Testing Forecast Rationality for Measures of Central Tendency
针对经济调查中受访者报告点预测时可能使用均值、中位数或众数等不同中心趋势度量的问题，提出在度量未知时检验预测理性的方法，并应用于纽约联储消费者预期调查的收入预测，发现这些预测只能作为众数预测被合理化。
Abstract Rational respondents to economic surveys may report as a point forecast any measure of the central tendency of their predictive distribution, e.g. the mean, median, or mode. We propose tests of forecast rationality when the measure used by the respondent is unknown. We overcome an identification problem that arises when the centrality measures are in a local neighborhood of each other, as is the case for approximately symmetric distributions. We apply our tests to income forecasts from the FRBNY's Survey of Consumer Expectations. We find these forecasts are rationalizable as mode forecasts, but not as mean or median forecasts.