The literature on the wisdom of crowds argues that in most
situations, the aggregated judgments of a large crowd perform
well relative to the average individual. There are, however,
many real-world cases where crowds perform poorly. A small
crowd literature has since developed, finding that better
performing small crowds often exist within whole crowds.
We compare previously proposed small crowd selection
methods based on absolute or relative group performance to a
new sequential search method and find that it selects better
performing small crowds more consistently for forecasts of
real gross domestic product (GDP) growth, inflation
(measured by consumer price index, CPI), and unemployment
rate made by US and Euro-zone surveys of professional
forecasters.