Doppler surveys have shown that the occurrence rate of Jupiter-mass planets appears to increase as a function of stellar mass .
However , this result depends on the ability to accurately measure the masses of evolved stars .
Recently , Lloyd ( 2011 ) called into question the masses of subgiant stars targeted by Doppler surveys .
Lloyd argues that very few observable subgiants have masses greater than 1.5M _ { \odot } , and that most of them have masses in the range 1.0-1.2 M _ { \odot } .
To investigate this claim , we use Galactic stellar population models to generate an all-sky distribution of stars .
We incorporate the effects that make massive subgiants less numerous , such as the initial mass function and differences in stellar evolution timescales .
We find that these effects lead to negligibly small systematic errors in stellar mass estimates , in contrast to the \approx 50 % errors predicted by Lloyd .
Additionally , our simulated target sample does in fact include a significant fraction of stars with masses greater than 1.5 M _ { \odot } , primarily because the inclusion of an apparent magnitude limit results in a Malmquist-like bias toward more massive stars , in contrast to the volume-limited simulations of Lloyd .
The magnitude limit shifts the mean of our simulated distribution toward higher masses and results in a relatively smaller number of evolved stars with masses in the range 1.0–1.2 M _ { \odot } .
We conclude that , within the context of our present-day understanding of stellar structure and evolution , many of the subgiants observed in Doppler surveys are indeed as massive as main-sequence A stars .