Measurement-Type “Calibration” of Expert Estimates Improves Their Accuracy and Their Usability: Pavement Engineering Case Study

Abstract

In many applications areas, including pavement engineering, experts are used to estimate the values of the corresponding quantities. Expert estimates are often imprecise. As a result, it is difficult to find experts whose estimates will be sufficiently accurate, and for the selected experts, the accuracy is often barely within the desired accuracy. A similar situations sometimes happens with measuring instruments, but usually, if a measuring instrument stops being accurate, we do not dismiss it right away, we first try to re-calibrate it – and this re-calibration often makes it more accurate. We propose to do the same for experts – calibrate their estimates. On the example of pavement engineering, we show that this calibration enables us to select more qualified experts, and make estimates of the current experts more accurate.