The main EC’11 conference includes talks on prediction markets, crowdsourcing, auctions, game theory, finance, lending, and advertising. The papers span a spectrum from theoretical to applied. If you want evidence of the latter, look no further than the roster of corporate sponsors: eBay, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo!.

There are also a number of interesting workshops and tutorials in conjunction with EC’11 this year, including:

Workshops:

• 7th Ad Auction Workshop
• Workshop on Bayesian Mechanism Design
• Workshop on Social Computing and User Generated Content
• 6th Workshop on Economics of Networks, Systems, and Computation
• Workshop on Implementation Theory

Tutorials:

• Bayesian Mechanism Design
• Conducting Behavioral Research Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk
• Matching and Market Design
• Outside Options in Mechanism Design
• Measuring Online Advertising Effectiveness

The umbrella FCRC conference includes talks by 2011 Turing Award winner Leslie G. Valiant, IBM Watson creator David A. Ferrucci, and CMU professor, CAPTCHA co-inventor, and Games With a Purpose founder Luis von Ahn.

Hope to see many of you there!

It’s a dynamic betting game with an automated market maker, not unlike Inkling Markets in functionality (or even Predictalot minus the combinatorial aspect). What stands out is the flashy UI, both literally and figuratively. The look is polished, slick, refreshing, and richly drawn. It’s also cutesy, animation-happy, and slow to load. Like I said, Flash-y in every way. The game is well integrated into Facebook and nicely incorporates trophies and other social rewards. Clearly a lot of thought and care went into the design: on balance I think it came out great.

Crowdpark is a German company with an office in San Francisco. In addition to their Facebook game, they have German and English web versions of their game, and white-label arrangements with gaming companies. They launched in English just last December.

Crowdpark’s stunning growth contrasts with decidedly more mixed results on this side of the Atlantic. I wonder how much of Crowdpark’s success can be attributed to their German roots, their product, their marketing, or other factors?

Crowdpark has an automated market maker they call “dynamic betting” that I can’t find any technical details about [1]. Here’s their well-produced video explanation:

They say it’s “patent pending”, though my colleague Mohammad Mahdian did some nice reverse engineering to show that, at least in their Facebook game, they’re almost certainly using good-old LMSR. Here is a graph of Crowdpark’s market maker price curve for a bet priced at 1%:

Here is the raw data and the fit to LMSR with b=20,000.

Still, there’s a quote buried in the video at 0:55 that caught my attention: “you’re current profit is determined by the fluctuation of the odds”.

There’s only one market maker that I know of where the profit fluctuates with the odds, and that’s my own dynamic parimutuel market, which by coincidence recently went from patent pending to inventor cube delivered.

With every other market maker, indeed almost every prediction market, the profit is fixed at the time of the bet. Add to that the fact that Crowdpark bought a majority stake in Florida horse racing circuit Saratoga Racing Inc. and plans to operate all bets exclusively through their system, leads me to wonder if they may have some kind of parimutuel variant, the only style of betting that is legal in the US.

Of course, it may be that I simply misinterpreted the video.

[1] The technical exec at Crowdpark seems to be Aleksandar Ivanov. I found a trade press paper on (internal) prediction markets he wrote in 2009 for the Journal of Business Forecasting.

To apply, please email David Pennock and Yoav Shoham by Wednesday May 11, 2011, with subject “YourLastName: EC’11 student registration award application” and include:

1. Your name, university, personal homepage, and current student status (e.g., 2nd year Ph.D. student)
2. Whether you are a member of ACM SIGecom
3. Any papers at EC’11 for which you are an author or co-author
4. Any papers at an EC’11 affiliated workshop (or under review) for which you are an author or co-author
5. Please also arrange for your academic advisor to email verification of your student status in good standing to the same two email addresses with your last name in the subject.

Applications must be submitted by Wednesday May 11, 2011. We will award the four free registrations by Friday May 13, prior to the early registration deadline of May 16.

thanks,
David Pennock, Chair ACM SIGecom
Yoav Shoham, General Chair, EC’11

P.S. This was announced on April 14 on the mailing list for the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom). If you missed it, you should join!

There is [less than] one week left to submit papers to AMMA, [The Second Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications], a market design conference that will be held in NYC this August. The conference brings together economists, computer scientists and practitioners who are interested in the use of market mechanisms to solve problems.

The best way to decide whether to submit to a conference you haven’t heard of is to look at the organizers and program committee. In this case, they’re superb.

Take a look at the middle right of the second page: it says “Play exciting games and win big” and features… Predictopus! That’s the Indian spinoff of Predictalot, the combinatorial prediction game I helped invent.

Predictopus has nearly 70,000 users and counting, and this ad certainly won’t hurt.

Yahoo!!!

BTW, I grabbed these images from an amazing site called Press Display, which I discovered via the New York Public Library.

