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James Surowiecki writes the Financial Page column for the New Yorker. He's also a sports fan and the author of the bestselling "The Wisdom of Crowds." The subtitle: "Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies, and nations."
Sports should have been somewhere in there.
Surowiecki is extraordinary at explaining complex financial and marketing issues in a way that makes them comprehensible to ordinary readers. In "The Wisdom of Crowds," one of the ways he does this is by using examples from the sports world.
With the Kentucky Derby coming up, and millions of folks wondering about the best way to parlay their $2, we thought it would be a good time to talk to Mr. Surowiecki. Unfortunately, the best thing to do with those two bucks, even with all the crowd wisdom we now know to look for and use, is to buy a slice of pizza, or something.
Jeff Merron: Jumping right in to the wisdom of crowds: there have been a couple of experiments when fans have been able to make in-game decisions. One was in 1951, Bill Veeck had "Fans Managers Night." Fans were able to vote "yes" or "no" on the options given to them. And then Portland State had "Flashcard Football" in 1989. Fans voted on whether they should run or pass. Just on one series of downs. And they scored a touchdown on that series. Do you think that kind of approach might make some kind of sense?
James Surowiecki: Obviously, that kind of carries it to the extreme level. But I think you would have to bracket out all the other questions involving management: about leadership, about how players who are getting their orders from the stands would be affected by that in some way or another. I could imagine a kind of pure play calling, or whatever it would be, if you could construct the options in a reasonable way. It's sort of a fascinating idea.
There was a struggling European soccer team that allowed the fans to do player selection. In theory, there's really no reason to think that it wouldn't work, if you could delimit the choices well enough. The "yes/no" is not always necessarily the best way to do it because, if you think about it, if 51 percent of the fans want to do one thing and 49 percent want to do the other, figuring out what the crowd really thinks in that kind of situation is not ideal.
It would be interesting to allow players to collectively decide what the strategy would be. I've always thought that is worth looking at. And sports is an interesting example where fans have quite a bit of information in some way or another about the game. They're probably relatively invested in the outcome, so of all the crowds out there, sports crowds are probably about as well-informed as most large groups of people.
I think if you let fans decide the lineup, for instance, every game, I have a hard time believing the results would be, in any meaningful sense, worse than allowing a manager to do so.
JM: But no better, either. So would there be a point to this?
