Suppose that one wants to estimate a parameter characterizing some feature of a specified population. One has some prior information about the population and a random sample of observations. A widely applicable approach is to estimate the parameter by a sample analog; that is, by a statistic...

Election polls elicit from individuals forecasts of their prospective voting behavior. Standard verbal polling questions do not enable respondents to adequately express uncertainty about whether they will vote and, if so, for whom. This paper puts forward the idea of probabilistic polling, which...

This paper analyzes the probabilistic measures of job insecurity that have recently become available through the nationwide Survey of Economic Expectations (SEE). Since 1994, employed SEE respondents have been asked questions eliciting their expectations of job loss in the coming year and their...

The basic idea of program evaluation is both simple and appealing. Program outcomes are measured and compared to some minimum performance standard or threshold. In practice, however, evaluation is quite difficult. Two fundamental problems of outcome measurement must be addressed. The first,...

Retirement savings decisions should depend on expectations of Social Security retirement income. Persons may be uncertain of their future Social Security benefits for several reasons, including uncertainty about their future labor earnings, the formula now determining social security benefits,...

The effects of tuition costs, financial aid, and individual attributes on college choice are analyzed using a conditional logit model. The results confirm that financial aid can be an important determinant of postsecondary school attendance and that individual academic ability relative to the...

This article develops a broad theme about treatment under ambiguity through study of a particular decision criterion. The broad theme is that a planner may want to cope with ambiguity by diversification, assigning observationally identical persons to different treatments. Study of the...