Article at a glance:

The promise of prediction markets: A roundtable

• Prediction markets, which aggregate information dispersed across organizations, produce forecasts that are usually at least as accurate as those of experts.
• In this roundtable, practitioners from Best Buy and Google, the author of a book about collective intelligence, and a professor of law discuss the potential of prediction markets and the main obstacles they must surmount to become a more widely used tool for making strategic decisions.
• One obstacle is that prediction markets challenge basic assumptions about expertise, power, and the way organizations should work. The other is uncertainty about the impact of securities and gambling laws on these markets.