Assessing the Adequacy of Natural Science Information: A Bayesian Approach

We apply a Bayesian framework in which the adequacy of natural science information used in setting environmental regulations may be assessed. Informational adequacy is defined as the extent to which the variability in agricultural yield response information affects the probabilities of overestimating ultimately realized economic surplus and thereby failing to plan for a more lax ambient pollution standard, or by underestimating the realized surplus and thereby failing to plan for a stricter ambient standard. For linear and for quadratic yield response functions, the framework is applied to four major U.S. field crops having dissimilar growing requirements and diverse market relations.