The Prediction Market Search Engine (pmia)
Editor’s note: If someone understands what this Prediction Market search engine does, would you be so kind to leave a comment and explain it to me? Thanks!
Editor’s note: Another reader to the rescue!
Please see Alex’s helpful explanation below.
London (Oct 22 2007) - The recent Prediction Market Summit held in London, UK, concluded with the creation of an international industry association tasked with promoting awareness, education and validation for the rapidly growing field.
“It’s essentially a search that is circumscribed to all the prediction market sites on the internet. As I understand it, it is limited to sites which actually host prediction markets, as opposed to sites that talk about prediction markets (such as UsableMarkets, or MidasOracle).
It’s helpful, of course, if you understand what a prediction market is. Wikipedia has a good description. In short, it’s a betting market about the outcomes of future events, with the prices of specific outcomes (Hillary is the next US president) being equal to the probability of that outcome occurring. If the contract was priced at 25 cents, then the market believes that that outcome has a 25% chance of occurring.
What would be really powerful, but what PMIA search doesn’t do yet, is if you could search for a specific contract - Hillary wins, for example - across all markets which have such a contract, and compare their predictions (or prices). That is something that doesn’t currently exist (although Slate groups together some prediction for political markets), but that people have been looking for.”
November 21st, 2007 at 8:04 am
It’s essentially a search that is circumscribed to all the prediction market sites on the internet. As I understand it, it is limited to sites which actually host prediction markets, as opposed to sites that talk about prediction markets (such as UsableMarkets, or MidasOracle).
It’s helpful, of course, if you understand what a prediction market is. Wikipedia has a good description (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market). In short, it’s a betting market about the outcomes of future events, with the prices of specific outcomes (Hillary is the next US president) being equal to the probability of that outcome occurring. If the contract was priced at 25 cents, then the market believes that that outcome has a 25% chance of occurring.
What would be really powerful, but what PMIA search doesn’t do yet, is if you could search for a specific contract - Hillary wins, for example - across all markets which have such a contract, and compare their predictions (or prices). That is something that doesn’t currently exist (although Slate groups together some prediction for political markets), but that people have been looking for.
~alex
www.usableMarkets.com