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- I'm a software engineer who has built web applications for Office Depot, Target, AIG (no I'm not proud of it) and many others. J. Stephens apparently has not worked in the private sector....
- Exactly.
- If I make a website that has a 10GB database and another with a 10,000GB database, the cost of the second is not 1000 times that of the first. The second site would perhaps cost more to host, but...
- Google may not provide monetary consideration to those who create the content that helps enable Google to generate revenue, but so what? The search engine-web publisher transaction is a purely...
- Adam -- Another very well written piece. When I get these by email, however, the author's name doesn't appear at the top, as it does on this page. I assume different authors on published in...
2 years ago
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My fundamental question, how does a prediction market actually foster innovation? Your paper did not appear to examine how an inventor would obtain R&D; funding to develop a product. I assume (based on the definition of "prediction certificate" (page 48)) that the inventor would "sell" these certificates to the "prediction market" inorder to obtain the funding to develop the product.
The reason for asking this concern, is that the trading of options usually occurs on existing products where the producer has little motivation to make a better product. For example, organge juice where one is betting on the weather. (To improve the odds, third parties are offering weather predictions and growers will take action to protect their crops. But the intent of the market is manage risk, not to make a better orange. A better orange will result from the grower finding a way to make the orange more tolerant to the weather.)
On page 8, you wrote "patents fall far short of protecting fundamental and abstract scientific discoveries, such as ones about the string theory fo physics or the epidemiology of Avian flu. This opens a whole can of worms. I am also hoping that I misinterpreted your intent. I believe that patents should not be granted to physical process and abstract ideas. By implication, I would also discourage the use of "prediction certificates" for this. Essentially, a lot of research along these lines is already paid for by the taxpayer through grants, so I would advocate that this "property right" already belongs to the public.
One of the big failures with patent law today appears to be incremental improvements. Virtually every advance is dependent on some form of "prior art" consequently we have many patent infringement lawsuits. How would the proposed "prediction market" squash these frivolous lawsuits?
2 years ago
An innovator could use the SPEx to raise funding because he would have an edge, by dint of the innovative nature of his discovery, over other traders. That, my friend, we call arbitrage.
I don't think that futures markets have any "intent"; how you use them depends on what you want. Granted, many traders use them to hedge against risk. But traders can and sometimes do use them to profit from insights they have and others do not.
You describe the limits of patents accurately. However, the policy reasons that justify those limits do not apply to predicition markets. Why? Because, in brief, a patent limits use of a valuable idea, whereas as prediction market does not.
I don't think a PM would stop frivolous patent suits. That is a separate problem calling for a different cure.
Tom
2 years ago
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