The Wisdom of Crowds and Transfer Market Values

Betting Strategies, Market Selection, and the Wisdom of Crowds

We investigate the limiting behavior of trader wealth and prices in a simple prediction market with a finite set of participants having heterogeneous beliefs. Traders bet repeatedly on the outcome of a binary event with fixed Bernoulli success probability. A class of strategies, including (fractional) Kelly betting and constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) are considered. We show that when tra...

Evaluating the Wisdom of Crowds

Estimating and forecasting are difficult tasks. This is true whether the activity requires the determination of uncertain future event outcomes, or whether the estimation effort is complex in itself and based on insufficient information. Consequently, such tasks are frequently assigned to experts. Surprisingly, recent research suggests that collectives of non-experts can outperform individual e...

The Multidimensional Wisdom of Crowds

Distributing labeling tasks among hundreds or thousands of annotators is an increasingly important method for annotating large datasets. We present a method for estimating the underlying value (e.g. the class) of each image from (noisy) annotations provided by multiple annotators. Our method is based on a model of the image formation and annotation process. Each image has different characterist...

Harnessing the Wisdom of Crowds*

We empirically examine the impact of herding on the accuracy of consensus earnings forecasts from a crowd-based platform (Estimize.com). We monitor user information set by tracking user viewing activities and running experiments. We find that the more public information a user views, the less weight she puts on her private information. While this improves the accuracy of individual forecasts, i...

The “Wisdom of Crowds” Effect