Monday
Sep292008
The free-market, more accurate than polls?
Monday, September 29, 2008 at 11:12AM HubDub is a great company based in Edinburgh (where I used to live), who apply the principles of the free market to predicting the outcomes of news stories. I've had a good chat with them, and they say that their market tends to be spookily accurate. I've heard anecdotal evidence that when this type of market is applied to predicting when internal projects will be completed within Microsoft, they were universally more pessimistic, and more accurate, than the project manager's estimates.
Here is the current prediction for who will win the US Presidential election, right now it has Obama winning (phew!). It will be interesting to look back and see how accurate it was in retrospect:
Reader Comments (3)
HubDub is a new and web 2.0ish entrant, but there's lots of data on prediction market accuracy over the last several election cycles (primarily of the Iowa Electronic Markets and Intrade), and at least one paper on the accuracy of political betting pools early in the last century.
See http://www.chrisfmasse.com/3/3/research/ for a fairly comprehensive list of papers on the topic.
Colored as undecided; Indiana, North Carolina and Florida have more than 0 electoral votes.
But they've been counted for Obama in the 538 total.
So the map is stupid.
And switch of red to blue for the commie dems since the 1996 network election coverage doesn't fool anybody either.
A sail veering about the blank bay waiting for a swollen designer sunglasses wholesale bundle to bob up, roll over to the sun a puffy replica sunglasses wholesale face, salt white. Here I am. They followed the winding path down to the creek. Buck Mulligan stood on a stone, in shirtsleeves, his wholesale cheap sunglasses unclipped tie rippling over his shoulder. A young man clinging to a spur of rock near him moved slowly frogwise his green sunglass wholesale legs in the deep jelly of the water. Buck Mulligan sat down to unlace his wholesale oakley sunglasses boots. An elderly man shot up near the spur of rock a blowing red sunglasses for wholesale face. He scrambled up by the stones, water glistening on his fashion sunglasses wholesale pate and on its garland of grey hair, water rilling over his chest and paunch and spilling jets out of his wholesale sunglasses china black sagging loincloth.