Information Sharing at Google

NYT has the story on how the Google prediction markets have fared over the past two-and-a-half years.

One of the biggest findings was that an employee's trading performance was most strongly correlated with the trading results of the other Googlers around him (or her). Friends and other coworkers who were not sitting in close proximity played a significantly smaller role.

I attended the session in New Orleans on Friday where Eric Zitzewitz of Dartmouth showed off the paper (co-written by Justin Wolfers of Wharton and Bo Cowgill, a project manager at Google who came up with the idea to run the markets) and here is an eye-popping chart similar to one from the presentation that best illustrates their finding of information sharing in close quarters.

The green shows people who are winning money (the big green area represents 16 traders) and the red shows the losers:

UPDATE 9:44 P.M.
Because of what I believe is an honest misunderstanding on the part of my source, I have taken down the chart showing the Google information clusters. But as I wrote previously, the charts should be made available soon by Google.

UPDATE 2 1:27 P.M. 1/8/08
And back again (click to enlarge):

Here is more information from Cowgill over at the Google blog.