Cultivate Labs Blog

Discussing how crowd forecasting, internal crowdfunding, and other new workplace trends can be used to improve the #futureofwork

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By Ben Golden on Sep 28, 2015

Does TruthCoin Solve A Problem?

I've been following the development of TruthCoin, a platform for decentralized prediction markets, for a while now. Prediction markets at their core are about crowdsourcing forecasts. At Cultivate Labs, we've also built a platform to crowdsource question authorship. TruthCoin goes one step further and crowdsources question resolution.

By Ben Golden on Sep 21, 2015

Forecasting Atrocities

Holly Ramer has a piece up at the Washington Post about our work with the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum to identify risks of mass violence in different countries:

By Adam Siegel on Sep 17, 2015

Nation of Insecurity

In society’s harsh klieg light, if you’re not a world class athlete with multiple Super Bowl rings, your company isn’t worth a billion dollars, you don't have rock hard abs 3 months after having a baby, or you’re a politician polling in single digits, you’re “middling.” 20 years ago, it was unheard of to meet anyone who had run a marathon, and rarer still to meet anyone who had completed an Ironman. Now you’re lucky to get a “nice job” on Facebook.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

By Adam Siegel on Aug 20, 2015

An Unintended Consequence of Profit Sharing

When Ben and I started Cultivate and talked about the core tenets we wanted the company to follow, one was to have people we worked with share in the profit the company was generating outside of any normal compensation. But that may be having some unintended consequences.

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.

By Vanessa Pineda on Aug 16, 2015

The Simple Answer to Change Management

“How do we get people to do things?” It was only the first week at my new job here at Cultivate Labs when a client asked about how to increase participation in their prediction market. It’s the million-dollar question that undoubtedly comes up in every work project that requires any sort of change management effort... ever.

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.

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.

By Ben Golden on Jul 23, 2015

When Intuition 'Trumps' Analysis

In growing my Inkling score from five thousand to ten million Inkles, one of the most important questions was related to the number of points each team would score in the most recent NBA season. The question asked about the difference between each team's points and the average of all teams.

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.

By Ben Golden on Jul 16, 2015

The Best Is Not Enough

Barry Ritholtz has written a curious column titled The 'Wisdom of Crowds' Is Not That Wise for Bloomberg View, which criticizes prediction markets. This is not a new view for Ritholtz, as he reminds us by linking to six blog posts critical of prediction markets each written by...Barry Ritholtz. Indeed Ritholtz has made it his mission to find instances of prediction markets 'failing', and has found six of them.

By Ben Golden on Jul 02, 2015

I, Benthinkin

The challenge was daunting—Inkling users start with five thousand Inkles--while the top forecasters have accrued hundreds of millions (in one case billions).

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