The Second Workshop on Prediction Markets, held in conjunction with Eighth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'07) will bring together researchers and practitioners from a variety of relevant fields, including economics, finance, computer science, and statistics, in both academia and industry, to discuss the state of the art today, and the challenges and prospects for tomorrow in the field of prediction markets.

A prediction market is a financial market designed to elicit a forecast. For example, suppose a policymaker seeks a forecast of the likelihood of an avian flu outbreak in 2008. She may float a security paying $1 if and only if an outbreak actually occurs in 2008, hoping to attract traders willing to speculate on the outcome. With sufficient liquidity, traders will converge to a consensus price reflecting their collective information about the value of the security, which in this case directly corresponds to the probability of outbreak. Empirically, prediction markets often yield better forecasts than other methods across a diverse array of settings.

The past decade has seen a healthy growth in the field, including a sharp rise in publications and events, and the creation of the Journal of Prediction Markets. Academic work includes mechanism design, experimental (laboratory) studies, field studies, and empirical analyses. In industry, several companies including Eli Lilly, Corning, HP, Microsoft, and Google have piloted internal prediction markets. Other companies, including ConsensusPoint, InklingMarkets, NewsFutures, and TradeSports, base their business on providing public prediction markets, prediction market software solutions, or consulting services. The growth of the field is reflected and fueled by a wave of popular press articles and books on the topic, most prominently Surowiecki’s “The Wisdom of Crowds”.

NOTE: You can indicate your intent to attend here, though official registration must go through the EC'07 conference.

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