Our public Prediction Market spin-off CROWDPARK is now in its beta phase! CROWDPARK is backed by a single-digit million Euro Series A financing of international Venture Capital firm Earlybird. While CROWDPARK uses Prediction Market algorithms its primary goal is not forecasting but being a social game – hence the tag line The Social Forecasting Game.
The idea is much closer to Social Gaming concepts, where players compete against each other, than to forecasting. In PMs players compete with each other as well but the forecast design of CROWDPARK is markedly different – not only visually – from that of PMs, e.g. a market stays open up until the underlying event is public knowledge. The goal of such a design is to engage players in playing against each other while the event is transpiring. The video below shows how this triggers much more activity from players than a market which closes right before the event.
The video shows how the forecast for a popular German game show develops over time. The show is about two candidates who compete in a series of trials and games against each other for a grand final prize. In on of the trials the blue candidate has an accident and which immediately triggers activity on the corresponding CROWDPARK market. The accident leaves the blue candidate with a handicap but as he recovers and even wins some of the subsequent challenges in other games (marked with white circles on the blue line) this triggers even more activity on CROWDPARK. Eventually the blue player is on a loosing track (last white circle) and CROWDPARK players also start loosing confidence in him.
As a forecast this market would not be very useful, but as a game it is much more interesting as demonstrated by the activity on CROWDPARK.
Currently, CROWDPARK is only available in German but soon the game will launch internationally together with the official launch of CROWDPARK. If you like CROWDPARK you can become a fan Facebook.
Harvard University is hosting the 11th ACM conference on E-Commerce this summer June 7-11. It’s interesting to see that Prediction Markets are gaining more and more momentum as six (!) out of 45 conference papers are about Prediction Markets.
Some of the PM papers are about new algorithms others about practical experiments. The focus of the conference is more on the scientific side and therefore perhaps best suited for PM scientists who want to meet in an trans-disciplinary environment. Enjoy the conference!
Analyx U.S. is the sponsor of this week’s M.I.T. Enterprise Forum Master Class on trust and performance in social media. Chris Brogan, best-selling author of Trust Agents, is going to share his expertise on such topics as “How to measure the ROI of social media?” and “How to use various social media channels in business?”.
You can view the full master class at by signing up for free on AuthorsGlobe’s website who hosts the virtual master classes of the M.I.T. Enterprise Forum.
Incentives are a powerful and popular way in business to achieve ones business goals, be it in HR (performance-based salary components), in operations or projects (bonuses for on-time delivery), in logistics (penalties for delays), Marketing (loyalty cards) and many other areas. Principal-agent theory, game theory, mechanism design are just some of the established research areas in business and economics which deal with incentives.
While incentives are well established in the business world, it seems, that games are not. Games are incentive systems, too, but the image of not being serious business has unfortunately prevented us from applying the powerful and popular incentive mechanism of gaming to the business world.
In a recent blog post on gigaom one can learn about how games and game concepts are starting to spill over into other areas of everyday life and work. Read this post if you want to have a look into the future of the work place where healthy game concepts could help boost performance as well as job satisfaction among workers!
Prediction Markets are but one way of introducing incentives in the work place. The success of Prediction Markets demonstrates how the right incentive structure can easily and quickly yield large benefits.
Incentives in the work place are coming and they are coming to stay with more and more graduates being brought up in a culture of gaming this culture will become more and more accepted and even expected at the work place of the future … and even of today ….
Heute ist ein Interview mit Alex Ivanov zum Thema Crowdsourcing in Unternehmen im besser2.0-Blog der T-Systems Multimedia Solutions erschienen. In dem Artikel werden die Erfolgsfaktoren für Crowdsourcing mit Prognosemärkten (auch bekannt als Prognosebörsen) diskutiert und zahlreiche Anwendungsbeispiele vorgestellt.
