Just before the end of the year, we read Ian Ayres’s musings on prediction markets over at Freakonomics. Writing on his personal blog, Consensus Point Chief Scientist Robin Hanson responded to the post and elaborated on whether prediction markets better served as methods or forums:

1. How to pick city policies, vs. how to pick the mayor.
2. How to cook a meal, vs. how to pick a restaurant.
3. How to win a game, vs. how to decide which team won.
4. How to do a study, vs. how to pick a study to publish.

These are four examples of methods vs. forums. Methods are ways to do things; forums are ways to pick who decides what to do. Yes, in a sense forums are methods, since choosing who decides indirectly picks what to do. But that is what makes forums powerful; good forums induce people to find good methods. Good elections induces good city policies, good restaurant competition induces good cooking, good game rules induce good play, and good journal review induces good articles.

To me, prediction markets are mostly interesting as forums, not methods. Alas many seem to confuse the two.

Robin elegantly puts the history of the concept into context and dismisses the idea that the wisdom of the crowds serves as an equalizer; rather true wisdom is revealed by self-selecting experts with incentives. He then goes on to suggest that academic journals might not be the best forum for choosing forecasting methods.

“Prediction markets” started from speculative markets, e.g. stocks, where accuracy comes much less from non-expert participation and much more from participants with incentives to self-select as experts. Any team that considers itself expert enough can pay to prove itself, but in fact most teams stay away and prices tend to be dominated by real experts, who get paid and really know better than most.

Prediction markets aren’t about emphasizing ordinary Joes over credentialed bigshots; they are about emphasizing whomever tends to be right. Simple opinion averages maybe be reasonable indicators of crowd wisdom, but they have too little of the forum-ness of letting self-selected expert teams come to dominate.

It seems to me that when academics like Aryes call for academic studies of prediction markets as methods, instead of as forums, they are implicitly suggesting that current academic institutions should be the forum in we choose forecasting methods. If academic journals prefer a method, they suggest, that’s the method the world should use.

In contrast, I suggest prediction markets may be a better forum than academic journals for choosing forecasting methods. Maybe the world shouldn’t use a method just because academics say its great; maybe those impressed with a method should have to put their money where their mouth is and trade on that method’s forecasts in prediction markets. Maybe the rest of us should just accept prediction market prices as our best estimates; if and when prediction market prices become dominated by traders using a method, that is when the rest of us will have implicitly accepted that method as best.

How might the academy respond? Our guess is with skepticism. Care to bet?

Nick Bostrom, Director of The Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, considers the impact that prediction markets could have on the creation of government policy in the UK. 

Rebooting Britain: Make policy using prediction markets

By Nick Bostrom | 01 December 2009

This article was published in the January issue of Wired UK magazine.

How do we know what to think about the future? Politicians make confident predictions. If we elect them, unemployment will allegedly go down, the economy will grow, crime will be reduced, and terrorist attacks will be prevented. If we elect their opponents, the opposite will happen. These opponents, of course, disagree. Whom should we trust?

We could listen to the media pundits, but pundits are usually given a platform because they are articulate and entertaining, not because they have a track record of being right. We could listen to academic experts, but both sides of a political dispute can usually point to some experts who support their view. Or we could try to form our own opinions; but we may not know very much about the issue at hand, and at any rate, it is unclear why we should believe that our opinions would be any more reliable than the opinions of all those millions of people who have considered the issue and embraced the opposite view.

One way of generating predictions is betting markets. If people are allowed to buy and sell bets that some hypothesis is true, then the fluctuating price of those bets can be interpreted as a probability estimate of that hypothesis. The hypothesis could be that some particular horse will win a race, or it could be that weapons of mass destruction will be found if our forces invade some particular country. The principle is the same in both cases but, as pointed out by the economist Robin Hanson, the information that could be revealed is much more valuable in the second case.

In every known head-to-head field comparison between speculative markets and other forward-looking institutions, the speculative markets have been at least as accurate. More often than not, they prevail. Orange-juice futures improve on National Weather Service forecasts, horse race markets beat horse race experts, Oscar markets beat columnists’ tips, gas demand markets beat gas demand experts, stock markets beat the official NASA panel at identifying the company responsible for the Challenger accident, election markets beat national opinion polls, and corporate sales markets beat official corporate forecasts.

Prediction markets can aggregate many small pieces of information held by large numbers of people from diverse backgrounds. Prediction markets seem to work well because they reward accuracy (rather than the ability to tell a convincing story) and punish error (rather than the voicing of politically inconvenient opinions).

No system for making predictions is going to be perfect, but so far the empirical evidence seems to quite strongly favour prediction markets compared to alternative ways of generating forecasts. Therefore, the traditional ways of forecasting uncertain political futures – pundits, academic experts, debates between leading politicians, and personal gut feelings – should be supplemented by the creation of prediction markets wherever possible. When the issue at hand is sufficiently important, such markets should be subsidised by the state as a relatively inexpensive form of intelligence gathering.

