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April 29, 2005
Mapping Strategy
Art Hutchinson blogged a couple of unrelated posts that mentioned Prediction Markets peripherally and used the occasion to make some interesting points himself. This is one of those rare cases where there's more material in the commentary than was evident in the sources. If you follow the links back, you'll find somewhat interesting blog entries that barely touch on the ideas that Art took out of his encounter with them.
To summarize Art's observations, the main things he pointed out were
- PM's contribution to information gathering in bureaucratic organizations like intelligence agencies is in attracting outside experts, and giving them incentives to not be entrapped in group think.
- Yahoo's Tech Buzz game is trapped in evaluating the level of buzz for competing products, which may or may not have much to do with commercial success.
- And finally, he reiterated the importance of choosing good metrics to base market outcomes on. If the markets don't focus on the outcomes that we really want to know about, they'll provide a confusing distraction rather than valuable information that will drive better decision making.
Posted by chris at April 29, 2005 03:01 PM