Abstract
In sample surveys it is often difficult to obtain true responses to questions of a personal or sensitive nature, such as questions regarding savings, drug use, or extramarital affairs. To avoid providing the requisite information, or to avoid embarrassment, some respondents may refuse to give answers or may give false answers. Thus the estimates obtained from a direct survey on such topics would be biased and inferences drawn from these would be erroneous. In order to solve this problem a number of randomized response techniques (RRT), pioneered by Warner [14], have been developed. Summaries of such techniques have been made by Chaudhuri and Mukherjee [4], Mukhopadhyay [11], and Chaudhuri [3]. Here we shall find an optimal estimator of the population total of a sensitive character y in surveys using randomized response techniques by an application of optimal estimating functions.