Anonymity is important for employees trading on internal prediction markets.
Chris F. Masse February 10th, 2007
About A 1990 Corporate Prediction Market. Comments at Overcoming Bias:
HAL FINNEY: What do you think about the fact that Xanadu employees put their probability of success as high as 70%? This product is somewhat legendary today for its repeated failures despite its high promise. A number of articles have been written (see http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/3.06/xanadu.html from 1995 for example) analyzing the many obstacles and problems which arose over the years to prevent it from succeeding. With hindsight, 70% seems to be a vast overestimate of any rational estimation of its chances of success. Do you recall what the price trend was? Was the probability falling as time went on?
ROBIN HANSON: As usual, project insiders acted very confident of success, and those of us more on the periphery expressed more doubts. The market price moderated the confidence of the insiders, and had more outsiders been able to participate we would have moderated that confidence even more. The price did fall, but not that far, at least for a while.
HAL FINNEY: Seems like this is a case where anonymity would be important, otherwise employees might be seen as disloyal if they predicted the product would fail. How was that handled at Xanadu?
ROBIN HANSON: Hal, this market was not anonymous, which may indeed have been a mistake.
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