Comments on: HubDub creates ‘fantasy league’ for news

By: The Industry Standard 2.0: Their Analysis, Your Predictions

The Industry Standard 2.0: Their Analysis, Your Predictions — Mon, 04 Feb 2008 05:18:15 +0000

[...] of other sites that also try to generate collective wisdom using prediction markets, including HubDub, Trendio, and Yahoo’s Tech Buzz Game. The problem with most of them is getting enough smart [...]

By: Chris Masse

Chris Masse — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 22:23:09 +0000

I have acknowledged and responded to Emile Servan-Schreiber.
http://www.mida...ent-by-traders/

Basically, his criticism is pertinent, but event derivative management by traders is so great that I hope that reputation systems will solve one day the issues that EJSS describe.

Any website these days has to deal with spamming and low quality stuff. We should fight that. We should not give up. There will be ways.

By: Emile Sevan-Schreiber

Emile Sevan-Schreiber — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:25:15 +0000

Another important difference with NewsFutures (where people have been “trading news” in 2000) is that hubdub doesn’t give away any prizes to performers. That, perhaps, is a direct consequence of the false good idea of letting people create their own markets. This not only creates many opportunities for fraud (if, for instance, the creator of the market also controls the outcome), but it also encourages incoherent outcome definitions, unverifiable outcomes, and duplicate or junkyard markets. Same problems that Inkling’s public markets suffer from.

Also, the mere idea of a Web 2.0 makeover of prediction markets is laughable. To paraphrase a good ol’ song from the 90’s, prediction markets were web 2.0 before web 2.0 was cool.

By: Scott Yates

Scott Yates — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 13:25:42 +0000

Trendio is another one doing this. They had a slick system and I was getting pretty good at it, and then one day they just put in a new UI and all the “money” I had accumulated vanished. Textbook case of how to piss off your biggest fans.

By: Jed Christiansen

Jed Christiansen — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 02:14:23 +0000

I don’t see HubDub as a “fantasy league” for news at all. As I’ve written on my blog, a lot of news day-to-day is just filler and regurgitation to sell newspapers and to have something “fresh” on a homepage. The problem is that much of the time little has actually changed!

By integrating a prediction market and a news aggregator, they can both feed off of each other. The market will recognise true “news” and these stories will be more prominent, thus making the news aggregator more effective. The prediction market will also be more effective as it’s always tied into a wide spectrum of news stories about a topic.

I’m a bit of a news junkie, and I think this could certainly help me focus on what’s _actually_ going on in the world on any given day, instead of what’s filling up newspaper column-inches.

Cheers,
Jed

By: margueron

margueron — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 21:53:22 +0000

Chris Masse, thanks for the clearing things up for me. The automated market maker is very interesting. Cheers.

By: alex

alex — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:32:35 +0000

Mike B – it is odd that whilst TC has moved away from reviewing startups, it then decides for reviews of me-too’s like these.

I would be happy to see more of what TC used to be about, but if you’re going to be limiting your startups reviews to as few as you do, I’d like to see the startups be more interesting/innovative than this.

Although, perhaps this just epitomizes the current state of the web 2.0 world, in that the only startups left to review are me-too’s

By: Chris Masse

Chris Masse — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:32:03 +0000

margueron,

As I said, HubDub (like Inkling Markets and WSX) uses MSR, which is both a new market design (mixing up CDA and Scoring Rules) and an automated market maker. It was invented by Professor Robin Hanson for DARPA in 2003 with the aim of tackling the liquidity problem that you’re talking about.

With MSR, you trade against a bot, so there is always liquidity.

InTrade uses real money and CDA, so it is indeed in a different league than HubDub.

Plus, HubDub associates a news aggregator to an exchange, which is unique, as of today.

One more point, with Inkling Markets and HubDub, one can create his/her own prediction market, which may be fun and/or useful (if one wants to harness the “wisdom of crowds” on one tricky issue).

By: Mike B

Mike B — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:17:04 +0000

Huh? Why is this getting any coverage?

By: WebSideVentures

WebSideVentures — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 18:04:08 +0000

Seems like a fun concept if you’re into that sort of thing. I personally don’t care enough to get that engaged with news stories.

By: margueron

margueron — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 17:47:52 +0000

Issues will surely be low liquidity and wide bid/ask spreads. Intrade is the prediction markets commonly quoted by the financial media, but Intrade is far from an efficient market. That said, inefficient markets can provide great opportunities for traders. What they tend not to provide are good predictions. In the case of the election contracts, people appear to be betting based on the latest poll numbers. These markets also seem to overreact to large events even more than other markets and are prone to momentum moves that can appear unwarranted. But these markets are fun and, at least for me, a lot easier to trade than, say, crude oil.

By: Chris Masse

Chris Masse — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:51:10 +0000

To Chris:
Yes, HubDub is in fact an event derivative exchange (like NewsFutures, which also uses play money, or like InTrade, TradeSports, and BetFair, which use real money). The trading engine allows to buy or sell a bet, and this is traded on a market. As I said, HubDub uses a simplified trading engine, called Market Scoring Rule (invented by Robin Hanson), which Inkling Markets also uses.

By: Bertrand Bodson

Bertrand Bodson — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:49:36 +0000

Ever tried Bragster.com? That’s really about bragging rights. You can test yourself on predicting the news (not in the same format as hubdub though), but to make it much more personal and in true bragging spirit, you can also dare your friends to do anything they bragged about, and then invite all your other friends to bet on whether the deed will be done.

By: CanCar

CanCar — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:40:34 +0000

It is a complement of digg? By the way, we are confronting problems with digg (login).

By: Chris

Chris — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:24:46 +0000

It’ll be interesting to see how they fair in such a broad category. Fafarazzi.com created the first Fantasy League for Celebrity Gossip and they’ve done really well, but it’s also a controlled set of news sources and people.

Obviously as Chris Masse said above, theirs seems to be more a stock market model where Fafarazzi is more like Fantasy Football.

By: Allen Vartazarian

Allen Vartazarian — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:22:18 +0000

It’s got a very “digg-esque” style to it. It will be interesting to see how popular this gets. As for myself, I’d rather spend time reading actual news instead of trying to predict it.

Allen Vartazarian
Famesource.com – Claim your fame!
http://www.famesource.com

By: Chris Masse

Chris Masse — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 16:16:07 +0000

JCarny,

HubDub is indeed a play-money prediction exchange, just like NewsFutures. Two key differences:

1. NewsFutures uses CDA as its trading mechanism (the same mechanism used at the NYSE or CME), without an automated market maker —while HudBud uses MSR, another market design (where the trader doesn’t have the choice to submit a precise sell/buy price), which makes use of an automated market maker.

2. HubDub is coupled with a news aggregator —while NewsFutures is a pure exchange.

Voila.

By: JCarny

JCarny — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:47:04 +0000

How is this different from Newsfutures or any of the other prediction market games out there?

By: Nick Wright

Nick Wright — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:39:41 +0000

#1
Hey, just so I could….

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