I like the general idea — gamblers can do useful work for society — but one area that needs improvement is the kind of things that the participants will be betting on.<p>"IBM wants to offer the minimum amount that the candidate will accept," however the gamblers are not asked to figure that out, instead the "entire wager pool is awarded to the Turks who had the closest answers [to what IBM actually offered]".<p>Thus the smart gambler tries to figure out not what the candidate would accept, but what IBM is likely to offer. At this point the prediction market does <i>not</i> predict what the candidate will accept, but what IBM will offer.<p>One might be able to construct a prediction market where the gamblers incentive is to identify the lowest number the candidate would accept, but this is not it.
I know where the name comes from but still, the word Turk being used as the name of the unit workforce while making automation by using mass manual labor is a bit inconvenient. We already have an ambiguity with the name of our country in the English language, give us a break :)
If one can make this work this would be huge. One could offer casino style games at a house edge of 0% (house edge = the amount that the house wins on average on every bet). This would not only be a super compelling value proposition to gamblers, it would be a huge step towards eliminating problem gambling: A gambling addict that plays at a 0% house edge would not loose money in the long run.<p>I run a small bitcoin casino called fastbets.io. We should talk to see if there is a potential for a collaboration (feel free to email henry@fastbets.io).
The hard part is making work into a game. I think Michael and Jane Banks would agree this is the foremost reason they prefer Mary to other possible nannies.
Something like this could be extremely valuable inside an organization. A lot of very valuable knowledge is locked up by employees with no incentive to reveal it.
> These solutions provide no value to anyone.<p>They provide entertainment value sometimes, and for winners they provide monetary value. This is like saying watching a movie or playing football has no value. The particularities of the game may create the value. E.g., poker is a well balanced game.
The first organization to figure out how to make a proper free-market prediction market platform will make a killing.<p>Casinos seem like a perfect way to make it happen as they already have special regulatory exemption for a transaction type BB doesn't like.
Something similar but without the gambling aspect has been done before:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_game" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESP_game</a>
One potential problem is that instead of assessing problem objectively, since the payout is based on "most popular" answer, people will choose which answer they expect to be most popular, rather than the one they necessarily believe in. This drives down the value of the crowdsourced data - because it's not real "insight", is already tainted by the very gamification you're looking to monetise!
Theoretically, is this idea possible?<p>1) Make a casino with slot machines/etc. Connect slot machines to a stock market day trading system that acts at random on each lever pull (I.E. buying and then selling 10 seconds later, when the price is a bit different)<p>2) Gamblers will gamble as they usually do, but since the stock market grows on average by 7% a year, they should theoretically come out ahead.<p>3) Casino can take 3.5% for setting everything up.<p>What would make this impossible?