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BAYESIAN OCKHAM’S RAZOR AND NESTED MODELS

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2019

Bengt Autzen Open the ORCID record for Bengt Autzen [Opens in a new window]
Bengt Autzen*
Affiliation:
Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München, Ludwigstrasse 31, 80539 München, Germany. Email: b.autzen@lmu.de. URL: www.mcmp.philosophie.uni-muenchen.de/people/faculty/autzen_bengt/index.html
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Abstract:

While Bayesian methods are widely used in economics and finance, the foundations of this approach remain controversial. In the contemporary statistical literature Bayesian Ockham’s razor refers to the observation that the Bayesian approach to scientific inference will automatically assign greater likelihood to a simpler hypothesis if the data are compatible with both a simpler and a more complex hypothesis. In this paper I will discuss a problem that results when Bayesian Ockham’s razor is applied to nested economic models. I will argue that previous responses to the problem found in the philosophical literature are unsatisfactory and develop a novel reply to the problem.

Keywords

Ockham’s razorBayesianismmodelsimplicityprior probability
Type
Article
Information
Economics & Philosophy , Volume 35 , Issue 2 , July 2019 , pp. 321 - 338
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2019 

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