Tapping Into the Oscar Wisdom of the Crowd

There are many things that are strange about the business of being an ACA health insurer. One of them surely is that most of our annual growth happens in a 6-week period, once a year, the Open Enrollment period. OE 2023 is upon us next week, starting on 11/1, and we can't wait for it to kick off!

But one of the great things about the dynamics of OE is that it allows us to run an annual superforecasting competition: all employees of Oscar can guess what our enrollment numbers will be, and whoever is closest in various ways (we also have sub-guesses like total number of phone calls received on deadline day), wins. What's remarkable about this wisdom of the Oscar crowd is that it's been quite prescient: the median of the guesses most often ends up being very close to the final outcome. That's what the chart at the top shows.

If you're an Oscar employee: superforecasting is open until 10/31! If you're not: I guess you can send me your guess anyway and I'm sure we can get you into the competition. Though you'll probably lose against folks from Sales, Data or Finance, because remarkably they usually win. Which is probably a good sign for the quality of our teams because they really should be the ones who know what they're talking and betting about.

Final stat: the cumulative enrollment error in all years with bets for the median employee bet is 232,693, and for my bets it is 232,426. So I'm slightly better than the wisdom of the crowd!