Predicting the future is serious business for virtually all public and private institutions, for they must often make important decisions based upon such predictions. This text explores how institutions might improve their predictions and arrive at better decisions by means of prediction markets.

How does one effectively aggregate disparate pieces of information that are spread among many different individuals? In other words, how does one best access the ‘wisdom of the crowd’? Prediction markets, which are essentially speculative markets created for the purpose of aggregating information and making predictions, offer the answer to this question. The effective use of these markets has the potential not only to help forecast future events on a national and international level, but also to assist companies, for example, in providing improved estimates of the potential market size for a new product idea or the launch date of new products and services. The markets have already been used to forecast uncertain outcomes ranging from influenza to the spread of infectious diseases, to the demand for hospital services, to the box office success of movies, climate change, vote shares and election outcomes, to the probability of meeting project deadlines. The insights gained also have many potentially valuable applications for public policy more generally. These markets offer substantial promise as a tool of information aggregation as well as forecasting, whether alone or as a supplement to other mechanisms like opinion surveys, group deliberations, panels of experts and focus groups. Moreover, they can be applied at a macroeconomic and microeconomic level to yield information that is valuable for government and commercial policy-makers and which can be used for a number of social purposes. This volume of original readings, contributed by many of the leading experts in the field, marks a significant addition to the base of knowledge about this fascinating subject area. The book should be of interest to anyone looking at monetary economics, economic forecasting and microeconomics.

How to adapt democracy to the accelerating pace of technological change—and why it's critical that we do Successful democracies throughout history—from ancient Athens to Britain on the cusp of the industrial age—have used the technology of their time to gather information for better governance. Our challenge is no different today, but it is more urgent because the accelerating pace of technological change creates potentially enormous dangers as well as benefits. Accelerating Democracy shows how to adapt democracy to new information technologies that can enhance political decision making and enable us to navigate the social rapids ahead. John O. McGinnis demonstrates how these new technologies combine to address a problem as old as democracy itself--how to help citizens better evaluate the consequences of their political choices. As society became more complex in the nineteenth century, social planning became a top-down enterprise delegated to experts and bureaucrats. Today, technology increasingly permits information to bubble up from below and filter through more dispersed and competitive sources. McGinnis explains how to use fast-evolving information technologies to more effectively analyze past public policy, bring unprecedented intensity of scrutiny to current policy proposals, and more accurately predict the results of future policy. But he argues that we can do so only if government keeps pace with technological change. For instance, it must revive federalism to permit different jurisdictions to test different policies so that their results can be evaluated, and it must legalize information markets to permit people to bet on what the consequences of a policy will be even before that policy is implemented. Accelerating Democracy reveals how we can achieve a democracy that is informed by expertise and social-scientific knowledge while shedding the arrogance and insularity of a technocracy.

Today, more mediated information is available to more people than at any other time in human history. New and revitalized sense-making strategies multiply in response to the challenges of "cutting through the clutter" of competing narratives and taming the avalanche of information. Data miners, "sentiment analysts," and decision markets offer to help bodies of data "speak for themselves"—making sense of their own patterns so we don’t have to. Neuromarketers and body language experts promise to peer behind people’s words to see what their brains are really thinking and feeling. New forms of information processing promise to displace the need for expertise and even comprehension—at least for those with access to the data. Infoglut explores the connections between these wide-ranging sense-making strategies for an era of information overload and "big data," and the new forms of control they enable. Andrejevic critiques the popular embrace of deconstructive debunkery, calling into question the post-truth, post-narrative, and post-comprehension politics it underwrites, and tracing a way beyond them.

This innovative and original book explores the relationship between blockchain and antitrust, highlighting the mutual benefits that stem from cooperation between the two and providing a unique perspective on how law and technology could cooperate.

This book offers a distinctive moral defense of capitalism. Unlike most such defenses, this book avoids the summoning of concepts and ideas drawn from the modern philosophical tradition that arose out of the 17th–18th century Enlightenment. It rejects the idea of supporting capitalism on the grounds of self-ownership, human dignity, property rights, social utility, or a social contract. Confidence in the power of human reason to demonstrate any of these notions has waned since the Enlightenment, and justifiably so. Capitalism stands in desperate need of different philosophic foundations. This book’s thesis is that capitalism can be more sturdily defended on a pre-modern basis. Adopting the ancient Roman philosopher Cicero as a guide, this book acknowledges the limits of human reason. It applies the ancient skepticism that Cicero represents, a school of thought that teaches us to be content with probabilities and to focus upon the practical dimensions of human existence. Philosophical inquiry is best directed to the task of identifying the means of securing both life and the good life for human beings. As such, this book stresses the overriding importance of maintaining social co-operation and advancing human excellence. It argues that capitalism satisfies both these imperatives.

The contributors to this volume discuss and for the most part challenge whether many minds can be wiser than one.