3. The methods of moving average and trend-line analysis also trend-line analysis produced a high level of satisfaction. Furthermore, trend-line analysis had one of the smallest percentages of dissatis¯ed users. This ¯nding is somewhat surprising in light of empirical evidence suggesting that neither method does very well on the criterion of accuracy, and that exponential smoothing tends to outperform both of these methods on many commonly used accuracy criteria. However, both of these methods have intu-

itive appeal for practitioners. In speci¯c cases the trend-line is utilized for benchmarking (if the future will be a linear extrapolation of the past) purposes, while moving average is used to remove randomness from the data.