Thursday, July 10, 2008

Electoral Markets Map

Two years ago we created maps to show state-by-state how the 2006 US Senate and Gubernatorial races were shaping up, based on security prices at Tradesports. These markets did very well in predicting the outcomes of those races.

Now in a presidential election year, we have recreated a map, this time for the electoral college and gave it its own URL electoralmarkets.com. This map takes its prices from Intrade, Tradesports current site for their non-sports securities. Once again darker blue indicates a more likely vote for the Democratic candidate (Obama) and darker red more likely for the Republican McCain. Roll over a state for more information or click on that state to go to the Intrade site for that security with historical information.

We created these maps to promote prediction markets as a useful tool for information aggregation. The Third Workshop on Prediction Markets was held at EC yesterday.

As the summer goes on we plan to add several new features so keep checking back and watch the election play out in probabilities in real time.

1 comment:

  1. This looks very similar to the map at fivethirtyeight.com, which aggregates data from polls to make predictions about the election.

    However, that might not mean much -- fivethirtyeight.com is well-known enough that it wouldn't surprise me if people trading on Intrade look at it.

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