|
"Employees at Google are encouraged to place bets on Google's prediction market — an exchange that tries to forecast events based on the money wagered on a particular outcome. Employees have made wagers with play money (Goobles, as in rubles) on questions like: will Google open a Russia office? will Apple release an Intel-based Mac? how many users will Gmail have at the end of the quarter? One tangible benefit to the company is that the market allows Google to track how information disseminates in the company. A paper called "Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From Google" discusses information flows in the company based on the prediction market data and contains many other interesting observations of Google culture. This piece appeared in the New York Times on Monday and was quite fascinating.
The focus of the
experiment is to
study how
information makes it
way through
companies. The study
"used the betting
patterns of
employees and their
demographic details
to try to find
common factors among
people with similar
opinions -- is it
type of job or level
within the corporate
structure, being
friends or sitting
close to one
another?" --- Gambling911.com News Wire Originally published January 7, 2008 10:48 pm EST
|
Google
Employees Encouraged
to bet on Prediction
Market