Forum
What is DR@W Forum?
DR@W Forum is an interdisciplinary discussion series which focuses on theoretical and empirical research about decision making.
The usual structure of the forum is a 30 - 45 minute introduction of the topic/working paper, with ample additional time for discussion.
The audience prefers discussing work-in-progress topics as opposed to finished papers. We meet on Thursdays between 2:30 and 3:45pm during term time, with streaming via Zoom. Contact John Taylor (John.Taylor[at]wbs.ac.uk) if you would like to suggest a speaker for a future event. Notifications of upcoming DR@W Forum events along with other decision research related activities can be obtained by registering with the moderated Behaviour Spotlight email listLink opens in a new window.
Note that several talks during the 2025/26 academic year are being hosted and orgnanised by the Economics department. This is indicated in the calendar entries. These talks will all take place in the Social Studies building. If you require further details regarding these sessions, please contact Matthew Ridley (Matthew.Ridley[at]Warwick.ac.uk) in the Economics department.
DR@W Forum: Jerker Denrell (WBS, Behavioural Science Group)
Suppose that you ask several experts about their evaluation of a new project. Should you be more or less confident in your assessment if the expert’s opinions vary a lot? We show that the answer depends on the distribution of opinions. Predictions based on variable opinions are more accurate for light-tailed distributions but less accurate for heavy-tailed distributions. Using this result, we characterize how the accuracy of a collective prediction - based on the average of several forecasts - varies with the variability of these forecasts. More variable forecasts are less accurate when the distribution of forecasts is strongly peaked around a mode close to the truth. More variable forecasts are more accurate only when the distribution of forecasts is flat-topped or skewed, or when there is heterogeneity in how correlated forecasts are.