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Google's Prediction Market
Googling Yourself writes "Employees at Google are encouraged to place bets on Google's prediction market — an exchange that tries to forecast events based on the money wagered on a particular outcome. Employees have made wagers with play money (Goobles, as in rubles) on questions like: will Google open a Russia office? will Apple release an Intel-based Mac? how many users will Gmail have at the end of the quarter? One tangible benefit to the company is that the market allows Google to track how information disseminates in the company. A paper called "Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google" discusses information flows in the company based on the prediction market data and contains many other interesting observations of Google culture. (pdf)"
This exists for everyone with funny money called inkles at Inkling Markets
Support a few technologists in Washington.
That they use "Goobles" to wager with; I'd have expected Quatloos.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
And it will stay "beta" for 2.5 years.
MHNATY.
I'm betting yes. So when do my stock options arrive?
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
I wonder what you would learn from the PopSci Prediction Exchange (PPX)? I've been playing around with it a little bit, but it seems to act more like a commodities market than an actual stock exchange.
I wonder if he got fired or got a raise?
Will this post be moderated +5, Funny?
The grass is always greener on the other side of the light cone.
The best example is that the prediction markets predicted Hillary would win the Democratic nomination by a wide margin. Now the consensus is that it will be Obama by a wide margin.
..who had this as a significant plot element in his novel, The Shockwave Rider
--Gene
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Wikipedia has a pretty good article on the topic that I read a few months ago. Be forewarned Websense views some of these prediction market sites as gambling. So, I wouldn't view them at work. Specifically Intrade.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
What does it say about the outcome of the HD-DVD/Blu-Ray battle? I want to buy my player now!
Earthweb is a novel by Marc Stiegler.
In Earthweb prediction markets have a major role in the plot. Prediction markets are used to harness the wisdom of the crowds over the whole planet; this is what the title references. The book also speculates on some of the problems that might happen with prediction markets, such as people who just try to figure out an expert's prediction and just bet the same as that expert. (This expert-following skews the results; the followers are not adding any more insight to the market, and they might be lending their support to someone who might be wrong.)
The book is really a bunch of cool future Information Age ideas, with just enough plot to stitch them together. The action sequences are as energetic and implausible as a Tomb Raider game. It's not Shakespeare but I enjoyed it.
P.S. The book also tells, as part of its backstory, about a bunch of inexpensive computing devices with networking built in being air-dropped over the poorest parts of the world, to give poor children some sort of an education. He wrote this years before OLPC.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I find prediction markets very fascinating and a powerful prediction system, when manned by experts of the field. Indeed, such a system was used to find a H-bomb that had been lost at see back in the 60s, as well as the missing submarine Scorpion. Read "The Blind Man's Bluff" for details, but there are excerpts online. Also see Bayes subjective probability.
Ander
@=
Pentagon tried just this in 2003 — use the method to predict terror attacks. The Congressional outcry about "trading in blood" was such, that the program was scrapped shortly after being announced...
Quoting from MSNBC report:
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
There's a fascinating book that addresses all these points called "More Than You Know" by Michael J. Mauboussin. I have recently been at one of his lectures at an investment conference (and got an autographed copy of his book). He gave a poignant example about prediction quality of a group vs the individual:
He put jelly beans in a jar and made his students guess the amount of beans the jar contained. He offered a small monetery reward as incenctive, to better ensure educated guesses. With the exception of 2 students, the class average came close to guessing the amount of beans in the jar than any one individual. His book offers interesting examinations of psychology and group behavior applied to financial markets.
I have been following the Intrade market, and I think that Obama's recent surge on that market may represent a serious blow to the idea.
I don't need Intrade to tell me what's happening at the polls; I can get that from the news. Intrade is interesting only if it's able to make predictions, and for a long time Clinton was twice as expensive as Obama. Today it's the reverse. That makes it a fine place to gamble, but not an interesting place to get an accurate representation of the future.
That market is still predicting that Huckabee's victory in Iowa will be short-lived, and it's still convinced that Romney's chances are low, but it's still heavily influenced by McCain's recent surge in the New Hampshire polls.
The campaign contains relatively few surprises. Candidates do not radically change their opinions or introduce truly novel programs. A sudden revelation can tank a candidate, but we're basically counting on Intrade to let the wisdom of crowds ferret out all of that before the polls, not after them.
Intrade may still redeem itself. The polls may be introducing a lot of volatility that will ultimately settle down. But it predicted Clinton vs Giuliani by wide margins for a very long time, and I'll put a lot less faith in its predictions if it's just tracking the state-by-state polls.
Alright, teacher of the people. Could you define, what "trading in blood" means?
Or did you simply fall for somebody else's demagoguery?
This market may or may not be efficient in predicting terrorist attacks, but there is nothing morally wrong with it.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.