Yearly Archives: 2008

How should prediction market firms (e.g., InTrade-TradeSports, BetFair-TradeFair) deal with Blogospheres criticism?

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I have just spent 20 minutes reading the comments on that post. (The post itself is to be forgotten- all the comments are outstanding, though.)

Insightful thoughts about Internet marketing. Required reading for Mark Davies, John Delaney, Emile Servan-Schreiber, and the rest of our little prediction market clique.

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50% of our prediction market luminaries have a MacBook.

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Right-click this link, open it in another browser tab, and you&#8217-ll get why.

[Jed’s observation.]

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • The FaceBook profiles of the 2 most important men of the field of prediction markets
  • THE HUMAN GADFLY WHOSE OBJECTIONS ROBIN HANSON IS DUCKING…???…
  • Google now considers Midas Oracle as a major blog.
  • Horizon 2015: A long-term strategic perspective for the real-money prediction markets
  • Join our group at LinkedIn to have your “Prediction Markets” badge on your profile. It’s ‘chic’. (“Groups” info should be set as “visible”, in your profile options.) We are 63 this early Saturday morning —keeps growing.
  • If you have been using PayPal to fund your InTrade, TradeSports or BetFair account, please, check that horror story.
  • 48 hours after the launch of the “Prediction Markets” group at LinkedIn, we have already 52 members —both prediction market luminaries and simple people (trading the event derivatives or collecting the market-generated probabilities).

FRIGHTENING: Jed Christiansens prediction market blog was briefly overtaken by web spammers, who inserted invisible links to their commercial sites so as to game the Google PageRank system.

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I wonder how that could have happened, and what IT was involved for that trick.

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Just like the armchair generals (presented on television as “military analysts”) carry the Pentagon’s propaganda, are our economics professors (who need the exchange data to pursue their academic career) in fact John Delaney’s unofficial P.R. agents, hidden behind an appearance of objectivity, and whose agenda is to generate favorable news coverage for InTrade? Is the symbiotic relationship between the prediction exchanges and the economics researchers dangerous for the truth?
  • Can we still trust Betfair? Should we trust Betfair? Or indeed, any betting exchange?
  • Prediction Markets at Google — by Peter A. Coles, Karim R. Lakhani, Andrew McAfee
  • Is that HubDub’s Nigel Eccles on the bottom left of that UK WebMission pic?
  • Collective Error = Average Individual Error – Prediction Diversity
  • When gambling meets Wall Street — Proposal for a brand-new kind of finance-based lottery
  • The definitive proof that it’s presently impossible to practice prediction market journalism with BetFair.

STRAIGHT FROM THE TRUISM DEPARTMENT: Money buys happiness.

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No GravatarThe richer people and countries become, the happier they get.

Wow, that&#8217-s what I call a discovery.

Freakonomics – #2 – #3

New York Times

CNBC video

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Just like the armchair generals (presented on television as “military analysts”) carry the Pentagon’s propaganda, are our economics professors (who need the exchange data to pursue their academic career) in fact John Delaney’s unofficial P.R. agents, hidden behind an appearance of objectivity, and whose agenda is to generate favorable news coverage for InTrade? Is the symbiotic relationship between the prediction exchanges and the economics researchers dangerous for the truth?
  • Can we still trust Betfair? Should we trust Betfair? Or indeed, any betting exchange?
  • Prediction Markets at Google — by Peter A. Coles, Karim R. Lakhani, Andrew McAfee
  • Is that HubDub’s Nigel Eccles on the bottom left of that UK WebMission pic?
  • Collective Error = Average Individual Error – Prediction Diversity
  • When gambling meets Wall Street — Proposal for a brand-new kind of finance-based lottery
  • The definitive proof that it’s presently impossible to practice prediction market journalism with BetFair.

Harvard fella says prediction markets are doomed.

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No GravatarHe bases his brilliant reasoning on &#8220-rumors&#8221- and total ignorance of the participation inequality law.

Another academic fella who would be better off researching his topic before blogging on something he does not master.

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Inkling Markets bring in awards, honors, advisors, and new clients —leaving competition in the dust.
  • No need of enterprise prediction markets to boost intra-corporation communication
  • Inkling Markets is included in the 2008 list of “Cool Vendors” by Gartner.
  • BetFair-TradeFair has won its second Queen’s Award for Enterprise in its eight-year history.
  • Inkling Markets is one of the “Hot Companies To Watch In 2008”, according to Forrester.
  • Plenty of great news coming from Inkling Markets in the coming weeks
  • ??? charity-driven prediction markets OR social issue prediction markets ???

