Prediction markets - markets used to forecast future events - have been used to accurately forecast the outcome of political contests, sporting events, and, occasionally, economic outcomes. This chapter summarizes the latest research on prediction markets in order to further their utilization by...

Interest in prediction markets has increased in the last decade, driven in part by the hope that these markets will prove to be valuable tools in forecasting, decision-making and risk management -- in both the public and private sectors. This paper outlines five open questions in the literature,...

We review the efficacy of three approaches to forecasting elections: econometric models that project outcomes on the basis of the state of the economy; public opinion polls; and election betting (prediction markets). We assess the efficacy of each in light of the 2004 Australian election. This...

Exponential growth bias (EGB) is the pervasive tendency of people to perceive a growth process as linear when, in fact, it is exponential. In this paper, we document that people exhibit EGB when asked to predict the number of COVID-19 positive cases in the future. The bias is positively...

Many countries consider the lifting of restrictions of social contacts (RSC). We quantify the effects of RSC for Germany. We initially employ a purely statistical approach to predicting prevalence of COVID19 if RSC were upheld after April 20. We employ these findings and feed them into our...

Economists traditionally tackle normative problems by computing optimal policy, i.e. the one that maximizes a social welfare function. In practice, however, a succession of marginal changes to a limited number of policy instruments are implemented, until no further improvement is feasible. I...

This paper presents a simple, analytically solvable Chamberlinian agglomeration model. As in the canonical core-periphery (CP) model, two agglomerative forces are at work. However, the present model exhibits a "pitchfork bifurcation" rather than the "tomahawk bifurcation" of the CP model.

"The conventional wisdom that inflation and unemployment are unrelated in the long-run implies that these phenomena can be analysed by separate branches of economics. The macro literature tries to explain inflation dynamics and estimates the NAIRU. The labour macro literature tries to explain...