Dear Mr. [PROFESSOR'S NAME GOES HERE],

I am writing on behalf of [PREDICTION MARKET SOFTWARE VENDOR'S NAME], a Netherlands based consulting firm, because our research has identified you as a scholar with some expertise in Prediction Markets or a related field. [THEY JUST SCRAPPED MIDAS ORACLE'S LISTINGS.] We would like to assess your suitability and interest to join the panel of scientific advisors with [PREDICTION MARKET SOFTWARE VENDOR'S NAME] (www.url.com).

In doing so, we propose to explore your area of experience and knowledge of Prediction Markets. Having established this, we would like to list you as our scientific advisor on your area of expertise on Prediction Markets. This will allow us to seek your services for a negotiated fee, once your particular expertise in developing or interpreting a Prediction Market issue is required.

I trust this message clarifies in short the mutual benefits in our cooperation. Please feel free to contact me to discuss further details.

Sincerely,

[LOW-LEVEL EMPLOYEE'S NAME GOES HERE]
Communications Manager
[PREDICTION MARKET SOFTWARE VENDOR'S NAME]

-

Some prediction market scholars have responded positively, and are now listed on the Holland-based consultancy firm website. Once the professor has agreed to have his name listed as an “advisor”, the consultancy firm gets a bit of the prestige associated with the first-tier university employing the scholar. The web visitors are lead to believe that those scholars are in deep cooperation with the consultancy firm. But as the letter above shows, the relationships between those US-based scholars and the Dutch consultant are completely shallow.

1. You give me your name (associated with your prestigious university) so that I can use it in my publicity.
2. If one day, by any chance, one gullible client wants to pay $150/hour for additional advice, we will ring you. {Don’t hold your breath, though.}

This is not a strong relationship. This is a weak relationship. It is not a relationship based on research and development [*] of the prediction market technology, and the pertinence of its applications in the business world. Another reason to be skeptical about the field of enterprise prediction markets.

[*] At the contrary, the relationship between Robin Hanson and Consensus Point is deep and real.

Dear Mr. [PROFESSOR'S NAME GOES HERE],

I am writing on behalf of [PREDICTION MARKET SOFTWARE VENDOR'S NAME], a Netherlands based consulting firm, because our research has identified you as a scholar with some expertise in Prediction Markets or a related field. [THEY JUST SCRAPPED MIDAS ORACLE'S LISTINGS.] We would like to assess your suitability and interest to join the panel of scientific advisors with [PREDICTION MARKET SOFTWARE VENDOR'S NAME] (www.url.com).

In doing so, we propose to explore your area of experience and knowledge of Prediction Markets. Having established this, we would like to list you as our scientific advisor on your area of expertise on Prediction Markets. This will allow us to seek your services for a negotiated fee, once your particular expertise in developing or interpreting a Prediction Market issue is required.

I trust this message clarifies in short the mutual benefits in our cooperation. Please feel free to contact me to discuss further details.

Sincerely,

[LOW-LEVEL EMPLOYEE'S NAME GOES HERE]
Communications Manager
[PREDICTION MARKET SOFTWARE VENDOR'S NAME]

Next: How some US-based university professors endorsed a Holland-based consultancy firm

Top-10 reasons why NewsFutures is the ideal partner to harness the wisdom of your crowd

1.) Integrated Solutions

We offer complete solutions, not just great software. This approach delivers a much higher success rate and enables the client organization to fully consider Prediction Markets as a key decision-support tool.

From experience, we know that a successful prediction market project requires a lot more than great software or a cool website. Above all:

- Featuring strategic and well-defined questions;
- Securing a high participation rate;
- Integrating the market into the management and decision-making processes.
- Our project management checklist covers 30+ task components of market design, market implementation, and market administration. To ensure success, NewsFutures offers hands-on management and best-practice advice at every stage, in close contact with the client-side team. And if the client is willing to handle some of those tasks itself, we make sure to transfer the relevant knowledge and skills.

