Law of Total Expectation - Iterated Expectations With Nested Conditioning Sets

Iterated Expectations With Nested Conditioning Sets

The following formulation of the law of iterated expectations plays an important role in many economic and finance models:

where the value of I1 is determined by that of I2. To build intuition, imagine an investor who forecasts a random stock price X based on the limited information set I1. The law of iterated expectations says that the investor can never gain a more precise forecast of X by conditioning on more specific information (I2), if the more specific forecast must itself be forecast with the original information (I1).

This formulation is often applied in a time series context, where Et denotes expectations conditional on only the information observed up to and including time period t. In typical models the information set t + 1 contains all information available through time t, plus additional information revealed at time t + 1. One can then write:

Read more about this topic:  Law Of Total Expectation

Famous quotes containing the words iterated, expectations, nested, conditioning and/or sets:

    “The customary cry,
    ‘Come buy, come buy,’
    With its iterated jingle
    Of sugar-bated words:”
    —Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830–1894)

    “Our children do not want models of perfection, neither do they want us to be buddies, friends, or confidants who never rise above their own levels of maturity and experience. We need to walk that middle ground between perfection and peerage, between intense meddling and apathy—the middle ground where our values, standards, and expectations can be shared with our children.”
    —Neil Kurshan (20th century)

    “I was asking for something specific and perfect for my city,
    Whereupon lo! upsprang the aboriginal name.
    Now I see what there is in a name, a word, liquid, sane, unruly,
    musical, self-sufficient,
    I see that the word of my city is that word from of old,
    Because I see that word nested in nests of water-bays, superb,
    Rich, hemm’d thick all around with sailships and steamships, an
    island sixteen miles long, solid-founded,”
    —Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

    “The climacteric marks the end of apologizing. The chrysalis of conditioning has once for all to break and the female woman finally to emerge.”
    —Germaine Greer (b. 1939)

    “It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.”
    —James Russell Lowell (1819–91)