AEI-Brookings Joint Center
Prediction Markets Conference 

Thursday, January 18th, 2007 

Information markets are markets for contracts that yield payments based on the outcome of an uncertain future event. They are used to predict a wide range of events, from presidential elections to printer sales. These markets frequently outperform both experts and opinion polls, and many scholars believe they have the potential to revolutionize policymaking.  The AEI-Brookings Joint Center Prediction Markets Conference, co-hosted by the Prediction Markets Industry Consortium, featured a number of the leading scholars and practitioners of information markets, whose diverse backgrounds fostered discussions covering the many applications of information markets.


AGENDA

Thursday, January 18th, 2007
8:45 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. 
Wohlstetter Conference Center, Twelfth Floor, AEI
1150 Seventeenth Street, N.W., Washington, D.C. 20036

8:45 A.M. Registration
9:00 P.M. Welcome:
ROBERT HAHN, AEI-Brookings Joint Center
9:15 A.M. Presentations:
ROBIN HANSON, George Mason University
ROBERT HAHN, Joint Center 
JUSTIN WOLFERS, Wharton School
EMILE SERVAN-SCHREIBER, Newsfutures
PETER LEITNER, Numeria
JOHN DELANEY, Intrade, Tradesports
3:15 P.M.  Panel
Robert Hahn, Robin Hanson, Emile Servan-Schreiber, Philip Polgreen, Justin Wolfers
4:00 P.M. Adjournment

For more information, please contact Molly Wells at 202.862.5903 or [email protected].

Biographies

John Delaney is Chief Executive Officer of InTrade and TradeSports.  Mr. Delaney co-founded InTrade to capture the opportunity for an Internet based person-to-person platform listing the most innovative markets based on the widest subject matter.  Shortly thereafter he created TradeSports.  The predictive information generated by both companies has been routinely analyzed and quoted by leading academics and the global media such as Forbes, Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, New York Times, CNBC, CNN, Bloomberg, Reuters, Dow Jones, Chicago Tribune and many others. Previously, Mr. Delaney worked for large financial organizations in Ireland where he held roles in financial, compliance and investment positions.  He received a Masters of Science degree in Investment Analysis and Treasury Management from Dublin City University, and a first class honor in the MBA program from the University College Dublin’s Smurfit School of Business. 


Robert Hahn is Co-Founder and Executive Director of the American Enterprise Institute-Brookings Joint Center and a resident scholar at AEI.  Previously, he worked for the Council of Economic Advisers.  He also has served on the faculties of Harvard University and Carnegie Mellon University.  Dr. Hahn frequently contributes to leading scholarly journals and general-interest periodicals, including The American Economic Review, The Yale Law Journal, Science, and The New York Times.  He is the author of Reviving Regulatory Reform: A Global Perspective (AEI-Brookings Joint Center, 2000) and In Defense of the Economic Analysis of Regulation (AEI-Brookings Joint Center, 2005).  In addition, Dr. Hahn is Co-Founder of the Community Preparatory School, an inner-city middle school in Providence, Rhode Island, that provides opportunities for disadvantaged youth to achieve their full potential.


Robin Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University. Professor Hanson has pioneered idea futures, also known as prediction/information markets, since 1988. He was a principal architect of the Foresight Exchange and of DARPA's Policy Analysis Market, and created the first internal corporate markets at Xanadu in 1990. He has written, spoken, and consulted widely on the application of idea futures to business and policy.  Professor Hanson has over 60 publications, including articles in Applied Optics, Business Week, CATO Journal, Communications of the ACM, Economics Letters, Econometrica, Economics of Governance, Extropy, Foundations of Physics, IEEE Intelligent Systems, Information Systems Frontiers, International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Journal of Evolution and Technology, Journal of Public Economics, Proceedings of the Royal Society, Public Choice, Social Epistemology, Social Philosophy and Policy, Theory and Decision, and Wired. 


Peter Leitner is the Chief Executive Officer of Numeria Management LLC and also managing partner of Waterford Advisors LLC, both in Princeton, New Jersey. Numeria is a decision market for valuing firms and their illiquid or hard- to-value assets. Waterford Advisors provides strategy, corporate finance and professional management services to established and emerging firms. Mr. Leitner contributes regularly to a blog, http://blog.numeria.us/, focusing on information markets and their applications.  He has a Bachelor of Science degree from Ithaca College and a Master of Business Administration degree from Lehigh University. He holds the titles of Certified Management Accountant (CMA) and Certified Financial Manager (CFM) from the Institute of Management Accountants.

Philip Polgreen, M.D. is the director of the Infectious Disease Society of America’s Emerging Infections Network, a CDC-sponsored sentinel surveillance group. In addition to traditional hospital epidemiology, his research interests include developing new ways to aggregate information about infectious diseases (e.g., prediction markets) and applying quantitative methods to help prevent the spread of infections. Dr. Polgreen is currently working with an interdisciplinary group of researchers to apply quantitative approaches (e.g., social networking, time series methods) to understand and solve problems in the field of infectious diseases.

Emile Servan-Schreiber is Chief Executive Officer of NewsFutures, a company that designs and implements prediction markets for corporations.  He has also used his expertise in human information processing to co-author two best-selling CD-Roms: The Challenge of the Universe and Secrets of the Mind.  Dr. Servan-Schreiber previously worked as an artificial intelligence engineer for Ilog, a software production company specializing in providing business solutions.  As a leading expert on prediction markets, he is an associate editor of the Journal of Prediction Markets, and has recently been quoted in Time, BusinessWeek, The New York Times, Newsweek, US News & World Report, CFO, Wired, and Nature.  Dr. Servan-Schreiber earned a B.S. in computer science and a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology, both from Carnegie Mellon University.

Justin Wolfers is an assistant professor of economics in the Business and Public Policy Department at the Wharton School. He is a visiting scholar with the San Francisco Federal Reserve, and a Research Fellow with the National Bureau of Economic Research. He was previously an Assistant Professor at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, and an economist with the Reserve Bank of Australia. Professor Wolfers earned his Ph.D. in economics in June 2001 from Harvard University, and was a Fulbright, Knox and Menzies Scholar and a fellow with the MacArthur Network on Inequality and Social Interactions. In 2002 he was awarded the Milken Institute prize for distinguished economic research.  Professor Wolfers' research fields are in labor economics, macroeconomics, political economy and behavioral finance, and he is also a frequent contributor to the public debate.