Archive for 'Chapter Introductions'
The Media
If democratic institutions are tools for translating public opinion into public policy, then the most important institution might be the one that contributes most to forming public opinion in the first place: the media.1 Constitutional protections for free speech and a free press such as the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution seem to reflect […]
Policy Analysts
The number of prediction markets that media organizations can be expected to sponsor in the future will in all likelihood be limited. Although it is possible to imagine a great number of topics regarding which prediction market predictions might be of interest to readers, a limited number of individuals may wish to bet on prediction […]
Businesses
In most of the examples discussed so far, the sponsors of prediction markets have been public-spirited, though perhaps animated by private concerns as well. The media might wish to attract readers and viewers, and policy analysis organizations might hope that markets will make predictions that support policies that they independently favor. In all of these […]
Committees
Because prediction markets provide consensus forecasts, their predictions might carry more weight than the assessment of any given individual. A reader of a newspaper who is educated about prediction markets might weight more heavily a prediction of the result of an election than an analysis by an expert, because that expert might be an outlier. […]
Regulatory Bodies
We have seen how private entities can use prediction markets to produce information and predictions that can help them or others make decisions. The media, for example, can use prediction markets to inform their readers, and policy analysts may […]
Administrative Agencies
Predictive decision making offers the promise of saving the government from the need to issue detailed statutes or regulations in areas such as safety and utility regulation. The government’s role is limited to establishing goals, running the prediction markets, and enforcing compliance. Though substantial, they are far simpler than tasks such as specifying particular technological […]
Public Corporations
The approaches developed in Chapters 5 and 6 allow the government to make decisions based on private parties’ predictions about the effects of both private and potential governmental actions. Nongovernmental decision makers, however, also might be interested in harnessing the power of prediction markets to assess the effects of their decisions. We have seen that […]
Courts
We have already considered several proposals for providing information and predictions to judges to help them improve their decision making. In Chapter 4, for example, we saw that subsidized deliberative prediction markets might be used to give participants incentives to offer legal arguments that are relevant to particular cases. These prediction markets would both predict […]
Legislative Bodies
The preceding few chapters have shown that prediction markets can substitute for voting regimes of many kinds. Instead of using a vote of administrative agency commissioners to decide whether to enact particular regulations, we could use predictive cost-benefit analysis, according to Chapter 6. Instead of relying on a board to defend the interests of shareholders […]
Predictocracy
The first nine chapters of this book have developed two arguments: first, that prediction markets can serve as a general-purpose tool for prediction, and second, that prediction in turn can serve as a general-purpose tool for aggregation of information, beliefs, and preferences. Underlying both arguments is the observation that prediction markets give incentives to be […]