Call for Participation
Third Workshop on Prediction Markets
We solicit research contributions, system demonstrations, and participants for the Third Workshop on Prediction Markets, to be held in conjunction with the Ninth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'08).
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 2009. She may float a security paying $1 if and only if an outbreak actually occurs in 2009, 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 Corning, Eli Lilly, Google, HP, and Microsoft, have piloted internal prediction markets. Other companies, including ConsensusPoint, InklingMarkets, InTrade, and NewsFutures, 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”.
The area of prediction markets faces challenges regarding how best to design, deploy, analyze, implement, and understand prediction markets. One important research direction is designing mechanisms for prediction markets, especially for events with a combinatorial outcome space. Another notable issue is manipulation in prediction markets. Understanding the effect of manipulation is especially important for prediction markets to find their way to assist individuals and organizations in making critical decisions. Moreover, how to implement market mechanisms that not only are easy to use but also facilitate information aggregation has been an important problem for practitioners. Prediction markets face social and political obstacles including antigambling laws and moral and ethical concerns, both real and constructed.
Submissions of abstracts for research contributions from a rich set of empirical, experimental, and theoretical perspectives are invited. Topics of interest at the workshop include, but are not limited to:
- Mechanism design
- Game-theoretic analysis of mechanisms, behaviors, and dynamics
- Decision markets
- Combinatorial prediction markets
- Market makers for prediction markets
- Manipulation and prediction markets
- Order matching algorithms
- Computational issues of prediction markets
- Liquidity and thin markets
- Laboratory experiments
- Empirical analysis
- Prediction market modeling
- Industry and field experience
- Simulations
- Policy applications and implications
- Internal corporate applications
- Legal and ethical issues
Submissions of summaries for demonstrations on prediction market systems are invited. Systems of interest at the workshop include, but are not limited to:
- Implemented combinatorial prediction markets
- Mature systems and commercial products of market mechanisms
- Research prototypes on prediction markets
- Other collective prediction systems
Research contributions should report new (unpublished) research results or ongoing research. We request an abstract not exceeding one page for every research contribution.
For system demonstrations, a summary of up to two pages including technical content to be demonstrated is requested. Please indicate if the demonstration requires network access.
Research contributions and system demonstrations should be submitted electronically to the organizing committee at pm2008@umich.edu no later than midnight Hawaii time, May 23, 2008.
At least one author of each accepted research contribution and system demonstration will be expected to attend and present or demonstrate their work at the workshop.
May 23, 2008: Submissions due midnight Hawaii Time
May 30, 2008: Notification of accepted research contributions and system demonstrations
July 9, 2008: Workshop date