REBUTTAL: SalesForce, StarBucks and Dell demonstrate that enterprise prediction markets as intra-corporation communication tools (as opposed to forecasting tools) are overhyped by the prediction market software vendors and a little clique of uncritical courtisans.

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SalesForce

My Starbucks Idea

Dell&#8217-s IdeaStorm

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No need of trading technology to get feedback and suggestions from employees. A simple voting mechanism is more than enough.

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Previously: Enterprise prediction markets give voice to serious, technology-minded professionals who really know their vertical (engineers, analysts and contractors) —and reveal how frivolous and unpertinent most horizontal managers are.

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The Promise Of Enterprise Prediction Markets – The McKinsey conference should have been rooted in the economic science and McKinsey should have invited economists.

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No GravatarMcKinsey: The Promise Of Prediction Markets

James Surowiecki: The premise is that under the right circumstances, the collective judgment of a large group of people will generally provide a better picture of what the future might look like than anything one expert or even a small group of experts will come up with. [&#8230-]

James Surowiecki: The Wisdom of Crowds is not an argument against experts. It is saying that you shouldn’t rely wholly on the judgment of one person or even a very small group of people. But for a crowd to be smart, it needs to satisfy certain criteria. It needs to be diverse, so that people are bringing different pieces of information to the table. It needs to be decentralized, so that no one at the top is dictating the crowd’s answer. It needs to summarize people’s opinions into one collective verdict. And the people in the crowd need to be independent, so that they pay attention mostly to their own information and don’t worry about what everyone around them thinks.

James Surowiecki: [&#8230-] One shortcoming is that a lot of people inside organizations don’t find the market mechanism intuitive or easily understood. They find it very challenging to use, which limits the pool of people who participate.

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On James Surowiecki&#8217-s last remark, I would say that Robin Hanson&#8217-s MSR technology (which powers most enterprise prediction exchanges but Google&#8217-s one) brought much needed simplification to trading.

Overall, a good roundup, but the conference speakers should have mentioned Robin Hanson&#8217-s pioneering work, and McKinsey should have invited him. He would have towered anybody and given great insights.

See Jed Christiansen for other remarks.

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As an aside, I&#8217-d say I prefer the sketch that is supposed to represent Bo rather than the real photo. The sketch makes him look like he is subtitle, charming, smiling, humble, and modest &#8212-quite a quantum leap. :-D

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Bo Cowgill

Bo Cowgill – Economics at Google

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  • PhotoShop designers improve the look of models on glossy magazine covers.
  • Sketchy artists improve the look of testosteroned, ultra-serious, ambitious, young business managers. :-D

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Previously: Do Google’s enterprise prediction markets work?

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Collective Error = Average Individual Error – Prediction Diversity
  • When gambling meets Wall Street — Proposal for a brand-new kind of finance-based lottery
  • The definitive proof that it’s presently impossible to practice prediction market journalism with BetFair.
  • The Absence of Teams In Production of Blog Journalism
  • Publish a comment on the BetFair forum, get arrested.
  • If I had to guess, I would say about 50 percent of the “name pros” you see on television on a regular basis have a negative net worth. Frightening, I know.
  • You can’t measure the usefulness of a system by how many resources it consumes.

Betfair Unleashed

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No GravatarBetfair Unleashed

A new betting blog by Julian Moors (a &#8220-famous unknown&#8221-, as my dad used to say, when we met any stranger).

Best wishes to&#8230- whoever &#8220-Julian Moors&#8221- could be. :-D

RSS feed (whose URL is messed with, on the site): http://www.betfairunleashed.com/feed/

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Please, send me the URLs of good blogs on TradeSports, InTrade, BetFair, Betdaq, MatchBook, HedgeStreet, TradeFair, NewsFutures, HubDub, Inkling Markets, Hollywood Stock Exchange, or else.

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Collective Error = Average Individual Error – Prediction Diversity
  • When gambling meets Wall Street — Proposal for a brand-new kind of finance-based lottery
  • The definitive proof that it’s presently impossible to practice prediction market journalism with BetFair.
  • The Absence of Teams In Production of Blog Journalism
  • Publish a comment on the BetFair forum, get arrested.
  • If I had to guess, I would say about 50 percent of the “name pros” you see on television on a regular basis have a negative net worth. Frightening, I know.
  • You can’t measure the usefulness of a system by how many resources it consumes.