Talk:PredictionMarkets

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I was originally excited about prediction markets, but lost my excitement after I started looking at how they performed. I recall a widely touted election prediction that a market allegedly made. But that wasn't really a "pre-diction;" The market was very wrong most of the time. Yet this was touted as a success..?! It was only a couple weeks before the election, when everyone was realizing what was going on, and how things were, that the market reflected the winner. A nice way to get a number on public knowledge, but is it a method for predicting the future? I don't think so.

That said, if you're looking for supporting articles, here's one. -- LionKimbro

Ah; Here's an article on what I was talking about. -- LionKimbro

Lion, thanks for comment. I see PredictionMarkets as a possible tool. Maybe they need to be named something else, because I am not really thinking about using them as a "prediciton" tool, so much as a way to aggregate insights and knowledge based around a "bet". I think there is a lot of supporting data about how, in the case where knowledge about something is dispersed, that PredictionMarkets perform well.

The example that Lion gives shows that in some cases, PredictionMarkets] do not perform well until knowledge about the questions they are asking becomes available. In the case of the FundCamp process, I am seeing PredictionMarkets as one potential tool to make available to inform the overall, but not required (same with Consensus polling. However, it is recommended as a way to explore certain dimensions of a business, in the form of questions, etc, eg "Will this market last for longer than one year?", "Will this idea be displaced by the iPhone", etc

I want to set it up in the platform so that people will be able to initiate these "bets", and associate them with an active project.