The Justin Wolfers series in the Wall Street Journal is plagued with rotten links to the WSJ’s bot-driven, play-money prediction sub-exchange (which is secretly programed to reflect InTrade’s real-money prices).
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The latest installment (which does not featured a single prediction market chart) is written by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzwewitz. A pillar of prediction market journalism is to show dynamics charts of prediction markets. Just describing with words a rise or a free-fall does not do the trick. Here are some charts that the two Wall Street Journal stringers don’t want you to see:
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2008 US Presidential Elections
2008 US Presidential Election Winner
2008 Democratic Nominee
2008 Republican Nominee
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BetFair
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Next US President Will Be Democratic.
© NewsFutures
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It’s obvious to anyone (but to Justin Wolfers, Eric Zitzwewitz, and their technophobic editor at the WSJ) that prediction market event study would be more usable with charts legended with news markers. (Maybe that will give Nigel Eccles an idea for his next startup. 
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So, let’s pass the truisms…
- If Pepsi withdrew from the Cola Wars, then sales of Coke would go up; 7-Up isn’t quite as similar of a product, and so would benefit a bit less. So too in politics.
- After the rich theater of the early primaries, the lead-up to Super Tuesday now looks pretty conventional, with each race expected to involve two candidates, and no third-party surprises.
And let’s try to spot some prediction market intelligence in their report. I don’t see any. It’s a boring historical report from two people whose specialty is everything (economics, prediction markets, betting, gambling, finance, sports) but politics. The ABC of reporting is to trade your passion. Political prediction market journalism deserves more that two university professors who are out of their turf and are using a clunky content management system to tout a bot-driven play-money prediction sub-exchange.
Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzwewitz are great prediction market experts, and their write-up in the Wall Street Journal is gentle, but that’s not enough because the competition is formidable. There is a glut of amateur and professional political analysts out there, who live and breathe by politics, and the top one percent of them outputs great, pertinent stuff that draws millions of pageviews. In such a cluttered field, you have to differentiate a lot by innovating a lot. Nothing in Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz’s political prediction market event study stands out. Instead of carving a niche, they are littering redundant banalities.
That said, they are true pioneers in prediction market journalism. They will make improvement, over the coming years, hopefully.
