… And while you're working in the most desired place to work in, you get to work a day a week on whatever you like, you're being paid like royalty, you have accommodations like in a hotel and you have your job secured, why don't you go for some additional money playing, while you're at it? I guess that's what Papa Google must have thought of, when the Lunchtime Betting Game was invented.

Well, initially, it was a corporate experiment that was first mentioned in September 2005 on the Official Blog; the prediction market seems to keep the Googlers creative and to nourish their will to work harder in order to achieve a certain outcome that they have predicted in the respective market. And more, as Barry Schwartz from searchengineland.com noted, it helps the company executives gage ideas that might come from a lower person on the Google food channel. I did mention that it's played during the free lunches they get, did I not?

The number in the title, 10,000 bucks, can be won quarterly as prizes if they get things right, and some Googlers have even built programs that help automate some of the bidding being done: "Google's prediction markets were launched in April 2005. [...] In Google's terminology, a market asks a question (e.g., 'how many users will Gmail have?') that has 2-5 possible mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive answers (e.g., 'Fewer than X users', 'Between X and Y', and 'More than Y'). Each answer corresponds to a security that is worth a unit of currency (called a 'Gooble') if the answer turns out to be correct (and zero otherwise). [...] There is no automated market maker, but several employees did create robotic traders that sometimes played this role", is what Bo Cowgill, the one who first mentioned the game, wrote, back in 2005.

It's pretty successful, out of the 6,425 employees and contractors involved, 1,463 placed at least one trade.