Human judgments have become quite important in revenue forecasting processes. This paper centres on human judgments in New York state sales and use tax by examining the actual practices of information integration. Based on the social judgment theory (i.e., the lens model), a judgment analysis exercise was designed and administered to a person from each agency (the Division of the Budget, Assembly Ways and Means Committee Majority and Minority, and the Senate Finance Committee) to understand how information integration is processed among different agencies. The results of the judgment analysis exercise indicated that revenue forecasters put different weight on cues. And, in terms of relative and subjective weights, the cues were used differently, although they were presented with the same information. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

This paper establishes a sampling theory for an inverted linear combination of two dependent F-variates. It is found that the random variable is approximately expressible in terms of a mixture of weighted beta distributions. Operational results, including rth-order raw moments and critical values of the density are subsequently obtained by using the Pearson Type I approximation technique. As a contribution to the probability theory, our findings extend Lee & Hu's (1996) recent investigation on the distribution of the linear compound of two independent F-variates. In terms of relevant applied works, our results refine Dickinson's (1973) inquiry on the distribution of the optimal combining weights estimates based on combining two independent rival forecasts, and provide a further advancement to the general case of combining three independent competing forecasts. Accordingly, our conclusions give a new perception of constructing the confidence intervals for the optimal combining weights estimates studied in the literature of the linear combination of forecasts.Combining weights, critical values, error-variance minimizing criterion, inverted F-variates, Pearson Type I approximation,

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Building on the well-known measure of the optimal combining weights under the error-variance minimizing criterion, this note has extended the sign-determination rule to the case of combining more than two competing forecasts. The algebraic rule derived provides a quick way to check the sign of each combining weight without directly comparing the correlation and variances of individual forecasting errors.