Capturing experts' uncertainty in welfare analysis: An application to organophosphate use regulation in US apple production

The use of organophosphate insecticides in apple production has become of r egulatory concern since the Food Quality Protection Act passed into law in 1996, Through an expert opinion survey, we assess the economic impact of po ssible regulatory scenarios on the apple industry. Because experts are unsu re of the impacts, we ask them for distributions of impacts to explicitly c apture the uncertainty they face. We apply Bayesian methods to aggregate th ese distributions. Welfare impact distributions for different policy scenar ios are estimated and ordered using a nonparametric test for stochastic ord ering of probability distributions to facilitate policy decision making.