A few updates…
March 26th, 2007If you're new here, you may want to get Mercury's Blog by Email or subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!
I’d like to bring your attention to a few things in the prediction market industry that you may or may not be aware of already.
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First, in the run-up to the 2008 United States presidential election, Slate magazine has created a webpage where you can compare the current prices / probabilities of each candidate winning their party primary as well as the prices / probabilities for winning the general election. Data comes from both the Iowa Electronic Markets and InTrade. (I believe they expect to integrate Casual Observer data once those markets are set up. Their website seems to be in a bit of a revision right now.) While the page layout could be a little bit cleaner, it certainly does show some interesting data. Perhaps the most intriguing issue is how InTrade and IEM deal with the candidates selected.
IEM only has contracts for Clinton, Obama, Edwards, and Field. InTrade also lists contracts for several more candidates (such as Richardson, Gore, etc.). When comparing them side-by-side, the results are interesting. Clinton keeps the same level of support across the IEM and InTrade, (43.5 and 48, respectively), but Obama has significantly different levels of support (43.7 on IEM and 29.4 on InTrade). Part of this can perhaps be explained by those extra candidates the InTrade allows trading on; Al Gore is currently priced just above 10. I’ll let you draw whatever conclusions you might draw from this data. My take is that in the more mature markets (IEM, which has been around for a lot longer and the limits on accounts mean less potential manipulation) Hillary and Barack are neck-and-neck for the Democratic nomination.
The same effect can be seen on the Republican nomination to a lesser degree. Guilani has less support on IEM than InTrade (about 8 points), where Romney has about 2 points more support on IEM than InTrade.
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Secondly, the Journal of Prediction Markets has published its first issue! This is quite an exciting development for prediction markets in my opinion. Hopefully it will spur additional research and visibility into these quite powerful tools. The editor is Leighton Vaughn Williams from the Nottingham Business School, and the Journal is published by the University of Buckingham Press right here in the UK.
I’m also quite happy to announce that you will find an article that I wrote in this inaugural issue. It examines small-scale prediction markets and discusses accuracy, behaviours, and other elements that are critical for success. I believe there is a free trial period for the Journal if you click here. Otherwise, please check out the website for the Journal of Prediction Markets here, and click here to see the rather esteemed Editorial Board.
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Finally, the Second Workshop on Prediction Markets will be held in San Diego on June 12, 2007. It’s part of the ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC’07), which takes place from June 11-14th. I currently plan on attending, and hope to see many of you out there. It does have a more academic tilt than some other conferences, but should be very worthwhile. You can check out their website for more details, and I certainly recommend attending if you can.
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On a final cultural note, today was the unofficial UK National Workout Day. As the first Monday after changing to Daylight Savings Time, today was the first day that you could come home after work where it was still light out. Perhaps it’s because I live near the walking/cycling path on the Thames, but it was absolutely incredible how many people were out running/jogging/walking tonight!
There’s only one other time I’ve seen that many people out working out at once; last year right after the switchover. After the first day, enthusiasm just isn’t as high, and you never see the same number of people out at once again.