En una prueba privada en donde se invito a la consultoría económica y política GEA Structura, se logro que el mecanismo de mercado de Evidente.com agrupara las opiniones y distintos puntos de vista de conocedores de la materia y reflejara finalmente un precio de mercado que indica la probabilidad con la que sucedería cada unos los eventos que se especificaron.

Los resultados son los siguientes:

Al cierre de la jornada electoral del 5 de julio y antes de que iniciara el conteo oficial del Instituto Federal Electoral en México, la plataforma de Evidente logro pronosticar acertadamente el resultado de cuatro de los seis Eventos donde los participantes apostaron por el resultado final de un Evento.

Como ejemplo, los números finales del los mercados fueron:

• El PAN tenia un 22% de probabilidad de ganar la gobernatura en Nuevo León?
• La candidata por el PRD, Ana Guevara nunca tuvo mas de 40% de probabilidad de ganar la jefatura delegacional de Miguel Hidalgo en la Ciudad de México.
• Que el PT tenia 40% de ganar la jefatura delegacional de Iztapalapa, lo cual finalmente sucedió.

Si bien esta prueba tiene un alcance limitado, la innovadora manera de agrupar la información al permitir que los que participan dentro de la plataforma puedan intercambiar sus puntos de vista de manera rápida y sencilla y que finalmente ganen con ese intercambio, hace que el primer Mercado de Predicción tenga un futuro promisorio.

El Primer Mercado de Predicción en Latinoamérica y las elecciones del 5 de julio en México

En la Plataforma de Evidente toda la información se agrega abiertamente de manera transparente. Los participantes de los mercados pueden ganar al compartir la información que tienen en un determinado momento.

Nos encontramos a unos días de las elecciones de “Medio Tiempo” en México y con un clima político complicado tanto para la ciudadanía como para los partidos políticos, Evidente ofrece por primera vez, una opción para conocer las opiniones y preferencias de un grupo selecto de conocedores políticos al mismo tiempo que agrega esa información en tiempo real.

Se han colocado 6 eventos donde la gente apuesta los unos contra los otros tratando de descifrar la probabilidad de que realmente sucedan.

Los Eventos son:

1.    ¿Ganará el PAN la gobernatura del Estado de Nuevo León en las elecciones del próximo 5 de julio?
2.    ¿Ganará el PT las elecciones a jefe delegacional en Iztapalapa en las elecciones del 5 de julio?
3.    ¿El tipo de cambio (pesos/dólar) al cierre del 5 de julio será mayor a 14 Pesos por dólar?
4.    ¿Conservará el PSD su registro después de las elecciones del 5 de julio?
5.    ¿Ganará Ana Guevara las elecciones para jefe delegacional en la delegación Miguel Hidalgo el próximo 5 de julio?

6.- ¿Regresará como Presidente Manuel Zelaya a Honduras antes del 5 de julio?

En estos últimos días hemos mejorado la plataforma y continuaremos implementando algunos cambios para facilitar el acceso y la interacción dentro de Evidente.com

Evidente tiene nuevos tutoriales en varios Sitios de Social Networking, para una pequeña muestra vean el adelanto:

Evidente.com launched what we called a Private Beta to allow a first interaction of a few selected users inside our platform. We closed on the 10th of June.

Our results where mixed. I wanted to share a brief explanation and follow up of the good the bad and the ugly of what we experienced over these past 2 weeks.

The Good:
•    We finally where able to try out the platform in real terms with real people and in real time.
•    The mechanics behind it are correct and the operations of the DB work fine.
•    The general look and feel got a thumbs up.
•    We learned how much effort it really takes to make people focus their attention for more than 5 minutes straight on one single aspect of our platform.
•    There’s no substitute to finally jump into the cold water to learn how to swim.

The Bad
•    Even as I could say there isn’t a BAD really BAD thing about our experience I could point out that:
•    We need to work hard on the “usability” of the markets
•    We took for granted things we never should have. We missed having clear  “titles” of the objects within.
•    The market dynamics are still a bit slow and we are working on allowing the users a more simple step to buy or sell contracts with a “one touch” or “buy it now” approach.

The Ugly
•    Market participation wasn’t as expected. We hoped to have at least 400 users on our initial Private Beta but people seemed to be a bit more distracted on other issues.
•    The speed of download needs to be improved dramatically and we are working on improving and optimizing the procedures and hopefully in a near future the servers structure.

