FORPOL

From October 2022 to March 2023, we ran a forecasting tournament with a total of 54

questions. Almost all of our forecasting questions were developed in cooperation with 16

different public institutions and ministerial departments. Each institution or department defined

its most useful forecasting topics, participated in a workshop to define specific questions with

us, and was later provided with the results. This was intended as a proof of concept of one

possible approach to incorporating forecasting in public decision-making.

Once defined, our forecasting questions were then posted on a private Metaculus sub-domain

(in Czech), where an average of 72 forecasters had the opportunity to address them as they

would any other question on Metaculus (median of 18 predictions per user). Throughout the

tournament, we produced 16 reports detailing the rationales and forecasts, to be used by the

cooperating institutions.

A handful of our partners have already reported acting on the information/judgment presented in

our reports. This has concerned, for example, the national foreclosure issue (some 6% of the

total population have debts in arrears) where the debt relief process is being redesigned midst

strong lobbying and insufficient personal capacities; or the probabilities of outlier scenarios for

European macroeconomic development, which was requested by the Slovak Ministry of Finance

to help calibrate their existing judgements.

It also seems useful to explore various approaches to grow the number of policymakers with

personal experience & skills in forecasting. In our case, we found curiosity and willingness to try

forecasting even in unexpected institutional locations (i.e. the Czech R&I funding body). This

makes us more confident that the “external forecasts” approach (as compared to building

internal prediction tournaments or focusing on advancing forecasting skills of public servants) is

worth investigating further precisely because it allows us to detect and draw on this interest

irrespective of institutional and seniority distinctions and resource constraints.

While we hope that any readers with an interest in forecasting may find our experience useful,

we expect that both this and any future projects of ours make it easier for other teams to work

towards similar goals. To that effect, the write-up also contains an Annex of “Methodological

Guidelines,” where we outline in more explicit terms the questions and decisions that we found

were important to tackle when running the project, and what they may entail.