The New York Times has an interesting piece this morning -- "Google's Lunchtime Betting Game" is as much about so-called "prediction markets" as it is about Google (NASDAQ: GOOG), its culture, and its driving values.Prediction markets are speculative markets created for the purpose of making decisions (see Wikipedia's page on predictive markets). The NYT article focuses on a specific project run by two outside economists, Justin Wolfers of the University of Pennsylvania and Eric W. Zitzewitz of Dartmouth College, and a Google economic analyst, Bo Cowgill.
The focus of the experiment is to study how information makes it way through companies. The study "used the betting patterns of employees and their demographic details to try to find common factors among people with similar opinions -- is it type of job or level within the corporate structure, being friends or sitting close to one another?"
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