ABC 20/20 featuring InTrade – (May 9, 2008)
Foretelling The Future: Online Prediction Markets —- (4 pages in all)
ABC video
YouTube video
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- Not a single word about InTrade-TradeSports fucking up its traders during the North Korea Missile episode.
- Although James Surowiecki is a great thinker overall, I’-m not happy he served InTrade’-s past forecasting successes in absolute terms —-and not in terms of probabilities. That shows James Surowiecki can’-t be the ultimate leader of the field of prediction markets. Robin Hanson, Justin Wolfers, Koleman Strumpf, Eric Zitzewitz, or even Emile Servan-Schreiber, would have not made that mistake.
- All prediction markets are not created equal. Spot that they go too far, saying terrorism prediction markets or earthquake prediction markets could serve a societal purpose. That is complete bullshit. That is pure hype. As I said yesterday, an analyst should check whether a given prediction market is really able of aggregating important information. Just because John Delaney wants to create a betting market to get money doesn’-t mean that that given prediction market will be able to give sound forecasts. Otherwise, we would have prediction markets about future lottery outcomes and we would make a fortune out of that.
- Spot that they put the emphasis on the easy translation between the 0–-100 prices and the 0–-100 probabilities. That puts BetFair’-s model (based on those damn digital/decimal odds) out of the picture.
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