73% of journalists [*] sometimes or always use blogs in their research.

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No Gravatar[*] = newspaper, magazine, TV, radio, and web journalists

Editors &amp- Publishers

Via Henry Blodget (who is hilarious, as always)

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Implications for the field of prediction markets (InTrade-TradeFair, BetFair-TradeFair, Betdaq, HSX, NewsFutures, Inkling Markets, etc.):

  1. The P.R. arm of the prediction market firms should also reach the bloggers &#8212-not just the journalists.
  2. Prediction market firms should monitor the Blogosphere for rumors, and deal with them in a subtitle way. :-D
  3. A long (&#8220-too long&#8221-, some will say), balanced, detailed blog post about your product is more useful to reach out than a media kit. :-D
  4. Our industry needs a blog network of reference, all focused on prediction markets. :-D

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Last year’s best April Fool’s Day Joke had something to do with the Wisdom Of Crowds.
  • Will HedgeStreet USA, the hypothetical InTrade USA, and the hypothetical TradeFair USA, be regulated in the future by a merged SEC+CFTC regulatory structure?
  • WORST THAN ELIOT SPITZER (if it were possible): Formula One boss, Max Mosley, had sado-masochist sex with 5 prostitutes, for 5 hours (!!), reenacting a concentration camp scene (!!) in which he played the role of both Nazi guard and inmate.
  • Is BetFair Poker a booby trap for the gullible novices? Does The Sporting Exchange (the operator of the BetFair brands) help gangs plucking down innocent recreational poker players?? To get an inkling, don’t read The Guardian, seeded by the BetFair spin doctor- read Midas Oracle.
  • The video that the technologically retarded BetFair spin doctor should watch.

Could a statistical reputation system built on top of Amazons Mechanical Turk be of any help to the prediction market firms?

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Obama-Cinton 1

Obama-Cinton 2

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I leave the mic to David Pennock so that he&#8217-ll explain to you what this is all about. (Be sure to check Panos Ipeirotis&#8216- comment on Lukas Biewald&#8216- blog post.) [UPDATE: Panos has just made it into Read &amp- Write Web!!!!!!]

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Mechanical Turk

New York Times

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I am more interested in what &#8220-Dolores Labs&#8221- does for a living. Here&#8217-s what Lukas Biewald has e-mailed me:

We collect large data sets for fun and profit using Mechanical Turk and a statistical reputation system that we&#8217-ve build on top of it. We&#8217-ve helped companies with tasks ranging from deciding if an analysts opinion about a stock is positive or negative to finding the best price for buying a hot tub online. (You can see other examples at http://doloreslabs.com/examples.html).

Recently we decided to take our small PR budget and instead of buying Google Ads, give our smart friends interesting data sets to play with in exchange for posting on our blog. So far, we&#8217-ve looked at race on Sports Illustrated covers over time (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=10), compared Hillary vs Obama coverage in the media (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=21) and collected subjective data on colors (http://blog.doloreslabs.com/?p=11). The beauty of these experiments is we can do them in just a day or two and they only cost us a few hundred dollars, so we can do lots of them.

We have lots of ideas of more stuff we want to do with our technology &#8212- if you have any thoughts I&#8217-d love to hear them.

Fascinating.

Any applications for the field of prediction markets (InTrade-TradeSports, BetFair-TradeFair, etc.)??

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • IIF’s SIG on Prediction Markets
  • Science
  • Why did prediction markets do well in the pre-polling era, professor Strumpf?
  • Mozilla FireFox users, do you have trouble downloading academic papers (as PDF files) from SSRN?
  • “Impact Matrix. Used to collect and gauge the likelihood and business impact of various events in the very long term.”
  • Ends and Means of Prediction Markets — Tom W. Bell Edition
  • How to run enterprise prediction markets… legally

Predictify got funded… Great for those who will be hired… But is it a good thing, overall?

