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The productive use of exchanges for idea futures, a form of prediction market, is an idea that has not yet garnered the support it deserves. Consider it to be like derivative equity markets, only with ideas, bets and bold declarations in place of stocks. The predictive performance of diverse collections of people with money on the line is, on the whole, pretty impressive - which suggests that if you are onto something big and want to get the word out, then prediction markets are a better way to do it than most other methodologies that spring to mind. All it will take is some bright spark to figure out the right business model and idea futures exchanges will be everywhere. This, I think, will be a good thing.
While healthy prediction markets exist for all sorts of blandly popular things - politics and sports, for example - there seems to be a lack of initiatives for idea futures. Nonetheless, if you wander through the contents of the medicine and biotechnology section at the Foresight Exchange - a system that is more game-like, as it doesn't use real money, but rather people play for a score - you'll find some traded ideas relating to radical life extension, physical immortality and the MPrize for anti-aging research:
I suspect that the running claim percentages are an indication that removing money and profit from the idea futures equation leads to overestimation - or that this small market suffers from pro-technology, pro-life-extension selection bias due to the sort of folk more likely to take part. You should explore the exchange and take a look for yourself, however.
Technorati tags: life extension, prediction markets
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Posted by Reason
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