Chicago QWAFAFEW and the IIT Stuart School's Center for Financial Innovation present a special election week event on prediction markets. The speakers will be Koleman Stumpf, Professsor of Economics at the Univeristy of Kanasas School of Business, and Adam Siegel, CEO and Co-Founder of Cultivate Labs. Prediction markets allow realtime information and belief aggregation. The markets for the U.S. presidential elections offer a striking test of prediction markets and their potential limitations, but perhaps only the barest hint of their future applications.
Prediction markets respond much more quickly than polls, and generally generate similar results. Compare, for example, current odds for the U.S. presidential election at BetFair, ElectionBettingOdds and PredictWise with the RealClearPolitics poll averages. Prediction markets do not need pollsters, are much less sensitive to the wording of quesitons and have no sampling strategies. On the other hand, their participants are self-selected, markets may be unduly influenced by large bettors and more easily subject to manipulation. One recent analysis concludes that electoral prediction markets were very effective before modern polling, but now largely follow polling results. Our speakers will give us insight regarding role prediction markets may play in our future.
Koleman Stumpf will address the following questions:
- What are prediction markets and what is the evidence that they work?
- What do we know about political prediction markets?
- How do prediction markets compare to other forecasting mechanisms like raw or smoothed polls?
- Have there been big political prediction market failures?
- How did prediction markets fare during the 2016 election?
Adam Siegel will address the following topics:
- How information overload, technological disruption, and a changing global workforce are forcing fundamental changes in corporate structure
- An overview of how companies are currently using crowdsourced forecasting
- A case study on Shell and how they’re using prediction markets in their Global Exploration group
- How Cultivate Labs expects companies to use prediction markets in the future
Speaker biographies:
Koleman Strumpf is a Professor of Economics at the University of Kansas School of Business and prior to that at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. He is currently associate editor of the Journal of Prediction Markets. Koleman's research spans a variety of applied microeconomics topics including prediction markets, file sharing, tax evasion, and health economics and has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Journal of Economic Perspectives. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, the Economist, NPR, and ABC News. His undergraduate degree is from Stanford University and he has a PhD is from MIT.
Adam Siegel is the CEO and Co-Founder of Cultivate Labs. He has been working in the crowdsourcing space for 10 years since starting his first company, Inkling Inc., in 2006. Inkling, funded by Y Combinator, focused on crowdsourced forecasting using prediction markets. Cultivate Labs recently acquired Inkling to focus on internal crowdsourcing as a way to optimize the insights and knowledge of current teams. Before becoming an entrepreneur, Adam spent a decade as a management and innovation consultant at Accenture in the Accenture Technology Labs. Adam lives in Chicago, IL and loves spending as much time as possible in cafes drinking overpriced coffee and reading the paper, trailing his 3 year old daughter helplessly as she wreaks havoc, or escaping Chicago to go hiking and camping.