Integration of Discrepant Sales Forecasts: The Influence of Plausibility Inferences Based on an Evoked Range

The authors hypothesize that when managers integrate two projections to form a sales estimate, they evoke and use a sales range to judge inappropriately the plausibility of each projection. This judged plausibility, as well as the "margin of error" (based on the market research company's typical accuracy), is used to assign weights to each projection. Five experiments find strong evidence for this process and demonstrate a resulting bias.