Hit or Miss: What Leads Experts to Take Advice for Long-Term Judgments?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ecken, Philipp; Pibernik, Richard
• 署名单位: University of Wurzburg; European Business School (EBS) University
• 刊物名称: MANAGEMENT SCIENCE
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0025-1909
• DOI: 10.1287/mnsc.2015.2219
• 发表日期: 2016
• 页码: 2002-2021
• 关键词: advice taking; Belief updating; CONFLICT; long-term judgments; expert judgment

摘要

Managers and policy makers frequently face crucial strategic decisions that inevitably rely on judgments about relevant future events. These judgments are often characterized by very high uncertainty and the absence of experience from previous good or bad judgments. Judgments of other experts are oftentimes an important-sometimes the only-source of additional information to reduce uncertainty and improve judgment accuracy. However, in many practical situations, decision makers have very limited means to evaluate the quality of such advice from other experts and could tend to ignore this valid source of information. In this paper, we study what leads decision makers to take advice from an expert panel when judging the probability of far-future events with high economic impact. Our analysis is based on a unique data set that comprises more than 15,000 advice-taking decisions made by almost 1,000 experts from different industries. We find that decision makers have a strong tendency to ignore advice, which pronounces even further when conflicts in terms of beliefs, past experiences, or desires arise.