For the past few years Chris Hibbert has been working on Zócalo, an Open Source Toolkit for Prediction Markets. He writes, “my purpose in the project is to build prediction market software that people can use as a foundation for deploying many markets of this type. As I said in my proposal to CommerceNet, the plan is to start by building software to support economists doing experiments with prediction markets, and expand from there to internal markets within businesses, and eventually expand to the point where the software would be sufficient for public real-money markets in important questions on technology development, economic impacts, and other important issues” (Hibbert). Essentially, Hibbert believes that by making prediction market software open source and customizable, prediction markets will be more widely used. We are watching this closely as we are considering the same with our Long Bets software. Build 2007.1 was released April 19, 2007; comments from users are most welcome.
(a screenshot of Zócalo via from sourceforge)
