Call for Participation: Crowd-sourcing “Wisdom of the Crowd” mechanisms. Win $10,000.

Igor Grossmann writes:

Together with colleagues from Innsbruck, Vienna, and Waterloo, we are launching an exciting new project and we would like to invite you to participate in (and your PostDocs, PhDs and other team members): it’s a crowd analysis project to explore which aggregation mechanisms best harness the “wisdom of the crowd” to predict future outcomes. Over a period of 6 months we will each month collect 16 predictions (4 each in 4 domains – politics, economics, sports and climate) by 640 people from the general population. Participating researcher’s tasks is to submit an aggregation mechanism (in Python or R) to aggregate these many predictions to one aggregate outcome.

The call for participation is hereand you can register here.

We hope for many participants, and would truly appreciate if you could spread the word – the entry hurdles are very low, the webpage is set up to pretest the aggregation mechanisms and the total workload can be one working day (can also be more if someone invests a lot of time to optimize his/her algorithm). All researchers receive, of course, consortium authorship and the most successful teams can win a total of up to EUR 10.000.

Sounds cool. Many challenging issues arise in information aggregation (for example, see this presentation from 2003; unfortunately I haven’t thought too hard about these issues since then, but I remain interested in the topic).