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Via Nigel Eccles and Mat Fogarty, the Predictify blog, Mashable, and VentureBeat.

NewsFutures, Consensus Point and Inkling Markets were self-funded, are now profitable, and are continuing to address their customers&#8217- problems with a continually improved technology. These 3 prediction market software vendors are proving that you can create a sustainable business without the need to get &#8220-funded&#8221- by angel investors or VCs. With the money from those guys also comes the pressure to &#8220-monetize&#8221- every thing. It&#8217-s not always a good thing to have the suits running the show. NewsFutures, Consensus Point and Inkling Markets are still in the hands of their founders, and they are still free to execute their vision &#8212-the way they want.

What&#8217-s your view, folks?

Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • A second look at HedgeStreet’s comment to the CFTC about “event markets”
  • Since YooPick opened their door, Midas Oracle has been getting, daily, 2 or 3 dozens referrals from FaceBook.
  • US presidential hopeful John McCain hates the Midas Oracle bloggers.
  • If you have tried to contact Chris Masse thru the Midas Oracle Contact Form, I’m terribly sorry to inform you that your message was not delivered to the recipient.
  • THE CFTC’s SECRET AGENDA —UNVEILED.
  • “Over a ten-year period commencing on January 1, 2008, and ending on December 31, 2017, the S & P 500 will outperform a portfolio of funds of hedge funds, when performance is measured on a basis net of fees, costs and expenses.”
  • Meet professor Thomas W. Malone (on the right), from the MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence.

YIPPEEEEEEEE!!!!… Praying mantis celebrating the arrival of transparency in the sub-field of enterprise prediction markets.

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No GravatarGOOOOOOOOOOOOAL!&#8230-

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Parying Mantis

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Adam Siegel of Inkling Markets is out of the woods on business strategy&#8230- and David Perry of Consensus Point, ignited by our Google-paper post, has vowed to tell all&#8230- (I still can believe it, but it sounds true, he really said it.)&#8230- while David &#8220-Sweetie&#8221- Pennock is applauding&#8230-

Where on Earth are NewsFutures and Xpree?? Are they napping?

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Last year’s best April Fool’s Day Joke had something to do with the Wisdom Of Crowds.
  • Will HedgeStreet USA, the hypothetical InTrade USA, and the hypothetical TradeFair USA, be regulated in the future by a merged SEC+CFTC regulatory structure?
  • WORST THAN ELIOT SPITZER (if it were possible): Formula One boss, Max Mosley, had sado-masochist sex with 5 prostitutes, for 5 hours (!!), reenacting a concentration camp scene (!!) in which he played the role of both Nazi guard and inmate.
  • Is BetFair Poker a booby trap for the gullible novices? Does The Sporting Exchange (the operator of the BetFair brands) help gangs plucking down innocent recreational poker players?? To get an inkling, don’t read The Guardian, seeded by the BetFair spin doctor- read Midas Oracle.
  • The video that the technologically retarded BetFair spin doctor should watch.

Robin Hanson wants to rule the world -just as CEOs and heads of states do for a living.

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Our Master Of All Universes moans that the Free World&#8217-s private and public decision makers rarely or never ask him for advice &#8212-even though he sits on many &#8220-Boards Of Advisors&#8221- (like NewsFutures&#8216- one), which are, by definition, set up to provide advice &#8212-or so he thought, at inception. How come CEOs and heads of states are not imploring him for advice to help them run the word, he asks. He blogs that advisers are probably paid primarily for the prestige value that they lend to the company.

Which leads me to realize that I pay zero French franc for having economist Michael Giberson on our Scientific Advisory Board, which is quite about what his prestige is worth in the field of prediction markets, as of today. :-D That might change in the future, though &#8212-especially if I continue to flatter him publicly in posts like this present one. He might suffer from ego inflation and charge me for using his so-called &#8220-prestige value&#8221-. All economists, be damned. They are as greedy as the people they study.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb likens modern-day financial markets to medicine in the 1800s, when going to a hospital in London or Paris multiplied your risk of death by four times, he says. Similarly, quants increase risk by deploying flawed financial tools designed to reduce it, he argues.

