IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/mpg/wpaper/2012_23.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Neglect the Base Rate: It’s the Law!

Author

Listed:
  • Christoph Engel

    (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn)

Abstract

If accurate prediction is the goal, and if information about the unconditional probability of the predicted event is available, a strong case can be made for using this information, i.e. for a Bayesian approach to inference. Not so rarely, the law calls for accurate prediction, e.g. if a bailing decision hinges on an estimate of recidivism risk. Yet for other questions of law, and for the law of evidence in particular, accuracy is not the exclusive goal. Substantive law determines who should bear the risk that doubt cannot be removed. These rules decide whether several individuals, or several acts for that matter, shall be treated as members of a class. Applying Bayes’ rule also implicitly treats the person or the action in question as a member of a class. If in conflict, the normative decision of substantive law overrides Bayes’ rule, and forces judges and administrators to neglect the base rate.

Suggested Citation

  • Christoph Engel, 2012. "Neglect the Base Rate: It’s the Law!," Discussion Paper Series of the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods 2012_23, Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods.
    • Handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2012_23
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.coll.mpg.de/pdf_dat/2012_23online.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:mpg:wpaper:2012_23. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Marc Martin (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/mppggde.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.