Case Name :      Surveying Professional Forecasters

Authors :           Yael Grushka-Cockayne, Kenneth C. Lichtendahl

Source :             Darden School of Business

Case ID :           UV6697

Discipline :        General Management

Case Length :    06 pages

Plagiarism : NO (100% Original work)

“This case serves to illustrate how averaging point forecasts harnesses the wisdom of crowds. Students access data from the Survey of Professional Forecasters (SPF) and compare the performance of the crowd (i.e., the average point forecasts) to the average performance of the individual panelists and the best performer from the previous period. The case is intended for use in a class on forecasting, and the instructor can present it in three ways: with all necessary SPF data cleaned and preprocessed in a student spreadsheet (UVA-QA-0805X, provided with the case); with code (also provided in the student spreadsheet) written by the case authors in R, the statistical computing package, as well as a supplementary handout (UVA-QA-0805H, also provided with the case), which walks students through R code, explaining how to clean and analyze the SPF data; or as a team project to be worked on over several days, providing neither the spreadsheet nor the supplement. The latter would be an excellent exercise in data retrieval, cleaning, reshaping, and analysis.”