When I started StyleHop last year, one of my friends in acadamia shared Duncan Watts seminal work that essentially debunked the concept that marketers can predict hits by looking to the “influentials” in their product categories.  Watts revisits this topic in Sunday’s Washington Post article: So You Can’t Pick the Hits.  Neither Can Anyone Else: [...]

While StyleHop isn’t modeled to be a true prediction market where currency is used to wager on and predict winners, the idea is the same. Across many fields, the wisdom of the crowd is trumping the prognosticators and so-called expert forecasters. Just recently, however, there has been quite a bit of criticism of prediction markets. [...]