Forecasting and monitoring time series in business and finance: the role of judgment

This is a Centre for Decision Research (CDR) Seminar taking place at Leeds University Business School on Wednesday 6 December 2017

Nigel Harvey, Professor of Judgment and Decision Research, University College London, will be delivering the eighth presentation in the Centre for Decision Research’s 2017/18 seminar series.

People frequently have to deal with information that appears or has appeared over time. In business and finance, this information is often numerical and may be represented graphically. Generally speaking, psychologists have not shown much interest in how people deal with this type of information – indeed, students, who otherwise received a fairly thorough grounding in statistics, typically learn nothing about time series analysis.

Professor Harvey will provide an overview of some recent work: discussing the role of judgment in forecasting, both in unaided judgmental forecasting and in judgmental adjustment of statistical forecasts. (Both these approaches are common in demand forecasting for supply chain management). He’ll also consider tasks in which people have to decide whether to act on the basis of information provided in time series. For example, financial traders may need to assess how risky it would be trade, given the behaviour of a price series. Finally, I’ll outline some research into tasks in which people have to monitor time series to determine whether there has been a particular type of structural break, such as a change in the level or variance of the series. These types of change are important to detect in many domains, such as medicine and finance.

Registration not required

For further information, please contact the Research Office at research.LUBS@leeds.ac.uk

About the speaker

Professor Nigel Harvey

Nigel Harvey is Professor of Judgment and Decision Research at University College London and Visiting Fellow in the Department of Statistics at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Apart from his research on how people deal with time series information, he works on advice taking, calibration of subjective probabilities, gambling, and ethical decision making.