Gain Decision Advantage with RFI Crowdsourced Forecasts
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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.
Become a Forecaster
We encourage anyone with an interest in forecasting, science and technology, or geopolitics to apply to join the RFI community.
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).
Issue: How to Posture NATO forces in Poland
Formulate Strategic Question: What is the likelihood that Russia will invade Latvia, Estonia, or Lithuania by 2027?
Strategic Decomposition: Create subquestions that deliver actionable answers, e.g.:
How long will it take for Russia to reconstitute offensive armored capabilities after any end to hostilities in Ukraine
Forecasters answer questions: Forecasters deliver predictions as time-bound probabilities
Outputs:
Forecast data
Trends
Rationales
Accuracy scores
Measure of bias and calibration
Aggregation: Different forecasts aggregated to provide client overall probabilistic forecast
Recomposition: Probabilistic answers can be combined to provide insight into broader topics
Updates: Queries to forecasters can be updates to account for changes in circumstances
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.
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.
Photo by Wesley Farnsworth/U.S. Air Force
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.
Funding
The RAND Forecasting Initiative (RFI) was independently initiated using gifts for research at RAND's discretion from philanthropic supporter Coefficient Giving, as well as the independent research and development provisions of RAND's contracts for the operation of its U.S. Department of Defense federally funded research and development centers, gifts from other RAND supporters, and income from operations. All of RAND's research publications include information about the funding sources for individual research projects. Learn more about how we ensure the integrity of our research.
Interested in supporting RFI? Your support for RFI's crowdsourced forecasting helps inform policy decisions at a critical time.
