Capturing Experts' Uncertainty in Welfare Analysis: An Application to Organophosphate use Regulation in U.S. Apple Production
通过专家意见调查，收集专家对有机磷杀虫剂监管影响的不确定性分布，用贝叶斯方法汇总，评估不同政策情景对苹果产业的福利影响，并用非参数检验排序分布以辅助决策。
Abstract The use of organophosphate insecticides in apple production has become of regulatory concern since the Food Quality Protection Act passed into law in 1996. Through an expert opinion survey, we assess the economic impact of possible regulatory scenarios on the apple industry. Because experts are unsure of the impacts, we ask them for distributions of impacts to explicitly capture the uncertainty they face. We apply Bayesian methods to aggregate these distributions. Welfare impact distributions for different policy scenarios are estimated and ordered using a nonparametric test for stochastic ordering of probability distributions to facilitate policy decision making.