An efficient use of moment's ratios of scrambling variables in a randomized response technique.

This paper aimed at providing an efficient new unbiased estimator for estimating the proportion of a potentially sensitive attribute in survey sampling. The suggested randomization device makes use of the means, variances of scrambling variables, and the two scalars lie between “zero” and “one.” Thus, the same amount of information has been used at the estimation stage. The variance formula of the suggested estimator has been obtained. We have compared the proposed unbiased estimator with that of Kuk (1990) and Franklin (1989), and Singh and Chen (2009) estimators. Relevant conditions are obtained in which the proposed estimator is more efficient than Kuk (1990) and Franklin (1989) and Singh and Chen (2009) estimators. The optimum estimator (OE) in the proposed class of estimators has been identified which finally depends on moments ratios of the scrambling variables. The variance of the optimum estimator has been obtained and compared with that of the Kuk (1990) and Franklin (1989) estimator and Singh and Chen (2009) estimator. It is interesting to mention that the “optimum estimator” of the class of estimators due to Singh and Chen (2009) depends on the parameter π under investigation which limits the use of Singh and Chen (2009) OE in practice while the proposed OE in this paper is free from such a constraint. The proposed OE depends only on the moments ratios of scrambling variables. This is an advantage over the Singh and Chen (2009) estimator. Numerical illustrations are given in the support of the present study when the scrambling variables follow normal distribution. Theoretical and empirical results are very sound and quite illuminating in the favor of the present study. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]