was discussed above. With this in mind, not anticipating
the actual inflation rate should not be considered a sign
of poor performance of a quantification method. Second,
the data set we use in this study is well-designed for extracting
accurate quantitative information from the consumers.
Both the qualitative and quantitative expectations
are obtained from the very same person in a matter of
seconds using consistently worded questions. This shields
the quantitative responses from many of the usual criticisms
of quantitative survey questions. By using only the
aggregated quantitative responses, we further reduce the
idiosyncrasies and potential measurement errors that may
be present in the individual-level responses. Moreover, as
the actual inflation rates are used to derive the quantified
series, spurious results could potentially be produced if the
same actual inflation rates are used to evaluate the performance
of quantification methods. As our intention is to use
the matched data directly for evaluating quantified expectations,
we use the survey mean, i.e., the sample mean of
the quantitative responses gathered by the survey, as our
target. Using the survey median or the published measure
of inflation expectations does not qualitatively alter our results