Baccelli, Jean and Stewart, Rush T.
(2020)
Support for Geometric Pooling.
The Review of Symbolic Logic.
Abstract
Supra-Bayesianism is the Bayesian response to learning the opinions of others. Probability pooling constitutes an alternative response. One natural question is whether there are cases where probability pooling gives the supra-Bayesian result. This has been called the problem of Bayes-compatibility for pooling functions. It is known that in a common prior setting, under standard assumptions, linear pooling cannot be non-trivially Bayes-compatible. We show by contrast that geometric pooling can be non-trivially Bayes-compatible. Indeed, we show that, under certain assumptions, geometric and Bayes-compatible pooling are equivalent. Granting supra-Bayesianism its usual normative status, one upshot of our study is thus that, in a certain class of epistemic contexts, geometric pooling enjoys a normative advantage over linear pooling as a social learning mechanism. We discuss the philosophical rami�cations of this advantage, which we show to be robust to variations in our statement of the Bayes-compatibility problem.
Monthly Views for the past 3 years
Monthly Downloads for the past 3 years
Plum Analytics
Altmetric.com
Actions (login required)
 |
View Item |
![[feed]](http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/style/images/feed-icon-32x32.png){kind=icon}