Crowdsourcing the N.C.A.A. Tournament

Obama's Bracket There are 9.2 quintillion possible outcomes to the N.C.A.A. basketball tournament.

Yahoo has built a new tool for this year’s tournament intended to determine which of these results are most likely.

Obama s Bracket Called Predictalot, it is a prediction market that allows users to bet on any outcome. It then continuously regenerates the odds of each outcome based on people’s bets.

Using prediction markets to guess the likelihood of future events is not new; solutions to various problems relying on the wisdom of crowds are increasingly common as better computing tools are developed to refine the predictions. Sporting events are seemingly good targets for experimentation, with clear results and many people who are willing to take a guess. Yahoo hopes to develop further markets based on Predictalot that will go beyond sports.

But how good is the crowd at picking N.C.A.A. winners?

Probably the most basic crowdsourcing strategy for the N.C.A.A. Tournament would be to copy ESPN’s national bracket, the aggregate of each individual bracket filled out through the Web site. In this bracket, all the people who make their predictions based on where they went to school or whose mascot is the cutest or how much they hate Duke cancel one another out, giving a consensus prediction for the tournament.

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