & Fabian Krüger, 2016. "Of quantiles and expectiles: consistent scoring functions, Choquet representations and forecast rankings," Journal of the Royal Statistical Society Series B, Royal Statistical Society, vol. 78(3), pages 505-562, June.
    18. Brent Meyer & Nicholas B. Parker & Xuguang Sheng, 2021. "Unit Cost Expectations and Uncertainty: Firms' Perspectives on Inflation," FRB Atlanta Working Paper 2021-12a, Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta.
    19. Armantier, Olivier & Filippin, Antonio & Neubauer, Michael & Nunziata, Luca, 2022. "The expected price of keeping up with the Joneses," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 200(C), pages 1203-1220.
    20. Tsakas, Elias, 2018. "Robust scoring rules," Research Memorandum 023, Maastricht University, Graduate School of Business and Economics (GSBE).

    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:awi:wpaper:0664. 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.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with 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: Gabi Rauscher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/awheide.html .

    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.