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Well Above Marginal Revolution – To Infinity And Beyond…!!!…
The Economist brings back its paywall… Perhaps it should hire an economist.
The Economist brings back its paywall…- Perhaps it should hire an economist. –- by Michael Masnick:
A bunch of folks have sent in the news that the Economist appears to be putting up something of a paywall, locking up all archival content older than 90 days, while also locking up one version of the magazine (the one that is made to look just like the physical paper layout). I have to be honest: I don’-t see how this makes any sense at all. In our experience, somewhere between 25% to 30% of our daily traffic is to archival content, usually in the form of search engine traffic —- or occasionally other sites picking up on an older story. Archival content is perfect Google fodder, driving traffic (and ad views) to pages that otherwise would get no traffic at all. In many ways, that’-s a big part of the value of having widespread archives —- to bring in such traffic for those who care about it. The chances of such a “-drive by”- viewer paying up for a subscription to view that content seems incredibly slim —- and it seems quite likely that the decline in traffic (and ad dollars) would almost certainly outweigh the number of new subscribers added. This doesn’-t seem to make any sense at all. Does The Economist have any information economists on staff?
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Google Search has sent 75,674 people to Midas Oracle since June 2009.
Google Search has sent 1,271 people to Midas Oracle yesterday alone. –- (2,577 pageviews, yesterday, fyi)
An excerpt of the historical chart regarding the Google Search traffic sent to Midas Oracle (I enlarged the time period so you can see the 2008 US Election Day spike):
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Niall OConnor told you so.
Financial Fiasco: How Americas Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis
“-A loose monetary policy that created lots of cheap money, government interventions into the housing market, and the hubris of Wall Street firms deemed ‘-too big to fail’- combined to send the world economy into a tailspin, argues Swedish author Johan Norberg.”-
“-Financial Fiasco: How America’-s Infatuation with Homeownership and Easy Money Created the Economic Crisis, an overview of what caused the current financial crisis (and what did not) and how politicians of all parties and all ideologies helped make the problem much worse.”-
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Never try to divine the IOC decisions on Olympics venues, Mike.
Prof Michael Giberson,
No “-careful observer knew this in advance”- (about Chicago being a lemon), for the simple reason that if they knew, they would have downgraded Chicago on the InTrade and BetFair prediction markets, and Ben Shannon would have not bet $6,000 on Chicago.
I look forward to your contrite correction on the frontpage of Knowledge Problem —-in bold, and with a link to Midas Oracle, stating that “-Midas Oracle is the only website in the world to have told you *not* to bet on Chicago a€”and to stay (far) away from any Olympics venue prediction market.”-
My thesis holds: The International Olympic Committee (IOC) is a close aristocratic group that does not leak out good information.
Previously: Chicago wona€™t have the Olympics in 2016.
ADDENDUM:
– BetFair’-s event derivative prices:
– InTrade’-s event derivative prices:
– HubDub’-s event derivative prices:
Why did all the prediction markets get the Olympic decision to reject Chicago so wrong?
The blogger at Sabernomics sees “-this as a win for prediction markets, not a failure.”-
I don’-t share his views, but I wanted to link to his piece for you to make up your own mind about the issue.
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Bill OReilly whips Republican South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham into submission.
If Michael Giberson is wrong, then that means that Chris Masse is right.
I donta€™ know that you could say Chicago was the a€?weakest linka€?, just because it got dropped first in the voting. The political process caused it to go early. However, Michael Giberson is wrong to imply that the prediction was accurate on the basis that Chicago and Rio were fairly close. Leta€™s keep in mind that the options are about as discrete as they come. Even if Chicago were to have come in a close second, it would have been a complete miss by the market.
If one needed to make a decision that depended on whether Chicago would win the bid, the prior choice would have been completely wrong, once the true outcome was revealed.
I have to agree with Chris. The market participants did not possess a sufficient level of information completeness to arrive at the correct prediction. Furthermore, the discrete nature of the outcomes made it a risky prediction. Finally, Ia€™m guessing that few, if any, of the IOC voting members were involved in the prediction markets, leading one to conclude that all (or almost all) of the market participants were a€?noisea€? traders.
Elsewhere, another commentator claimed that, because the prediction market started to show Chicagoa€™s share falling during the morning of the vote, this was evidence that prediction markets work. Hardly. It does show that prediction markets rarely provide accurate predictions sufficiently in advance of the outcome, in order for useful decisions to be made.
The prediction market industry really needs to investigate the determinants of success and which types of markets (issues) have the potential to provide consistently accurate predictions. Way too much time and effort is being spent arguing about meaningless markets, trivial questions, and false accuracy claims.
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Previously: Chicago wona€™t have the Olympics in 2016.
ADDENDUM:
– BetFair’-s event derivative prices:
– InTrade’-s event derivative prices:
– HubDub’-s event derivative prices: