NYT: Pentagon Abandons Plan for Futures Market on Terror
UPDATE: Just one day after going public with the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) project, the Pentagon pulled the plug. Congressional critics from both sides of the aisle spent the day heaping criticism on the experiment in predictive modeling.
The PAM effort would have created the equivalent of a financial futures market, where participants bet on which outcomes are most likely to happen. But instead of allowing bets on stock prices, the PAM system would have allowed betting on political events. DARPA designed the PAM project with an eye to providing probability analysis for events in the Middle East and even predicting which types of institutions might become terrorist targets.