We are learning and moving fast especially in the days to come as we continue to pay attention to details and focus on market usability. We have the right team and energy levels are high as to keep on moving.

A quick link that will fuel you in the morning. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yetHqWODp0

Stay tuned.

I want to share a few points of the last Prediction Markets Cluster in New York where Evidente participated.

On April 24th Evidente’s team spent the whole day talking about Prediction Markets with the industry leaders and renowned academics. Here it goes:

Find the right audience to make the markets work, this means dispersion and different opinions.

From IEM.
•    Make very visible (bright icon) when the markets closes
•    Visually engage  traders’s  senses
•    Use visual elements

From Newsfutures.com
•    Make bets obvious from start to end
•    The 4 REWARDS that you need to give
o    Recognition
o    Relevance
o    Relationship
o    Reward (Monetary-prize might not be the only reward)
•    Move beyond price when offering prediction services. More than SAS
•    Harvest collective intelligence. Create trends

From Robin Hanson. George Mason University
•    Inputs- Costs (What type of incentives are enough?)
•    Traders are looking for, give them a clear answer to this:
o    How do I express my opinion?
o    What exactly is my influence?
o    What exactly are my incentives?
•    What is it that we are doing to encourage the people to participate and tell us the truth?
•    Create transparency between the users and the platform (That where Evidente comes in)

From Tom Malone.  MIT
•    Mapping the genome of Collective Intelligence
o    What- creates software modules
o    Who-crowd
o    How- by collaborating
o    Why- Reputation- incentives
•    Example of Kasparov Vs the World (http://www.chessgames.com/perl/chessgame?gid=1252350 )
•    http://www.marketocracy.com/
•    The 1-9-90 rule should be modelled in our PLC

From CrowdCast.com
•    Fixed Payoff just for trading.
•    Payoffs are fixed but interim values are according to crowd beliefs

From just a few days of trying out our platform we remain very exited and ready to jump into the water. I liked the experiences and remarks from a veteran in the industry. A few points I recovered to help us have an effective launch at Evidente.com are:

•    Promote “heavy interaction” among everyone in the platform and that includes also Evidente’s Staff.

•      We have prepared a few Pre-Launch information materials but need to frame it in a comprehensive long term marketing campaign.  We are being present more and more in the blogosphere, in social networks, twitter, etc, etc. A few presentations, overview documents, and our first video is being distributed in several sites as we speak.

•       The more the merrier: We couldn’t agree more with this. I know of the importance of liquidity in the  markets and how important is to keep the moral high. So taking some of the estimated numbers from Inkling’s experience we would hope to have around a 65% take-up rate among those who are invited to participate in  our Private Beta in May.

•       Like Siegel’s paper points out “of those that register, a small percentage of traders will be fanatical users, a large percentage will make a few trades per month, and the remaining may make one or two trades in a multi-month period and otherwise have stagnant accounts.”

•       We coincide with Adam in the point that having only one market when launching is a bad idea. We aim to create excitement within the markets and thus our traders will be able to put their money in to different markets, with this we hope to control price volatility in a few of those markets. On the other hand, having 20 markets when only 100 people are participating will decrease the liquidity in each market and invalidate many of the predictions.

Following on some of the “Incentive Strategies for Keeping Traders Interested” mentioned by Siegel I totally agree with the following:

We  are going to have a mix of long-term and short-term Events where the topics vary and will attract experience and ingenuity. We hope to convene into a reliable market price that will be using Evidente’s own algorithm

The name of the game in this first stage is to be clear and precise with our communications strategy. As Adam puts it, we should be “Loud and Often”, showing players their results and how they are standing in the middle of the game.  Evidente will remain an open, dynamic and fresh platform where new markets are added and content is created on a constant basis.

Last but not least let me point out that we have thought of a few strategies to create excitement in Evidente. Not only the cash and price incentives are a clear solution to the indifference problem. Our players will be part of the community, one where competition is important and success is rewarded in different forms.

I can give you just a quick preview of what we have planned….Those first Beta Testers that are invited and are able to create a significant profit on their operations will get first hand access to the opening of the real money platform which will be much more exciting and off course rewarding. I’ll see you guys inside.