Wednesday, July 23, 2008

Why did you trade that way?

In any Inkling market, traders express their opinions through their trades and in the discussion threads associated with each market.

Now there is an opportunity to capture feedback (optional of course) about why someone traded the way they did for each specific trade. This input is especially helpful to those who are trying to use the prediction market outcome as input to resource allocation decisions, understanding risk probabilities, or simply as input towards strategic decisions.

This new source of free-form information may also help to more easily identify outliers - now both the trade data and anonymous explanations are at a marketplace owner's disposal. Let's say a question is asked about the probability of a quality assurance issue arising in a product about to go on the market. If the market says the probability is low but there are a few people giving specific explanations as to why they feel the opposite, minimally the market owner can begin asking questions and gather more information.

In capturing this information we've tried not to interrupt the simple trading experience. It's just an optional field on the final confirmation screen (click to enlarge):

3 comments:

Andy said...

Isn't this a bad thing? Wisdom of the Crowds suggests that if errors are correlated, the accuracy of information aggregation decreases. Folks who surf this feature and adopt a "me too" market position are not providing the market with an unbiased, individual estimate; they're mimicking someone else's take on the question.

Unknown said...

The input that is captured is private. No other trader sees it so the influence that you talk about doesn't exist. The sole purpose was to give administrators of corporate marketplaces additional insight in to why people were trading the way they were.

Anonymous said...

Numerous people have told me that it totally changed their thinking about trading, investing, and how they approached markets.

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