Journal of Political Economy Vol. 126 No. 6 2018
Predicting Experimental Results: Who Knows What?
Abstract
We analyze how academic experts and nonexperts forecast the results of 15 piece-rate and behavioral treatments in a real-effort task. The average forecast of experts closely predicts the experimental results, with a strong wisdom-of-crowds effect: the average forecast outperforms 96 percent of individual forecasts. Citations, academic rank, field, and contextual experience do not correlate with accuracy. Experts as a group do better than nonexperts, but not if accuracy is defined as rank-ordering treatments. Measures of effort, confidence, and revealed ability are predictive of forecast accuracy to some extent and allow us to identify “superforecasters” among the nonexperts.
- DOI
- 10.1086/699976
- Volume
- 126
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 2410-2456
- Language
- en
- Sources
- bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref