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I Don’t Know

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 August 2020

MATTHEW BACKUS  and
ANDREW T. LITTLE Open the ORCID record for ANDREW T. LITTLE [Opens in a new window]
MATTHEW BACKUS*
Affiliation:
Columbia University
ANDREW T. LITTLE*
Affiliation:
University of California, Berkeley
*
Matthew Backus, Philip H. Geier Jr Associate Professor, Department of Economics, Columbia University, NBER, and CEPR, [email protected]
Andrew T. Little, Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, [email protected]
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Abstract

Political decision makers make choices in a complex and uncertain world, where even the most qualified experts may not know what policies will succeed. Worse, if these experts care about their reputation for competence, they may be averse to admitting what they don’t know. We model the strategic communication of uncertainty, allowing for the salient reality that sometimes the effects of proposed policies are impossible to know. Our model highlights the challenge of getting experts to admit uncertainty, even when it is possible to check predictive success. Moreover, we identify a novel solution: checking features of the question that only good experts will infer—in particular, whether the effect of policies is knowable—can induce uninformed experts do say “I Don’t Know.”

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 114 , Issue 3 , August 2020 , pp. 724 - 743
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2020. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

Thanks to Charles Angelucci, Jonathan Bendor, Sylvain Chassang, Wouter Dessein, Sean Gailmard, James Hollyer, Ryan Hübert, Navin Kartik, Greg Martin, Mallesh Pai, Matthew Mitchell Andrea Prat, Michael Raith, Daniel Rappaport, Maher Said, Jim Snyder, Joel Sobel, Philipp Strack, and audiences at MPSA 2015, EARIE 2017, The 28th International Game Theory Conference, QPEC 2017, Petralia Workshop 2017, SAET 2017, ESSET 2018, Columbia, Harvard, the Higher School of Economics, the University of Hong Kong, Peking University, and Stanford for thoughtful comments and suggestions. We thank Jett Pettus, Alphonse Simon, and Brenden Eum for their excellent research assistance. All remaining errors are our own.

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