The Wall Street Journal

The Wall Street Journal appears as a news organization testing how well information gathered from a group can predict a public outcome. In March 2000, its reporters canvassed Academy members about their Oscar ballots; the resulting forecast got five of the six major categories right, while the Hollywood Stock Exchange got all six. The comparison makes the paper’s reporting a revealing benchmark for collective prediction rather than a simple triumph of journalism over markets.

The 2000 Oscar Forecast

In the weeks before the 2000 Academy Awards, twelve Wall Street Journal reporters set out to discover how members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences had voted. The Academy objected publicly, with its president criticizing the effort to reveal the results before Oscar night, and urged members not to speak to reporters. The newspaper offered anonymity, and 356 members—about six percent of the Academy—disclosed how they had filled out their ballots.

On the Friday before the ceremony, the paper published its forecast for six major awards: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress. When the winners were announced, the forecast had picked five of the six. The result showed that a relatively small set of disclosures could yield a strong prediction, even though the respondents represented only a small fraction of the Academy.

Comparison with the Hollywood Stock Exchange

The newspaper’s five correct predictions were impressive, but the Hollywood Stock Exchange did better, correctly forecasting all six winners. The contrast is central to the account: the Journal pursued direct reports from Academy voters, while the exchange produced a forecast through a market that aggregated participants’ judgments. The newspaper’s reporting offered a useful comparison, but the market’s perfect score in that ceremony was the more accurate of the two.

The book places this episode within a broader account of prediction markets. The Iowa Electronic Markets, despite having no more than roughly eight hundred traders and a participant pool that did not resemble the electorate, often outperformed major national polls. The Hollywood Stock Exchange’s success at the Oscars likewise illustrates how collective estimates may outperform a more direct but limited information-gathering effort. The single ceremony is a concrete comparison, not proof that one method will always prevail.

Reporting, Information, and Prediction

The episode demonstrates the difference between gathering information from people close to an outcome and aggregating judgments about that outcome. The Journal’s reporters obtained ballots from 356 Academy members, while the Hollywood Stock Exchange drew on its traders’ predictions. The resulting five-of-six and six-of-six records let readers compare the two approaches against a definite result: the awards themselves.

In the book’s wider argument, the Journal’s forecast is part of a discussion of markets as mechanisms for combining dispersed information. A crowd can be useful when its members bring different information and their judgments can be aggregated; a direct survey, by contrast, depends on who responds and how much of the relevant group is reached. The Oscar results make that distinction visible without establishing that the market’s advantage in this instance will hold in every prediction task.