An efficient method of estimating the true value of a population characteristic from its discrepant estimates

Abstract

A fruitful method of pooling data from disparate sources, such as a set of sample surveys, is developed. This method proceeds by finding the first two moments of two conditional distributions derived from a joint distribution of two sample estimators of employment for each of several geographical areas. The nature of the two estimators is such that one of them can yield a better estimate of national employment than the other. The regression of the former estimator on the latter estimator with stochastic intercept and slope is used to generate an improved estimator that is equal to bias- and error-corrected estimator for each area with probability 1. This analysis is extended to cases where more than two estimates of employment are available for each area.