The wisdom of crowds theory has its fair share of skeptics, and with good reason.  When we look around us, we see lots of examples of crowds acting unwise.  Lynch mobs come to mind, as do street rioters, Nazi soldiers, and sometimes even stock market investors. In each of these examples, the crowd did things [...]

If you survey the prediction market landscape, you’ll notice that the outputs that PM’s provide fall into one of two categories:  odds & ends. By “odds” I’m referring to the probability of a certain future outcome occurring.  For example, “The probability of Obama winning the 2012 presidential election is ___%” or “The probability of the [...]

Prospective clients interested in our iCE prediction market technology often ask whether it’s a crowdsourcing tool.  My standard answer is “kinda.”   The term crowdsourcing is defined on Wikipedia as: …the act of outsourcing tasks, traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, to a large group of people or community (a crowd), through an open [...]

The Woodrow Wilson Center’s Science and Technology Innovation Program (STIP) recently announced that they’re creating a prediction market to forecast future events of interest to the scientists, such as who will make the first breakthrough with real “artificially intelligent” machines or which Millennium Prize math problem will be solved next.  Nerdy stuff. As is common for prediction [...]

Clients interested in using a prediction market for market research often ask us whether they should setup their market using internal employees or external consumers as traders.  Since this is such a common question, I figured it deserves a blog post. Before getting into the pro’s and con’s of each approach, I should note that [...]