*Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment*

That is the new and very interesting book by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein.  Think of “noise” as the new major problem rather than bias.  Here is one excerpt:

…we presented our findings to the senior managers of an asset management firm, prompting them to run their own exploratory noise audit.  they asked forty-two experienced investors in the firm to estimate the fair value of a stock (the price at which investors would be indifferent to buying or selling).  The investors based their analysis on a one-page description of the business; the data included ismplified profits and loss, balance sheet, and cash flow statements for the past three years and projections for the next two.  median noise, measured in the same way as in the insurance company, was 41%.  Such large differences among investors in the same firm, using the same valuation methods, cannot be good news.

I will be covering this book more soon, you can pre-order it here.  And here Tim Harford does FT lunch with Kahneman, self-recommending.

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