Gary Chamberlain and Guido Imbens published this paper in the Journal of Business & Economic Statistics in 2003. I just came to read it in connection with the paper by Luke Bornn, Niel Shephard and Reza Solgi that I commented a few months ago. The setting is somewhat similar: given a finite support distribution with associated probability parameter θ, a natural prior on θ is a Dirichlet prior. This prior induces a prior on transforms of θ, whether or not they are in close form (for instance as the solution of a moment equation E[F(X,β)]=0. As in Bornn et al. In this paper, Chamberlain and Imbens argue in favour of the limiting Dirichlet with all coefficients equal to zero as a way to avoid prior dominating influence when the number of classes J goes to infinity and the data size remains fixed. But they fail to address the issue that the posterior is no longer defined since some classes get unobserved. They consider instead that the parameters corresponding to those classes are equal to zero with probability one, a convention and not a result. (The computational advantage in using the improper prior sounds at best incremental.) The notion of letting some Dirichlet hyper-parameters going to zero is somewhat foreign to a Bayesian perspective as those quantities should be either fixed or distributed according to an hyper-prior, rather than set to converge according to a certain topology that has nothing to do with prior modelling. (Another reason why setting those quantities to zero does not have the same meaning as picking a Dirac mass at zero.)
“To allow for the possibility of an improper posterior distribution…” (p.4)
This is a weird beginning of a sentence, especially when followed by a concept of expected posterior distribution, which is actually a bootstrap expectation. Not as in Bayesian bootstrap, mind. And thus this feels quite orthogonal to the Bayesian approach. I do however find most interesting this notion of constructing a true expected posterior by imposing samples that ensure properness as it reminds me of our approach to mixtures with Jean Diebolt, where (latent) allocations were prohibited to induce improper priors. The bootstrapped posterior distribution seems to be proposed mostly for assessing the impact of the prior modelling, albeit in an non-quantitative manner. (I fail to understand how the very small bootstrap sample sizes are chosen.)
Obviously, there is a massive difference between this paper and Bornn et al, where the authors use two competing priors in parallel, one on θ and one on β, which induces difficulties in setting priors since the parameter space is concentrated upon a manifold. (In which case I wonder what would happen if one implemented the preposterior idea of Berger and Pérez, 2002, to derive a fixed point solution. That we implemented recently with Diego Salmerón and Juan Antonio Caño in a paper published in Statistica Sinica.. This exhibits a similarity with the above bootstrap proposal in that the posterior gets averaged wrt another posterior.)