from Thomas Malone, The Future of Work, pages 95-97, 
Harvard Business School Press, 2004.

Idea Futures

Sometimes internal markets don't involve buying and selling things; they 
just involve exchanging information.  ...

Robin Hanson first proposed this concept of idea futures in about 1988, and 
several other people have experimented with it since. ...

Just as this book was going to press, the U.S. Defense Department proposed a 
similar market for estimating the probabilities of various events related to 
terrorism in the Middle East.  At first, the idea was widely criticized, but 
then thoughtful observers began to see significant potential in variations 
of the concept.  The proposal was, as one editorial summarized, a "PR 
disaster," but a very intriguing idea.