Times of India Mumbai edition
30 Mar 2011

Times of India Mumbai edition
30 Mar 2011

Also, congrats India, and thanks! I nearly doubled my virtual bet with the victory:

The EC’11 list of accepted papers is out and the program looks great (including six papers from Yahoo! authors). And it’s not too late to submit a paper to one of the associated workshops. Two of particular interest, both on June 5, 2011, are:

Workshop on Social Computing and User Generated Content

The workshop will bring together researchers and practitioners from a variety of relevant fields, including economics, computer science, and social psychology, in both academia and industry, to discuss the state of the art today, and the challenges and prospects for tomorrow in the field of social computing and user generated content.

Social computing systems are now ubiquitous on the web– Wikipedia is perhaps the most well-known peer production system, and there are many platforms for crowdsourcing tasks to online users, including Games with a Purpose, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, the TopCoder competitions for software development, and many online Q&A forums such as Yahoo! Answers. Meanwhile, the user-created product reviews on Amazon generate value to other users looking to buy or choose amongst products, while Yelp’s value comes from user reviews about listed services…

SUBMISSIONS DUE April 15, 2011, 5pm EDT

Seventh Ad Auctions Workshop

In the past decade we’ve seen a rapid trend toward automation in advertising, not only in how ads are delivered and measured, but also in how ads are sold… The rapid emergence of new modes for selling and delivering ads is fertile ground for research from both economic and computational perspectives…

We solicit contributions of two types: (1) research contributions, and (2) position statements…

Submission deadline: April 15th, 2011 (midnight Hawaii Time)

Predictalot v0.3 is easier to play. We whittled down the ‘Make Prediction’ process from four steps to just two. Even if you don’t want to wager, with one click come check out the projected odds of nearly any crazy eventuality you can dream up.

Please connect to facebook and/or twitter to share your prediction prowess with your friends and followers. You’ll earn bonus points and my eternal gratitude.

The odds start off at our own prior estimate based on seeds and (new this year) the current scores of ongoing games, but ultimately settle to values set by “the crowd” — that means you — as predictions are bought and sold.

For the math geeks, Predictalot is a combinatorial prediction market with over 9 quintillion outcomes. Prices are computed using an importance sampling approximation of a #P-hard problem.

What kind of information can we collect that a standard prediction market cannot? A standard market will say that Texas A&M is unlikely to win the tournament. Our market can say more. Yes, A&M is unlikely to reach the Final Four and even more unlikely to win apriori, but given that they somehow make it to the semifinals in Houston, less than a two hour drive from A&M’s campus, their relative odds may increase due to a home court advantage.

Here’s another advantage of the combinatorial setup. A standard bookmaker would never dare to offer the same millions of bets as Predictalot — they would face nearly unlimited possible losses because, by tradition, each bet is managed independently. By combining every bet into a single unified marketplace, we are able to limit the worst-case (virtual) loss of our market maker to a known fixed constant.

We are thrilled to announce Yahoo!’s third annual Key Scientific Challenges Program. This is your chance to get an inside look at — and help tackle — the big challenges that Yahoo! and the entire Internet industry are facing today. As part of the Key Scientific Challenges Program you’ll gain access to Yahoo!’s world-class scientists, some of the richest and largest data repositories in the world, and have the potential to make a huge impact on the future of the Internet while driving your research forward.

THE CHALLENGES AREAS INCLUDE:

- Search Experiences
- Machine Learning
- Data Management
- Information Extraction
- Economics
- Statistics
- Multimedia
- Computational Advertising
- Social Sciences
- Green Computing
- Security
- Privacy

KEY SCIENTIFIC CHALLENGES AWARD RECIPIENTS RECEIVE:

- $5,000 unrestricted research seed funding which can be used for conference fees and travel, lab materials, professional society membership dues, etc.

- Access to select Yahoo! datasets

- The unique opportunity to collaborate with our industry-leading scientists

- An invitation to this summer’s exclusive Key Scientific Challenges Graduate Student Summit where you’ll join the top minds in academia and industry to present your work, discuss research trends and jointly develop revolutionary approaches to fundamental problems

CRITERIA: To be eligible, you must be currently enrolled in a PhD program at any accredited institution.

We’re accepting applications from January 24th – March 11th, 2011 and winners will be announced by mid April 2011.

To learn more about the program and how to apply, visit http://labs.yahoo.com/ksc.

I’ve been considering submitting some thing(s): I’m curious if anyone else is planning to submit or attend?

Date: 3 – 5 April 2011
Event: Third International Conference on Prediction and Information Markets
Location: Nottingham Conference Centre
Organiser: Nottingham Business School

Details:

The Third International Conference on Prediction and Information Markets will be held in association with Economic Issues and the Journal of Prediction Markets.

Prediction / information markets offer a way of harnessing the wisdom of crowds. They have been used to aggregate information in order to provide forecasts of a wide range of events…

In recent years, a number of companies have employed these markets as a means of aggregating the information dispersed widely among their employees and customers…

Call for papers and presentations
Please send an abstract (maximum of 200 words) to Professor Leighton Vaughan Williams by email, by the closing date for receipt of abstracts of Monday 21 February 2011. Confirmation of receipt of abstracts will be sent within a maximum of five working days.