Comments on: MediaPredict: A Market For Predicting Media Hits

By: Rob

Rob — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 19:51:18 +0000

K,
I must misunderstand the business model of mediapredict, because I don’t see Hollywood Stock Exchange as a relevant comparison. I thought their goal was to sell voting information to companies to help them make go or no-go decisions on projects, and I don’t think that will work for power law results. If they are just going to sell companies access to daily market prices of the media stocks people trade, that is a different idea entirely.

By: laurence haughton

laurence haughton — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 17:11:20 +0000

I’ve heard in weather forecasting that prediction models are tested by feeding past data and checking to see of the model predicts the past outcomes. There must be a way to do that with this system. I’ll make a prediction: if there is a way (like in weather forecasting) to test the model’s accuracy the promoters will never participate.

By: K. Williams

K. Williams — Fri, 01 Jun 2007 15:25:55 +0000

I don’t think the logic here makes sense. Assuming that the event being predicted is independent of the crowd that’s doing the predicting — which is the case with book sales or movie grosses, etc. — there’s no reason that the outcomes need to follow a bell curve for the crowd to do a good job of predicting. In fact, we have quite a bit of concrete evidence in this regard: the crowd of bettors at the Hollywood Stock Exchange actually does a good job of predicting the grosses of Hollywood films, better, in fact, than any Hollywood studio’s internal forecast.