Jeffrey Frankel believes that with regards to Why Did Economists Get It So Wrong? Krugman is Right, and adds that while macroeconomists should not be let off the hook for not being more helpful in predicting and handling the crises of the 80’s and 90’s, Frankel believes the field did a better job with the emerging market crisis of 1994-2001.
Predicting the future
Here is a list of sites that try to predict what is going to happen next....enjoy...
The problem with sites like intrade is that even though money might make the predictions closer to what people actually think...it does nothing to prevent herd-like thinking as we saw with the build up of bubbles in the housing market, or internet bubble, or with the Argentina crisis. The trouble is that people predict a straight-line projection into the future
picture-92.pngDo you think you know who is going to buy Facebook, or how many copies of Halo 3 will be sold by the end of the year? You can make your make your best guess on ZiiTrend, a social prediction site that launched on Monday. (The answers to those two questions right now are: No one and 6.2 million, respectively).
ZiiTrend comes up with a group prediction based on every player’s vote. Unlike a true prediction market like Trendio, though, where players actually trade virtual stocks around events and predictions are derived from the resulting price, ZiiTrend makes things simpler. You simply make a prediction, and ZiiTrend’s neural-network algorithm blends your answer with everyone else’s to come up with a statistically valid answer that captures the crowd’s intelligence. Rather than revolving around trading, which is hard for many people to grasp, the site’s main appeal is designed to be more around social news exchange. Similar to PlaytheDay, which creates group predictions out of a quiz, ZiiTrend wants to make the whole process accessible to more people.
Members who predict correctly are rewarded with higher status and their votes carry more weight when they make further predictions. The clever bit is a tag-based scoring system that makes the votes of good predictors count more only on questions whose topics match the tags that they’ve proven their expertise on. So if you correctly answer the question, “Who will win the 2008 Oscar award for best actor?”, your personal tag score will go up for any future questions that include the words “Oscar award” or “best actor,” but not for ones about “oil prices.” That’s a steal-able feature for any startups out there trying to build expert databases or knowledge-management systems.
The problem with all prediction markets is that it is difficult to get people to participate. And that will be ZiiTrend’s biggest challenge. The site does make it easy for anyone to upload their own question for everyone else to vote on, which could help it spread virally. But what they really need is a Facebook/MySpace/blog widget that could bring people into the system.
Trendio is a stock market for news trends - sign up and get $10,000 in fake money to trade on words. Trendio monitors their usage from various news sources, and the price increases or decreases based on how often the word appears in those sources. There is also a French version of the site, here.
In this wiki, you will find a collection of the students notes on a variety of global issues, with a focus on international finance, international relations, politics and business. Clearly not all of the content is our own, nor do we endorse students opinions posted on our pages. There have been many contributors to this site, and our role is just to moderate the content and make sure it fits the "GloboTrends" theme. We try to link properly and send readers to other interesting news sites. If you see any inappropriate material, please let us know.
What are "GloboTrends?"
“GloboTrends” are fundamental underlying trends, which means that they are important, but might not be obvious. Many trends are interconnected, and have global implications. Not paying attention to the development of global trends in can come back to haunt any business person, and so… we have dedicated ourselves to summarizing these events in simple language, and we are trying to show how these events might be important to different regions, and to different industries.
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