TY - BOOK ID - 84658355 TI - Consensus Forecasts and Inefficient Information Aggregation AU - Crowe, Christopher. AU - International Monetary Fund. PY - 2010 SN - 1462327486 1455276790 1282846507 9786612846502 1455201898 PB - Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, DB - UniCat KW - At head of title: Research Department. KW - Economic forecasting KW - Information theory in economics KW - Econometrics. KW - Econometric models. KW - Economics, Mathematical KW - Statistics KW - Economic cybernetics KW - Econometrics KW - Forecasting KW - Forecasting and Other Model Applications KW - Expectations KW - Speculations KW - General Aggregative Models: Forecasting and Simulation KW - Economic Forecasting KW - United States UR - https://www.unicat.be/uniCat?func=search&query=sysid:84658355 AB - Consensus forecasts are inefficient, over-weighting older information already in the public domain at the expense of new private information, when individual forecasters have different information sets. Using a cross-country panel of growth forecasts and new methodological insights, this paper finds that: consensus forecasts are inefficient as predicted; this is not due to individual forecaster irrationality; forecasters appear unaware of this inefficiency; and a simple adjustment reduces forecast errors by 5 percent. Similar results are found using US nominal GDP forecasts. The paper also discusses the result’s implications for users of forecaster surveys and for the literature on information aggregation. ER -