Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge / 2021 / ib / Paper 1 / 6H / b / Solution

The Rao-Blackwell theorem states that if $T$ is sufficient and $U$ is an estimator with finite variance, thenhas the same expectation as $U$ and no larger variance; it preserves unbiasedness. The tower property of conditional expectation givesThe law of total variance givesSufficiency ensures that $U^{\ast }$ is a statistic whose definition does not depend on the unknown parameter. The inequality is strict exactly when the conditional variance is positive with positive probability.