Seminar Announcement: Using Prediction Markets in Government

Together with MITRE, the MIT Lean Advancement Initiative, and Iowa State University, we're hosting a day long seminar September 22nd in McLean, VA about using prediction markets in the Federal Government.



Registration is free and we're pretty excited about the agenda we've assembled:

The Lean Enterprise: a vision for collective intelligence in Government
Ricardo Valerdi, MIT
Matthew Potoski, Iowa State University

Using prediction markets to mitigate procurement risk
John Michitson, MITRE

Aggregative Contingency Estimation Program at IARPA
Jason Matheny, IARPA

Prediction markets at Ford Motors
Tom Montgomery, Ford

Using prediction markets to enhance agency open government initiatives
David Rejeski, Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

How to measure the effectiveness of a prediction market
Jon Schuler, MITRE

Getting started: applications and lessons learned
Adam Siegel, Inkling

New Feature - Give someone else karma by "liking" their question or comment

A few months ago we introduced the concept of "karma" to Inkling. We had a lot of ideas at the time, but had quickly moved on to some more pressing things. Unfortunately, the only way to earn karma thus far has been to answer free polls, which some marketplaces have been using, some have not.

Now there's a new way to earn karma - have people "like" your comments and questions. If you're on Facebook, you're already familiar with this concept with the main difference being that we keep what you like anonymous to your peers vs. sharing it with your friends, your friend's friends, your friend's friend's friends. You get the idea. :)

Each time someone "likes" a question you've asked or a comment you've written you earn one karma point. It's as simple as that. Just start looking for the like button and click it to give someone else a karma point.

If this proves to be popular, we'll add the like button in more places and may even introduce a "most liked" leaderboard, but we'll try not to make it too clique-y.

The Overconfidence Problem in Forecasting

An article on Friday in the New York Times highlighted a peculiar problem we've heard about as well. A few of our clients who have studied the responses of different strata in their organization say that upper management who participate in their prediction markets have been proven to have a more optimistic forecast than what reality dictated. And those in the lower levels of the organization tended to have a more pessimistic outlook than reality dictated.

Richard Thayer from the Chicago Booth School of Business discusses the problem on a larger scale here:
NYTimes: The Overconfidence Problem in Forecasting