I have organized a conference on corporate prediction markets which may be of interest to Midas Oracle readers. It will take place on 1 November at the Kauffman Foundation in Kansas City. All of the details are available on the conference webpage (http://people.ku.edu/~cigar/PMConf_2007/PredictionMarketsConference.html) with some background available on the conference flier (http://people.ku.edu/~cigar/PMConf_2007/PredictionMarketsConference_Flier.html). Note that this is a free conference but you should get in touch with me if you plan on attending.

The preliminary schedule is listed below:

Schedule

8:30 Registration, Coffee, Opening Remarks

9:00 Lessons from Corporate Applications of Prediction Markets

Henry Berg, Microsoft

Discussant: Robin Hanson (George Mason Department of Economics)

Christina Ann LaComb, GE (The Imagination Market; abstract is free, text is gated)

Discussant: Marco Ottaviani (Kellogg School of Management, Management and Strategy)

10:45 Coffee Break

11:00 Lessons from Corporate Applications of Prediction Markets (cont)

Dawn Keller, Best Buy (Best Buy’s TAGTRADE Market)

Discussant: Paul Rhode (Department of Economics. Eller College of Management, University of Arizona)

Bo Cowgill, Google (Putting Crowd Wisdom to Work)

Discussant: Eric Zitzewitz (Dartmouth Department of Economics)

12:30 Lunch

Keynote address: Jim Lavoie, Co-Founder and CEO, Rite-Solutions

1:45 Lessons from Prediction Market Organizers and Operators

John Delaney, Founder and CEO, Intrade

David Perry, Co-Founder and President, Consensus Point

3:00 Break (refreshments)

3:15 The Legal Playing Field

Tom W. Bell, Chapman University School of Law

Discussant: Robert E. Litan (VP Research and Policy at the Kauffman Foundation, Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, Director of the AEI-Brookings Joint Center on Regulatory Studies)

4:00 General Discussion

6:30 Dinner

Location TBA