hm... perhaps bush?

a book i'm reading now, the wisdom of crowds: why the many are smarter than the few uses the iowa electronic market (iem) as an example of how a diverse group can predict the outcome of an event relatively accurately, even more accurately than any one individual in the group. the book talks about how the iem has been relatively successful in predicting the winner of most elections, so i thought i'd check out what it had to say about this one...

the iem kind of works like wall street, where individuals buy "shares" of a candidate and, if theirs wins, they receive money, and if s/he doesn't, they don't. although the market is open to everyone, very few participate, and a majority of them are males from iowa.

right now bush is ahead in the winner-takes-all category:

although who knows what will happen in the next few weeks, esp. since the popular vote market is so close. but one thing's for sure, i'm going to keep an eye on it. although, since i can't vote, i kind of feel like a poor kid at a candy store window...

update: well, futures markets were pretty worthless at predicting that the yankees would loose this one. look at tradeports.com's market and notice that earlier today they were favored to win. however, to be fair to the wisdom of crowds theory, i don't know anything about the demographics of tradingsports.com's folks.

update: just made the picture smaller.

Labels: political