Category: Wonderful

I’ve been having some fun lately with Inkling. It is a site that hosts prediction markets, the kind that James Surowiecki writes about in The Wisdom of Crowds.

Prediction markets, for those of you who haven’t heard of them before, are like stock markets but instead of trading in shares of a company they trade in shares of possible outcomes of current events. So, for example, I’m invested heavily in the market tracking the Canadian Liberal Leadership Race.

The cool thing about Inkling is that you can create your own markets. I’ve set one up to predict the winner of Survivor: Cook Islands, for example. (Somehow the market I set up to determine how many roads a man must take before you call him a man was rejected).

All the trading is done in an imaginary currency called inkles (whose symbol, by the way, remarkably resembles that of the dollar) so you don’t have to risk any real money to participate. It’s all for fun… or bragging rights… or predicting the future… or something.

Anyways, if you’d like to have some fun guessing who will win Survivor, I invite you to sign up with Inkling and place some bets.