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. 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 mailing list - email behaviour_spotlight at newlistserv dot warwick dot ac dot uk to be added to the list.
If you attend DR@W please take some time to fill in our survey It helps us understand who our audience are and how we can widen participation.
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.