Frequently Asked Questions
How is this tool different from prediction markets?
There are 3 main differences between our tool and prediction markets.- Our tool encourages everyone to share their opinion: You don't need to have money or be willing to bet on the outcomes. As such we have a wider breadth of people providing information that can be used to build reliable forecasts.
- Secondly, our user metrics focus on how your forecasts compare against the final outcome. The reason this differs from standard prediction markets is due to the nature of options buying: When buying or selling options we can profit by being ahead of the curve, i.e. buying low and selling high, even if we have no knowledge of the final outcome.
- Lastly, we build our consensus by merging the existing forecasts according to the information each forecaster provides. In money markets the average forecasts is weighted according to how much money each person has to bet, which is different from their forecasting ability.
What is the difference between the popular and expert consensus?
Popular Consensus gives every user an equal standing: I take the (last) forecast of each user and take the average. This does not represent the uneven distribution of knowledge: Doctors understand more about medicine, physicists about physics, and each person has their area of expertise. By taking into account the performance of different users Quest Powered is able to provide you with better forecasts of the future.What user metrics are used?
Currently there are 3 metrics we focus on:- Conformism measures how your forecasts diverge from the existing popular consensus, at the time of submission.
- Confidence measures how confident you are of your forecasts. A value below 1 shows underconfidence, and the value over 1 shows overconfidence. The best way to interpret this is as a scaling factor, sjowing how much you should scale your forecasts towards or away from the existing consensus.
- Weight measures the weight of your forecasts against the previous existing consensus. If $n$ people forecast on a subject, the average weight should be $\frac{1}{n}$ , however people will differ based on how much information they provide.
However your use case might require a different metric. If you have other metrics in mind we would be happy to hear from you at performancemetrics@questpowered.com.