Some thoughts on Le Cam's statistical decision theory

Abstract: The paper contains some musings about the abstractions introduced by Lucien Le Cam into the asymptotic theory of statistical inference and decision theory. A short, self-contained proof of a key result (existence of randomizations via convergence in distribution of likelihood ratios), and an outline of a proof of a local asymptotic minimax theorem, are presented as an illustration of how Le Cam's approach leads to conceptual simplifications of asymptotic theory.