Title
Probabilistic Coherence Weighting for Optimizing Expert Forecasts
Abstract
<P>Methods for eliciting and aggregating expert judgment are necessary when decision-relevant data are scarce. Such methods have been used for aggregating the judgments of a large, heterogeneous group of forecasters, as well as the multiple judgments produced from an individual forecaster. This paper addresses how multiple related individual forecasts can be used to improve aggregation of probabilities for a binary event across a set of forecasters. We extend previous efforts that use probabilistic incoherence of an individual forecaster's subjective probability judgments to weight and aggregate the judgments of multiple forecasters for the goal of increasing the accuracy of forecasts. With data from two studies, we describe an approach for eliciting extra probability judgments to (i) adjust the judgments of each individual forecaster, and (ii) assign weights to the judgments to aggregate over the entire set of forecasters. We show improvement of up to 30% over the established benchmark of a simple equal-weighted averaging of forecasts. We also describe how this method can be used to remedy the “fifty–fifty blip” that occurs when forecasters use the probability value of 0.5 to represent epistemic uncertainty.</P>
Year
DOI
Venue
2013
10.1287/deca.2013.0279
Decision Analysis
Keywords
DocType
Volume
probabilistic coherence,crowdsourcing,fifty&#150;fifty blip,forecast aggregation,linear opinion pool,practice
Journal
10
Issue
ISSN
Citations 
4
1545-8490
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.38
8
4
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Christopher W. Karvetski110.38
Kenneth C. Olson210.38
David R. Mandel311.40
Charles R. Twardy4277.60