If you haven't seen this yet, this gambling site has Atlanta, GA / Boston, MA / Austin, TX as the top three choices for HQ2.
http://www.paddypower.com/bet?action=go_type&ev_type_id=2271...
http://www.paddypower.com/bet?action=go_type&ev_type_id=2271...
Austin (3:1) - 25% | Boston (3:1) - 25% | Atlanta (3:1)- 25% | DC (10:1) - 9% | Pitt (10:1) - 9% | Nyc (12:1) - 7.5% | Toronto ( 14:1) - 6%
We're already at greater than 100% (106.5%). And there are 13 more cities with >= ~5% chance. It's pretty tough to have any faith in this site or their odds.
Could've been an interesting data point to look at though.
Also NB: The odds don't reflect the bookie's opinion of what the real outcome will be. They reflect the bookie's opinion of gamblers' willingness to bet on each option. The bookie is trying to get the odds-adjusted amount bet on each option to be as close to equal as they can manage. That way, no matter what the outcome is, they can just take the money paid by the losers give some of it to the winners and then keep what is leftover for themselves.
I'm not sure that's quite true. For example, a Wisdom of the Crowds consensus approach can do really well in picking Academy Awards winners for example.
It's not immediately obvious that you can't take the same approach here. The bigger issue is probably that, while with the Academy Awards experienced pickers can bring a fair amount of historical perspective about the types of things that win, precursor awards, etc. in this case:
- There's no track record to look at
- No one outside of the people involved know what's going on behind the scenes
- No one knows how Bezos & company are really thinking about this, what they really value, etc.
So in the end, the crowd has so little real information to go on, any Wisdom of the crowds is going to be incredibly noisy. The wisdom of the crowds assumes everyone is not just throwing a random dart at a map.