Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures

Any significant activity of forecasting involves a large component of judgment, intuition, and educated guesswork. Indeed, the opinions of experts are the source of many technological, political, and social forecasts. Opinions and intuitions play an important part even where the forecasts are obtained by a mathematical model or a simulation. Intuitive judgments enter in the choice of the variables that are considered in such models, the impact factors that are assigned to them, and the initial values that are assumed to hold. The critical role of intuition in all varieties of forecasting calls for an analysis of the factors that limit the accuracy of expert judgments, and for the development of procedures designed to improve the quality of these judgments. …