Prediction market

Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. Assets are created whose final cash value is tied to a particular event (e.g., will the next US president be a Republican) or parameter (e.g., total sales next quarter). The current market prices can then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. Other names for prediction markets include information markets, decision markets, idea futures, and virtual markets.

Introduction

People who buy low and sell high are rewarded for improving the market prediction, while those who buy high and sell low are punished for degrading the market prediction. Evidence so far suggests that prediction markets are at least as accurate as other institutions predicting the same events with a similar pool of participants.

Public examples include Intrade[1],TradeSports, the Iowa Electronic Markets, NewsFutures, Hollywood Stock Exchange and HedgeStreet. One of the oldest and most famous is the University of Iowa's Iowa Electronic Market. Since 1988, it has predicted the results of American presidential elections more accurately than traditional polls 75 percent of the time. The Hollywood Stock Exchange, a virtual market game established in 1996, in which players buy and sell prediction shares of movies, actors, directors, and film-related options, correctly predicted 35 of 2005's 40 big-category Oscar nominees and 7 out of 8 top category winners. HedgeStreet, designated in 2004 as a market and regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, enables internet traders to speculate on economic events.

These markets actually have a long and colorful lineage. Betting on elections was common in the U.S. until at least the 1940s, with formal markets existing on Wall Street in the months leading up to the race. Newspapers reported market conditions to give a sense of the closeness of the contest in this period prior to scientific polling. The markets involved thousands of participants, had millions of dollars in volume in current terms, and had remarkable predictive accuracy. See Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf (2004) [2] for additional details.

In July 2003, the U.S. Department of Defense publicized a Policy Analysis Market and on their website speculated that additional topics for markets might include terrorist attacks. A critical backlash quickly denounced the program as a "terrorism futures market" and the Pentagon hastily cancelled the program.

Prediction markets were championed in James Surowiecki's 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds.

Prediction markets are rapidly becoming useful decision support tools for corporations. Several major companies in the US and in Europe are current users of internal prediction markets (source: [3]).

Theoretical challenges

Some academic research has focused on potential flaws with the prediction market concept. In particular, Dr. Charles F. Manksi of the Northwestern University Department of Economics published a paper in 2004, “Interpreting the Predictions of Prediction Markets”, [4] in which he attempts to show mathematically that under a wide range of assumptions the "predictions" of such markets do not closely correspond to the actual probability beliefs of the market participants unless the market probability is near either 0 or 1. Manski suggests that directly asking a group of participants to estimate probabilities may lead to better results. However, Steven Gjerstad (Purdue) in his paper "Risk Aversion, Beliefs, and Prediction Market Equilibrium" [5] has shown that prediction market prices are typically very close to the mean belief of market participants if the distribution of beliefs is smooth (as with a normal distribution, for example). Justin Wolfers (Wharton) and Eric Zitzewitz (Stanford) have obtained similar results, and also include some analysis of prediction market data, in their paper "Interpreting Prediction Market Prices as Probabilities" [6]. In practice, the prices of binary prediction markets have proven to be closely related to actual frequencies of event in the real world. Relevant data has been published in Pennock et al's "The real power of artificial markets" [7] (Science, 2001) and Servan-Schreiber et al's "Prediction Markets: Does Money Matter?" [8] (Electronic Markets, 2004).

Prediction markets also suffer from the same types of inaccuracy as other kinds of market, i.e. liquidity or other factors not intended to be measured are taken into account as risk factors by the market participants, distorting the market probabilities. There can also be direct attempts to manipulate such markets. In the Tradesports 2004 presidential markets there was an apparent manipulation effort (an anonymous trader sold short so many Bush 2004 presidential futures contracts that the price was driven to zero, implying a zero percent chance that Bush would win. The only rational purpose of such a trade would be an attempt to manipulate the market in a strategy called a "bear raid". The manipulation effort failed, however, as the price of the contract rebounded rapidly to its previous level.) As more press attention is paid to prediction markets, it is likely that more groups will be motivated to manipulate them. However, in practice, such attempts at manipulation have always proven to be very short lived. In their paper entitled "Information Aggregation and Manipulation in an Experimental Market" (2005) [9], Hanson, Oprea and Porter (George Mason U), show how attempts at market manipulation in fact end up increasing the accuracy of the market because they provide that much more profit incentive to bet against the manipulator.

Prediction markets may also be subject to speculative bubbles. For example in the year 2000 IEM presidential futures markets a flood of new traders in the final week of the election caused the market to gyrate wildly, making its "predictions" useless.

A common belief among economists and the financial community in general is that prediction markets based on play money cannot possibly generate credible predictions. However, the data collected so far disagrees. Pennock et al (Science, 2001) analyzed data from the Hollywood Stock Exchange and the Foresight Exchange and concluded that market prices predicted actual outcomes and/or outcome frequencies in the real world. Servan-Schreiber et al (Electronic Markets, 2004) compared an entire season's worth of NFL predictions from NewsFutures' play-money exchange to those of Tradesports, an equivalent real-money exchange based in Ireland. Both exchanges performed equally well. In this case, using real money did not lead to better predictions.

