Traditional groups meetings are an inefficient and ineffective method for making forecasts and decisions. We compare two structured alternatives to traditional meetings: the Delphi technique and prediction markets. Delphi is relatively simple and cheap to implement and has been adopted for...

This paper proposes a unifying theory of forecasting in the form of a Golden Rule of Forecasting. The Golden Rule is to be conservative. A conservative forecast is consistent with cumulative knowledge about the present and the past. To be conservative, forecasters must seek all knowledge...

Ideally, presidential elections should be decided based on how the candidates would handle issues facing the country. If so, knowledge about the voters’ perception of the candidates should help to forecast election outcomes. We make two forecasts of the winner of the popular vote in the U.S....

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group One, a panel of experts established by the World Meteorological Organization and the United Nations Environment Programme, issued its Fourth Assessment Report. The Report included predictions of dramatic increases in...

Prior research found that people’s assessments of relative competence predicted the outcome of Senate and Congressional races. We hypothesized that snap judgments of "facial competence" would provide useful forecasts of the popular vote in presidential primaries before the candidates become...

When people forecast, they often use analogies but in an unstructured manner. We propose a structured judgmental procedure that involves asking experts to list as many analogies as they can, rate how similar the analogies are to the target situation, and match the outcomes of the analogies with...

If people in conflicts can more accurately forecast how others will respond, that should help them to make better decisions. Contrary to expert expectations, earlier research found game theorists' forecasts were less accurate than forecasts from simulated interactions using student role players....

How useful are probabilistic forecasts of the outcomes of particular situations? Potentially, they contain more information than unequivocal forecasts and, as they allow a more realistic representation of the relative likelihood of different outcomes, they might be more accurate and therefore...

Rule-Based Forecasting (RBF) is an expert system that uses judgment to develop and apply rules for combining extrapolations. The judgment comes from two sources, forecasting expertise and domain knowledge. Forecasting expertise is based on more than a half century of research. Domain knowledge...