From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Wed Jul 30 2003 - 11:22:56 MDT
Robin Hanson wrote:
> At 02:36 PM 7/30/2003 +0930, Emlyn O'regan wrote:
>
>> Can the policy analysis market work without DARPA funding/backing? Is
>> there
>> some reason that a private entity couldn't create & run it?
>
>
> DARPA backing made it easier to overcome legal hurdles, but sufficiently
> motivated private entities could overcome those as well. The idea of
> an information market is that someone wants to know something, so they
> create markets on the questions that interest them. The DoD is by far
> the biggest customer around that wants to know about military and political
> events in the middle east, so it will be hard to find a customer to replace
> them for that product. But the basic technology can be applied in many
> other areas, including corporate governance (which ad agency should we
> hire, which product should we introduce, should we merge, and so on).
>
>
> Robin Hanson rhanson@gmu.edu http://hanson.gmu.edu
> Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
> MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
> 703-993-2326 FAX: 703-993-2323
>
If you're going to do this as a private market, would it need to be
limited to terrorism? Couldn't you make "bets" about nearly anything
that someone else would bet on?
A few of questions strike me as needing an answer, though:
1) How could you be certain that the market wasn't rigged?
2) Does the market allow selling short? Buying on the margin? (etc.)
3) Can you collect without fearing repercussions?
If so, such a market could lead to a lively "trade" in IP, etc., both
legal and otherwise.
-- -- Charles Hixson Gnu software that is free, The best is yet to be.
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 30 2003 - 11:30:57 MDT