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For questions, please email Shayne Trotman (shayne.trotman@nyu.edu)
Abstract:
This talk is motivated by, and relies on data from, recent large-scale geopolitical forecasting tournaments (Mellers et al., 2014). Two key results of the tournaments are (1) the possibility to identify reliably expertise (Budescu & Chen, 2015; Chen et al, 2016) of individual forecasters and leverage it to improve the accuracy of the forecasts through efficient aggregation of relatively small crowds of “selected” forecasters (Mannes et al. 2014), and (2) the surprising success of small collaborative teams. This “teaming effect” is particularly intriguing because it seems to contradict the “wisdom of the crowd” hypothesis that emphasizes the importance of independence among forecasters. We discuss both results with special attention to the “teaming effect” which we attribute to the hybrid approach implemented, which allowed forecasters to share information electronically and asynchronously, but required them to provide forecasts individually, for a statistical aggregation procedure. This hybrid approach benefits from the strengths of Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) and Statistical Aggregation.