Crowd performance in prediction of the World Cup 2014

This paper investigates the performance of the Yahoo crowd and experts in predicting the outcomes of matches in the World Cup in 2014. The analysis finds that the Yahoo crowd was statistically significantly better at predicting outcomes of matches than experts and very similar in performance to established betting odds. In addition, this paper finds that there was a statistically significant difference between the Yahoo crowd and a different crowd's performances, for the same task, suggesting that characteristics of the “crowd matter.” Finally, this paper finds that different crowdsourcing approaches apparently provide different results. Accordingly, it is important to specify the particular crowdsourcing approach, rather than simply “crowdsource.”