Cultivate Labs Blog
Discussing how crowd forecasting, internal crowdfunding, and other new workplace trends can be used to improve the #futureofwork
By Ben Golden on Sep 14, 2015
Evaluating Accuracy Effect By Percentile
In my last post analyzing my own forecasting history on Inkling Markets, I showed that I was consistently identifying long-shot bets that were more likely to pay off than their existing probability would suggest. In this post, I'll look at how my forecasts improve the accuracy of these markets, calculating how many the change in component Brier score within different percentiles.
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By Ben Golden on Sep 11, 2015
Evaluating User Forecasts By Percentile
To analyze forecasts' accuracy, I looked specifically at forecasts that crossed percentile thresholds, and then examined how often the result being forecast actually occurred.
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By Ben Golden on Sep 09, 2015
Usually Wrong Can Be Right
We're developing some new tools to analyze forecasters' performance, biases, and ways to help them improve, and I've been digging into my own forecasting history on Inkling. I've focused on a set of 3,343 forecasts I've made in questions that use an LMSR algorithm and have already resolved. The first interesting finding is that most of my forecasts have been wrong.
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By Ben Golden on Aug 31, 2015
What Ashley Madison Can Teach About Prediction Markets
(You know, besides how to cheat...)The recent hack of Ashley Madison--a dating service marketed towards married people--revealed that almost no women were actively using the site. Rather, the site's almost entirely male userbase was paying to interact with non-existent, fake, or inactive female accounts.
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By Ben Golden on Aug 20, 2015
Gaming Prediction Markets
Prediction markets are generally very good at generating accurate forecasts, but a key secondary challenge is to determine which forecasters are contributing most to forecast accuracy. User scores are closely linked to their accuracy because the underlying market mechanism rewards users when they move a forecast closer to its actual result and penalizes them when they move the forecast away from the result.
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By Ben Roesch on Aug 16, 2015
Crowdsourced Forecasting & Why it's the Best Forecasting Tool Around
What is Crowdsourced Forecasting and Why is it the Best Forecasting Tool Around? Francis Galton was an English scientist who believed in the stupidity of the average human. Galton believed that, to have a healthy society, you needed to concentrate power in the select few who didn't fit that bill.
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By Ben Golden on Aug 06, 2015
Someone Has To Win
On December 7 of last year, the Carolina Panthers were 3-8-1 and I spent about 1100 Inkles forecasting that they would make the playoffs. Even at long odds, this may seem like wasted Inkles--I'm pretty sure that a 3-8-1 had never gone on to make the playoffs. But there were a couple other important factors.
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By Ben Golden on Jul 23, 2015
Pundits and Prediction Markets
As I've become more involved with prediction markets, I've grown increasingly frustrated with journalists who make predictions (aka pundits) without linking to prediction market questions. This is, in my opinion, lousy journalism, and insulting to readers.
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By Ben Golden on Jul 17, 2015
Enterprise Crowdsourcing: A Primer
When my grandmother immigrated to the United States, she couldn't afford to call her family on the telephone. That was about 70 years ago. Today, I have a friend whose brother moved to Sri Lanka to become a Buddhist monk and literally lives in a cave. He and his family Skype. This is the power of the Internet--for a significant portion of the planet, it's now possible for any two people to communicate from anywhere, in real-time, basically for free.
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