The flow of information at the Googleplex
Posted by Bo Cowgill, Economics
Group
>Earlier on this blog, we shared some exciting
early results from our firm's implementation of
>prediction markets. At
>last Friday's meeting of the
Association, we shared the results of a deeper study, "
Using Prediction Markets to Track Information Flows: Evidence From
Google," that uses prediction markets to show how
organizations process information and respond to external events.
Here are some interesting findings:
-
Traders in the same location tend to make the same trades at
the same time. The trades of cubemates within a small radius is
the best predictor we found. By using a record of historical office
changes, we could observe that the correlation begins shortly after
people are seated nearby. It makes sense, because the physical
proximity enables easy communication. As Eric Schmidt (our CEO) and
Hal Varian (now our Chief Economist)
id="ha2h" >advised in 2005: "The best way to make
communication easy is to put team members within a few feet of each
other. No telephone tag, no e-mail delay, no waiting for a
reply." As you can see below, our finding about the importance
of proximity holds, even once we account for many other
factors.
-
Although we did find strong correlations among professional
and social contacts, these were substantially weaker than the
correlations for micro-geography. We also measured the
influence that people on similar projects, in similar places in the
organization and with similar demographic characteristics exert on
each other. This helped establish that geographic proximity — and
not some other type of similarity — was responsible for the
correlations we saw.
Despite the markets'
>strong forecasting abilities, there is a
slight optimistic bias driven mainly by new employees. On
average, outcomes that were good for Google were overpriced by 20%.
This bias was strongest on days after appreciations in
>Google stock and, ironically, for outcomes
under our own control! We also find biases against extreme outcomes
and
>short selling. Given a range of five outcomes,
the middle ones were typically overpriced and unprofitable by
comparison with the outliers.
Although the proof is in the paper, nothing quite helps like a
graphic. Below you can see a snapshot of trading in one of our
offices. The areas where employees are making profitable decisions
is green, and the areas where employees are making unprofitable
decisions is red. There are about 16 profitable traders in that big
green blotch in the middle!
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