Slashdot Mirror
Tech Companies Draw on 'Wisdom of the Crowds'
An anonymous reader writes "News.com is carrying an article on a 'mini-conference' held at Yahoo's HQ this past Wednesday. The get-together put representatives from Google, Microsoft, Yahoo!, and HP together to talk about their experiments with predictive networks. The 'wisdom of the crowds' allows these companies to make use of the collective knowledge their employees hold to answer important questions for the company." From the article: "David Pennock, a principal research scientist at Yahoo Research, said the company has created a currency called a Yootle. It's described as a 'scorekeeping system for favors owed.' Pennock offered as an example a programmer offering to write a piece of code for a few Yootles. Or, when organizing a dinner outing, one employee could use an internal SMS tool to bid 2 Yootles for Italian and 4 Yootles for Mexican. 'If you don't get to go to the restaurant you want to, you get compensation' in Yootles, he said. Related to Yootles is Yahoo Research's experiment with a fantasy prediction market for technology called the Tech Buzz Game. It's a modified version of software licensed from NewsFutures in conjunction with O'Reilly Media and features topics like Atlantic hurricanes and portable media devices. Winners are those who predict how popular a topic will be on Yahoo Search. "
I think Yootle is a stupid name for a unit of fake currency. How about... hmm... hey I know, "Flooz"! No wait, even better, "Beanz"!
"Don't belong. Never join. Think for yourself. Peace." V.Stone, Microsoft Corporation
The problem with Birch's scheme is that individuals are incentivized to lie about what they want in order to get more money from the group. In the example given where Charles is willing to subsidize a trip to Chinese food, you could extract extra money from him by pretending it's a huge disappointment to you.
For a strategyproof scheme, check out the Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism. Basically, everyone gives weighted votes about something, and the winners of the tally pay a penalty equal to the imposition they caused the rest of the people. Only trouble is, this penalty has to be completely discarded to prevent hyjinx...