RAND Forecasting Initiative

RFI enhances decisionmaking with crowdsourced forecasting

Warfighters, the intelligence community, and policy analysts across government confront complex, emerging questions that test their best analytical techniques. The RAND Forecasting Initiative (RFI) delivers the collective, diverse insights of crowdsourced forecasting to expand decisionmakers' analytical toolkits.

Building on RAND's 75-year legacy of rigorous quantitative and qualitative analysis, RFI taps the power of crowdsourced forecasting to inform policy decisions and highlight areas of consensus and disagreement. Those insights empower decisionmakers to navigate complex landscapes and peer over the horizon with a broader perspective.

RFI aims to become the world's leading crowdsourced forecasting enterprise on policy-relevant questions. Decisionmakers can contact RFI now to learn more about how forecasting helps identify emerging threats and opportunities, highlights nascent trends, and supports rationales for policymaking.

How Can RFI Help?

RFI can pose policy-relevant questions to forecasters and synthesize crowdsourced probabilities to such questions as:

• Will the People's Liberation Army invade, blockade, or attack the main island of Taiwan in the next six months?
• Will Vladimir Putin cease to be the president of the Russian Federation before December 31, 2025?
• Will Ukraine join NATO before December 31, 2028?

RFI Forecasting In Depth

RFI gets requests from decisionmakers on what they need to understand about the future. Those queries are refined into questions that best represent what decisionmakers need to know through the process of strategic decomposition (i.e., breaking down a big strategic question into smaller subquestions to frame specific queries that will deliver the most-actionable answers).

RFI issues questions to its trained cadre of RAND staff and outside forecasters. Those forecasters deliver answers in the form of time-bound probabilities that then are aggregated. Their answers also can be analyzed to glean additional information about how a strategic question may trend. This process of recomposition can combine forecasts to provide insight into broader topics.

Forecasters also can update their probabilistic answers to incorporate new information or additional insights, helping decisionmakers account for changing circumstances.

Hear from Pro Forecasters

Why Choose RFI?

• Integrated expertise: Seamlessly merge the power of trained RFI forecasters with RAND's expert analysis to gain more-comprehensive insights.
• Dynamic and adaptive: RFI's platform, run by Cultivate Labs, allows for continuous updates and adjustments based on new information, providing decisionmakers agility in evolving scenarios.
• Enhanced decisionmaking: By leveraging a broad range of inputs, RFI empowers users with contextually rich insights that support effective and timely policy development. A forecaster mix of research subject-matter experts and trained laypeople helps mitigate expert bias and groupthink.

Applications Across Sectors

RFI outputs offer the leading-edge information necessary for analysis and decisionmaking in various settings, including:

• U.S. government: Enhance policy-relevant solutions through early risk identification and strategic foresight.
• Intelligence community: Support intelligence assessment with crowdsourced forecasts to augment other forms of analysis.
• Combatant commands: Develop scenarios for wargaming exercises and strategic planning.
• Research: Use RFI to identify trends, rationales, and early warning or post-mortem lessons learned as part of the broader research and analysis process.