Midas Oracle .ORG » Oscars

The Oscars 2011 & The Prediction Markets – [POST-MORTEM]

Chris F. Masse — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 14:59:44 +0000

Paul Hewitt.

Best Picture: The Social – [VIDEO]

Chris F. Masse — Tue, 11 Jan 2011 10:21:18 +0000

CBS.

Oscars 2010 Post-Mortem — InTrade Prediction Markets

Chris F. Masse — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:36:05 +0000

Professor Mark Perry is wrong to yell victory. Evaluating probabilistic predictions is tougher than one thinks.

Source: InTrade

Conditional Likelihood Loss — Redux

Chris F. Masse — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 18:55:22 +0000

- Nate Silver: 0.6032

- InTrade: 0.3699

- HubDub: 0.2237

HubDub beats both InTrade and Nate Silver.

Conditional Likelihood Loss

Chris F. Masse — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 09:49:54 +0000

- Nate Silver: 0.6032

- InTrade: 0.3699

InTrade looks much better than Nate Silver on the Oscars 2009.

Waiting for the HubDub numbers, now. Nigel, are you napping or what?

HubDub: “We nailed all 50 states; Panos did not.”

Chris F. Masse — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 17:19:46 +0000

UK’s Guardian lambasts Mr Crystal Balls Nate Silver.

Niall O'Connor — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:48:20 +0000

“A less-than-brilliant Oscars for Nate Silver, who used his skills as a baseball statistics nerd to turn his politics blog, FiveThirtyEight.com, into the online hit of last year’s election. Silver predicted the presidential outcome with eerie precision, and gamely crunched the numbers for Sunday’s awards ceremony too, weighing such factors as release date, box office takings, genre, and which other awards a movie or actor has won this season. And so step forward Best Actor Mickey Rourke and Best Supporting Actress Taraji Henson, from Benjamin Button. Oh well.”

Well, looks like the only prediction news in the press these days is bad…even, though, as we all know, he should be getting praised for having failed to get them all right .

HubDub takes home the Gold at the Oscars.

Jenni Peterson — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 18:19:09 +0000

Well the Oscars have come and gone and although most pundits are chattering about Slumdog’s amazing 8 wins and Hugh Jackman’s dulcet tones, I’m more impressed by Hubdub’s amazing success.

Out of the major races, we got EVERY SINGLE ONE RIGHT. We were also the only major prediction exchange to correctly predict the Best Actor race (Betfair, HSX, InTrade, Newsfutures and even Nate Silver all gave the gold to Mickey Rourke). Also, in five of the big 6 races, we showed higher confidence than InTrade predictors.

	Hubdub	InTrade
Best Picture	98%	90%
Best Director	76%	90%
Best Actor	63%	33.5% (wrong)
Best Actress	87%	85%
Best Sup Actor	100%	95%
Best Sup Actress	64%	58.8%

From the complete 24 award lineup, we nailed 19, generally by impressive condifence margins. Check out all of our settled markets here.

Not only have Hubdubbers had a successful night, each of my personal Oscar predictions were correct and I added another 40 thousand Hubbucks to my coffers. Award season is now finally behind us, but American Idol is just getting started!

Crossposted from Newspundits

Predicting the Oscars is in no way the right litmus test for assessing the predictive power of the prediction markets.

Chris F. Masse — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:41:32 +0000

Mickey Kaus:

Most people in the U.S. with indoor plumbing could get [the Oscars] right.

Nate Silver’s model vs. InTrade’s prediction markets

Chris F. Masse — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 08:19:13 +0000

The information is below.

However, before that, just a short note.

The real comparison to do would be to compare the prediction markets with a panel of very diverse Oscar predictors.
The real question to ask is, “Was forecasting each Oscar category an easy task or a difficult task?”. If it is considered easy, then the prediction markets have no merit.
The ultimate question is, “Do the prediction markets help us approaching omniscience?”. And the honest answer would be: epsilon.

Nate Silver:

Wikipedia:

(In black, what either Nate Silver and/or InTrade missed.)

Best Picture = Slumdog Millionaire

Best Director = Danny Boyle

Best Actor in a Leading Role = Sean Penn

Best Actress in a Leading Role = Kate Winslet

Best Actor in a Supporting Role = Heath Ledger

(Nate Silver missed 2, whereas InTrade missed only 1.)

UPDATE: Nate Silver’s confused post-mortem