BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Pentagon plans online terror bets
Research indicates that markets are extremely efficient, effective and timely aggregators of dispersed and even hidden information," it said in a statement.
Risk Services
"Futures markets have proven themselves to be good at predicting such things as election results; they are often better than expert opinions."
The scheme is called the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) and it is run by a Pentagon unit known as the Defence Advanced Research Projects Unit.
This is under the control of retired Admiral John Poindexter who has been involved in another controversy recently in a plan for a sweeping electronic intelligence operation.
I like this because the y have come up with a damn good idea and want to make use of what is in effect an open source model (albeit it involving transactions) of gaining future info. However because of the nature of the topics it is obviously courting controversy -
Markets have done this in economics for some time and the Iowa Electronic Markets does it for US presidential elections, so it is not really novel
Merli Baroudi
Personally I think I will bet on the likelihood of this succeeding - a five year bet should have quite good odds :0
Posted by Paul Goodison at July 29, 2003 01:10 PM | TrackBack