Policymakers need to know whether prediction is possible and if so whether any proposed forecasting method will provide forecasts that are substantively more accurate than those from the relevant benchmark method. Inspection of global temperature data suggests that it is subject to irregular...

I examined six ways of selecting forecasting methods: Convenience, “what’s easy,” is inexpensive, but risky. Market popularity, “what others do,” sounds appealing but is unlikely to be of value because popularity and success may not be related and because it overlooks some methods....

Purchase intentions are routinely used to forecast sales of existing products and services. While past studies have shown that intentions are predictive of sales, they have only examined the absolute accuracy of intentions, not their accuracy relative to other forecasting methods. For example,...

We drew upon findings from the diffusion literature to assess the prospects for the diffusion of expert systems in forecasting. Forecasters judged potential adoption of expert systems in relation to two techniques that had been widely adopted in the past, Box-Jenkins and scenarios. They also...

Rule-Based Forecasting (RBF) is an expert system that uses judgment to develop and apply rules for combining extrapolations. The judgment comes from two sources, forecasting expertise and domain knowledge. Forecasting expertise is based on more than a half century of research. Domain knowledge...

Role playing can be used to forecast decisions, such as “how will our competitors respond if we lower our prices?” In role playing, an administrator asks people to play roles and uses their “decisions” as forecasts. Such an exercise can produce a realistic simulation of the interactions...

Traditional groups meetings are an inefficient and ineffective method for making forecasts and decisions. We compare two structured alternatives to traditional meetings: the Delphi technique and prediction markets. Delphi is relatively simple and cheap to implement and has been adopted for...