This week I’m off to Germany to present at the University of Frankfurt’s eFinanceLab Spring Conference (thursday Feb 21). I’m teaming up with the City University of Hong Kong’s Christian Wagner to talk about how prediction markets can be used to manage risk in the financial sector. I’m also looking forward to a private meeting with professor Bernd Skiera, who has co-authored with Martin Spann some excellent papers on using prediction markets for business forecasting.
Professor Wagner and I will present some results from our recent experiment of using markets to predict trends in Hong Kong property values. Other results will be presented from the prediction markets NewsFutures has operated for various clients such as the World Economic Forum, Eli Lilly and the Texas Department of Transportation. If time permits, we might even discuss Intrade’s US recession market and NewsFutures’ own presidential markets.
The last time I was in Germany was in 2005, when NewsFutures implemented an internal prediction market at Siemens, to forecast sales of its cellular phones. The pilot, although conclusive — the market outperformed official sales forecasts — unfortunately did not survive the sale of the cellular phone division to a Taiwanese company, which soon went bankrupt…
