This is really good, thanks! I am a fellow fan of prediction markets and have been puzzled by their slow adoption, so I really appreciate this comprehensive and honest look at some of their drawbacks.
Seems like some key interventions might be:
As always, making prediction markets more legal / less banned...
You talk about how teamwork philosophies like scrum/agile/etc, and techniques like kanban boards and issue tracking and internal company wikis, have really good polished software tools (like gitlab) but prediction markets don’t. Seems like there is a good opening for a gitlab-like company to handle the regulatory/legal issues and offer a prediction market solution that could be adapted for companies’ specific situations? Idk if anything is happening in that space or has been tried before.
You say, “Sales are important but forecasting sales might not be as important. In particular, forecasting sales might not meaningfully help increase them.” That makes total sense. But I gotta wonder… this is just begging for the classic futarchy technique of conditional prediction markets! Just like predicting “what will USA GDP be under a republican president ” / “GDP under a democrat”, just predict sales conditional on marketing strategy A versus marketing strategy B! Obviously this turns up the complexity required for an endeavor that is already clunky and unfamiliar… but it could be worthwhile especially if some of the complexity could be handled by a Gitlab-style company.
Hey, I appreciate this comment. I’ve shared this post with a few prediction markets people; we’ll see if any of them want to become the Gitlab of prediction markets.
This is really good, thanks! I am a fellow fan of prediction markets and have been puzzled by their slow adoption, so I really appreciate this comprehensive and honest look at some of their drawbacks.
Seems like some key interventions might be:
As always, making prediction markets more legal / less banned...
You talk about how teamwork philosophies like scrum/agile/etc, and techniques like kanban boards and issue tracking and internal company wikis, have really good polished software tools (like gitlab) but prediction markets don’t. Seems like there is a good opening for a gitlab-like company to handle the regulatory/legal issues and offer a prediction market solution that could be adapted for companies’ specific situations? Idk if anything is happening in that space or has been tried before.
You say, “Sales are important but forecasting sales might not be as important. In particular, forecasting sales might not meaningfully help increase them.” That makes total sense. But I gotta wonder… this is just begging for the classic futarchy technique of conditional prediction markets! Just like predicting “what will USA GDP be under a republican president ” / “GDP under a democrat”, just predict sales conditional on marketing strategy A versus marketing strategy B! Obviously this turns up the complexity required for an endeavor that is already clunky and unfamiliar… but it could be worthwhile especially if some of the complexity could be handled by a Gitlab-style company.
Hey, I appreciate this comment. I’ve shared this post with a few prediction markets people; we’ll see if any of them want to become the Gitlab of prediction markets.