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)"

Worldwide for free: inkling

[stomv]

This exists for everyone with funny money called inkles at Inkling Markets [inklingmarkets.com]

Like Popular Science

[doombob]

I wonder what you would learn from the PopSci Prediction Exchange (PPX) [popsci.com]? 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.

Wikipedia article on prediction markets

[Thelasko]

Wikipedia has a pretty good article [wikipedia.org] 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.

Re:Worldwide for free: inkling

[sholden]

And with non-funny money at: https://www.intrade.com/ [intrade.com]

Prediction markets in Earthweb

[steveha]

Earthweb [amazon.com] is a novel by Marc Stiegler [skyhunter.com].

In Earthweb [amazon.com] 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

Re:Congress was only calling the spade a spade.

[mi]

Congress was only calling the spade a spade.

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.