Some experimental systems are underway to provide data on alternatives to prediction markets that seek to avoid some of the theoretical pitfalls mentioned earlier. For example, polling firm TIPP Online has experimented with "national zeitgeist" questions which ask participants who they think will win rather than who they will vote for personally. This proved to be a more stable and accurate predictor in the 2004 US presidential race than traditional polls. Another experimental system is Owise which directly asks participants to estimate probabilities on a wide range of future events, and rewards accurate performance with status, titles, and small cash prizes. Owise functions as a hive mind or a kind of neural network in which each "neuron" is a human being whose predictions are assigned a weight based on past performance. In fact, this is not so different from what naturally happens in a prediction market where those who make good predictions do profit at the expense of those who make bad predictions, thus progressively increasing their relative influence on the market through how much money they can bring to bear to back up their predictions. There is currently not enough data and history to check how these alternatives will compare to prediction markets in terms of forecasting ability.

Some kinds of prediction markets may create poor incentives. For example, a market predicting the death of a world leader might be quite useful for those whose activities are strongly related to this leader's policies, but it also might turn into an assassination market.

Adding to the chorus of those who question the powers of markets to predict outcomes is Hollywood Stock Exchange creator, Max Keiser, who, summing up his views in a letter published in the Financial Times suggests that not only are these markets no more predictive than their established counterparts, such as the New York Stock Exchange and the London Stock Exchange, and that reducing unpredictability of markets would mean reducing risk and, therefore, reducing the amount of speculative capital needed to keep markets open and liquid.

Commercial interest

Hewlett-Packard pioneered applications in sales forecasting and now uses prediction markets in several business units. Mentioned in academic publications from HP Labs. Also mentioned in Newsweek [10] (October 2004)
Corning, Eli Lilly, Abbott Labs, Siemens, Masterfoods, Arcelor Mittal and other global companies are listed [11] as NewsFutures customers.
Intel mentioned in Harvard Business Review (April 2003) in relation to managing manufacturing capacity.
Microsoft is piloting prediction markets internally.
France Telecom's Project Destiny has been in use since mid-2004, with very successful predictive behaviour.
Google has confirmed that it uses a predictive market internally in its official blog [12].
The WSJ reported (June 2006) that GE uses prediction market software from Consensus Point to generate new business ideas.
BusinessWeek [13] (August, 2006) lists MGM and Lionsgate Studios as two of HSX's clients.
Abbott Labs, O'Reilly Media, and the Institute for the Future are listed as Inkling Customers.
Companies trying to promote innovation by leveraging employee pool to do both idea creation and idea selection (based on The Wisdom of Crowds) could do so through targeted prediction marketplace tools developed by InnovateUs
HSX built and operated a televised virtual stock market, the Interactive Music Exchange, for Fuse Network [14] to be used as the basis of their daily live television broadcast, IMX, which ran from January, 2003 through July, 2004. The television audience traded virtual stocks of artists/videos/songs, and predicted which would make it to the top of the Billboard music charts. The first of its kind, Fuse Network and HSX won an AFT Enhanced TV (American Film Institute) Award [15] for innoviation in television interactivity.
HSX built and ran the Ultimate Hustler Xchange [16] for Black Entertainment Television, as a prediction site for audiences to forecast who would be the winner of a 16 week reality Television Show contest.

Online prediction exchanges

These are also known as "event-driven futures exchanges" in the U.S. and "betting exchanges" in the UK.

Real money

TradeSports - Ireland, E.U.
Intrade - Ireland, E.U.
Betfair - UK, E.U.
Iowa Electronic Markets - U.S.A. (no-action letter from CFTC)
HedgeStreet - U.S.A. (regulated by CFTC)
UBC Election Stock Market - Canada
BETDAQ - Ireland, E.U.
SpreadFair - UK, E.U. (regulated by UK's Financial Services Authority)
De Politieke Aandelenmarkt - Holland (de Volkskrant / NewsFutures)
Poolitics - U.S.A.

Play money

Foresight Exchange Canada
NewsFutures U.S.A. + E.U.
Inkling U.S.A.
CrowdIQ U.S.A.
PublicGyan India
The simExchange U.S.A.
Yahoo! Tech Buzz Game U.S.A.
Hollywood Stock Exchange U.S.A.
Washington Stock Exchange U.S.A.
ProTrade Sports U.S.A.
World Economic Forum's Global Risks Prediction Market (powered and web-hosted by NewsFutures) Switzerland
Cenimar U.S.A.
Serotonin Software Prediction Markets Canada
RealityMarkets.com U.S.A.
Trendio.com English and French versions
My-Currency (in Alpha; San Francisco, CA USA housing only)
Nyhedsspillet (powered by Nosco) Denmark
ABC-7 Futures Market