Ordinal Responses with Latent Uncertainty: a Bivariate Model

In responding to a rating question, an individual may give an answer according to his/her knowledge (feeling) or to his/her level of indecision (uncertainty) and such behavior can be modelled through a latent variable. In this paper, two latent binary variables are assumed to rule the answers to two rating questions. The joint distribution of the ordinal variables, describing the two responses, is modelled by a mixture of four components corresponding to the cases of uncertainty in both the answers, feeling in both the answers and uncertainty in only one of them.