Not really. Get three opinions from professionals giving the default answer and you have three default answers. Because it’s non-competitive it doesn’t even require coordination. Get three home appraisals in 2007 and they’re all coming in at the offer. They don’t have to know each other, they’re just aligned with the same individual incentives.
> Get three opinions from professionals giving the default answer and you have three default answers.
What's the likelihood they've all standardized on the exact same default heuristic?
But even if they did, at least in some of the examples giving the same default answer would be literally impossible when 2nd opinions are taken into account.
The security guard example is instructive. Scatter a truckload of security guards throughout the entire building. They cannot all occupy the same space at the same time. Consequently, the sound of ostensible wind to one security guard is the sound of a robber breathing to another security guard.
Scatter a truckload of rocks throughout the entire building. Now you have a bunch of goddamned rocks.
I'm no digital signal processing professional but by substituting rocks I'd say we suffered a loss in fidelity.
> What's the likelihood they've all standardized on the exact same default heuristic?
In some cases really high. Professionals are often under the same constraints, have no reason to be diverge, and even are incentivized to converge in opinions. These are not independent probabilistic events.
To my earlier example, _many_ appraisers adopted the heuristic of “appraisal = offer + irrelevant_random_noise”.
You security guard example doesn’t really apply to professional opinions. They’re usually done independently. By hiring multiple security guards, you’re forcing them (or at least encouraging them) to spread out. Sure, you’d get a similar effect if you hired ten doctors to spend 20 minutes with you all at the same time. They couldn’t all listen to your heart and tell you to take an aspirin. But if you visit them one at a time they can. So it’s more like ten security guards all watching one camera feed from different rooms.
Examples of this problem aren’t made up. Citigroup accidentally sent $900 million dollars to creditors. An issue I believe is still in litigation about a year later and has been a huge loss. It was approved by three people.
