Indian state Gujarat election prediction market pilot launched as precursor to 2019 general election

By Adam Siegel on November 28, 2017

We're excited to be working with Idealantis, a startup based in Hyderabad, India on a prediction market pilot about the upcoming Gujarat state elections. Working with research organization People's Pulse, Idealantis has launched this test as a precursor to a country-wide effort for the general elections coming in 2019. 

Thinking about how to proliferate a prediction market in India is very different than in the U.S. or Western Europe, and I'm excited to work with Idealantis to see where we can take this. Specifically, I expect they will take advantage of our API to build a custom mobile app and basic SMS interfaces to ensure that the broadest possible audience can participate.

One issue the pilot has uncovered is the general population's unfamiliarity with our prediction interface. 

Our current method simply asks people for a probability. We then either craft a prediction market trade for them, or they can create a trade independent of the probability value they've given us. This design has been generally well received thus far, and gives us the ability to collect specific probabilities from people (which then allows us to perform accuracy calculations using Brier scoring.) 

But some people have found this method to be more of a cognitive load, especially if they are only making one or two predictions and not participating on an ongoing basis. As an alternative we are discussing whether our former interface (back when we were a company called Inkling) would be easier for a broad audience. In that interface, users were told the current crowd consensus probability, then asked how much higher or lower they thought it should be. In plain language: "a little higher," "higher," "much higher" etc. This interface, if resurrected, would be going on 14 years since we first introduced it, but like a fine wine, maybe it has only gotten better with age. :) 

In the meantime, here is some nice press coverage on the Idealantis pilot, and you can try out the pilot here.   

• The Hindu: Crowdsourced election predictor launched
  
• Business Standard: Hyderabad start-up launched crowdsourced results predictor
• Sakshi Post: People's Pulse to deploy crowdsourced election predictor for Gujarat elections

You might also be interested in: Attempted Manipulation of our French Election Prediction Market - Here's What we Learned.

Blog Post By: Adam Siegel

CEO, Co-Founder

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