Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds: Lessons about Judgmental Forecasting
The talk will describe research conducted as part of two large-scale forecasting competitions sponsored by the Intelligence Advanced Research Project Activity (IARPA). The competitions involved elicitation of probabilistic forecasts of geopolitical events from large groups of volunteers, and aggregation of these forecasts to maximize the collective accuracy. The talk will describe some of the projects seeking to answer practical questions about the size and composition of the forecasting crowd, early identification of forecasting skills, and the surprising benefits of teaming. The talk will highlight the interplay between basic, theory driven, and translational research.
Speaker
2022 Jefferson Science Fellow
David Budescu
Fordham University
David V. Budescu is the inaugural Anne Anastasi Professor of Psychometrics and Quantitative Psychology at Fordham University. He has a PhD from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and he held tenured positions at the University of Illinois and the University of Haifa, and visiting positions at Carnegie Mellon University, University of Gotheborg (Sweden), the Kellogg School at Northwestern University, the Technion (Israel Institute of Technology), INSEAD Business School, and the Center for Adaptive Rationality at the Max Planck Institute in Berlin. His research is in the areas of human judgment, individual and group decision making under uncertainty and with incomplete and vague information, probabilistic forecasting, optimal information aggregation, as well as measurement, methodology, and statistics for the behavioral and social sciences. His work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF), U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), the Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity (IARPA), and other agencies. He is the Editor of Decision and past Associate Editor of Decision Analysis and Psychological Methods. He is past president of the Society for Judgment and Decision Making (SJDM) (2000-2001), fellow of the Association for Psychological Sciences (APS), of the Psychonomic Society and of the American Psychological Association (Division 5), and an elected member of the Society for Multivariate Experimental Psychology (SMEP).
USAID Profile
Bureau for Management
Office of Management Policy, Budget, and Performance (M/MPBP)
USAID's Bureau for Management's Office of Management Policy, Budget, and Performance (M/MPBP) serves as the Agency's lead advisory office in support of management and operations. The Office ensures alignment of operational policy, budget, and operational performance with USAID goals. M/MPBP established a Climate Team, which is housed in the Performance and Policy Divisions. The Climate Team implements efforts to target climate change resources and strategically lead and coordinate the Bureau's growing management operations climate and sustainability portfolio. Dr. Budescu helps in the implementation plan for the Climate Readiness Plan (CRP) under Executive Order (E.O.) 14008, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, and the Agency's annual Sustainability Plan and supports the Bureau's engagement in USAID's Climate Strategy development and implementation.