Background In 2003 the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) introduced its Monthly Economic Forecasting Survey. Each month the WSJ polls between 50 and 60 well-known economic experts asking their forecasts of future key economic variables such as GDP, inflation, US treasury rates, unemployment, housing starts, and other data. The forecasts are always for set times of the year, namely the ends of the first...

Con icts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of di erences in their preferences over outcomes. We investigate how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken. We show that only slight distortions will be necessary when agents' signals are sufciently accurate or when the numb...

I analyze a model of advice with two perfectly informed experts and one decision maker. The bias of an expert is her private information. I show that consulting two experts is better than consulting just one. In the simple “peer review” mechanism, the decision maker receives just one report, and the second expert decides whether to block the first expert’s report. A more rigid peer review proce...