Dear Lazyweb, World Cup edition

[katestine]

I don't get it: is In-Trade no longer the place to go for prediction markets? They don't have any markets for the (soccer) World Cup! I'm going to a charity thing at work tonight where we've been asked to buy raffle tickets. Evil English and another regular source of gossip are both highly involved and sent personal appeals. They've priced the

Comments

[egofood]

Yahoo's got a beta thingy, the Predicatlot which debuted with the NCAA basketball tournament and is now doing the World Cup.

Or just look at the FIFA rankings, groupings, and schedule then take Brazil, Spain, Germany, and Argentina in that order. (And Netherlands, Italy, England and France if you need a longer list. Portugal, United States, Switzerland, Cameroon, Greece, Mexico, Serbia, and Paraguay would be the rest of the teams making it out of their groups.)

[katestine]

Well, if I buy $50 worth, I get 11 raffle tickets. Predictalot is currently saying there's a 48% chance of Brazil winning and a 32% chance of Spain winning, with only Portugal and the Netherlands having over 3% chance. I'm thinking 5, 4, 1, 1 respectively, to hedge my bets. (I figure far fewer people are likely to put their tickets in the Portugal and Netherlands bins, so it might be worth it to trade-off some probability of making it to the finals - they do drawings among all countries still in the running today, quarter final, semi final, and final - to get a higher probability of winning.)

[egofood]

The Netherlands certainly have a shot to make the final four; easier group and they'd likely face Paraguay after that to get into the field of 8 probably facing Italy then Argentina to get to the Final. Portugal not so much; they're in Brazil's group so they'll almost certainly be the B team and then get to face Spain in the next round. The United States would be the upset special; they have the best chance among the "B" teams to sneak out of their group as an "A" which would give them an easy game to get into the field of 8.

[katestine]

Interrresting. I was vaguely annoyed that they had us buy tickets when we walked in the door at the event, instead of after the analysis by the pro soccer players they brought in.

[mangosteen]

If you don't mind doing a bit of a document dive, Goldman put out a report on the topic.

[katestine]

Actually, I ended up flipping through the UBS report, which was a bit shorter :)

[jofish22]

I've been doing some Twitter prediction work and I'm not sure it'd be very valuable here, because what you mainly get is lots of local bias, just aggregated. I did a quick prediction algorithm for the last round of American Idol and it came through as predicted, but that doesn't tell you a lot since Idol is actually influenced by the people who are making noise, which doesn't work for soccer.

I believe the general wisdom is that Brazil is always a reasonable bet. And following that by Spain/Netherlands/etc is good. Although you might want to think about strategic things here: are there people you're going with that would be valuable to be on their side for this? Throwing a ticket in the direction of England for Saturday, at least, might be a good social investment.

[katestine]

Interrresting. Are there generally available, on the web tools or are you building your own stuff?

Not sure if Evil English would respect that actually: it's not like I have to polish my Anglophile cred with her ;)

[jofish22]

a) i'm rolling my own. actually, there's a public version of some of my twitter research that you can have a look at, at http://pulse.nokiaresearch.com (ignore the fact that we had a crash last night so there's nothing until 10am this morning.) what you're seeing is the words that most frequently show up in tweets with the topic, so the opening screen is words that show up in the same tweet as "nokia". i think you might enjoy the "rumors" topic (pull down from the menu at the top right) which is just tweets that contain rumor/rumour/rumors/rumours. you can also look at the week instead of the day which is a bit more interesting usually by clicking on "this week" at the top

[marcusmarcusrc]

fivethirtyeight.com just published their World Cup first round prediction...

[marcusmarcusrc]

Summary: Brazil, 22%, Spain 16, England 12, Argentina 9, Netherlands 9, no one else above 4% for winning the cup. 538 also gives odds for Semis and advancing out of groups...