Individual inconsistency and aggregate rationality: Overcoming inconsistencies in expert judgment at the technical frontier
Patrick Funk, Alex L. Davis, Parth Vaishnav, Barry Dewitt, Erica R.H. Fuchs · Technological Forecasting and Social Change · 2020
Commercialization of a new material or process invention can take decades. A predominance of tacit knowledge, information asymmetries, and insufficient human capital with knowledge in the field can contribute to this delay. Focusing on an emerging technology which offers an extreme example of such issues, we seek to capture what expert decision-making looks like at the technological frontier and opportunities for interventions to accelerate the commercialization of technologies with these issues. We elicit implicit and explicit knowledge of experts about the feasibility of producing parts with metal additive manufacturing (MAM), then recruit 27 of 65 experts from industry, academia, and government to complete the survey. We find that no two experts make the same judgments about the feasibility of producing jet engine parts with MAM. Further, the majority of experts exhibit some internal inconsistency (intransitivity) in their judgments. Aggregate expert knowledge has greater internal consistency, suggesting that relying on one or two experts could cause considerable divergence from aggregate knowledge. Through resampling the experts, we show the degree of this divergence decreases as the number of experts in the sample increases. The results suggest that capturing, pooling, and scaling aggregate expert knowledge could accelerate commercialization of new materials and processes.