Inkling Markets is a new play-money prediction exchange. It does not use CDA, but MSR. It has recently been featured by TechCrunch, a very popular and informative Silicon Valley blog. Here’s what one of Inkling’s three two co-founders had to say, in a recent blog interview:
We use an automated market maker, an algorithm to set the price of the stock based on demand. Using that kind of mechanism, it’s easier to get activity with even a few people in the market. A traditional stock markets use a continuous double auction. In that approach, you need more people to get any activity going, but our system takes fewer people to get the market going.
Why is it that Inkling never mentions MSR or Hanson, in interviews or on its website, other than when I ask them? It would make Inkling look good. I’m baffled. Does Robin Hanson stink? Same question to David Perry of the Washington Stock Exchange (another play-money prediction exchange using MSR, and which has won the support of many scholars, for a mysterious reason).
PostScript: In an earlier posting on Inkling, I took a skeptical stance on them, for that same reason. I was wrong; here’s why. Yes, Inkling CEO Adam Siegel’s discourse is simplistic. The NewsFutures guy has more experience and many more toolkits. Inkling‘s simplicity is its best arm, actually. It allows it to establish minshare in segments of the general population that traditional prediction market operators don’t reach. For the Silicon Valley reporters, Inkling is a “Web 2.0″ firm (i.e., “cool” and “advanced”). Let’s hope that all this media coverage will attract many techies to the field of prediction markets.
