IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/nat/nathum/v2y2018i1d10.1038_s41562-017-0247-6.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The wisdom of the inner crowd in three large natural experiments

Author

Listed:
  • Dennie van Dolder

    (Centre for Decision Research and Experimental Economics, University of Nottingham
    School of Business and Economics, VU Amsterdam)

  • Martijn J. van den Assem

    (School of Business and Economics, VU Amsterdam)

Abstract

The quality of decisions depends on the accuracy of estimates of relevant quantities. According to the wisdom of crowds principle, accurate estimates can be obtained by combining the judgements of different individuals 1,2 . This principle has been successfully applied to improve, for example, economic forecasts 3–5 , medical judgements 6–9 and meteorological predictions 10–13 . Unfortunately, there are many situations in which it is infeasible to collect judgements of others. Recent research proposes that a similar principle applies to repeated judgements from the same person 14 . This paper tests this promising approach on a large scale in a real-world context. Using proprietary data comprising 1.2 million observations from three incentivized guessing competitions, we find that within-person aggregation indeed improves accuracy and that the method works better when there is a time delay between subsequent judgements. However, the benefit pales against that of between-person aggregation: the average of a large number of judgements from the same person is barely better than the average of two judgements from different people.

Suggested Citation

  • Dennie van Dolder & Martijn J. van den Assem, 2018. "The wisdom of the inner crowd in three large natural experiments," Nature Human Behaviour, Nature, vol. 2(1), pages 21-26, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:2:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41562-017-0247-6
    DOI: 10.1038/s41562-017-0247-6
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-017-0247-6
    File Function: Abstract
    Download Restriction: Access to the full text of the articles in this series is restricted.
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1038/s41562-017-0247-6?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Xiaoxiao Niu & Nigel Harvey, 2022. "Point, interval, and density forecasts: Differences in bias, judgment noise, and overall accuracy," Futures & Foresight Science, John Wiley & Sons, vol. 4(3-4), September.
    2. Celia Gaertig & Joseph P. Simmons, 2021. "The Psychology of Second Guesses: Implications for the Wisdom of the Inner Crowd," Management Science, INFORMS, vol. 67(9), pages 5921-5942, September.
    3. Samuel Jebaraj Benjamin & Zhuoan Feng & Pallab Kumar Biswas, 2023. "Negative Social Media Sentiments and Capital Structure," Capital Markets Review, Malaysian Finance Association, vol. 31(2), pages 1-22.
    4. Simone Cerreia-Vioglio & Roberto Corrao & Giacomo Lanzani, 2020. "Robust Opinion Aggregation and its Dynamics," Working Papers 662, IGIER (Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research), Bocconi University.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:nat:nathum:v:2:y:2018:i:1:d:10.1038_s41562-017-0247-6. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.nature.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.