India, Sept. 15 -- Consumer sentiment is often a key metric to ascertain the state of the economy. There are private and institutional estimates of the measure across countries. In India none other than the RBI conducts the survey. How objective are such measures? More and more data, including one released recently for the UK shows that people's reporting of consumer sentiment might have to do more with their political partisanship than objectively determined. A comparison of data for the UK, USA and India shows that the confirmation bias in the Indian survey might be lower than in other two countries.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Hindustan Times....