2.) A suite of powerful tools

Our platform offers a full suite of knowledge aggregation tools that are optimized for various forecasting needs and business contexts: prediction markets, and more, much more.

As an early pioneer in the field of enterprise prediction markets, NewsFutures has been among the first to recognize not only the power of this tool, but also its various practical limits in certain situations. We are experienced enough to recognize when other knowledge aggregation mechanisms may offer more practical or productive solutions.

That’s why, in close collaboration with some of our clients (in particular InterContinental Hotels, Eli Lilly, Arcelor Mittal, and Pfizer), we have developed a suite of innovative software tools that enable us to optimally aggregate predictions in a variety of business contexts. All of these tools are currently fielded with various clients.

Our software platform currently includes:

Prediction Markets. A continuous double auction trading engine (with optional market maker) is particularly appropriate for measuring risks and opportunities as event probabilities. It can also be used to forecast continuous variables.

Competitive Forecasting. Designed for collective forecasting of specific business variables, such as quarterly sales, especially under several conditional scenarios, or with a small pool of participants.

Idea Pageant. Ideal for rapid harvesting and filtering of a large number of new ideas that require evaluation and prioritization.

Impact Matrix. Used to collect and gauge the likelihood and business impact of various events in the very long term.

This versatile set of tools enables us to propose and implement the most effective solution in every case.

3.) World-Class Expertise

NewsFutures has the longest record of implementing enterprise prediction markets, the most extensive enterprise client list, and the widest geographical reach.

Our team has been immersed in every aspect of delivering successful enterprise prediction markets since 2002. We have implemented internal markets and external markets of all shapes, durations and sizes, around the world: U.S.A., Brasil, France, U.K., Germany, Holland, Japan, Hong Kong, and as far as New Zealand. We have built the longest-running continuous client relationship in the industry (servicing Eli Lilly since 2003).

Our methodology and technological solutions have been shaped by this rich history of confrontation with reality. We know that implementing a successful enterprise prediction market requires clear goals, significant resources, constant care and monitoring, and we know what it takes to deliver success. No other team is more seasoned.

«NewsFutures has done some of the most innovative work in the area for longer than most. They were in there making it happen for real while others were clueless on the fringes.»
- Ajit Kambil – Gobal Director, Deloitte Research

Notably, we have also built our eponymous public prediction exchange into one of the best known play-money exchanges. The experience of running this market non-stop since the year 2000 gave us deep insights into what it takes to successfully manage a market for the long run.

4.) Creative leadership

NewsFutures is a thought leader and a creative driving force within the industry.

NewsFutures started implementing prediction markets in 2000, years before the buzz words “wisdom of crowds” and “web 2.0″ even surfaced in the brains of James Surowiecki and Tim O’Reilly – and we’ve been at the forefront of innovation ever since: Over the years, we’ve fielded several innovative tools for harvesting the wisdom of crowds in various enterprise contexts, and we even applied for a pending patent on a multi-outcome continuous double auction (CDA) trading engine.

In 2003, NewsFutures led the first field study comparing real-money and play-money markets, publishing the results in a landmark article co-authored with some of the field’s leading academic researchers: Prediction Markets: Does Money Matter? – Electronic Markets, 14 (3), September 2004. This research significantly enhanced the credibility of play-money markets and, as a result, boosted their adoption within enterprise contexts.

In 2007, NewsFutures started experimenting with an innovative business model for real-money public prediction markets: Bet2Give.

NewsFutures work has been covered on television by CBS News (here) and CNBC (here), and in print by prestigious publications in the United States and Europe, including James Surowiecki’s international best-seller The Wisdom of Crowds.

Our CEO, Emile Servan-Schreiber, has lectured on the topic all over the world, including at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, and at the Wharton Business School.
In recognition of NewsFutures’ practical and throught leadership, Emile was chosen to chair the new Prediction Market Industry Association. He is also an associate editor of the Journal of Prediction Markets.

