- Who will win? (Image: Steven Johnson/Reuters)
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Pollsters tend to rely on phoning a list of people picked at random to ask who they are voting for. Wei Wang at Columbia University in New York City wanted to find a more efficient way.
During the 2012 US elections, he and researchers at Microsoft sent daily queries to Xbox players about who they planned to vote for, along with their age, sex and other demographic information. They collected more than 700,000 responses from 345,000 players around the country – far more than a typical phone poll might get.
Xbox users don't represent the random mix that pollsters want: they are mostly young white men. But when Wang's team factored this in, they found that they could make predictions about the presidential and state elections that were just as accurate as traditional polls (International Journal of Forecasting, doi.org/v5g). Wang says it could work on Facebook too. "These polls are cheaper, faster, more timely and an order of magnitude larger," he says.
Microsoft is now exploring other ways to run polls online with the Prediction Lab, an interactive site that asks the crowd to help predict the result of the US elections in November.
This article appeared in print under the headline "Gamers polled on Xbox can predict election results"