01957cas a2200313 a 4500 AALejournalIMF006659 230101c9999 xx r poo 0 0eng d 5.00 USD 9781455201891 1018-5941 BD-DhAAL BD-DhAAL Crowe, Christopher. Consensus Forecasts and Inefficient Information Aggregation / Christopher Crowe. Washington, D.C. : International Monetary Fund, 2010. 1 online resource (43 pages) IMF Working Papers <strong>Off-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required <strong>On-Campus Access:</strong> No User ID or Password Required Electronic access restricted to authorized BRAC University faculty, staff and students 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. Mode of access: Internet Consensus Forecasts imf Information Aggregation imf Math imf Table imf WP imf United States imf IMF Working Papers; Working Paper ; No. 2010/178 Full text available on IMF http://elibrary.imf.org/view/journals/001/2010/178/001.2010.issue-178-en.xml IMF e-Library