5.) Customized solutions

Our software platform is customization-friendly, enabling us to tailor our solutions to a client’s special needs.

When dealing with high-end demanding customers, one size cannot fit all. The NewsFutures philosophy is to tailor a market solution to the problem at hand, rather than force-fit the problem to a pre-existing market template. That usually means, in addition to choosing the most appropriate tool and market design, customizing the user interface to optimize the integration with the client’s IT infrastructure and the navigation among various markets.

It also means being responsive to customer requests for additional features that extend the platform’s capabilities, and sometimes even developing completely new tools. (Indeed, this is how we came to develop and integrate into the platform a whole suite of original tools in addition to prediction markets.)

In contrast to the one-size-fits-all market and navigation templates provided by others, the NewsFutures software platform offers the flexibility needed to address the unique needs of demanding customers.

6.) Industrial-strength software

NewsFutures software satisfies the highest professional standards and demanding environments.

Internet giant Yahoo!, who knows a thing or two about quality software, chose to acquire the source code of our prediction market engine to power its own Yahoo! Tech Buzz Game.

Our platform is so reliable that it has been used to operate high-stakes real-money political markets for Holland’s leading daily de Volkskrant (see this report), and we currently use it to operate our own real-money prediction exchange Bet2Give.

7.) Military-grade security and confidentiality

We offer a range of access, backup, encryption, integration and hosting options that satisfies the most demanding customers.

NewsFutures has been vetted by customers who put a premium on data security and confidentiality, such as the U.S. Military, pharmaceutical clients, and others in the super-competitive IT industry.

While most clients are satisfied to host their applications on our servers, located in a high-security facility, others have had us ship fully configured hardware that they can install behind their own firewall, or had us install the prediction market application directly on one of their own servers within their existing IT infrastructure.

8.) Multilingual applications

In a global world, English is not enough.

Our software platform is designed to operate in multi-language mode, with a user interface that can offer several languages simultaneously. English, French, Dutch and German versions are already implemented. Other languages can easily be added on request. This feature is important for multinational companies that want to tap the collective intelligence of a linguistically diverse population.

9.) Round-the-clock support

Present on two continents, NewsFutures offers rapid response across many time-zones.

The NewsFutures enterprise team operates the world over from New Jersey, USA, and Paris, France. This enables rapid response in many different time zones and continuous availability from 08:00 to 01:00 GMT. We are currently servicing clients in the United States (from coast to coast), France, Holland, and as far as New Zealand. Our multi-cultural team is well suited to operate in a global world while being attuned to the importance of local differences.

10.) Team players

Although NewsFutures is equiped to deliver integrated solutions, we also have significant experience in partnering with consultancies to service their clients.

We find such partnerships rewarding and productive, and we are very comfortable with them, especially because they help implant the solutions deeper into the host organization. Over the years, we have teamed up with consultancies large and small. Among the largest are SAIC (on a U.S. Military project), Accenture (on a MIT Technology Review project), and the RAND Corporation (on a Texas DOT project).

If you are a consultancy and you would like to deliver wisdom of crowds solutions to your clients, please contact us for details of our partnership program.

In general, futures markets are “less futures markets than immediate-past markets”.

It is hard to evaluate the markets fairly given how difficult it is for someone in New Hampshire to participate in them. Naturally then, the [prediction] markets more easily come to reflect the polls and national media – which were wrong in this case. (Here, the left-leaning media fell in love with Obama, while the right-leaning media happily went about trying to bury the Clinton “dynasty”. Consider the tremendously misleading FOX NEWS clip that PoliticalBetting.com linked to over the weekend.)

The legal situation also damages liquidity to the point where these markets are usually manipulated at the margin, as traders with momentum sense a rout and begin to engage in predatory trading, i.e. pushing prices to extremes to force capitulation and/or margin blow-ups.

