Swarm Creativity Blog

I just stumbled on this interesting Blog post which compared the predictive quality of the Intrade prediction market to correctly predict this and last year's Oscars. It seems the market picked the winner correctly 11 out of 12 times. Also interesting is the comment by BarTaxCa on the post, noting that depending on which prediction market one picks (HSX, Intrade, Inkling market) prediction differs. So it seems there is still a role to play for analyzing the wisdom of swarms through their Web buzz on IMDB and Rottentomatoes. In fact, what we found is that throwing the two together (prediction market + Web buzz) leads to the best results.

Coolhunt Log #20 Friday, May 11, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT research affiliate with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator MODERATOR: This is the last day of our month-long coolhunt. Could you tell us where you're calling from? SCOTT: I'm calling from my home office in Newton Highlands, MA. PETER: I'm calling from Switzerland. MODERATOR: Today, on our last coolhunt I was hoping we could go over where we've been and talk about where we're going in the future with social networking. Can you tell me what you think about the list of all the sites we've visited that Gary Michael Smith posted last night? PETER: I can't believe we've visited so many sites. SCOTT: I was pretty impressed when I saw the list. MODERATOR: Some of the things that jumped out at me is that we had a very protracted and good discussion abo...

Coolhunt Log #9 Thursday, April 26, 2007 On Stage: Scott Cooper, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Peter Gloor, MIT researcher with the Sloan School of Management, co-author of Coolhunting Steve O'Keefe, moderator Listening in from Sweden is one of the co-authors of the book Design-Inspired Innovation . Leading the Coolhunt today is Peter Gloor. PETER: Today, we're going to talk about prediction markets. A really great example is InTrade. WEB: http://www.intrade.com PETER: Prediction markets are a great way to tap into the wisdom of crowds. Instead of having an expert predicting the outcome of certain events, you have people placing bets on what's going to happen. SCOTT: This ties in with things we've discussed in previous days. The concept of collective intelligence to predict outcomes is similar to what we talked about with "Mutual Fun" at Rite Solutions. Essentially, anything that hits the news that has an outcome ...

Yesterday’s New York Times profiles Intrade.com, a prediction market and betting web site in Ireland. The article makes the point for the wisdom of crowds, where swarms of people putting their money where their mouth is are better in predicting outcomes of political elections than the official polls of TV stations and the like. For example, in the 2004 presidential elections, Intrade correctly predicted the outcome in all 50 states. For the 2008 elections, bets are on…… Hillary Clinton and John McCain as the Democratic and Republican frontrunners (see Intrade snapshots of yesterday) The article got me curious to see what the Web predicts. I ran a TeCFlow coolhunting query on the leading presidential contenders over the last 40 days. The results were somewhat different from Intrade: The first point to notice is that there is no clear frontrunner, at least by Web buzz. Hillary is not doing too well, John Edwards is spoken about more, while Mitt Romney displays a weakness attack even ...