Daily Archives: March 28, 2008

Information that is shared, but not sought, is now perceived as natural.

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No GravatarThe New York Times

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Implications for the field of prediction markets (InTrade-TradeFair, BetFair-TradeFair, Betdaq, HSX, NewsFutures, Inkling Markets, etc.):

  1. Publish the &#8220-Share This&#8220- widget on each of your prediction market page, to make it easier for your customers to recommend that web spot to their friends (via e-mail or via social content aggregators)-
  2. Offer feed-compatible chart widgets that any specialized bloggers (who are opinion leaders on their vertical) can embed easily in their blog posts, so that they can tell their little community about your prediction markets.

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Would be fun to have the equivalent for event derivatives.
  • “We’ll be eight degrees hotter in 30 or 40 years and basically none of the crops will grow.” “Most of the people will have died and the rest of us will be cannibals,” said Turner, 69. “Civilization will have broken down. The few people left will be living in a failed state —like Somalia or Sudan— and living conditions will be intolerable.”
  • QUESTION TO THE READERS: Could anyone guess what Nassim Nicholas Taleb would think of the prediction markets?
  • YouTube Videos on Prediction Markets
  • The Prime Minister of Ireland has just said he will resign, but neither InTrade nor BetFair would give the first fig.

73% of journalists [*] sometimes or always use blogs in their research.

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No Gravatar[*] = newspaper, magazine, TV, radio, and web journalists

Editors &amp- Publishers

Via Henry Blodget (who is hilarious, as always)

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Implications for the field of prediction markets (InTrade-TradeFair, BetFair-TradeFair, Betdaq, HSX, NewsFutures, Inkling Markets, etc.):

  1. The P.R. arm of the prediction market firms should also reach the bloggers &#8212-not just the journalists.
  2. Prediction market firms should monitor the Blogosphere for rumors, and deal with them in a subtitle way. :-D
  3. A long (&#8220-too long&#8221-, some will say), balanced, detailed blog post about your product is more useful to reach out than a media kit. :-D
  4. Our industry needs a blog network of reference, all focused on prediction markets. :-D

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Last year’s best April Fool’s Day Joke had something to do with the Wisdom Of Crowds.
  • Will HedgeStreet USA, the hypothetical InTrade USA, and the hypothetical TradeFair USA, be regulated in the future by a merged SEC+CFTC regulatory structure?
  • WORST THAN ELIOT SPITZER (if it were possible): Formula One boss, Max Mosley, had sado-masochist sex with 5 prostitutes, for 5 hours (!!), reenacting a concentration camp scene (!!) in which he played the role of both Nazi guard and inmate.
  • Is BetFair Poker a booby trap for the gullible novices? Does The Sporting Exchange (the operator of the BetFair brands) help gangs plucking down innocent recreational poker players?? To get an inkling, don’t read The Guardian, seeded by the BetFair spin doctor- read Midas Oracle.
  • The video that the technologically retarded BetFair spin doctor should watch.

Could a statistical reputation system built on top of Amazons Mechanical Turk be of any help to the prediction market firms?

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Obama-Cinton 1

Obama-Cinton 2

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I leave the mic to David Pennock so that he&#8217-ll explain to you what this is all about. (Be sure to check Panos Ipeirotis&#8216- comment on Lukas Biewald&#8216- blog post.) [UPDATE: Panos has just made it into Read &amp- Write Web!!!!!!]

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Mechanical Turk

New York Times

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I am more interested in what &#8220-Dolores Labs&#8221- does for a living. Here&#8217-s what Lukas Biewald has e-mailed me:

We collect large data sets for fun and profit using Mechanical Turk and a statistical reputation system that we&#8217-ve build on top of it. We&#8217-ve helped companies with tasks ranging from deciding if an analysts opinion about a stock is positive or negative to finding the best price for buying a hot tub online. (You can see other examples at http://doloreslabs.com/examples.html).

Recently we decided to take our small PR budget and instead of buying Google Ads, give our smart friends interesting data sets to play with in exchange for posting on our blog. So far, we&#8217-ve looked at race on Sports Illustrated covers over time (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=10), compared Hillary vs Obama coverage in the media (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=21) and collected subjective data on colors (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=11). The beauty of these experiments is we can do them in just a day or two and they only cost us a few hundred dollars, so we can do lots of them.

We have lots of ideas of more stuff we want to do with our technology &#8212- if you have any thoughts I&#8217-d love to hear them.

Fascinating.

Any applications for the field of prediction markets (InTrade-TradeSports, BetFair-TradeFair, etc.)??

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