谷歌本月推出了一项新服务——在Google Cloud上创建预测市场。据悉，谷歌内部已运行预测市场一年，超过10,000名员工参与了超过175,000次预测。这个名为Gleangen的市场是谷歌尝试的第二个预测市场，第一个是2007年的Prophit。Gleangen允许任何人创建问题，但通常效果不佳，因此谷歌设有专门的团队进行审核和修改。市场以游戏货币和排行榜权利作为奖励，但目前似乎并未受到公司高层的重视。

🔍 谷歌内部预测市场Gleangen允许员工对各种问题进行预测，这是谷歌继2007年Prophit之后第二次尝试此类市场。Gleangen的独特之处在于任何员工都可以创建问题，但这往往导致问题质量不高，因此需要专门的团队进行审核和改进。

💼 预测市场的目的是聚合信息，提高决策质量，但在谷歌的实践中，似乎并未引起高层管理者的足够重视。尽管市场以游戏货币和排行榜位置作为奖励，但尚无迹象表明高管们会根据预测结果来做出决策。

📉 Google的首席经济学家Hal Varian指出，预测市场在商业应用中的问题在于，公司最想获得概率评估的信息往往过于敏感，可能会违反SEC关于内幕知识的规则。因此，即使预测市场能够提供有用的信息，其实际应用仍受到限制。

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-let-me-google-that

Let Me Google That For You

New from Google this month: Creating A Prediction Market On Google Cloud. Google announces that they’ve been running an internal prediction market for the past year, with “over 175,000 predictions from over 10,000 Google employees”. 1 Predictive analytics.jpg

Most of it’s classified because they’re predicting stuff about Google’s corporate secrets, but some friendly Googlers were at least willing to walk me through the article and clarify pieces I didn’t understand.

The market, called Gleangen, is actually the second prediction market Google’s tried. The first, in 2007, was called Prophit - the team included occasional ACX commenter Patri Friedman, who’s since moved into the charter city space. (source)

Prophit wound down because the founders left and nobody really knew what to do with; you can read about some of their findings here. In 2020, with all the uncertainty around coronavirus, some Googlers decided to try again. Gleangen is the result.

Unlike most prediction markets, anybody can create a question on Gleangen. This usually goes badly: most people are terrible at writing questions with objective resolutions. Google manages by having a dedicated team of moderators who go over everything and amend it when needed. The market pays out in play money and the right to be on a leaderboard.

So far it’s not doing much else. The Googlers I talked to saw no evidence that company executives were paying much attention to it when making decisions. Why not? Hal Varian, Google’s chief economist, said in a Conversation with Tyler Cowen:

COWEN: Why doesn’t business use more prediction markets? They would seem to make sense, right? Bet on ideas. Aggregate information. We’ve all read Hayek.

VARIAN: Right. And we had a prediction market [referring to Prophit in 2007]. I’ll tell you the problem with it. The problem is, the things that we really wanted to get a probability assessment on were things that were so sensitive that we thought we would violate the SEC rules on insider knowledge because, if a small group of people knows about some acquisition or something like that, there is a secret among this small group.