TRC

Recently Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for best picture. It’s already considerable box office muscle is going to be further enhanced. But this was a movie that nearly did not get made. The money men who read the script did not think it was a likely candidate for success and hence it had to go through its own harrowing twists and turns to hit the screen. That is not at all an atypical scenario in the world of movies. Predicting box-office success is very difficult. It is difficult even when the movie has been made and pre-screening reviews are available. The task is considerably more difficult when only the script is available for prediction. Someone who decides to plunk down money will have to visualize a lot based on words on paper. In this kind of difficult situation is it possible to make good predictions about the success of a script if one were to take an analytical approach? Yes, say three researchers who have demonstrated a method of doing precisely that.

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You can read my previous two election posts here and here. In this post I will take a look at who got the election right and what factors to look for in making that evaluation. Those factors include single polls versus (simple and complex) poll aggregations, use of combination forecasting, the use of cell phone only households in surveys and the astonishing performance of quantitative models that accurately predicted the final results almost a year back. Keep in mind that as of this writing, the final results are still not in both in terms of vote share and in terms of states (Missouri). That said, the results are close enough that we can get a good idea of what went right.

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