Some researchers are looking now into the role crowdsourcing played in Facebook IPO. Before the big event, there was a website created with the purpose of predicting the share values of Facebook. The prediction market (
http://www.FacebookIPODayClosingPrice.com/)
got it terribly wrong: $54, while the market closed at $38. The reason is explained by the nature of the participants: the less you know, the better. Read more here:
http://blog.microtask.com/2012/06/predicting-the-facebook-ipo-the-crowd-gets-it-wrong/
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Crowdsourcing and Facebook IPO
12 Tuesday Jun 2012
Posted in Data Mining, Forecasting, Research
I’ve added some additional comments about this method of aggregating collective intelligence at: http://torontopm.wordpress.com/2012/06/14/not-so-intelligent-collective-intelligence/
I’ll be writing a followup piece to answer the question: what if they had used a prediction market instead of simply averaging the guesses?
Please feel free to comment on my blog.