SBIR Phase I: OpIndex: A Dynamic Index of Consumer Opinions

这个小型企业创新研究第一阶段项目集中在组织消费者意见方面存在的机会，非结构化信息构成了互联网内容的重要部分。组织这些信息将导致当前市场的效率提高，并将使新兴市场成为可能。这一建议整合了预测市场和休闲游戏，以生成一个结构化的、非即席的、大规模的消费者真实意见的动态指数。预测市场是明确设计的机制，在这种机制下，消费者被激励通过交易游戏真实地透露他们的观点。然而，从历史上看，预测市场并没有扩大规模。休闲游戏是一种非正式的问题解决机制，已被证明通过互联网和移动设备大规模扩展。然而，休闲游戏是临时的，不会诱导出一个协调的、有目的的数据集。本研究的智力价值在于将这两种机制结合起来，并将研究结果应用于商业企业。这项研究的更广泛影响是：(1)通过降低复杂机制中大众参与的门槛，在更大范围内提供集体意见，进而(2)减少不确定性并增加对信息质量的信心，(3)在当前决策过程中创造更高的效率，(4)在减少信息不对称的情况下使新市场得以出现，以及(5)对许多工业部门产生溢出效益。综合方法是对新兴社交计算平台软件设计方法的新贡献，在社交计算平台中，体系结构越来越多地基于参与，而不是单一设计。通过更好的报酬结构和更低的交易成本，本文的研究将有助于发展预测市场本身的内在逻辑。如果部署成功，该方法将使旨在评估消费者参与度和趋势的在线研究能够以更低的成本参与。

This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project concentrates on the opportunities that exist in organizing consumers' opinions, unstructured information that makes up a significant portion of Internet content. Organizing this information will lead to efficiency gains in current markets and will enable emerging ones. This proposal integrates prediction markets and casual games to generate a structured, non ad-hoc and dynamic index of consumers' true opinions on a large scale. Prediction markets are explicitly designed mechanisms where consumers are given incentives to reveal their opinions truthfully through trading games. However, historically prediction markets have not scaled. Casual games are informal problem-solving mechanisms that have been shown to scale massively through Internet and mobile devices. However, casual games are ad hoc and do not induce a coordinated purposeful dataset. The intellectual merit of the proposed research lies in integrating these two mechanisms and applying the result to the commercial enterprise. The broader impacts of this research are the ability to (1) provision the collective's opinions on a larger scale by lowering barriers for mass participation in a complex mechanism, that in turn (2) decrease uncertainty and increase confidence in the quality of the information, (3) create greater efficiency in current decision-making processes, (4) enable new markets to emerge given the reduced information asymmetries, and (5) have spill-over benefits to many industrial sectors. The integrative approach is a novel contribution to software design methodologies for emerging social computing platforms, where the architecture is increasingly based on participation and less on monolithic designs. The proposed research will contribute to development of the internal logic of the prediction market itself, through better reward structure and lower transaction costs. If successfully deployed, the approach will enable lower-cost engagement for online research geared toward assessing consumer engagement and trends.