Bayesian inference in group judgment formulation and decision making using qualitative controlled feedback

Summary This paper considers the problem of making statistical inferences about group judgments and group decisions using Qualitative Controlled Feedback, from the Bayesian point of view. The qualitative controlled feedback procedure was first introduced by Press (1978), for a single question of interest. The procedure is first reviewed here including the extension of the model to the multiple question case. We develop a model for responses of the panel on each stage. Many questions are treated simultaneously and an autoregressive model is developed for explaining the responses of the group members as a function of the feedback. The errors are assumed to follow a matrix intraclass covariance structure. Marginal and conditional posterior distributions of the regression coefficient vector are found in both small and large samples. The broadly defined generic family of multidimensional Student-t-distribution is found to play a major role in the results.