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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons™
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Psychology Faculty Publications
Probability elicitation; decision analysis; continuous distributions; fractile estimation
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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
A Comparison Of Two Probability Encoding Methods: Fixed Probablity Vs. Fixed Variable Values, Ali E. Abbas, David V. Budescu, Hsiu-Ting Yu, Ryan Haggerty
A Comparison Of Two Probability Encoding Methods: Fixed Probablity Vs. Fixed Variable Values, Ali E. Abbas, David V. Budescu, Hsiu-Ting Yu, Ryan Haggerty
Psychology Faculty Publications
We present the results of an experiment comparing two popular methods for encoding probability distributions of continuous variables in decision analysis: eliciting values of a variable, X, through comparisons with a fixed probability wheel and eliciting the percentiles of the cumulative distribution, F(X), through comparisons with fixed values of the variable. We show slight but consistent superiority for the fixed variable method along several dimensions such as monotonicity, accuracy, and precision of the estimated fractiles. The fixed variable elicitation method was also slightly faster and preferred by most participants. We discuss the reasons for its superiority and conclude with several …