Psychology Commons^™

Automated Update Tools To Augment The Wisdom Of Crowds In Geopolitical Forecasting, Amy Summerville, Cara Widmer, Brandon Minnery, Ion Juvina, Subashini Ganapathy

Psychology Faculty Publications

Despite the importance of predictive judgments, individual human forecasts are frequently less accurate than those of even simple prediction algorithms. At the same time, not all forecasts are amenable to algorithmic prediction. Here, we describe the evaluation of an automated prediction tool that enabled participants to create simple rules that monitored relevant indicators (e.g., commodity prices) to automatically update forecasts. We examined these rules in both a pool of previous participants in a geopolitical forecasting tournament (Study 1) and a naïve sample recruited from Mechanical Turk (Study 2). Across the two studies, we found that automated updates tended to improve …