UC Riverside&#8217-s Sloan Center for Internet Retailing has just launched their eLab eXchange, a website for gathering collective predictions about marketing in the digital world. The New York Times had a nice write up about it this morning. I mention this because the eLab eXchange features two NewsFutures knowledge aggregation mechanisms of which there are precious few public examples: Competitive Forecasting and Idea Pageants. So, if you&#8217-re curious about what they look and feel like, just take a look at the eLab eXchange&#8230-

Just like HP did with BRAIN, NewsFutures invented and refined those techniques over the years as simpler/better-fit alternatives to prediction markets for some enterprise problems and contexts. It&#8217-s no secret around here that most people don&#8217-t have an intuitive feel for &#8220-trading&#8221-, and that the busier they are (eg, senior execs), the less time and patience they have to learn anything new&#8230- Nowadays, we find that most companies we work for naturally choose to use one of these alternative mechanisms for gathering the wisdom of their crowd. These approaches fit the customer&#8217-s problem tightly so we don&#8217-t have to fit the customer&#8217-s problem to a generic prediction market approach.

Competitive forecasting is specialized for extracting range forecasts for business variables, like sales, prices, market share, etc, while Idea Pageants are designed especially for the task of quickly identifying the best new ideas in a very large pool. For instance, the NYT article mentions two of NewsFutures other clients: Arcelor Mittal is a long-time user of Competitive Forecasting, while InterContinental Hotels Group relies on an Idea Pageant to vet new ideas.

Importantly, both of these approaches stay true to what NewsFutures believes should be the two pillars of any reality-based knowledge aggregation mechanism: reward people for (a) being right, (b) before others.

We look forward to your questions and comments about these approaches, which you can now get your hands on at UC Riverside&#8217-s eLab eXchange.

[Cross-posted from the NewsFutures blog.]

I have organized a conference on corporate prediction markets which may be of interest to Midas Oracle readers. It will take place on 1 November at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. All of the details are available on the conference webpage (http://people.ku.edu/~cigar/PMConf_2007/PredictionMarketsConference.html) with some background available on the conference flier (http://people.ku.edu/~cigar/PMConf_2007/PredictionMarketsConference_Flier.html). Note that this is a free conference but you should get in touch with me if you plan on attending.

The preliminary schedule is listed below:

Schedule

8:30 Registration, Coffee, Opening Remarks

9:00 Lessons from Corporate Applications of Prediction Markets

Henry Berg, Microsoft

Discussant: Robin Hanson (George Mason Department of Economics)

Christina Ann LaComb, GE (The Imagination Market- abstract is free, text is gated)

Discussant: Marco Ottaviani (Kellogg School of Management, Management and Strategy)

10:45 Coffee Break

11:00 Lessons from Corporate Applications of Prediction Markets (cont)

Dawn Keller, Best Buy (Best Buy’s TAGTRADE Market)

Discussant: Paul Rhode (Department of Economics. Eller College of Management, University of Arizona)

Bo Cowgill, Google (Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work)

Discussant: Eric Zitzewitz (Dartmouth Department of Economics)

12:30 Lunch

Keynote address: Jim Lavoie, Co-Founder and CEO, Rite-Solutions

1:45 Lessons from Prediction Market Organizers and Operators

John Delaney, Founder and CEO, Intrade

David Perry, Co-Founder and President, Consensus Point

3:00 Break (refreshments)

3:15 The Legal Playing Field

Tom W. Bell, Chapman University School of Law

Discussant: Robert E. Litan (VP Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center on Regulatory Studies)

4:00 General Discussion

6:30 Dinner

Location TBA

Previous blog posts by Koleman Strumpf:

• Prediction Markets in the Classroom: Inkling Markets
• Slides of presentations from Conference on Corporate Applications of Prediction/Information Markets (1 November), Kansas City
• Summary of Conference on Corporate Applications of Prediction/Information Markets (1 November), Kansas City
• Reminder: Corporate Applications of Prediction Markets Conference (1 November)
• Copernican Principle: How To Predict the End of the World
• Win Justin’s Money? (re: Is there manipulation in the Hillary Clinton Intrade market? Redux.)
• Is there manipulation in the Hillary Clinton Intrade market?

At Economist&#8217-s View, Mark Thoma draws attention to a recent paper that uses financial markets data to infer a market prediction of the likely effectiveness of the U.S. government&#8217-s &#8216-Surge&#8217- strategy in Iraq.

In &#8220-Is The &#8216-Surge&#8217- Working? Some New Facts&#8220-, MIT&#8217-s Michael Greenstone writes:

This paper shows how data from world financial markets can be used to shed light on the central question of whether the Surge has increased or diminished the prospect of today&#8217-s Iraq surviving into the future. In particular, I examine the price of Iraqi state bonds, which the Iraqi government is currently servicing, on world financial markets. After the Surge, there is a sharp decline in the price of those bonds, relative to alternative bonds. The decline signaled a 40% increase in the market&#8217-s expectation that Iraq will default. This finding suggests that to date the Surge is failing to pave the way toward a stable Iraq and may in fact be undermining it.

(HT to Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution.)