Dr. Servan-Shrieber’s comment suggests that these market errors might persist even in modern regulatory regimes like Holland, and corroborates the excellent Erikson/Wlezien paper. Leaving aside the question of significance, Erikson and Wlezien have apparently found a market inefficiency, but since markets can take this into account (they are a “meta forecasting tool“), we should expect it to dissipate over time.

…asks Slate’s Daniel Gross —via Mister Usability (Alex Kirtland), who needs to go and get his own gravatar.

So, I’ve been watching the action in one of the political futures markets this evening, Intrade. And the action in this prediction market has reinforced my opinion that these are less futures markets than immediate-past markets. The price movement tends to respond to conventional wisdom and polling data; it doesn’t lead them.

Throughout the day and into the early evening, while polls were still open, Democratic investors, mimicking the post-Iowa c.w. and polls, believed Obama was highly likely to be the Democratic nominee. The Obama contract was trading in the lows 70s, meaning investors believed he had a 70 percent chance of being the nominee, while Hillary Clinton contracts were in the 20s. [...] At 6 p.m., this market had written Hillary Clinton’s entire presidential campaign off. At 9:30 p.m., it was calling a dead heat. What caused investors to change their minds so drastically in the space of a couple of hours? A few data points that went against the day’s prevailing conventional wisdom and polls. [...]

See also Niall O’Connor’s assessment:

I am looking forward to the post New Hampshire Caucus, when all you prediction market advocates crawl out from under your stones. For the record at one point the market on Intrade and Betfair was suggesting that Obama had a 95% probability of winning the caucas; whilst Intrade had him at 77% to win the nomination.A case perhaps of both the foolery of crowds and, the market biting back.

New Hampshire will go down as the Black Wednesday of prediction markets and unless there is now objective transparent debate (as opposed to the usual biased sabre rattling) – prediction markets will be dead in the water.

My answer to Dan Gross’ legitimate question and to Niall O’Connor’s snarky comment:

1. Prediction markets are forecasting tools of convenience that feed on advanced indicators. When those advanced indicators are wrong, the prediction markets are wrong.
2. If you prefer the polls or the pundits, your call —but polls and pundits were also wrong, this time, right? Required reading for mister Niall O’Connor: “New Hampshire’s Polling Fiasco” + “Analysis: pundits eat crow“.
3. The ultimate forecasting tool would be a way to reverse our psychological arrow of time —so as to remember the future instead of the past. Only science-fiction writers and some imbécile ( ) believe in that.
4. The prediction market approach is to stick with the markets, on the long term. Take their successes. Take their failures. Unlike Donald Luskin and Markos Moulitsas, Chris Masse will not turn against the prediction markets when they fail punctually. What counts is the long series.
5. My first point should be included in the prediction markets approach definition, in my view, but others (like economist Michael Giberson) might have different opinions.
6. With respect to my first point, I bet that the prediction markets will never replace the polls as the forecasting tool of choice for political analysts —on that particular point (but not on a myriad of others), I break away from Justin Wolfers’ irrational exuberance and I side with Emile Servan-Schreiber of NewsFutures (my preferred play-money prediction exchange). Prediction market reporting will have a function, indeed (as suggests Justin Wolfers), but not the dominant function.
7. Going forward, prediction market journalism should emphasize relative accuracy (as opposed to absolute accuracy) —that is, comparing prediction markets with polls and pundits, which is what Robin Hanson has said from day one. Our good friend Niall O’Connor has difficulty to compute that, apparently. He should eat more fish.

—

Justin Wolfers:

“In a few years, we may regard the second half of the 20th century as the aberration in which the press used polls rather than markets to track political races,” Justin Wolfers, a business professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, wrote in an e-mail message. “And in the 21st century, we may return to the habits of the early 20th century, reporting on political races through the lens of prediction markets rather than polls.”

Emile Servan-Scheiber:

1) The traders themselves are the first to look at the polls to inform their trades. So the polls are here to stay.

