Role playing can be used to forecast decisions, such as “how will our competitors respond if we lower our prices?” In role playing, an administrator asks people to play roles and uses their “decisions” as forecasts. Such an exercise can produce a realistic simulation of the interactions...

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...

Two studies were conducted to examine expert opinions of criteria used to select forecasting techniques. In Study One, while "accuracy" was a dominant criterion, the ratings of five of thirteen criteria varied by the role of the forecaster. Researchers rated accuracy relatively higher than did...

This paper identifies and analyzes previously published studies on annual earnings forecasts. Comparisons of forecasts produced by management, analysts, and extrapolative techniques indicated that: (1) management forecasts were superior to professional analyst forecasts (the mean absolute...

In 1982, the Journal of Forecasting published the results of a forecasting competition organized by Spyros Makridakis (Makridakis et al., 1982). In this, the ex ante forecast errors of 21 methods were compared for forecasts of a variety of economic time series, generally using 1001 time series....

This paper examines the feasibility of rule-based forecasting, a procedure that applies forecasting expertise and domain knowledge to produce forecasts according to features of the data. We developed a rule base to make annual extrapolation forecasts for economic and demographic time series. The...

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...