Typically survey data have responses with gaps, outliers and ties, and the distributions of the responses might be skewed. Usually, in small area estimation, predictive inference is done using a two-stage Bayesian model with normality at both levels (responses and area means).This is the...

This paper proposes a new estimator for least squares model averaging. A model average estimator is a weighted average of common estimates obtained from a set of models. We propose computing weights by minimizing a model average prediction criterion (MAPC). We prove that the MAPC estimator is...