Wisdom of crowds in sports forecasting.

Today, people are spending hour upon hour on various social media platforms. As a result of this, for the vast majority of people, social media is the primary source from where they get their information about current events, sports, celebrity gossip, etc. Given the significant role that social media plays in our everyday lives and the fact that our dependence on social media seems to be growing at a seemingly never-ending rate, it is logically then of great importance to study whether tools such as Instagram polls contain valuable information or it is all just noise. The wisdom of crowds is based on the idea that good group judgement can be generated from the aggregation of individual judgments and this study aims to find out whether Instagram polls can be used as a reliable source for the wisdom of the crowd. Furthermore, it is hoped that the findings of this thesis will promote the use of these polls to forecast the outcome of sports events and further investigate the application of Instagram polls to forecast the success of new products, movies box office, tourism preferences, etc. A database of Instagram polls of a sports event was generated to study its effectiveness in forecasting sports events. Tests were conducted to determine if the Instagram polls performed better forecasts than a guess chance. The preliminary results of the tests were found to be favourable for Instagram polls. In addition, tests were conducted determine if the surveys could provide better forecasts than TV specialists and other benchmarks, in this case, the hypothesis that the surveys were different from the experts' forecasts or other benchmarks could not be rejected. Although it could not be shown that the crowd through the Instagram surveys was better at forecasting than the benchmarks, it can not be said that the benchmarks are better than the crowd, which validates that the Instagram crowd can be as good source of wisdom as the benchmarks.