Competitive Intelligence Marketplace

Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD: How Competitive Analysis Would Have Helped

Rob Enderle writes a nice piece exploring how the HD-DVD proponents should have used competitive analysis in their fight against Blu-Ray.

Prediction Markets

I happened to come across two different mentions of prediction markets within about five minutes.  One is a Freakonomics blog post about several research papers related to prediction markets and the second a post on Kent's Imperative titled A Hard Look at Prediction Markets.  The second is a good read in and of itself and the first is a good source for links to prediction market related information.  Interestingly both reference the release of results from Google's internal prediction market.  From Kent's imperative:

The study covers nearly three years of the operation of an exchange which handled over 70,000 transactions – each conveying a degree of belief on one of almost 300 particular questions, on behalf of 1500 active employees (although nearly 6500 held accounts that were not used.) Interesting, they identify unexpected influences due to physical proximity, as well as the impact of cognitive bias towards optimism based on employee fiscal considerations created by Google’s rising share price. Also quite interesting was their observation that new employees were more influenced by this bias, and that staff with longer tenure within the firm tended towards more calibrated judgment – a not inconsistent phenomenon within any analytic activity.