Prediction markets failed to accurately predict the unexpected effect a few tears had on the New Hampshire primaries- and some analysts rushed to blame the tool and undermine its reliability and applicability. Let me restate some fundamentals and my view, in a snapshot:
- Markets are not prophets, prophets do not exist.
- A mechanism’-s forecastability should not be judged against a virtual fool-proof prophet- we’-d better compare it with other existing or widely-used mechanisms and -to my partial and context-bound knowledge- markets outperform all those.
- Markets are the only tool that intrinsically suggests their probability of failure. If Obama’-s stock is traded at 70 cents, this suggests that there is a 30% probability of Obama losing- I’-d say markets are by character modest and no fanfare has any place in describing their suggestions.
- Markets are primarily an aggregation/meta mechanism- as such, garbage-in-garbage-out effects are expected to happen, so we’-d need to keep focus on minimizing garbage rather than blaming the market/compiler.
- Maturity of the mechanism and its use, as long as trading volume (in real-money intrade for example), have not yet reached a fully efficient level (more on this to come soon), but these result in significant profit opportunities, so I expect things to just keep getting better.
cross-posted from my blog