Participants trade stocks whose ultimate value is determined by some clearly defined outcome in the future. They submit orders to buy and sell in a "continuous double auction" (CDA) and trade directly with each other at the negotiated prices. Optionally, a robot market maker can be activated to provide additional liquidity to the order book.

This software has been used by some clients to successfully operate public-facing real-money markets, which testifies to its high degree of robustness and reliablility.

• Market Structure:
• All-or-nothing (binary) or continuous (linear) contract payoffs;
   
• A contract's minimum and maximum values can be any integer, even negative.
   
• Stocks can be organized into topic-related groups and separately endowed tournaments;
   
• Users own a separate trading account for each tournament;
   
• Tournaments can be open to all, invitation-only, or private;
   
• Each tournament maintains its own ranking of participants;
   
• Trading Engine:
• Continuous Double Auction, with optional robot market maker;
   
• Real-time order matching: one-to-many / one-to-one / partial matches / multiple matches;
   
• Buy / Sell / Short / Cover;
   
• Ability to purchase fixed-price baskets of alternative stocks;
   
• Trading can be anonymous (or not);
   
• Trading history charts available at four different scales (one day, one week, one month, or full history) and three different sizes;
   

It is optimized for collective forecasting of specific variables, even under several conditional scenarios.

Using a friendly slider control, participants are asked to make high/low forecasts for the target variable. They are given incentives to make their forecasts early, to update them often, and to narrow the spread between their high and low estimates as much as they dare.

Scoring Rule:

Individual Forecasts

Collective Forecast

• Very easy to use - no learning curve;
   
• Rich data gathering and many opportunities to analyze various biases among different groups of participants;
   
• Easy set up of conditional scenarios;
   
• Charts display the distribution of individual forecasts, the mean forecast and its standard deviation throughout the forecasting period.

A large number of ideas makes a standard prediction market approach impractical. The Idea Pageant is particularly suited to accelerating the front end of the innovation process, when ideas are plentiful, but truly good ideas are few.

Participants are given tokens to bet on various ideas or projects. Green tokens are rewarded when an idea is deemed a success, red tokens are rewarded when the idea is deemed a failure.

At regular intervals, existing bets are frozen and a new set of tokens is allocated to each participant to bet in the next betting period. A consensus about which ideas are most likely to succeed quickly emerges.

Participants may also propose new ideas using a built-in Wiki. When ready, those new ideas are entered into the pageant where they compete with all the other ideas for the bettors' tokens.

• Very easy to use - no learning curve;
   
• Search and filter pageant ideas by names, popularity (green-red), date, or topic;
   
• How many tokens of each kind are distributed to participants, how regularly, and how many of each kind may be bet on a single idea are all fully configurable parameters of the system;
   
• Very simple administration of the idea wiki, and one-click operation to enter a new idea into the pageant;
   
• Optional graphs display the distribution of the collective investments over time.