Iowa Electronic Markets runs futures markets, similar to the futures markets in stocks, on all kinds of questions. The players are betting real money on a wide variety of questions: they are people who feel expert enough to put their money where their mouth is. I am inclined to take them seriously – they conform to the wise-crowd model, which I have talked about before.
Among other things, they have a winner-takes-all futures market on the presidential elections. Here is the contract – the description of how it works. Here is a graph of the daily prices since it opened (via Instapundit). As you can see, at the moment Bush is ahead, just barely.
Posted by David Boxenhorn at August 2, 2004 05:09 PM