Prediction Market - Use By Corporations

Use By Corporations

• The simExchange introduced a perpetual contract that it calls "stocks" to predict the global, lifetime sales of video game consoles and software titles. These stocks do not expire like most contracts on prediction markets because the founder, Brian Shiau, argued that video game sales can continue for years. The premise for these stocks is that Shiau believes the video game industry suffers from a "lack of comprehensive sales data" and he compares the information problem of a game's sales to the information problem of evaluating a company's market value. Hanson warns that such a system may not work if a connection is not enforced. Keith Gamble has described the simExchange as a Keynesian beauty contest and that financial markets have certain remedies such as company buy-outs that cannot happen on the simExchange. Gamble concludes that such a prediction market can work but will be confined to play money.
• Best Buy, Motorola, Qualcomm, Edmunds.com, and Misys Banking Systems are listed as Consensus Point clients.
• Hewlett-Packard pioneered applications in sales forecasting and now uses prediction markets in several business units. Mentioned in academic publications from HP Labs. Also mentioned in Newsweek. It is working towards a commercial launch of the implementation as a product, BRAIN (Behaviorally Robust Aggregation of Information Networks).
• Corning, Renault, Eli Lilly, Pfizer, Siemens, Masterfoods, Arcelor Mittal and other global companies are listed as NewsFutures customers.
• Intel is mentioned in Harvard Business Review (April 2004) in relation to managing manufacturing capacity.
• Microsoft is piloting prediction markets internally.
• France Telecom's Project Destiny has been in use since mid-2004 with demonstrated success.
• Google has confirmed that it uses a predictive market internally in its official blog.
• The Wall Street Journal reported that General Electric uses prediction market software from Consensus Point to generate new business ideas.
• BusinessWeek lists MGM and Lionsgate Studios as two HSX clients.
• HSX built and operated a televised virtual stock market, the Interactive Music Exchange for Fuse Networks Fuse TV to be used as the basis of their daily live television broadcast, IMX, which ran from January, 2003 through July, 2004. The television audience traded virtual stocks of artists/videos/songs, and predicted which would make it to the top of the Billboard music charts. The first of its kind, Fuse Network and HSX won an AFI Enhanced TV (American Film Institute) Award for innoviation in television interactivity.
• Starwood embraced the use of prediction markets for developing and selecting marketing campaigns. Marketing department started out with some initial ideas and allowed employees to add new ideas or make changes to existing ones. Then subsequently incentives based prediction markets were leveraged to select the best of the lot.