And indeed, that happened in both 2010 and again this year: the "wisdom" index outperformed the conventional final polls on both occasions.
But as long as firms are now prepared to publish such evidence, it is surely worth considering whether any of them were indeed experimenting discreetly with techniques that outperformed the public numbers.
All are likely to be outperformed by yet more previews of How to Train Your Dragon 2 on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.
The eurozone economy outperformed the UK and US economies in the first quarter.
The resulting economic insecurity for the working and middle classes is most acute in Europe and the eurozone, where in many countries populist parties – mainly on the far-right – outperformed mainstream forces in last weekend's European parliament election.
At the time, however, Sega's rival Saturn machine outperformed the Sony console, shifting 200,000 units on its 22 November launch day.
Although its overall well-being score at 71.6 was lower than Britain's 81.1, Poland also slightly outperformed the UK on the health dimension of the Seda score.
Even without any borrowing, a buy-to-let property has still outperformed other mainstream investments, the report said, returning £5,071 for every £1,000 put in.
Carsten Stendevad of Citi, an investment bank, notes that between 2002 and 2007 the returns of firms that used a balanced mix of acquisitions and disposals outperformed acquisition-focused companies by almost 5% a year.Why?
And even in the few periods when paper and pulp has outperformed, it has been riskier than the market in general, thanks to wild swings in the price of pulp, the industry's main raw material.There are other reasons to be sceptical about investing in the paper and pulp business.
Though not quite as good as the best, made by Caterpillar, they outperformed their Japanese and Korean rivals.
