While most empirical analysis of prediction markets treats prices of binary options as predictions of the probability of future events, Manski (2004) has recently argued that there is little existing theory supporting this practice. We provide relevant analytic foundations, describing sufficient...

Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as information markets, idea futures or event futures, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future event, thereby yielding prices that can be interpreted as market-aggregated forecasts. This article summarizes the...

In September 2002, a new market in Economic Derivatives was launched allowing traders to take positions on future values of several macroeconomic data releases. We provide an initial analysis of the prices of these options. We find that market-based measures of expectations are similar to...

Prediction markets have been proposed for a variety of public policy purposes, but no one has considered their application in perhaps the most obvious policy area: crime. This paper proposes and examines the use of prediction markets to forecast crime rates and the impact on crime from changes...