As soon as that un-informed comment hit Google Reader, I received, in my e-mail inbox, proof that some prediction market vendors are doing very well lately, as prestigious Fortune-500 companies have been joining the ranks of organizations trying out enterprise prediction markets as their internal forecasting tool. Some of these names will be made public later on, I hope.
All the prediction market vendors I know of are bullish.
Sports Derivative Exchange
A kind of HSX for sports.
In beta.
Best wishes to them.
UPDATE: The SDX co-founder has a comment.
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Previously: About Justin Wolfers’-s column
Justin Wolfers’- Freakonomics post (which suggests that BetFair would have a better predictive power if US traders could use it).
Bo Cowgill:
Google and Yahoo are working with a number of other companies to join us for a larger announcement. We already have some lined up, and are looking for more. Some Midas Oracle readers might have already been contacted or will be contacted shortly —- we are still interested in working together.
Stay tuned! If your company would like to support our effort (or if you know someone at a company that might be interested), please be in touch.
Also:
1. Although our coalition is called “-Coalition for Internal Markets,”- our petition discusses public markets used for business as well.
2. The signatories from Google and Yahoo! were Hal Varian and Preston McAfee, two senior execs and Chief Economists at Google and Yahoo.
from: Cody Stumpo
subject: Simulating joint dynamics of InTrade’-s electoral prediction markets
mailed-by: gmail.com
Hi there,
I am writing you as experts on prediction markets to ask what you think of some work I have done. At InTrade, you can bet on the 51 electoral markets individually. So using these 51 time series, I generated a daily return covariance matrix to simulate the joint dynamics of how they might move forward in the days until the election. Assuming a normal copula of daily returns and simulating the 48 (IIRC) days until the election 5000 times, I get a distribution of outcomes. The histogram of Obama electoral votes (which interestingly is bimodal) is the main output. The mean is 259 – and the chance he will win the election (as of yesterday’-s close) was 44.4%. This agreed almost exactly with http://www.fivethirtyeight.com which is the best polls-based approach I know of.
Some more details are on my blog, http://houseofcramps.blogspot.com/ . You are free to use/extend the idea, with credit.
Regards,
Cody Stumpo
YOU HEARD IT ON MIDAS ORACLE FIRST.
Once again, we out-scoop Freakonomics and Overcoming Whatever.
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HubDub:
Reuters partners with Hubdub to put a presence on the prediction market site.
Reuters is pleased to announce their new presence on Hubdub, the virtual prediction market site.
Hubdub allows users to trade predictions with virtual money on the outcomes of breaking news stories and future events, with approximately 2 million Hubdub dollars traded daily. As part of a new, dedicated Reuters section within the site Reuters generates questions for users to trade on based on the latest breaking news and ranging in topics from the current credit crunch to the 2008 presidential election. Reuters questions are already among the most popular on Hubdub.
Additional tools and resources are also included to help build a Reuters community within the site, including a “-friends”- application, comment capabilities, links to the top Reuters stories of the day and Reuters market widgets, found at http://www.hubdub.com/partners/reuters.
Finally, because Hubdub prediction markets aggregate thousands of trades, the site often produces accurate forecasts on the likelihood of future events. Beyond weighing in on the outcome, users are able to reference the site for up-to-the-minute information on the public’-s predictions about breaking news from Reuters.
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HubDub partnership program:
Become a Partner
Partner with Hubdub to engage and grow your community. Enrich your content for your users by adding forecasts, and drive traffic by creating a branded presence on Hubdub.
As a partner you can:
* Create branded questions on Hubdub for anyone to predict, with links back to your relevant content
* Sponsor and link to particular questions and get links back to your relevant content
* Get a branded profile page to highlight your questions and display a relevant news feed from your site or blog
* Post questions, graphs and forecasts as widgets alongside your content to engage users
* It’-s all completely free!
– News sites – engage your readers with forecasts they return to
– Bloggers – get novel content to enrich your posts and drive relevant traffic
– Special interest sites – give your community informative forecasts and attract new users
Become a partner – it’-s free!
Create an account on Hubdub and drop us an email asking to become a partner. Once we review your application we’-ll upgrade your account to a partner one. Easy!
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UPDATE: HubDub PR
Video
HubDub
Previously: About Justin Wolfers’-s column
Justin Wolfers gives his views about the (now past) differences between the probabilistic predictions given by InTrade on the 2008 US presidential elections…- and the ones generated by the other real-money and play-money prediction exchanges. One hypothesis: US political insiders can’-t access BetFair, legally, and thus can’-t arbitrage. (But they can trade legally on the Iowa Electronic Markets, NewsFutures, Inkling, and HubDub, one could retort.)
Emile Servan-Schreiber’-s hypothesis still holds.
Or else —-your own hypothesis is welcome.
P.S.: The latest news is that InTrade now gives Barack Obama slightly above John McCain.
The conversation ended up on a draw.
Robin Hanson was AWOL.
