Decision Makers' Ability To Identify Unusual Costs And Implications For Alternative Estimation Procedures

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an experiment in which individuals visually fitted a cost function to data.  The inclusion or omission of unusual data points within the data set was experimentally manipulated.  The results indicate that individuals omit outliers from their visual fits, but do not omit influential points.  Evidence also suggests that the weighting rule used by individuals is more robust that the weighting rule used in the ordinary least squares criterion.