I like that you distinguish between the PM software, the market itself, and how the market is used in decision making. I completely agree. Personally I believe you have to work backwards from how the market will be used to eventually get to the software you need to use.

I think public prediction markets can certainly almost always provide informational value to people unfamiliar with a topic; the value to people familiar with an industry/contract may be substantially less, though seeing immediate trends may still be useful.

Finally, I definitely agree with your last point on the corporate world missing opportunities. Fundamentally I think it comes down to the organisational tension: connecting the lower-level employees to the upper management threatens middle management, who like to be the conduit of information. I hope that more successful stories are published in the future about how PM's can in fact put numbers behind key areas of uncertainty in corporations.

Thanks again for your comment!

The software vendors make it sound very easy to set up internal prediction markets. We should keep in mind that the software is but a tool to be used by the prediction market, which is a tool to be used in corporate decision making. The software solution is relatively easy (apart from the choice of mechanism). The hard part is satisfying the necessary conditions (crowd, diversity, independence) for accurate predictions.

Generally, public markets stay open until just before the outcome is revealed. They provide very little useful predictive value, if any. Internal markets must reveal their predictions much earlier, if they are to be useful and become more widely used.

Finally, I believe the corporate world has missed the opportunity to use prediction markets to measure the uncertainty surrounding predictions of key events and conditions (so far, at least). There is very little literature on the use of prediction markets to measure uncertainty. I believe this would be a very valuable use of prediction markets in the corporate world.

I like that you distinguish between the PM software, the market itself, and how the market is used in decision making. I completely agree. Personally I believe you have to work backwards from how the market will be used to eventually get to the software you need to use.

I think public prediction markets can certainly almost always provide informational value to people unfamiliar with a topic; the value to people familiar with an industry/contract may be substantially less, though seeing immediate trends may still be useful.

Finally, I definitely agree with your last point on the corporate world missing opportunities. Fundamentally I think it comes down to the organisational tension: connecting the lower-level employees to the upper management threatens middle management, who like to be the conduit of information. I hope that more successful stories are published in the future about how PM's can in fact put numbers behind key areas of uncertainty in corporations.

Thanks again for your comment!

The software vendors make it sound very easy to set up internal prediction markets. We should keep in mind that the software is but a tool to be used by the prediction market, which is a tool to be used in corporate decision making. The software solution is relatively easy (apart from the choice of mechanism). The hard part is satisfying the necessary conditions (crowd, diversity, independence) for accurate predictions.

Generally, public markets stay open until just before the outcome is revealed. They provide very little useful predictive value, if any. Internal markets must reveal their predictions much earlier, if they are to be useful and become more widely used.

Finally, I believe the corporate world has missed the opportunity to use prediction markets to measure the uncertainty surrounding predictions of key events and conditions (so far, at least). There is very little literature on the use of prediction markets to measure uncertainty. I believe this would be a very valuable use of prediction markets in the corporate world.