For those of you who love prediction markets (a variety of which we’ve written about in the past), there’s a new site that looks to be as vast, inclusive, and user-friendly as anything I’ve seen: Predictify. You can wager on standing bets (who will be the Yankees’ next manager, e.g.) or “tap collective wisdom” (I hope they’re paying Jim Surowiecki . . .
Submit your entries for the new NASA slogan. Will humans evolve based on high carb diets? (Earlier) The latest in prediction markets: how good will a new product be? Vote for the future of Boston’s energy, design and healthcare.
Well, at least the folks at the PopSci Predictions Exchange listen. Last week Dubner blogged about Jatropha, a weed that could spearhead a biofuel revolution. At the end of his post, he urged the PopSci Predictions Exchange to launch a contract on Jatropha. Voila. So far there are only sellers — people betting against Jatropha — and no buyers.
Prediction markets. Are there any other two words that couple as nicely as those, at least to readers of this blog? The promise of a prediction market is simple and profound: if you ask a lot of people a question about politics or sports or Hollywood movies, and those people are motivated to answer it correctly, their collective judgment turns . . .
Tomorrow marks the iPhone’s official release to the public, in what will be one of the most hyped and anticipated product debuts in history. So far we’ve seen prediction markets making odds on everything from sales figures to the likelihood of spontaneous combustion. But what of the aftermath? Will economists, psychologists, sociologists and other researchers pick up where the tech . . .
Via Marginal Revolution: In his quest to explain the male-female wage gap in business, academia, and other fields, the economist M. Daniele Paserman studied the role that gender plays in competitive environments. Where’d he get his data? From professional tennis matches. Paserman argues that male athletes are generally more adept at handling high-pressure situations. With iPhone frenzy reaching a peak, . . .
Included in the hubbub leading up to the final Harry Potter installment is a prediction exchange in which participants bet on whether Harry lives or dies — although betting has now been influenced by an anonymous Web spoiler claiming insider knowledge that the hero doesn’t meet an untimely doom. Gelf magazine has an interview with the economist Uri Gneezy, who . . .
On the InTrade prediction market site, John Edwards has fallen behind the undeclared Al Gore. Here is Edwards’s recent price chart: And here is Gore’s: Note how far Gore has fallen since the Oscar hubbub. Note, also, that Gore remains (fairly) adamant that he won’t run. On the GOP side, meanwhile, the not-quite-yet-declared Fred Thompson has just about caught up . . .
We’ve blogged quite a bit about prediction markets. Now, some very prominent economists (including four Nobel prize winners) have come together to release a joint statement asking the U.S. government to make it easier for researchers to create them. While the statement argues the merits of prediction markets extremely cogently, and while I’m completely in favor of prediction markets and . . .
Pennsylvania State University has set up a prediction market for the weather, letting two groups of students bet against professional forecasting services like AccuWeather in trying to predict the temperature in different locations. “To date, the weather markets have been as accurate as the major public forecasting services,” says the Penn State press release, which is printed below in its . . .
Who doesn’t love a good prediction market? The Economist does and so does Wired — and we certainly do too, as evidenced here and here. Here is a new blog about prediction markets and here is the famous Iowa Electronic Market, which will be a very busy place as the upcoming elections unfold. And who doesn’t love a good poker . . .
I love to gamble. Personally, I’m pretty content with the menu of bets you can find at the typical internet sports book: NFL, Nascar, the next winner of American Idol, etc. But for the deeper thinkers among you, there is a great “betting” site called www.longbets.com. The wagers there are a little more exotic. Mitch Kapor and Ray Kurzweil, for . . .
A question for the baseball experts: has any team in history ever been as bad as the A’s were early in the season and done as well as they are doing now? It has been an amazing run. Interestingly, the market at tradesports is still giving the A’s no respect. The bid-ask spread on total wins this season for the . . .