Horse-betting is selfish, but betting on policy-relevant outcomes would be public service. Pundits should be expected to put their money where their mouths are, and everybody who can afford to lose £10 or £20 should be encouraged to participate. Journalists should be asked to include information about prediction market estimates in their coverage of controversial topics. Schoolchildren should be taught applied probability theory in the classroom and given the opportunity to practice their skills in real-world settings.

This way, I think, Britain would make shrewder policy decisions. Moreover, its population would learn to think about uncertainty in a sophisticated and mature manner. In our complex modern world, that would be a winner.

Nick Bostrom is director of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University.

On November 5 in Chicago, Dr. Robin Hanson, Chief Scientist of Consensus Point, and Rami Levy of Motorola, will be discussing the most effective applications of prediction and idea markets in business and government organizations at a lunch hosted by Consensus Point. Idea and prediction markets will become part of the internal DNA of the best organizations, as these solutions link human capital to organization results by providing leading indicators for the most important initiatives. Rami Levy of Motorola will share the business objectives and specific results of Motorola’s Thinktank Idea Exchange.  Dr. Hanson will share some specific approaches to structuring effective markets.

Robin Hanson, PhD., Associate Professor of Economics, George Mason University and Chief Scientist, Consensus Point

Rami Levy, Technical Lead and Manager, Open Source Technologies team, and distinguished member of Motorola’s technical staff, Motorola, Inc.

For more information, contact Consensus Point at info@consensuspoint.com.

The Prediction Market Clusters in collaboration with Aurora WDC, Consensus Point, University of Chicago Gleacher Executive Center and many others announces the Prediction Markets Summit and Collective Intelligence Cluster Friday 6 November 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

San Francisco, CA (PRWEB) May 31, 2009 — The Prediction Market Clusters in collaboration with Aurora WDC, Consensus Point, University of Chicago Gleacher Executive Center and many others announces the Prediction Markets Summit and Collective Intelligence Cluster Friday 6 November 2009 in Chicago, Illinois, USA.

Prediction Markets Summit and Collective Intelligence Cluster The venue is the stunning University of Chicago Gleacher Executive Center in Chicago, Illinois, USA. 

Learn how prediction markets, social media and collective intelligence networks are fundamentally altering the enterprise landscape. New forecasting techniques and technologies are driving executive decision making, leading collaborative forecasting and optimizing supply chain management. Engage with experts in knowledge markets that are reshaping all practices of knowledge management (KM), advancing innovation and propelling enterprise knowledge ecologies of the future.

“There is not much that any of us do that is more important than telling the company what we know.” Jeff Severts, EVP, Best Buy

We are thrilled several key scholars and thought leaders will join your cluster including:
Robin Hanson, Professor, Economist, Polymath, George Mason University
George Neumann, George Daly Professor of Economics, University of Iowa

In 2004 James Surowiecki published his now-famous book, The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. For many this milestone introduced the era of collective intelligence for people, business, institutions, the environment and civil society.

“Thanks for organizing an extremely useful and informative workshop!” – Professor Tom Malone, MIT Center for Collective Intelligence

Testimonials

New ways to share, trade and aggregate information using Internet-based markets are exploding. These powerful Web 2.0 social media and network knowledge markets help companies, schools, governments and individuals to acquire and master ever-growing bodies of knowledge. These prediction market capabilities achieve mastery knowledge management (KM) and collective intelligence with stunning speed, efficiency and accuracy.

“Prediction markets are brutally honest and uncannily accurate.” – Geoffrey Colvin, Fortune Magazine

New collaborative market mechanisms and social innovations are driving collective intelligence networks. They resolve questions of science, technology, management, strategy, planning and policy far better than experts or management.

Collective intelligence inhabits the ceaseless flurry of self-correcting social exchanges, social networks and collective knowledge markets. They cover everything from politics and business plans to sports and new product features. Enormously potent, these social networks and markets generate new ideas and amass and refine knowledge and collective wisdom with blinding speed, low cost and accuracy.

Collective intelligence networks and knowledge markets have become commonplace in the enterprise. Top firms using prediction markets are Best Buy, Google, Microsoft, Eli Lilly, Abbott Laboratories and Yahoo! to name a few. Major analysts firms declare prediction markets critical to Enterprise 2.0 information and knowledge management portfolios.

“A company that can predict the future is a company that is going to win.” – Bernardo Huberman, PhD, Senior HP Fellow, HP Labs

Cluster sessions are focused, practical and conversational. They are for executives, directors, mangers, users and practitioners having immediate needs to apply collective intelligence networks and market mechanisms to advance enterprise business outcomes through mastery of collective wisdom.

Pricing and Availability

Registration for the Collective Intelligence Cluster is open and available now. All are welcome. The event participant tuition, including full-day experience, meals, refreshments, books, reception and materials is $399.00 Secure online event check-in and registration in advance required. Early-bird registration ($299.00) is open until 30 September 2009.

Prediction Markets Summit and Collective Intelligence Cluster

Collective Intelligence Cluster Sponsors

Sponsors of the Collective Intelligence Cluster are the world’s leading producers of prediction market software, services, exchanges and expertise. They supply continuous innovation in prediction markets and collective intelligence networks. They include Aurora WDC, ConsensusPoint, Mercury-RAC, Prediction Market Clusters and many others.

