Can Election Fuures Markets Be More Accurate Than Polls期货市场可以选举比投票更准确.pptVIP

Can Election Futures Markets Be More Accurate Than Polls? U.S. presidential elections are tremendously important to Americans and to others throughout the world. Because the elections are so important, many people work hard to try to predict their outcomes. Introduction Public opinion polls are an important part of American political life. Polling informs and influences political debate, the state of the economy, social trends and more. Political scientists and polling companies have developed sophisticated techniques to improve polling, making it more accurate. Now, however, there is a new approach to predicting election outcomes that is proving to be even more accurate than polling. This approach involves using futures markets—where people risk some of their own money— to predict the outcome of such things as presidential elections. This approach appears to deliver more accurate results than opinion polls. the purpose of this lesson is to compare two approaches for predicting the outcomes of presidential elections. The first approach is to use the traditional and highly sophisticated opinion polls conducted by such well-known organizations as Gallup and Harris. What are the challenges that public opinion companies face in their efforts to get accurate results? Sampling One major challenge for pollsters is to identify a random sample of voters. This cannot be done by talking to people in a shopping mall or asking people to call into a television station. Probability sampling is the basis for all scientific survey research. The basic idea is that a small, randomly selected sample of a population can represent the opinions of all of the people in the population. The goal is to obtain the same results that would have been obtained had every member of the population been included in the survey. Sample Size Random selection of a sample is one issue polling companies face; sample size is another. For every poll, pollsters must determine how man