Philadelphia Future Salon - Prediction Markets October 3, 2006

Prediction Markets are an important emerging phenomenon in social finance where millions of users log their predictions of the outcomes of a variety of events ranging from political elections to microprocessor wars to celebrity status. Either fictitious or real money is used to keep score. The crowd wisdom of prediction markets often beats more traditional forecasting methods.

Prediction Markets examples:
http://buzz.research.yahoo.com
http://www.ideosphere.com/
http://www.biz.uiowa.edu/iem/
http://www.longbets.org/
http://hedgestreet.com/

FUTURE SALON SPEAKER:
Dr. Justin Wolfers, Wharton School of Business, University of Pennsylvania
http://bpp.wharton.upenn.edu/jwolfers

FUTURE SALON TOPIC:
Professor Wolfers will discuss the emerging field of "Prediction Markets," analyzing the extent to which simple markets can be used to aggregate disperse information into efficient forecasts of unknown future events. The talk draws together data from a range of prediction contexts including financial markets, sports, politics and entertainment, and will argue that market-generated forecasts are typically fairly accurate, and outperform most moderately sophisticated benchmarks.

COST: Free and open to the public. No registration necessary.

NEXT MEETING:
Weds, Nov 8: Virtual Worlds design and entrepreneurship with Tim Allen from www.SLBoutique.com

THE SALON:
The Philadelphia Future Salon is part of a nationwide network of future salons discussing cutting edge science and technology innovations and their implications: http://accelerating.org/futuresalon.html

Official Website: http://groups.google.com/group/PhiladelphiaFutureSalon