Abstract: The present disclosure provides a system that implements a prediction market, used for making forecasts and, more particularly, for extracting participant utility. One or more forecasts of a specific participant or subset of participants are taken, and a measure of divergence of these forecasts from a group as a whole (or for that matter, any group) is calculated. This divergence may then later be employed in the prediction market (e.g., for present or future forecasting). For example, if it is known that “sales managers” are consistently too liberal in forecasting product release dates than others within a company, this tendency may be compensated for or used in a variety of manners, such as automatically correcting predictions or forecasts for perceived error, automatically discarding or modifying predictions, or automatically generating “virtual” predictions for future events. Other actions may also be taken.

Abstract: This disclosure provides a database, methods and associated software to implement and manage a prediction market. By collecting individual predictions as a set of predicted outcomes, such as a range of outcomes, the principles presented herein permit aggregation of overlapping predictions to generate a cumulative probability distribution, effectively using “crowd wisdom” to build a probability model of an event. Through the use of “roll-up” and “roll-down” techniques, this disclosure provides a way of applying new information not only to an event being predicted, but also to the outcomes of other, related events. Conversion to a common probability distribution format may be used to simplify and accelerate mathematical operations, easing the burden in quickly calculating and updating a cumulative probability model for events in each affected dimension in the predicted market.