Resources & Tutorials
The Ultimate Resource - 'Wisdom Of The Crowds' Book
If you haven't read it, then how did you get to our site?This is definitely a must-read book, about prediction markets and everything around crowds wisdom.
Written by James Surowiecki, this book has become a best seller. I believe most people & companies that have come to this fascinating arena, were drawn to it after reading this fascinating book.
We're not getting any percentage here... just go and read it - Wisdom Of The Crowds homepage.
General Prediction Market Resources
Wikipedia - Prediction Markets Entry Naturally, this is the first place to look if you are new to this area. Read this entry to get the highlights of what is a prediction market. If you're looking for something more, continue to the next resources...Corporate Usage of Prediction Markets
Article About Letting Employees Influence Corporate DecisionsThis great article by Francisco Dao, illustrates what a corporate has to gain by letting its employees become full participants in the process of decision making.Prediction Markets is one of the tools recommended by this article.
CNN Article About Using Prediction Markets in corporate This article, called "Why Gambling at the Office Pays", describes how large corporations like HP, GE and other companies have decided to use such markets for their internal decision making.
Gartner Recommends Prediction Markets This link to a blog by Patti Anklam, gives a peak into Gartner's thoughts of web 2.0 in the corporate world. And guess what - they recommend managers to try out social networking mechanisms, and prediction markets specifically.
In her words: 'Pilot interesting new market concepts that encourage consumers, buyers and employees to trade "virtual shares" in promising ideas and innovations - prediction markets, for one'.
Another article summarizing Gartner's recommendation from ITExpo 2007 at Gartner Unveils Four Messages That Define the Leading Edge of IT Change.
Business Week - CEO Tips For Using Prediction Markets BusinessWeek magazine offers tips for CEOs in using prediction markets inside the company - what's the best way to approach it, how to present it to employees and mistakes to avoid. Worth reading.
Wall Street Journal article on corporate Prediction Markets A Wall Street Journal article giving some background on this exciting world. .
Scientific Articles
Prediction markets have been studied and worked at by the acadamy and researchers for over 20 years.There are many interesting articles, resources & papers out there, so we tried to gather just the very best for you.
Iowa Electronic Markets The researchers at the university of Iowa were probably the first to do something real with prediction markets - they set up the Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM), where they created a market for almost every election held in the US in the last 15-20 years (presidency, congress, governors etc). Interesting fact about these markets - in most of the cases, they got closer to the end results then all the state surveys/polls - and with only ~700 people participating in every market! We should note, that in all cases, even when polls were closer to reality, results were still amazingly close - even a week before the election. See their comparison to polls at http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/archive/BFNR_2000.pdf
Also see their related articles at Results From A Dozen Year Of Election Future Markets.
Does Money Matter Well - The bottom line from this excellent paper is "No, it doesn't". The paper, published at 2004, discusses the importance of using real money in prediction markets, versus other incentives one could give to market participants. The paper shows a few experiments conducted on the subject, and the surprising result is - play-money markets performed just as well as real-money markets!
Automatic Market Maker - LMSR This paper by Robin Hanson provides the theory behind his great invention - his LMSR market maker (or scoring rule), which is the method we use here at Qmarkets for our market trading. If you are looking for a simplified version of this, you can also look at this article by David Penock
Prediction Markets Blogs
Our Blog Our blog covers many aspects of real world uses for prediction markets.Midas Oracle Great Blogs & Other resources about prediction markets. This site, built by Chris F Masse, gives you all the angles of this subject.
Usable Markets UsableMarkets is a blog written by Alex Kirtland, and focuses on design strategy, online markets (specifically prediction markets), and information design.
Mercury's Blog Mercury Research is a consulting company for businesses. Their blog articles offer some good advice on uses for prediction markets in the corporate world.