Predictify

[undyingking]

Predictify is a newish thing relating to the wisdom of crowds, which longstanding readers might remember I posted a bunch of stuff about a couple of years back.

If you remember my Election Predictor, at the time people made some discussion along the lines that it would be more reliable if predictors were staking small sums of money on the reliability of the overall result, to make them more serious in their predictions. I thought this sounded good in theory, and of course there are plenty of sites where you can do exactly that with real money, but I didn't pursue how you could run it without effectively turning into a betting exchange / futures market.

Predictify though comes up with a solution, which is to use in-game reputation as the stake, with a clever structure of real-world reward underpinning it. And they've made it look a bit like fun, which is quite an achievement in itself.

I'll certainly be giving it a go, just to see if it really works or not. Anyone else interested?

Comments

[thecesspit.livejournal.com]

If you remember my Election Predictor, at the time people made some discussion along the lines that it would be more reliable if predictors were staking small sums of money on the reliability of the overall result, to make them more serious in their predictions. I thought this sounded good in theory, and of course there are plenty of sites where you can do exactly that with real money, but I didn't pursue how you could run it without effectively turning into a betting exchange / futures market.

As I understand it, Betfair have a good record as being an efficent predictor and market for the elections in both the UK and the US. Outliers definitely get punished.

[undyingking.livejournal.com]

They do indeed, but I was thinking it would be nice to be able to get that effect without having to have all the regulatory oversight, lotteries and gaming act, betting tax, etc that they have to labour under because they're using a "betting" mechanism. Which these Predictify guys might be able to manage, I think -- we'll see if their predictions are actually any good when separated (even in their clever way) from real money stakes.