2) Our recent experience in Western Europe seems to indicate that the superior accuracy of markets over polls when predicting elections may be a U.S. artifact that isn’t so easily reproducible elsewhere. I’ve discussed this with Forrest Nelson of IEM [Iowa Electronic Markets], and apparently, ever since the Truman-Dewey polling debacle of 1948, U.S. pollsters have adopted a policy of reporting mostly raw numbers rather than projections based on sophisticated secret formulas, so they can’t be accused of manipulating opinion. However, raw numbers are notoriously unreliable when based on small samples, and Western European pollsters never report them, preferring instead to publish projections based on historically-informed statistical formulas. What we’ve observed in France and Holland is that it it’s very hard to beat the accuracy of such projections.

[I don't make mine Emile Servan-Schreiber's second point, but that's a minor.]

—

InTrade’s expired prediction markets:

—

New Hampshire

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The Democrats

—

The Hillary Clinton event derivative was expired to 100.

—

The Republicans

—

The John McCain event derivative was expired to 100.

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Iowa

—

The Democrats.

The Barack Obama event derivative was expired to 100.

—

The Republicans

The Mike Huckabee event derivative was expired to 100.

—

Source: InTrade

—

[A more complete prediction market reporting should have included expired contracts from NewsFutures and BetFair. Sorry for that. Note that InTrade-TradeSports is the only exchange to offer a "closed contacts" section.]

—

NEXT: Prediction Markets 101 + Who did best in explaining the prediction markets to the lynching crowd? + After the New Hampshire fiasco, 16 people came to defend the prediction markets, so far. + The prediction markets deserve a fair trial. + Prediction Markets = the greatest time-saving invention of this century

—

The Power of Prediction Markets

The rapidly changing landscape of responders and related technology factors are two reasons why Justin Wolfers, Wharton professor of business and public policy, believes in the power of prediction, or betting, markets. Wolfers — who is associated with several prediction market sites such as InTrade.com or Tradesports.com [*], where participants buy and sell contracts on sports and potential political outcomes — argues that prediction markets are a more reliable outcome predictor than polls, for three reasons.

“First, by forcing you to ‘put your money where your mouth is,’ they yield truthful revelation of beliefs,” Wolfers notes in a paper on pricing political risks with prediction markets. “Second, markets provide profit opportunities for those willing to gather new information that helps predict the future. And third, markets aggregate information dispersed across many traders.”

“You are not asking who they will vote for, but who they think will win,” says Wolfers. “The evidence is overwhelming that prediction markets provide a more accurate prediction than polls. On average, the final forecast from a Gallup poll is within about 2.25 percentage points, and the average for prediction markets is 1.5 percentage points.”

He points out that “the idea of betting on presidential elections is not new at all. Betting on elections has been going on for the last 100 years. If you read The New York Times from the turn of the century [**], they will report what is in the prediction markets — called ‘betting markets’ back then — and not polls, which hadn’t yet been invented. But since 1940, the elections have been dominated by polls.”

Wolfers predicts that “within a few years and a couple of election cycles, we will be back to tracking political markets through the lens of prediction markets instead of polls. [***] In fact, in the last few election cycles, we have seen political commentators talking more and more about the race in light of prediction markets.”

[*] What kind of association is it? I take it that it is an informal association. I have never seen anything written on the InTrade-TradeSports sites.

[**] Thanks to Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf. PDF file

[***] I would be more prudent. I’d say that more and more commentators will follow the prediction markets, but the polls will remain the dominant barometer.

—

UPDATE: Emile Servan-Schreiber (NewsFutures CEO) comments…

1) The traders themselves are the first to look at the polls to inform their trades. So the polls are here to stay.

