Prediction Market for CFOs Launches

It's like a fantasy sports league that might actually matter. CFO Magazine has announced a partnership with Crowdcast, the enterprise prediction market software provider that we profiled last week, to launch a series of markets on issues of relevance to corporate CFOs.

The site will use a traditional leaderboard system, rather than real money, where winners can win prizes ranging from subscriptions to the Economist Magazine (CFO Magazine is part of the Economist Group) to Amazon gift cards to a ticket to the CFO Rising East Conference.

The initiative likely stemmed from the results of the quarterly Duke University/CFO Magazine Global Business Outlook Survey where "the ability to forecast results" consistently tops the list of CFOs' concerns. On the platform, CEOs can bet on economic indicators such as business inventory levels, the rate of inflation, oil prices, consumer spending, CFO turnover, and accounting rules convergence.

More accurate predictions on these economic indicators and regulatory decisions would no doubt be of great value to CFOs and the collective wisdom of this particular crowd would likely be impressive. But will CFOs want to share their wisdom with all of their competitors and collaborate in this way? Will the thrill of the competition be enough to spur participation (I doubt that an Economist subscription is much of an incentive to this crowd)?

Unfortunately, you need to be a CFO in order to be let onto the site, so outsiders can't see the market's penetration. Alas, we also can't see the results. [Update: Crowdcast has clarified that the site is open (clicking "other" occupation lets you in fully) and I'm now in] Unlike many prediction market platforms out there, this one is actually asking questions that matter -- and I would love to see what the world's corporate financial leaders's forecasts.

Comments

[asg]

Hah, that reminds me a little of the semi-facetious Fantasy Supreme Court league that the Volokh blog ran a few years back -- players drafted 2 of the 9 justices for their teams, and there was a complicated scoring system based on majority opinions written, dissents, etc.

[Tim]

I wonder if they would allow journalistic access. You should ask for a special account, probably have to agree that you'd run any articles by them, etc. but worth a shot.

[Leslie Fine]

Melody,

Thank you for posting about the CFO/Crowdcast Prediction Market. While you do have to be a registered user of CFO.com to participate, registration is free and easy. And, you can read more here.

We’re really excited about our partnership with CFO magazine. We think it will create a unique place for readers – finance executives around the world – to develop accurate forecasts for metrics critical to their day-to-day jobs. As you have rightly mentioned, the ability to forecast consistently tops the CFO concerns list. Crowdcast's primary mission is to help our clients translate team intelligence to business intelligence to enhance decision making, but we are happy to partner with CFO to demonstrate the power of prediction markets.

Best regards,

Leslie Fine
Chief Scientist, Crowdcast

[Melody]

Thanks, Leslie for the clarification. I registered and explored the site, but I was surprised to see that it was open to the public. I assumed that one of the benefits of the partnership with CFO would be to tap into the knowledge of a select group of participants. It was also interesting to see the bell curve format -- is the methodology of how you determined the mean open to the market participants?