According to Nate Silver, Romney Is Losing Ground This Week

Prediction markets are championed in James Surowiecki's 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds, Cass Sunstein's 2006 Infotopia, and How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business by Douglas Hubbard.

The research literature is collected together in the peer reviewed The Journal of Prediction Markets, edited by Leighton Vaughan Williams and published by the University of Buckingham Press. The journal was first published in 2007, and is available online and in print.

In John Brunner's 1975 science fiction story The Shockwave Rider there is a description of a prediction market that he called the Delphi Pool.

In October 2007 companies from the United States, Ireland, Austria, Germany, and Denmark formed the Prediction Market Industry Association, tasked with promoting awareness, education, and validation for prediction markets.

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However, Steven Gjerstad (Purdue) in his paper "Risk Aversion, Beliefs, and Prediction Market Equilibrium," has shown that prediction market prices are very close to the mean belief of market participants if the agents are risk averse and the distribution of beliefs is spread out (as with a normal distribution, for example). Justin Wolfers (Wharton) and Eric Zitzewitz (Dartmouth) have obtained similar results, and also include some analysis of prediction market data, in their paper "Interpreting Prediction Market Prices as Probabilities." In practice, the prices of binary prediction markets have proven to be closely related to actual frequencies of events in the real world.

17. Intrade is filled with republicans And they are always wrong

they currently give Obama a roughly 70% chance of winning, against 35% for Romney.