I hung out at the Yahoo! campus last night for the free confab they sponsored titled: Prediction Markets: Tapping the Wisdom of Crowds.
This is very, very cool stuff. The conversations were moderated by James Surowiecki of Wisdom of Crowds fame, with speakers from Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, and HP, as well as the master theorist of prediction markets Robin Hanson of GMU.
Here’s some background on prediction markets. Here are some notes. Here is a post about the internal Yahoo currency they use on their prediction markets. This is David Bennock’s blog (Yahoo! Research) — I’m subscribing.
I’m going to do some reading and research and will post my own notes and thoughts in the near future.
Ah, I should introduce you to a guy I know who works at Marketocracy – a firm whose mutual fund makes its buy/sell decisions based on a prediction-market basis.
Hi —
Glad you liked the confab.
The Prediction Markets Cluster is your industry consortium and worldwide prediction markets community.
Your next research cluster on Prediction Markets is at AEI-Brookings in Washington, DC.
See: http://www.pmcluster.com/
Cheers,
John
Ben-Very interesting post. I’ve worked on some research during my Phd involved using markets to perform software estimation. The Wisdom of Crowds book was what spawned the whole idea for Dr. Don Berndt there. Very thought provoking book, interesting applications. The Yootle, lol, how long before we get an exchange to trade dollars for those?
Glad you enjoyed the confab.
Thought you might be interested in talking to Storage Markets when you’re in town next month. Let me know if you want an intro.