Expert Elicitation Techniques in the Social Sciences

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Abstract:

When empirical data are limited or difficult to obtain, expert elicitation provides a valuable methodology for quantifying subjective judgments in the social sciences. By systematically capturing knowledge from subject experts, elicitation techniques can offer insights into complex social phenomena that are challenging to measure directly. This talk will overview structured approaches to expert knowledge elicitation for reliably capturing probabilistic beliefs. Key principles include facilitating group information sharing, avoiding incoherent probability judgments through structured questioning, and using behavioural aggregation to synthesize individual judgments into consensus distributions representing the group's collective beliefs.

Notable applications of expert elicitation span diverse areas such as healthcare, environmental science and business planning. The talk will highlight our own work using expert judgments to enhance the measurement of criminal sentence severity. Through an elicitation workshop, practitioner assessments of the relative severities of different sentencing options were obtained, allowing refinement of traditional pairwise comparison scaling models.

As always, everyone is welcome! Please help us spread the word of this event by passing this email on to any PGR students you might be supervising. Lunch and coffee/tea will be available.