U.S. Supreme Court Prediction Market

Recently posted to SSRN: FantasySCOTUS: Crowdsourcing a Prediction Market for the Supreme Court, a draft paper by Josh Blackman, Adam Aft, & Corey Carpenter assessing the accuracy of the Harlan Institute's U.S. Supreme Court prediction market, FantasySCOTUS.org. The paper compares and contrasts the accuracy of FantasySCOTUS, which relied on a "wisdom of the crowd" approach, with the Supreme Court Forecasting Project, which relied on a computer model of Supreme Court decision making. From the paper's abstract:

During the October 2009 Supreme Court term, the 5,000 members made over 11,000 predictions for all 81 cases decided. Based on this data, FantasySCOTUS accurately predicted a majority of the cases, and the top-ranked experts predicted over 75% of the cases correctly. With this combined knowledge, we can now have a method to determine with a degree of certainty how the Justices will decide cases before they do. . . . During the October 2002 Term, the [FantasySCOTUS] Project’s model predicted 75% of the cases correctly, which was more accurate than the [Supreme Court] Forecasting Project’s experts, who only predicted 59.1% of the cases correctly. The FantasySCOTUS experts predicted 64.7% of the cases correctly, surpassing the Forecasting Project’s Experts, though the difference was not statistically significant. The Gold, Silver, and Bronze medalists in FantasySCOTUS scored staggering accuracy rates of 80%, 75% and 72% respectively (an average of 75.7%). The FantasySCOTUS top three experts not only outperformed the Forecasting Project’s experts, but they also slightly outperformed the Project’s model - 75.7% compared with 75%.

You can download a copy of the draft paper here.

[Crossposted at Agoraphilia, Midas Oracle, and MoneyLaw.]

Pants Down Part 2

http://classbias.blogspot.com/2011/04/ncaa-and-law-schools.html

Pants Up

I am sincerely sorry if the last post on this blog somehow spelled the end of any contributions. To try and make up for it, I want to try to get those pants pulled back up. The problem is that it is probably only a wishful thinking pants up. One of the things that stood out in the US News and World Report rankings this year was the decline of the University of Missouri Law School. I have tried unsuccessfully to determine the exact factors causing this decline and the limited information I could find suggests they were mainly financial. Nevertheless, here's what I would like to believe: Their ranking fell because they refused to game the system AND in the aftermath they did not fire their dean. Plus, in the prisoner's delimma world of gaming the system, that school's risk taking will be followed by others. I do not know if that is true but, if so, a big Pants Up to them.