THE POTENTIAL OF PREDICTION MARKETS

ROBIN HANSON

Economics, George Mason University

Prediction markets, and related forms of collective forecasting, are
slowly becoming more robust and reliable, and applied more widely in
industry. This talk reviews the concept, mechanisms, issues, and 
enormous future potential of related information aggregation mechanisms.  

BIO

Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason
University, a research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of
Oxford University, and chief scientist at Consensus Point. After receiving
his Ph.D. in social science from the California Institute of Technology in
1997, Robin was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation health policy scholar at
the University of California at Berkeley. In 1984, Robin received a masters
in physics and a masters in the philosophy of science from the University of
Chicago, and afterward spent nine years researching artificial intelligence,
Bayesian statistics, and hypertext publishing at Lockheed, NASA, and
independently.

Robin has pioneered prediction markets since 1988. He was the first to write
in detail about people creating and subsidizing markets in order to gain
better estimates on those topics. Robin was a principal architect of the
first internal corporate markets, at Xanadu in 1990, of the first web
markets, the Foresight Exchange since 1994, and of DARPA's Policy Analysis
Market, from 2001 to 2003. Robin has developed new technologies for
conditional, combinatorial, and intermediated trading, and has studied
insider trading, manipulation, and other foul play.