UC Riverside’-s Sloan Center for Internet Retailing has just launched their eLab eXchange, a website for gathering collective predictions about marketing in the digital world. The New York Times had a nice write up about it this morning. I mention this because the eLab eXchange features two NewsFutures knowledge aggregation mechanisms of which there are precious few public examples: Competitive Forecasting and Idea Pageants. So, if you’-re curious about what they look and feel like, just take a look at the eLab eXchange…-
Just like HP did with BRAIN, NewsFutures invented and refined those techniques over the years as simpler/better-fit alternatives to prediction markets for some enterprise problems and contexts. It’-s no secret around here that most people don’-t have an intuitive feel for “-trading”-, and that the busier they are (eg, senior execs), the less time and patience they have to learn anything new…- Nowadays, we find that most companies we work for naturally choose to use one of these alternative mechanisms for gathering the wisdom of their crowd. These approaches fit the customer’-s problem tightly so we don’-t have to fit the customer’-s problem to a generic prediction market approach.
Competitive forecasting is specialized for extracting range forecasts for business variables, like sales, prices, market share, etc, while Idea Pageants are designed especially for the task of quickly identifying the best new ideas in a very large pool. For instance, the NYT article mentions two of NewsFutures other clients: Arcelor Mittal is a long-time user of Competitive Forecasting, while InterContinental Hotels Group relies on an Idea Pageant to vet new ideas.
Importantly, both of these approaches stay true to what NewsFutures believes should be the two pillars of any reality-based knowledge aggregation mechanism: reward people for (a) being right, (b) before others.
We look forward to your questions and comments about these approaches, which you can now get your hands on at UC Riverside’-s eLab eXchange.
[Cross-posted from the NewsFutures blog.]
I have two minor remarks.
1. I think the press should use the term “information aggregation mechanism”, and not “prediction markets”, when it is not a trading technique.
2. I would like to hear Emile Servan-Schreiber about Robin Hanson’s Market Scoring Rule, because it seems to me that it is an open system, being adopted by many scholars and companies.
That said, best wishes to eLab eXchange and to the NewsFutures’ information aggregation mechanisms.
Re ESS post:
From the NYT story, it appeared that eLab eXchange was not exactly a “so called prediction market”, but it was not entirely clear from the article just what was the underlying tool (even though the article does mention “competitive forecasting”). Thanks for the clarifications.
Re CFM comment:
Good luck trying to get the press to use your preferred terms. You are, of course, right about the terminology.
It was said that the Harry Potter contract at NewsFutures was suggested via the Idea Pageant system. As a curious person
, I would be very interested in knowing about this.