In a 1945 paper, the great Austrian economist F.A. Hayek described how prices set by a free market are really “a mechanism for communicating information” about the probability of future events.
Now, technology firms are using a modern twist on this idea, called prediction markets, as a way to save money, harness the distributed knowledge of their rank-and-file employees, and even answer questions like: When will this software ship? And what will memory prices be like in a few months?
Link: news.com
