Asa Palley

Areas of Expertise

Decision Analysis; Wisdom of Crowds; Judgment and Decision Making; Forecasting

Academic Degrees

• PhD, Duke University, 2016
• MS, Carnegie Mellon University, 2010
• MS, University of Maryland, College Park, 2009
• AB, Bowdoin College, 2007

Professional Experience

• Assistant Professor, Indiana University, Kelley School of Business, 2016 – present
• Instructor, Duke University, Master of Engineering Management Program, 2014

Selected Publications

• Palley, A.B., Soll, J.B. (2018), "Extracting the Wisdom of Crowds When Information is Shared," forthcoming, Management Science. View Full Text

Abstract Using the wisdom of crowds -- combining many individual judgments to obtain an aggregate estimate -- can be an effective technique for improving judgment accuracy. In practice, however, accuracy is limited by the presence of correlated judgment errors, which often emerge because information is shared. To address this problem, Asa and his colleague propose an aggregation procedure called pivoting that adjusts a crowd''s average judgment away from the average estimate of the judgment that all other respondents will provide on average. Data from four studies suggests that pivoting can significantly outperform classical averaging procedures.

• Offerman, T., Palley, A.B. (2016), "Lossed in Translation: An Off-the-Shelf Method to Recover Probabilistic Beliefs from Loss-Averse Agents," Experimental Economics, 19(1): 1–30. View Full Text
• Palley, A.B., Kremer, M. (2014), "Sequential Search and Learning from Rank Feedback: Theory and Experimental Evidence," Management Science, 60(10): 2525-2542. View Full Text
• Keeney, R.L., Palley, A.B. (2013), "Decision Strategies to Reduce Teenage and Young Adult Deaths in the United States," Risk Analysis, 33(9): 1661-1676. View Full Text