40 forecasters—deserve to be called “professional,” since they make some forecasts on the Japanese economy as part of their occupation. The respondent’s real names are publicly available, identified with their affiliations and business titles. The affiliations, as well as some think tanks retained by financial intermediaries or industrial companies, cover trading companies, domestic and foreign security companies, insurance companies, and investment advisory companies. Each forecaster is required to submit the questionnaire response during the first week, and the compiled survey results are published around 10th of each month online (http://www.jcer.or.jp/esp/index.html). The summary is available for free, but the full text is accessible only to dues-paying members. All the information is published in Japanese only, as of today.

The questionnaire items are twofold: forecasts for fiscal years up to 2-3 years ahead; and quarterly forecasts up to 6-10 quarters ahead. The fiscal year forecasts list a variety of items: nominal and real GDP growth, GDP components, CPI, overall unemployment rate, and so forth, in addition to some financial market indicators such as the dollar/ yen exchange rate and the Nikkei Stock Average, while the quarterly forecasts pick up a subset of the fiscal year items. Concerning real GDP growth and CPI among the fiscal year forecast items, as well as the point forecasts, since June 2008 the survey has also required the forecasters to answer the density forecasts. The density forecasts designate bins of either a step size 0.5 from -6 to 6 or 0.25 from -2 to 5 in percentage, for the annual growth rates of the real GDP or the CPI, respectively. The forecasters distribute each subjective probability into the bins, amounting to 100 percent in total. The forecast years cover the current year, the following year, and the year after that. Note that the coverage of the survey is the annual CPI rate of a fiscal year for all items less fresh food.

Since 2005, once a year, the survey has announced its “excellent forecasters,” five persons whose fiscal year forecasts were relatively superior to those of the others. Professional fame appears to play a role, since some of the prestigious forecasters have frequently appeared in the excellence list. Through 2009 to 2011, four of the five excellent forecasters have appeared on the list at least twice since 2005. Those two forecasters won three times in 2009 (one for 2006, 2008, and 2009; the other for 2006, 2007, and 2009) and in 2010 (one for 2005, 2009, and 2010; the other for 2008, 2009, 2010). Each person won four times in 2010 (for 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2010) and in 2011 (for 2008, 2009, 2010, and 2011), and one forecaster appeared five times during 2005-2011 (the exceptions were in 2008 and 2009).

### 3.2 Dissimilarity

We discuss some dissimilarities and similarities between what the Keynes' beauty contest supposes and what the professional forecasters face in responding to the ESP Forecast Survey.

Arguments on the beauty contest emphasize a role of equilibrium asset prices played in the information aggregation, as Grossman and Stiglitz (1980) suggested. Absent from privately acquired information on the fundamentals asso-