adam

While these pictures are beautifully shot, I always find it interesting in similar pictorials of "Earth" that the U.S. is often represented by long tracts of houses in suburbia, or a system of byzantine highways. You'd think the entire U.S. population lives in houses that look the same and we all sit in heavy traffic each day. In fact, the same could be said for other pictures here as well; many just seem to promote existing stereotypes vs. the unique beauty that every one of these countries possesses.

This sounds right in theory, but isn't how we've actually seen it play out in practice.

For one, the people typically participating in a question like ship dates are not just from the project team, but from other roles as well, i.e. people who will be involved in marketing the product, selling the product, engineers who work on similar products, etc. These people have less of a direct interest in the outcome vs. simply expressing what they think is going to happen. So diversity of participation by role is pretty key.

Your point about self-fulfilling prophecy is also something we get asked about regularly. In practice, the market is available to trade 24/7 until the outcome is known. So going through your scenario, let's say the market is showing a really high likelihood something is going to ship late. Management decides to mitigate that risk by putting more people on the project. Well the market is still open, so if no one actually thinks putting more people on the project is going to do a damn thing, then the likelihood of being late will remain high in the market. Or maybe those people just got pulled from another project so now that project is in jeopardy. Well the market would hopefully begin to reflect that and when the answer is known everyone will be judged on whether they were right or not.

So ideally if your marketplace is setup correctly and people are actively participating, you're getting all this realtime feedback about what people think is going to happen AND you can even see what people think will happen in reaction to the management decisions you're making. Usually an employee wants management to know something is screwed up without having to stand up and say it to their face in a status meeting.

Also in your scenario you're assuming management is making decisions based on the prediction market alone. I've never seen this - instead it's one factor they consider among others. Despite my belief in the value of prediction markets, I also believe in management being able to make independent decisions. Prediction markets are just a simple and systematic way to get human input from those who have different perspectives.

The government is now running prediction markets in several different branches (I know this because they're using our software - Inkling) and the TIA project comes up all the time in initial discussions. The comments however are usually that the idea was a good one and it was producing valuable information, they were just very tone deaf to perception issues.