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FutureMAP, a project of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, was to involve experiments to determine whether information markets could improve Defense Department decisionmaking. Information markets are securities markets used to derive information from the prices of securities whose liquidation values are contingent on future events. The government intended to use such a market to assess the probabilities of potential political assassinations, and the indelicacy of this potential application contributed to a controversy leading to the cancellation of the program. In this Article, Professor Abramowicz assesses whether information markets in theory could be useful to administrative agencies, and it concludes that information markets could help discipline administrative agency predictions, but only if a number of technical hurdles such as the danger of manipulation can be overcome. Because the predictions of well-functioning information markets are objective, they function as a tool that exhibits many of the same virtues in predictive tasksThe firestorm over FutureMAP mostly reflected its implications for anti-terrorism efforts.Concerns included that FutureMAP actually might encourage terrorism, 5 and politicians reasonably worried that federally sponsored wagering on whether foreign leaders might be assassinated could damage foreign relations. 6 Yet there was virtually no discussion in the media of the relevance of information markets themselves for governmental decisionmaking. S. 360, 373-74 (1989) (noting that the agency is required to take a "hard look" at the environmental effects of its action).3 limit ideological decisionmaking, but their usefulness depends on some difficult empirical questions that the economics literature on information markets has not yet adequately answered.The phrase "information market" evokes the mechanics of the approach and highlights the intuition underlying it. An information market, as traditionally constructed, is a stock market created for the purpose of extrapolating information from share prices. The securities in such a market do not serve as claims to corporate ownership, but rather offer payoffs contingent on some future contingency specified by the market's sponsor. A security in an antiterrorism program, for example, might be issued with the proviso that its face value will be paid if and only if a cyberterrorism attack succeeds in shutting down the New York Stock Exchange in the next year. By examining the price at which the security is traded, the Defense Department would be able to obtain an estimate of this risk. 9 Although some firms might use such a market as a means of hedging risk, 10 its primary purpose is to harness the power of securities markets to aggregate information. An information market is potentially useful whenever an agency decision depends in part on information about the future and a security can be constructed whose price would provide a relevant prediction.The word "market," however, can be misleading. Information markets need not...

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Bitcoin is a protocol promoted as the first peer-to-peer institution, an alternative to a central bank. The decisions made through this protocol

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