Crowd Sourcing and Prediction Markets

We introduce our work on the use of prediction markets as a tool for mining knowledge from within an enterprise (i.e., Nokia Corporation). Various companies – including Google, HP, and Yahoo – have experimented with internal prediction market services, testing its utility for tapping knowledge distributed and nascent within their organization. We are also exploring the use of this tool for capturing knowledge within the corporation, such as estimating the market-readiness of a product (e.g., mobile phone) in the run up to its release. For this exploration, we created a custom prediction market service, called FishMarket, and experimented with several iterations of the game design. Our variant of the game is designed specifically for mobile devices. Our objective is to provide quick, low overhead usage that enables a large population to participate during brief moments of opportunity, that we call mobile moments. We briefly describe the three design iterations of FishMarket, the small-scale pilots to assess the designs, the resulting lessons learned, and summarize some open issues. Author