Heu… Sorry… Nicholas Kristoff’s Op-Ed featuring the InTrade betting exchange in the 2007-07-30′s New York Times – $$$ 
… Via Freakonomics…
Right now the pundit with perhaps the most outstanding record thinks Hillary Rodham Clinton has the best chance of becoming president, with Bill Richardson enjoying the best shot of becoming vice president. That pundit is not a human but rather Intrade, a political betting Web site (www.intrade.com) that has regularly proven more accurate than polls and political experts alike. In the last presidential election, it called the winner accurately in each of the 50 states. That’s a tribute to what is called “the wisdom of crowds,†the notion that the collective judgment of many people is typically more accurate than the judgment of even a very well-informed individual. If you collect a bunch of guesses about, say, the weight of an ox, the average estimate will be eerily accurate. For the record, Intrade’s bets at this very early stage give Mrs. Clinton a 27 percent chance of becoming president, followed by Barack Obama and Rudy Guiliani, each at about 20 percent; Fred Thompson, 15 percent; and Mitt Romney, 8 percent. [...]
U.K.-based BetFair has the same predictive power than Ireland-based InTrade but the British prediction exchange (betting exchange) never gets cited in the U.S. media. Totally unfair.
Kristof goes on to say;
“Yet while crowds may be good at making predictions, they’re often lousy at recognizing their own self-interest. That problem is explored in the best political book this year: “The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies” This book, by Bryan Caplan, an economist at George Mason University, does a remarkably thorough job of insulting the American voter. The cover portrays the electorate as a flock of sheep….The central idea is that voters are irrational”
Actually, it is pretty fair that Intrade gets more citations than Betfair does. Intrade is by far the most liquid of the poli futs markets, so its prices have the most cash supporting them.
The problem, Alex, is that BetFair is *NEVER* cited. That’s what is unfair, not the preeminence of InTrade, which is indeed the market leader in North-America.
I complained about the *total absence* of BetFair citations, even though BetFair is as predictive as InTrade when it comes to politics.