The whizzdom of crowds

I've been enjoying the heck out of the Seavey's "Fantasy Iditarod" game.  It occurred to me that with so many participants (469!) it might be interesting to look at how everybody bet, to see whether or not the game actually had any predictive value.

A few years back James Suroweicki wrote a book called "The Wisdom of Crowds," the basic premise of which is that "a large group's aggregated answers to questions involving quantity estimation, general world knowledge, and spatial reasoning has generally been found to be as good as, and often better than, the answer given by any of the individuals within the group." Over the past decade or so there's been tremendous growth in what are called "prediction markets," in which participants buy and sell prediction shares in things like political elections, Academy Awards, etc.

So, how well can a group of Iditarod fans predict the race outcome?  Not that well, as it turns out, but not that badly, either.  There seems to be some accuracy at the high ends (winners) and low ends (um, not winners), but the pricing and rules of the game have a distortive effect in the middle, I think.

Here's my premise: according to the rules of Fantasy Iditarod, each person has $27,000 to allocate to up to 7 mushers.  Each musher had a "price," with very experienced, successful mushers being priced quite high and rookies or people who hadn't been particularly in the past priced quite low.  The prices were set such that a player couldn't spend it all on top mushers - if they wanted 7 mushers they'd need to bet on some lesser-known or less-successful mushers.  I thought it was possible that the raw counts of how many people had included a given musher might indicate something about how the race would turn out.  So, I wrote a simple script to count the number of bets on each of the mushers (and did the same for the rookie bets - more on that later).

 I was surprised that Martin Buser had gotten as many bets as he had, and he was the jackrabbit early in the race.  Aliy Zirkle was the most popular choice and she came in a very close second.   Joar Leifseth Ulsom was ranked 5th, which is not what you'd normally expect for a rookie, but was quite close to how he actually did (7th).  Mitch Seavey was the 9th most popular choice but had far, far viewer bets than Aliy (74, to her 232).

I think to some extent the results were distorted by our inability to pick the seven teams we thought would place the highest, although I don't think they were distorted that much.  Almost certainly people with no chance received more votes than they would have absent the $27,000 limit, and people with some chance received a bit fewer.  I also think there was a lot of sentimental voting as a way of showing support for mushers people particularly like, regardless of what the expected outcome would be.

In the rookie race, Joar was the hands-down favorite.  If you follow dog mushing at all he would have had to have been your choice.  He received 92 votes for the Rookie Award, and the closest competitor was Travis Beals, at 45.  Josh Cadzow received 42, which surprised me quite a bit - I would have thought he'd get the second-most votes, based on past performance.  If anybody has any insight into why Travis got more votes from fans I'd be really interested to hear your take on it.

The tables are below, with names, votes, and actual placement.  Some teams are still on the trail so the final standings aren't complete, but 36 teams are in and I think that's enough to get a handle on how well the Fantasy Iditarod bets line up with the actual results.

Fantasy Iditarod bet counts

Name	Bets				Placement
Aliy Zirkle	232				2
Dallas Seavey	206				4
Martin Buser	156				17
Lance Mackey	127				19
Joar Leifseth Ulsom	98				7
Jeff King	97				3
Jake Berkowitz	86				8
Ramey Smyth	80				20
Mitch Seavey	74				1
DeeDee Jonrowe	71				10
Gerry Willomitzer	71				withdrawn
Kristy Berington	70
Mike Ellis	68				30
Travis Beals	68
Brent Sass	65				22
Josh Cadzow	61				14
Matt Giblin	54
Newton Marshall	51				scratched
Peter Kaiser	50				13
John Baker	47				21
Cindy Abbott	46				scratch
Allen Moore	44				33
Aaron Peck	42
Anna Berington	42
Richie Diehl	40				36
Cim Smyth	40				15
Matt Failor	38				28
Paige Drobny	36				34
Mikhail Telpin	32
Christine Roalofs	31
James Volek	30
Aaron Burmeister	28				11
Scott Janssen	28				scratched
Jason Mackey	27				scratched
Paul Gebhardt	26				16
Charley Bejna	25				scratched
Nicolas Petit	25				6
Jessie Royer	23				18
Luan Ramos Marques	23
Mike Williams Sr	23
Wade Marrs	22				32
Jodi Bailey	21
Karin Hendrickson	21
Angie Taggart	20
Jan Steves	18				scratched
Michelle Phillips	18				24
Justin Savidis	17
Ken Anderson	17				12
Ray Redington Jr	17				5
Jim Lanier	15				35
Michael Williams Jr	14				23
Curt Perano	14				27
Kelley Griffin	14				26
Louie Ambrose	13
Bob Chlupach	11
Jessica Hendricks	10				25
Robert Bundtzen	9				scratched
Kelly Maixner	9				31
Sonny Lindner	7				9
Cindy Gallea	7
Rudy Demoski Sr	6				scratch
Linwood Fiedler	5				29
Michael Suprenant	3				scratched
Gerald Sousa	3
Ed Stielstra	3				scratched
David Sawatzky	1				scratched

Fantasy Iditarod rookie bet counts

Joar Leifseth Ulsom	92
Travis Beals	45
Josh Cadzow	42
Paige Drobny	32
Mike Ellis	30
Richie Diehl	23
Cindy Abbott	11
Mikhail Telpin	10
Charley Bejna	9
James Volek	9
Christine Roalofs	8
Luan Ramos Marques	7
Louie Ambrose	6