The concept of the "wisdom of crowds" was first formalized by a British statistician, Sir Francis Galton, in 1906 after he visited a fair and conducted an experiment with data from villagers guessing the weight of an ox. The mean of their guesses was the ox’s actual weight, while no individual villager came nearly as close with their guess. This simple insight, that a crowd, in aggregate, can be "wise" given certain conditions, is a power we are still trying to leverage today.
During his talk, Adam will discuss a brief history of predictive crowd mechanisms like prediction markets that are specifically designed to produce consensus forecasts. He will then give some examples of how organizations are using these mechanisms today to drive risk identification and evaluation. Finally, he’ll offer a hypothesis of how organizations may leverage crowd forecasting in the future and some recommendations for getting started now.
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