There is a strange phenomenon in groups. Quite the opposite of group emotion known as the 'mob mentality,' group intelligence turns out to be quite accurate. To wit: a group of people asked to guess the weight of an ox will each be wrong, but taken as a group the average of their guesses is often very near the mark. This happens regardless of the people's education and occurs even when they don't talk to each other about the idea.
Turns out that group-think might not just be accurate about the present state of things, but about the future as well. Good has run internal prediction markets, where employees can bid on future events -- product launches, etc. They claim that the employees as a group are pretty accurate about the probability and timing of product launches.
The implication is huge: large companies can use their own employees as a type of confidential benchmarking and forecasting tool. There are already open markets of this type, such as the Iowa Electronic Markets for politics, etc.
Why does it work? Are the results of the market merely predictive, or are they prescriptive as well? Do we do things because conventional wisdom states that they are expected?
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