Daily Archives: October 17, 2007

How do prediction markets benefit our society?

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KansasCity.com (page two):

[…] To advocates such as business professor Justin Wolfers, people can better plan their lives, their purchases and their businesses by knowing how much investors are willing to wager that, for example, mortgage rates drop.

“It’s an empirical question, not a theoretical one: Does the market do better than polls or pundits in predicting outcomes? The short answer is yes,” said [Justin] Wolfers, of the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. […]

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • IIF’s SIG on Prediction Markets
  • Science
  • Why did prediction markets do well in the pre-polling era, professor Strumpf?
  • Mozilla FireFox users, do you have trouble downloading academic papers (as PDF files) from SSRN?
  • “Impact Matrix. Used to collect and gauge the likelihood and business impact of various events in the very long term.”
  • Ends and Means of Prediction Markets — Tom W. Bell Edition
  • How to run enterprise prediction markets… legally

Is WeatherBill doing well, really??

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WeatherBill does so well that TechCrunch has just published two &#8211-yes, two&#8211- blog posts on it, today (Wednesday, October 17, 2007). Here&#8217-s the first one, which basically says that two VCs have just poured $12,5 million dollars in it. Good for them. The second blog post, written by another TechCrunch writer, and which has been quickly taken off their website, basically said the same, but with this twist:

CEO David Friedberg says that WeatherBill has hundreds of customers and faces such high demand that it needs to bring more people aboard to increase capacity. The site has launched not only in the US but Canada, the UK, the Netherlands, Spain, Germany, and Norway as well.

So, should we believe the content of this now-deleted blog post? Or was it deleted because this information is not accurate? Mystery. ValleyWag should investigate. :-D

APPENDIX: Here&#8217-s the deleted TechCrunch blog post on WeatherBill. (The second item that follows is the first blog post that was published by TechCrunch.)

Deleted TechCrunch WeatherBill

&#8212-

UPDATE: VentureBeat on WeatherBill&#8230-

VentureBeat on WeatherBill

UPDATE: Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch&#8230-

Our apologies for misleading everyone into thinking Weatherbill enables people to gamble the weather as if it were a casino game. The service is meant rather to provide insurance for companies that could be aversely affected by fluctuations in the weather.

Weatherbill’s CEO informs us that only companies with a net worth of at least $1 million can participate due to regulations of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. He also says that Weatherbill is the first service to ever provide access to hedges on the weather (online or otherwise).

Also, for anyone wondering why we had two posts up about this story, that’s because Duncan and I reported on it independently by accident. I guess you could say we both find the weather very interesting.