2) Our recent experience in Western Europe seems to indicate that the superior accuracy of markets over polls when predicting elections may be a U.S. artifact that isn’t so easily reproducible elsewhere. I’ve discussed this with Forrest Nelson of IEM [Iowa Electronic Markets], and apparently, ever since the Truman-Dewey polling debacle of 1948, U.S. pollsters have adopted a policy of reporting mostly raw numbers rather than projections based on sophisticated secret formulas, so they can’t be accused of manipulating opinion. However, raw numbers are notoriously unreliable when based on small samples, and Western European pollsters never report them, preferring instead to publish projections based on historically-informed statistical formulas. What we’ve observed in France and Holland is that it it’s very hard to beat the accuracy of such projections.

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.

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

—

UPDATE: VentureBeat on WeatherBill…

UPDATE: Mark Hendrickson of TechCrunch…

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.

Dead:

• CME Economic Derivatives — Auction format
• Economic Derivatives – (U.S.A.) — CME + ICAP + Longitude (previously with Goldman Sachs) — These financial instruments are traded through a Universal Dutch Auction format —an automated parimutuel technique. — OTC market (which limits participants to eligible contract participants) excluded from regulation by the CFTC.
• U.S. Idea Futures Exchange – (USIFEX) – (U.S.A.) — a defunct play-money prediction exchange
• Innovation Futures – (Massachusetts, U.S.A.) — by MIT’s Technology Review — a defunct play-money prediction exchange
• Global Imbalances – (U.S.A.) — Macro-economic prediction markets — By invitation only. Powered by NewsFutures. — CDA trading, it seems.
• Crowd IQ – (N.Y.C., N.Y., U.S.A.) — URL: CrowdIQ — Launched in 2006 by Chris Sun and Frank Conway — It has bellied up.
• BetBug – (Jersey) — Bills itself as “the Kazaa of betting”. — It has bellied up.
• LCD TV Futures — Not an exchange, no trading. — The LCD TV Futures game is open to the public. — Scoring Rules: players’ predictions are scored on 3 criteria: accuracy, duration, and certainty. — Discontinued.
• Penn State Idea Futures Market – (Penn State U., Pennsylvania, U.S.A.) — For use by human resource professionals — In collaboration with the Human Resource Institute — Launched in February 2006 by David L. Passmore and Rose M. Baker — Powered by NewsFutures
• UNC Chapel Hill Futures Trading Application – (U. of North Carolina, North Carolina, U.S.A.)
• Soccer Exchange – (Rotterdam, Holland, E.U.) — Soccer
• NobelPreisBörse – (Germany, E.U.) — Nobel Prize predictions — Seems defunct.
• WallStreet Sports – (Ireland, E.U.) — Defunct play-money prediction exchange of the Trade Exchange Network.
• BetX – (Germany, E.U.) — in German?

—

Almost Dead:

Biz Predict – (U.S.A.??) — Uses Consensus Point technology — Uses Robin Hanson’s Market Scoring Rules (a mix between CDA and Scoring Rules), in one dimension — Uses an automated market maker (AMM)

—

In Reconstruction

My Currency – (U.S.A.) — Powered by Consensus Point’s Foresight Server

See Jed Christiansen’s comment just below.

[...] From what I understand they’re in alpha and getting funding to expand the site to major cities nation- (and world-) wide.

—

- Complete listing of the real-money and play-money prediction exchanges at CFM

The NewsFutures clients:

The world’s largest steel maker.

CORNING
Display Technologies.

Japan’s largest advertising firm.

Hungary’s leading news weekly.

Voted “most innovative” pharmaceutical company in Fortune‘s 2003 and 2004 rankings.

The US packaged foods giant.

Giant U.S. Pharmaceutical.

Leading provider of objective analysis and effective solutions.

One of the world’s leading providers of outsourcing and IT services.

Europe’s leader in corrugated packaging.

Germany’s global powerhouse in electrical engineering and electronics.

Texas Department of Transportation.

The most complete source for integrated information and technology applications in the global financial services industry.

The Netherlands’ daily newspaper of reference.

Host of the annual Davos meeting of world leaders.

The No. 1 Internet brand globally.