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 elementsFrom 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 trendsFrom 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 PLCFrom CrowdCast.com
• Fixed Payoff just for trading.
• Payoffs are fixed but interim values are according to crowd beliefs
May 23, 2009
Prediction Markets Cluster. New Yorik City, 24th of April.
May 21, 2009
When launching a Prediction Market…….
When launching a Prediction Market keep in mind…. Well, I liked the thoughts and ideas from Adam Siegel’s INKLING: ONE PREDICTION MARKET PLATFORM PROVIDER’S EXPERIENCE, so I decided to comment on this before our Beta launch in Evidente.
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.