Should the Forecasting Process Eliminate Face-to-Face Meetings?

When financial columnist James Surowiecki wrote The Wisdom of Crowds, he wished to explain the successes and failures of markets (an example of a "crowd") and to understand why the average opinion of a crowd is frequently more accurate than the opinions of most of its individual members. In this expanded review of the book, Scott Armstrong asks a question of immediate relevance to forecasters: are the traditional face-to-face meetings an effective way to elicit forecasts from forecast crowds (i. e., teams)? Armstrong doesn't believe so. Quite the contrary, he explains why he considers face-to-face meetings a detriment to good forecasting practice, and he proposes several alternatives that have been tried successfully. Copyright International Institute of Forecasters, 2006