Crowdsourcing

You want to know who is going to cover the spread in an NFL game on Sunday. Or...you want to determine the best route to drive from Chicago to Indianapolis to avoid the cops.

You might want to consider the process of crowdsourcing. This practice is the gathering of information, predictions, and data from a wide population of people through a variety of survey tools.

Crowdsourcing has emerged as a popular academic topic in the world of behavioral finance and economics over the last decade. Estimize, an online aggregator of public views on earnings forecasts, has produced a 70% higher success rate at predicting companies’ quarterly EPS and revenue figures than the Wall Street analysts whose job is to cover these companies.

Also, crowdsourcing has become a popular way to track roadway accidents through the mobile app Waze, while the app Sickweather has enabled people to track illnesses like the flu across the United States at the height of flu season.