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Via Stan Jonas, Nassim Nicholas Taleb cited in a Bloomberg article (Taleb Outsells Greenspan as Black Swan Gives Worst Turbulence):

Stress tests are inherently risky because they ignore rare but potentially devastating events. […] .. [“stress test” = Wall Street lingo for examining how a market rout will play out]

Past shortfall doesn&#8217-t predict future shortfall. […]

Bayesian is necessary but not sufficient. […]

If you are in banking and lending, surprise outcomes are likely to be negative for you. Put yourself in situations where favorable consequences are much larger than unfavorable ones. […]

Go to parties! If you&#8217-re a scientist, you will chance upon a remark that might spark new research. […]

Also, see Stan Jonas&#8217- 2 takes on FOMC.

Info Value = the added accuracy the markets provide relative to other mechanisms, times the value that accuracy can give in improved decisions, minus the cost of maintaining the markets, relative to the cost of other mechanisms.

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Robin Hanson:

A highly accurate market has little value if other mechanisms can provide similar accuracy at a lower cost, or if few substantial decisions are influenced by accurate forecasts on its topic.

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[Here&#8217-s Robin Hanson&#8217-s website. For your information (if you are a newbie), Robin Hanson is the most advanced researcher in the field of prediction markets. He co-invented the modern-day prediction markets, the concept of decision markets, and a new marked design, the Market Scoring Rule.]

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.

A highly accurate prediction market has little value if other mechanisms can provide similar accuracy at a lower cost, or if few substantial decisions are influenced by accurate forecasts on its topic.

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No GravatarRobin Hanson

Robin Hanson – Overcoming Bias –

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Robin Hanson

Robin Hanson at LinkedIn

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Robin Hanson:

Info Value = the added accuracy the markets provide relative to other mechanisms, times the value that accuracy can give in improved decisions, minus the cost of maintaining the markets, relative to the cost of other mechanisms.

A highly accurate market has little value if other mechanisms can provide similar accuracy at a lower cost, or if few substantial decisions are influenced by accurate forecasts on its topic.

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Robin Hanson:

[&#8230-] I meant trying to field the highest value applications. That is naturally measured in accounting terms – value minus cost. Measures of popularity or familiarity would not at all be the same thing.

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Robin Hanson:

[One should] try to offer a cost-benefit calculation. You could count how many employees had ever gone to a TQM meeting, but that wouldn&#8217-t tell you if TQM is valuable or not.

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[Here&#8217-s Robin Hanson&#8217-s website. For your information (if you are a newbie), Robin Hanson is the most advanced researcher in the field of prediction markets. He co-invented the modern-day prediction markets, the concept of decision markets, and a new marked design, the Market Scoring Rule.]

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Related Info:

Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google – (PDF file – PDF file) – by Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitwewitz – 2008-01-06

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Last year’s best April Fool’s Day Joke had something to do with the Wisdom Of Crowds.
  • Will HedgeStreet USA, the hypothetical InTrade USA, and the hypothetical TradeFair USA, be regulated in the future by a merged SEC+CFTC regulatory structure?
  • WORST THAN ELIOT SPITZER (if it were possible): Formula One boss, Max Mosley, had sado-masochist sex with 5 prostitutes, for 5 hours (!!), reenacting a concentration camp scene (!!) in which he played the role of both Nazi guard and inmate.
  • Is BetFair Poker a booby trap for the gullible novices? Does The Sporting Exchange (the operator of the BetFair brands) help gangs plucking down innocent recreational poker players?? To get an inkling, don’t read The Guardian, seeded by the BetFair spin doctor- read Midas Oracle.
  • The video that the technologically retarded BetFair spin doctor should watch.

Googles Bo Cowgill takes a swipe at the prediction market software vendors.

