Q&A: Ron Dembo on crowd-spotting black swans

Veteran quant argues large groups are better at gauging extreme uncertainty than small teams of experts

This article accompanies Risk.net’s project on crowdsourced scenario generation.

The future isn’t what it used to be – at least, not if judged by the financial industry’s efforts at modelling it.

Time and again, the standard method of estimating losses by looking at what has happened before – imagining the future by selectively replaying the past – has been found wanting.

Covid-19 is just the latest example. For every day that passes with the world’s largest economies under lockdown, the