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https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/mantic-monday-let-me-google-that

Let Me Google That For You

New from Google this month: Creating A Prediction Market On Google Cloud. Google announces that they\u2019ve been running an internal prediction market for the past year, with \u201cover 175,000 predictions from over 10,000 Google employees\u201d.
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Most of it\u2019s classified because they\u2019re predicting stuff about Google\u2019s corporate secrets, but some friendly Googlers were at least willing to walk me through the article and clarify pieces I didn\u2019t understand.

The market, called Gleangen, is actually the second prediction market Google\u2019s tried. The first, in 2007, was called Prophit - the team included occasional ACX commenter Patri Friedman, who\u2019s since moved into the charter city space.
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Prophit wound down because the founders left and nobody really knew what to do with; you can read about some of their findings here. In 2020, with all the uncertainty around coronavirus, some Googlers decided to try again. Gleangen is the result.

Unlike most prediction markets, anybody can create a question on Gleangen. This usually goes badly: most people are terrible at writing questions with objective resolutions. Google manages by having a dedicated team of moderators who go over everything and amend it when needed. The market pays out in play money and the right to be on a leaderboard.

So far it\u2019s not doing much else. The Googlers I talked to saw no evidence that company executives were paying much attention to it when making decisions. Why not? Hal Varian, Google\u2019s chief economist, said in a Conversation with Tyler Cowen:

COWEN: Why doesn\u2019t business use more prediction markets? They would seem to make sense, right? Bet on ideas. Aggregate information. We\u2019ve all read Hayek.

VARIAN: Right. And we had a prediction market [referring to Prophit in 2007]. I\u2019ll tell you the problem with it. The problem is, the things that we really wanted to get a probability assessment on were things that were so sensitive that we thought we would violate the SEC rules on insider knowledge because, if a small group of people knows about some acquisition or something like that, there is a secret among this small group.