Which dreams come true? Endogeneity, industry structure and forecasting accuracy

Michael L. Barnett, William H. Starbuck and P. Narayan Pant

Industrial and Corporate Change, 2003, vol. 12, issue 4, 653-672

Abstract: Forecasts are plentiful. Accurate long-range forecasts are rare. But some forecasts are more accurate than others are and a few are very accurate. In this paper, we first explore the case of Moore's Law, a forecast that has proven quite accurate for almost 40 years. We illustrate how expectations that Moore's Law will continue to be accurate actually make it accurate. Based on the insights of this case, we hypothesize that two factors facilitate such self-fulfilling forecasts and so make accuracy more possible. We test these hypotheses on a set of 3142 forecasts about US manufacturing industries during the 1970s. We find that high industry concentration and high control over the predicted variable tend to increase the accuracy of forecasts. Copyright 2003, Oxford University Press.

Date: 2003
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:oup:indcch:v:12:y:2003:i:4:p:653-672

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://academic.oup.com/journals

Access Statistics for this article

Industrial and Corporate Change is currently edited by Josef Chytry

More articles in Industrial and Corporate Change from Oxford University Press and the Associazione ICC Oxford University Press, Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP, UK.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Oxford University Press ().