The information that you get from others — how reliable is it and how much reliance do you place upon its accuracy?
Say, for instance, that depending upon certain data, your product would either get a generous suite of promotional activities, or not. What if someone cooked the data a bit? Would that sort of be like giving performance bonuses for VA administrators if their admission stats were good?
“Debut of ‘Transformers’ Was Big — but How Big?” Wall Street Journal, July 1, 2014 B1 http://on.wsj.com/1vtRYMQ Apparently some people are questioning whether estimates of weekend ticket sales were goosed. They can’t do that, can they? Even if the numbers were inflated, do you care?
If you use third-party data to make financial decisions, how do you make sure that data isn’t similarly goosed? What assumptions underlie that data?