Economic Forecast Evaluation: Profits versus the Conventional Error Measures
解释为何利润最大化的企业购买专业预测，尽管传统误差统计显示简单模型预测效果相近，因为传统统计与预测利润关联很弱。
Economists are often puzzled as to why profit-maximizing firms buy professional forecasts when statistics such as the root-mean-squared error or the mean absolute error often indicate that a naive model will forecast about as well. This paper argues that the reason is that these traditional summary statistics may not be closely related to a forecast's profits. Using profit measures, the authors find only very weak relationships between such summary error statistics and forecast value. If these results are robust, then least-squares regression analysis may not be appropriate for many studies of economic behavior. Copyright 1991 by American Economic Association.