Guest poster, Justin Wolfers, said a few words recently on the Freakonmics blog about prediction markets at Google. I found the linked Googleblog post, “Putting crowd wisdom to work” quite interesting as it described how Google was “walking their own mission talk”…
At Google, we’re constantly trying to find new ways to organize the world’s information, including information relevant to our business.
This article describes how Google uses prediction markets to forcast product launch dates and other important strategic events. What struck me about the more recent Freakonomics post, however, is that the question changed:
So we decided to move beyond asking, “Do prediction markets work?” and instead use them as a tool for better understanding how information flows within a (very cool) corporation. Information is terrific to theorize about, but hard to measure. That’s where the prediction market is useful: if you and I trade similarly on a market, then we can infer that you share similar information.
Yes! It’s all in the asking the right questions. How often have we improved our understanding of a system or event, just by asking the questions from a different perspective?