About Prediction Market Clusters

The Prediction Market Clusters, founded in 2004, are the global industry commons and open community for prediction markets and collective intelligence networks worldwide. The open, agnostic network is a focused collaboration of vendors, academia, traders, users, developers, markets, regulators and stakeholders. The goal is to provide awareness, diffusion, adoption and pull-through for enterprise, institutional and consumer prediction markets. The Prediction Markets Cluster is the worldwide Next Practices leadership network for collective intelligence networks practices, tools and theories. For more information, please visit Prediction Markets Cluster.

For more information, discounts and to sponsor the Collective Intelligence Cluster, please contact Jennifer Hulett, Tel: 714-458-3826 Fax: 714-572-3742, for details.

(Cross posted from Robin Hanson’s blog Overcoming Bias)

In these cases good tools, representations, interfaces, etc. can greatly help people join together in a spirit of constructive camaraderie to build documents, analyses, plans, etc.   People then appreciate the additions and edits of others in building a common product that all will admire.  False or misleading contributions can be quickly detected and eliminated.

The big problems for most collective intelligence tools come when the topics are controversial, and the contributions involve a lot of judgment.  For example, consider folks elaborating a schedule of which projects will be finished when, or designing a budget of which potential projects shall be funded.  Here folks are often justly concerned that many “contributions” will be self-serving attempts to make them or their groups look better or gain more resources.

Prediction markets were designed for exactly these sort of hard problems – contributors know they face a risk of losing as well as gaining from their contributions.  So folks think a little more carefully about what they might say, and choose not to speak when they doubt they have something useful to say.  Prediction markets allow organizations to tap the collective to aggregate info on their most important and controversial topics.  But of course they aren’t the only or best way to support collaboration on all topics.

Top Executives to lead Business Growth of Prediction Market Company

Nashville, TN (February 16, 2009) – Consensus Point, headquartered in Nashville, today announced the addition of several executives to oversee its growing customer base and expand the business development and professional services teams.  The company is one of the nation’s largest providers of prediction markets, innovative collective intelligence solutions to improve the accuracy of prospective business decisions.

“Consensus Point is well positioned to further advance the provocative prediction market industry,” commented David Perry, President and co-founder, Consensus Point. “In these times of uncertainty and economic challenges, we are excited to offer proven prediction market solutions to provide “early warning signals” and forecasts to corporations and government organizations from the collective wisdom dispersed throughout their enterprises.”  Perry and co-founder Ken Kittlitz, Chief Technology Officer, will continue to successfully lead the software development and technology teams serving organizations such as GE,
Best Buy, and Motorola.

Highlights of the Consensus Point additional leadership team include:

Linda Eskind Rebrovick, Chief Executive Officer – Rebrovick brings 32 years of executive experience and expertise leading information technology consulting, marketing and sales organizations. She formerly served as VP, Dell Healthcare Sales, EVP and Chief Marketing Officer, BearingPoint, EVP and National Managing Partner, KPMG Consulting and Business Unit Executive, IBM. Rebrovick serves on the Board of Directors, HealthStream, Inc and Tennessee Governor Bredesen’s eHealth Advisory Council.  She received her bachelor’s degree from the College of Business at Auburn University and was recognized as one of Auburn University’s top 400 women graduates in the past 100 years.

Robin Hanson, Ph.D., Chief Scientist – Hanson pioneered the prediction markets movement in 1988 and was a principal architect of the first internal corporate market in 1990. He brings a wealth of expertise and assists Consensus Point with design and development of their prediction market applications and supports their customers with quantitative analysis. Hanson, associate professor of economics, George Mason University, and research associate at Oxford University, received his Ph.D. in social science from California Institute of Technology and masters in physics and masters in the philosophy of science from University of Chicago.

Brad Wilson, Vice President of Services – Wilson joins Consensus Point as a veteran in developing and delivering services for Fortune 1000 companies. His background in the consulting and services businesses includes management roles at Dell, BearingPoint and KPMG Consulting. Wilson brings superior and proven background responding to customer needs and delivering world-class service to lead services delivery and customer support.

“Prediction Markets break through bureaucracy and organizational barriers to provide business leaders with real time predictions in an engaging social network environment surpassing any traditional research methods” said Linda Rebrovick, Consensus Point’s CEO. “We have an unwavering commitment to deliver business outcomes and results to our customers by providing valuable forecasts and indicators regarding the projects and investments that matter most to the company in order to make insightful business decisions that are critical to their success.”

About Consensus Point, LLC – Consensus Point, a Nashville-based company, is the leading provider of enterprise prediction markets serving corporations and government.  With over 15 years of experience providing enterprise prediction markets, Consensus Point offers a comprehensive collective intelligence solution, including Software as a Service (SaaS) with on-demand or on-site licenses and consulting services.  The company helps their clients reduce the risk of uncertainty, improve revenue through accurate forecasts of products and services, and manage projects with immediate insight into future completion dates and budgets.   For more info, please visit www.consensuspoint.com.