Ein weiterer Schwerpunkt des Interviews sind auch die Herausforderungen, die es zu beachten gilt, wenn ein Unternehmen seine ersten Schritte in Richtung internes Crowdsourcing unternimmt. Den kompletten Text erreichen Sie durch Klick auf das obige Bild. Wir wünschen viel Spaß beim lesen!
This weekend we had the honor to give a presentation in front of the young leaders forum of the Warsaw School of Economics. The school is the most prestigious business school in Poland and is renown for its rigor in quantitative teaching and research.
This was the second time an invitation was extended to us to present in front of Alumni and graduate students after 2008. Our presentation lecture lasted 3.5 hours – how did we keep people from falling asleep? Of course prediction markets were one of the topics which fascinated people but the lecture covered the full range of topics which Analyx, the home company of CrowdWorx, is engaged with. These topics include diverse field such as market research, business analytics, data warehouses, reporting systems, econometric modeling, agent-based modeling and computer simulation and optimization methods. All of which can be subsumed under the topic of business analytics.
If you are interested to find out more about Analyx, please visit our web site at Analyx.com. We wish to thank all the participants of our lecture for the lively discussions at Warsaw School of Economics and are looking forward to our next visit there!
Tags: workshop Posted on March 4th, 2010 by admin in Events |
We took the time to pick the best slides we have for presenting prediction markets to a business audience without prior knowledge of the topic and decided to share them on the web. The slides are available at slideshare.com and are optimized for being viewed in the standard slideshare.com preview window.
We hope that these slides can make a small contribution towards spreading the word about PMs and helping people understand what PMs are all about and they can be used in business forecasting. Enjoy the (slide) show.
A while a go we have reported about the start of Prediction Market forecasting with a global FMCG client here. After a preparation phase, which included the tailoring of our CrowdWorx system to the existing forecasting process of the client, we are now proud to present first results from the introductory phase of this CrowdWorx implementation.
Each week various products have been forecasted. Looking at the weekly MAPE (Mean Absolute Percentage Error) one can recognize how CrowdWorx outperforms the internal forecasts. The average MAPE is 22.5% for CrowdWorx and 38.0% for the internal forecast. CrowdWorx also handled the difficult-to-predict sales around the bustling Christmas period in calendar weeks 49-53 well, outperforming the internal forecast in 4 out of 5 weeks.
Prediction Markets are known to get better over time after participants have gotten used to the new tool and with the best forecasters having accumulated a large amount of play-money along them to exert larger influence on the forecasts than poor forecasters. Our results are excellent and relevant already but we hope to be able to improve even more as CrowdWorx progresses into the client’s forecasting process.
We’re looking forward to reporting more exciting news about the performance of our prediction markets!
Vor einiger Zeit hatten wir hier über den Workshop „Kollektive Intelligenz“ am Stuttgart Management Institute (SMI) berichtet auf dem auch eines unserer Projekte vorgestellt wurde. Nun ist das zugehörige Paper im Tagungsband des Workshops erschienen.
Das Paper berichtet über die Erfahrungen bei der Einführung von Prognosemärkten (auch bekannt als Prognosebörse) bei einem Einzelhändler. Die Prognose-Teilnehmer sind die Filialleiter des über 1000 Filialen zählenden Vertriebsnetzes des Klienten. Neben den theoretischen und organisatorischen Aspekten wird in dem Bericht auch den Ergebnissen der Prognosen weiter Raum eingeräumt. Das Paper schließt mit der Feststellung, dass Prognosemärkte in der Lage sind, die Unsicherheit bei Entscheidungen einzufangen und in sinnvolle Handlungsempfehlungen umzusetzen.
Der Tagungsband ist im Verlag Steinbeis-Edition Stuttgart/Berlin erschienen und kann im Buchhandel bezogen werden.
In this month’s edition of the German Technology Review magazine CrowdWorx has received some coverage in a piece about Prediction Markets.
The article cites various cases of PM applications and also reflects on possible avenues for wide PM adoption. Sascha Stürze, CEO of Analyx - the maker of CrowdWorx, points out his views on how to make PM a success and comments on the future of PM.
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