The Pick-the-Winner-Picker Heuristic: Preference for Categorically Correct Forecasts

A couple years ago, Jay Naborn wrote: I am studying people’s preference for categorically correct forecasts (such as getting the winner of a sports game right) over error-minimizing ones (such as getting close on the margin). We have experimental evidence of this, why it happens, etc. What I would be interested in doing is demonstrating that this preference is/can be a mistake. To do so, it would be nice to show that doing well in terms of minimizing continuous error is a better predictor of future winner-picking than is doing well in terms of winner-picking. I am curious if you have any leads as to some existing dataset that would be helpful here, or some simulation/modeling strategy that may work. I replied that, yes, this relates to a point we made here. Recently Naborn followed up: The blog post you sent (and a couple others of yours) were very informative for our background thinking. My work (with Jonathan Bogard) forecast evaluation is now published at the Journal of Marketing…