Premium
Disinformation: Properties of market forecasts of benevolent opinion leaders
Author(s) -
Beggs John J.
Publication year - 1984
Publication title -
behavioral science
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.371
H-Index - 45
eISSN - 1099-1743
pISSN - 0005-7940
DOI - 10.1002/bs.3830290206
Subject(s) - disinformation , variable (mathematics) , government (linguistics) , politics , process (computing) , economics , econometrics , political science , computer science , law , mathematics , mathematical analysis , linguistics , philosophy , social media , operating system
This paper focuses on the asymmetric nature of the information‐processing capacility, in particular between the central government and the marketplace in regard to certain major policy variables and leading indicators. It applies to decision making at the individual, group, and national levels. Under suitable circumstances the less well informed will follow the opinions of the better informed and, hence, be liable to manipulation. Though widely discussed in the political arena, the question of manipulative forecasts, or disinformation, remains largely unexplored in major policy areas of economics. Here I demonstrate important properties of manipulative forecasts: (1) they are more variable than mean‐square‐error forecasts and may be even more variable than the process being forecast, and (2) they tend to chop‐and‐change more often than either the mean‐square‐error forecast or the actual process being forecast.