Tapping into the collective intelligence of all employees is a hot topic for all manner of organisations right now.  Whilst concepts like idea jams are pretty well known now, with IBM running their jams for over a decade, the whole concept does kinda rest on the confidence levels of employees.  If they feel able and confident enough to speak up and share their views, then they can be very effective.  If that kind of culture doesn’t exist however, they can be quite awkward as tumbleweed blows through the whole process.

This is where prediction markets can come in, because most offer employees the ability to anonymously participate in the decision making process.  Most of the work in this area has thus been US based, so it’s nice to see the first Spanish effort launch this month.  The project, called The Agora Market, has emerged from the Experimental Economics Laboratory in the Universitat Jaume I.  The Agora Market platform can implement prediction markets in an enterprise as a tool for improving the efficiency of internal information management and strategic decision-making.

The platform has all of the hall marks of traditional prediction markets, offering participants the opportunity to buy and sell shares based upon their predictions.

As the team explain, “Individuals buy and sell stocks based on their own predictions of what they think it will work or not, and after that they get real money for the actions that match their predictions. That enables to track real time what an informed group believes that will happen”.

The software is now ready for commercialization in medium or large companies, along with a comprehensive implementation service by the hand of researchers at the Laboratory of Experimental Economics that ensures its proper use to achieve reliable and robust predictions to the customer. The technology can be applied in any business of any economic sector and industrial area.

The tool has also a market maker, which provides the programme with the necessary liquidity making public offers of purchase and sale of any prediction at a given point in time and at a specified price by an algorithm or market scoring rule that enables to calculate purchase and sale prices continuously. The development of this algorithm and software package is essential for the system to be effective. Security and anonymity are achieved by generating pages that users use dynamically, so that the browser does not record any of the requests sent to the database with a particular user name.