The effectiveness of one aspect of the London School of Economics (LSE) approach to econometrics is assessed in a simulation study. The paper uses a data set and nine models analogous to those in Lovell's (1983) study of data mining. A simplified general-to-specific algorithm is tested in a...

A decision maker tests whether the gradient of the loss function evaluated at a judgmental decision is zero. If the test does not reject, the action is the judgmental decision. If the test rejects, the action sets the gradient equal to the boundary of the rejection region. This statistical...