Causal forces are a way of summarizing forecasters' expectations about what will happen to a time series in the future. Contrary to the common assumption for extrapolation, time series are not always subject to consistent forces that point in the same direction. Some are affected by conflicting...

Rothenberg's book is a delight to read, and it provides a singular opportunity to compare what the agencies delivered in the Subaru proposals with what clients should expect. On the negative side, the book lacks structure so that it is difficult to follow the time sequencing or understand how...

To improve forecasting accuracy, combine forecasts derived from methods that differ substantially and draw from different sources of information. When feasible, use five or more methods. Use formal procedures to combine forecasts: An equal-weights rule offers a reasonable starting point, and a...

Research over two decades has advanced the knowledge of how to assess predictive validity. We believe this has value to information systems (IS) researchers. To demonstrate, we used a widely cited study of IS spending. In that study, price-adjusted diffusion models were proposed to explain and...

Introduction: Sports and war metaphors abound in business today. For example, one management book, Thunder in the Sky, by Thomas Cleary, opens with a Chinese saying that translates: “The marketplace is a battlefield. The Asian people view success in the business world as tantamount to victory...

Twenty-five years ago, the International Institute of Forecasters was established “to bridge the gap between theory and practice.” Its primary vehicle was the Journal of Forecasting and is now the International Journal of Forecasting. The Institute emphasizes empirical comparisons of...

Introduction: With more and more firms contemplating expansion in the international market, the question of how a firm estimates its sales potential in a given country takes on increasing importance. Certainly one vital piece of information in estimating sales potential would be the size of the...

In important conflicts such as wars and labor-management disputes, people typically rely on the judgment of experts to predict the decisions that will be made. We compared the accuracy of 106 forecasts by experts and 169 forecasts by novices about eight real conflicts. The forecasts of experts...

The following hypotheses about long-range market forecasting were examined: Hl Objective methods provide more accuracy than do subjective methods. H2 The relative advantage of objective over subjective methods increases as the amount of change in the environment increases. H3 Causal methods...

Fildes, Hibon, Makridakis and Meade (1998), which will be referred to as FHMM, extends two important published papers. The idea of taking findings from each study and testing them against the data used in the other study is a good one. Such replications and extensions are important in the effort...