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The planned Laser Interferometer Space Antenna (LISA) is expected to detectthe inspiral and merger of massive black hole binaries (MBHBs) at z <~ 5 withsignal-to-noise ratios (SNRs) of hundreds to thousands. Because of these highSNRs, and because these SNRs accrete over periods of weeks to months, it shouldbe possible to extract the physical parameters of these systems with highaccuracy; for instance, for a ~ 10^6 Msun MBHBs at z = 1 it should be possibleto determine the two masses to ~ 0.1% and the sky location to ~ 1 degree.However, those are just the errors due to noise: there will be additional"theoretical" errors due to inaccuracies in our best model waveforms, which arestill only approximate. The goal of this paper is to estimate the typicalmagnitude of these theoretical errors. We develop mathematical tools for thispurpose, and apply them to a somewhat simplified version of the MBHB problem,in which we consider just the inspiral part of the waveform and neglectspin-induced precession, eccentricity, and PN amplitude corrections. For thissimplified version, we estimate that theoretical uncertainties in sky positionwill typically be ~ 1 degree, i.e., comparable to the statistical uncertainty.For the mass and spin parameters, our results suggest that while theoreticalerrors will be rather small absolutely, they could still dominate overstatistical errors (by roughly an order of magnitude) for the strongestsources. The tools developed here should be useful for estimating the magnitudeof theoretical errors in many other problems in gravitational-wave astronomy.

LISA detections of massive black hole inspirals: parameter extraction errors due to inaccurate template waveforms