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Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence from Google – (PDF file – PDF file) – by Bo Cowgill, Justin Wolfers, and Eric Zitwewitz – 2008-01-06

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Bo Cowgill:

[&#8230-] Trade-by-trade data can reveal characteristics of specific working groups: What they know, how they feel, how they process and share information and how all of that changes over time. I didn&#8217-t try to put any of this in the paper because the conclusions would be sensitive, and I thought this application was pretty obvious to anybody who understood our methodology. [&#8230-]

Bo Cowgill:

I&#8217-ve also heard that other companies would find it impossible to analyze the interaction between their market and the organization. Why? Lack of data. [&#8230-]

Bo Cowgill:

Some more remarks about applications that combine prediction markets and organizational data (org charts, social networks, seating locations). The obstacle to these applications is not a lack of data. Jed mentions privacy concerns &#8212- and if he thinks this is a big obstacle then I&#8217-d be interested in discussing his thoughts.

A bigger problem is that that current prediction market vendors and consultants cannot support these applications. At heart, these vendors are software engineers and salespeople at heart, not statisticians or data miners. They want to write one system that can support lots of clients. At conferences, one hears PM vendors complain about having to do &#8220-customization&#8221- work for clients.

This approach would not work for the applications I describe for two reasons:

  1. The inputs for different clients won&#8217-t be the same. Each client&#8217-s organizational data will likely take a different structure. This makes it difficult for prediction market vendors to architect a single system that can served many clients (yet another challenge with integrating markets with other corporate IT services).
  2. The outputs for different clients won&#8217-t be the same. The business relevance and statistical power of each analysis will differ with each client&#8217-s data.

Prediction market vendors may also need to familiarize themselves with the statistical learning methods necessary to fully utilize these rich datasets. So what&#8217-s the solution? First, move to a software-and-consulting model. By &#8216-consulting,&#8217- I don&#8217-t mean &#8216-consulting on how to implement the market.&#8217- I&#8217-m talking about helping the client solve its problem using a variety of data, including prediction market data.

Second, the vendors also need to pitch prediction markets as more than a forecasting tool. People in the business world commonly identify as data junkies &#8212- probably more so than they identify with the &#8216-wisdom of crowds&#8217- ethos. It is unclear how much companies really care about accurate forecasting anyway.

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On a related note, there is something that only the prediction market software vendors could do, at this time, for those who are in capacity to do so: setting up inter-industry prediction markets &#8212-or at least, handing over (with everybody&#8217-s agreement) anonymized prediction market data on industry topics to anyone else in the industry who is a client of that PM firm. I don&#8217-t know about NewsFutures or Inkling Markets, but if you look at Consensus Point&#8217-s list of clients, you&#8217-ll see that David Perry&#8217-s firm is strong in the (consumer) electronic industry &#8212-Motorola, Qualcomm, Siemens, Nokia. Use your imagination, or ask David Perry directly, for more&#8230- (I can&#8217-t talk- otherwise, next thing, I&#8217-m a dead blogger.)&#8230-

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Previous blog posts by Chris F. Masse:

  • Last year’s best April Fool’s Day Joke had something to do with the Wisdom Of Crowds.
  • Will HedgeStreet USA, the hypothetical InTrade USA, and the hypothetical TradeFair USA, be regulated in the future by a merged SEC+CFTC regulatory structure?
  • WORST THAN ELIOT SPITZER (if it were possible): Formula One boss, Max Mosley, had sado-masochist sex with 5 prostitutes, for 5 hours (!!), reenacting a concentration camp scene (!!) in which he played the role of both Nazi guard and inmate.
  • Is BetFair Poker a booby trap for the gullible novices? Does The Sporting Exchange (the operator of the BetFair brands) help gangs plucking down innocent recreational poker players?? To get an inkling, don’t read The Guardian, seeded by the BetFair spin doctor- read Midas Oracle.
  • The video that the technologically retarded BetFair spin doctor should watch.