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 General Information

Document Type:	Presolicitation Notice
Solicitation Number:	MDA972-03-T-0002
Posted Date:	Dec 19, 2002
Original Response Date:	Feb 03, 2003
Original Archive Date:	Feb 18, 2003
Current Archive Date:
Classification Code:	A -- Research & Development

Contracting Office Address

Other Defense Agencies, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, Contracts Management Office, 3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA, 22203-1714

Description

DARPA Mission, The DARPA mission is to develop imaginative, innovative and often high-risk research ideas offering a significant technological impact that will go well beyond the normal evolutionary developmental approaches; and, to pursue these ideas from the demonstration of technical feasibility through the development of prototype systems. FutureMAP Program Objectives, Strategic decisions depend upon the accurate assessment of the likelihood of future events. This analysis often requires independent contributions by experts in a wide variety of fields, with the resulting difficulty of combining the various opinions into one assessment. The FutureMAP program at DARPA is investigating the use of markets and market-like mechanisms in aggregating information from diverse multiple sources. Specifically this will involve (a) defining and running demonstration markets for proof-of-concept, (b) conducting analytical studies to develop new market structures and features of interest to the DoD, (c) designing and running a laboratory testbed to evaluate and validate market structures, and (d) conducting red team exercises to ensure robustness. Additionally, FutureMAP will investigate ancillary topics such as incentives for participation, the use of information markets in conjunction with natural markets, and regulatory and logistical issues. We have two efforts ongoing, and would like to complement these with a few small studies. These small studies might cover topics that are currently not being investigated by the DARPA projects, or they might provide additional oversight and analysis of challenges faced by the two ongoing efforts. We would welcome proposals for small projects, not to exceed $100,000 in cost, that might complement these two ongoing lines of work. One of the ongoing efforts, at Neoteric Technologies (http://www.neotek-al.com/) is defining and managing markets to answer specific questions of interest to the DoD. Typically these markets will have a small number of invited participants who will bring their information together through the market mechanism. We envision markets of 15 to 20 participants addressing questions about the probabilities of specific kinds of failure within our national infrastructure. The results from these markets would be used as input to further analytical steps, perhaps within the context of Bayesian networks. The other ongoing effort, at Net Exchange (http://www.nex.com) is defining and managing long-running markets based on data series that are available from independent news and intelligence sources. The markets will allow the trading of futures on composite securities that express changes in combinations of series. Composite securities provide a participant, who has insight into interrelations among basic securities, with a means of expressing this insight and benefiting from the expression if correct. A simple composite is an intersection between two basic securities; e.g., the probability that a decrease in Country X GDP will coincide with an increase in Country X civil unrest.

Original Point of Contact

Barbara Meyrowitz, Contracting Officer, Phone (703) 696-2208, Fax (703) 696-2208, Email bmeyrowitz@darpa.mil

Place of Performance

Address:	3701 North Fairfax Drive, Arlington, VA
Postal Code:	22203
Country:	US