On 31 May 2015, Émile Servan-Schreiber posted a one-sentence judgement about crowdfunding and expertise:
Experts are no better than crowdfunders at deciding what is art.
Émile Servan-Schreiber, LinkedIn, 31 May 2015
A Knowledge at Wharton interview published on 21 May 2015 offers a specific research comparison. Ethan Mollick discussed work with Ramana Nanda on crowdfunding decisions and expert evaluations of theatre projects. Their study asked how two ways of selecting projects compared when applied to the same proposals.
What the comparison actually tested
Wharton’s account describes 120 theatrical projects seeking Kickstarter funding over a three-year period. Mollick explained that professional judges included people experienced in arts funding, criticism and theatre awards. The comparison asked whether their evaluations agreed with the crowd’s funding choices.
Harvard Business School’s contemporaneous interview with Nanda adds an important design detail: the experts saw project material stripped of funding-outcome information. They assessed artistic merit, feasibility, contribution to cultural dialogue and commercial viability. Their scores were positively associated with crowdfunding success.
The study found substantial agreement. When the two groups differed, it was more often because the crowd supported a project the experts would not fund. The subsequent journal abstract reports no quantitative or qualitative outcome differences between projects funded by the crowd alone and those selected by both groups. The paper appeared online in Management Science on 11 September 2015.
A complementary route to support
The research gives a specific context for considering Servan-Schreiber’s broader judgement. The study examined theatre funding and project outcomes. It did not settle the definition of art or establish that experts and crowds perform equally in every domain. A reported absence of outcome differences also leaves uncertainty about how precisely their performance was estimated.
The authors’ interpretation was that crowdfunding could complement expert selection by giving projects another evaluation route and reducing missed opportunities. Its focus is selection: which proposed projects receive an opportunity to be made, and what follows when different evaluators make that choice.
For forecasting, the methodological connection is to compare judgements on a shared set of cases, specify the evaluation criteria and examine later outcomes. Our account of social-circle surveys and prediction markets explores a different aggregation setting. The theatre study adds evidence that a crowd can broaden selection without simply reversing expert preferences.
