Admissibility of Some Stepwise Bayes Estimators

Abstract

This paper treats the problem of estimating an arbitrary parametric function in the case when the parameter and sample spaces are countable and the decision space is arbitrary. Using the notions of a stepwise Bayesian procedure and finite admissibility, a theorem is proved. It shows that under some assumptions, every finitely admissible estimator is unique stepwise Bayes with respect to a finite or countable sequence of mutually orthogonal priors with finite supports. Under an additional assumption, it is shown that the converse is true as well. The first can be also extended to the case when the parameter and sample space are arbitrary, i.e., not necessarily countable, and the underlying probability distributions are discrete.

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