  Observations of blazar jets are shrouded in relativistic effects, thus
hindering our understanding of their intrinsic properties and dominant physical
processes responsible for their generation, evolution,radiation and particle
emission. In this work we focus on extracting information about timescales in
the jet rest frame using a population-modeling approach. We employ Monte Carlo
simulations to derive a simple population model for the intrinsic unbeamed
luminosities and the Lorentz $\Gamma$ of blazar jets that adequately describe
the observed redshift and apparent superluminal speed distributions for
flux-limited blazar samples. We derive separate models for BL Lacs and Flat
Spectrum Radio Quasars. We then use these models to compute the predicted
distribution of Doppler factors in each blazar class, and address the following
questions: (a) What is the relativistically induced spread in observed
timescales (e.g., event duration, time lags) in a flux-limited sample of
relativistic jets? (b) Could differences between BL Lacs and FSRQs observed in
the time domain be attributed to differences in beaming between the two
populations? (c) Is there a statistically preferred amount of beaming in a
flux-limited sample? How large are statistical deviations from that preferred
value? We use our findings to propose promising approaches in phenomenological
studies of timescales in blazar jets.
