On (implementation issues of) Virtual Stock Markets

After my recent post on prediction markets, I decided to implement a small auctioneer for virtual stock markets with two parties making deals, i.e. not a market maker mechanism but a (traditional) double auction. But, despite the simple idea behind a bid/ask driven market, the implementation has to take into account quite a number of details: can you buy/sell one unit or multiple units of a good at a time? Does trading occur at discrete events or is it continuous? Is pricing uniform (all trade at the same equilibirum price) or discriminatory (individual matching of bid/ask orders)? And, if one the two options is chosen, how is the price determined?

• Beside the double auction system, bidding can take other forms: Auctions and Bidding: A Guide for Computer Scientists
• Everything you wanted to know about double auctions, but were afraid to (bid or) ask
• And finally a paper on two multi unit k-double auction algorithms

Reading Speed: Chinese vs English

I always wondered about mankind's languages and writing systems, one of the reasons I looked into Lojban (quite) a while ago. In an earlier post about writing systems I expressed my fascination about non-linear systems. But even with linear systems, we have alphabetic, syllabic and logographic systems. But it turns out the our systems are optimal in the sense that our cognitive abilities won't let us process more optimized systems, at least that is indicated by a study on reading speed with Chinese vs English - two major examples of logographic and alphabetic writing systems.

Futarchy: applying prediction markets

R. Hanson suggests to use prediction markets to make better use of information to evaluate strategies in politics. He calls the combination of democracy and speculative market information processing futarchy. There is a short manifesto and a full paper (PDF).

The central idea is: Use democracy to express what you want, use prediction markets to evaluate how to reach these goals. People can give strategies which are traded after paying a small fee; when they seem to be efficient the get a payback, otherwise they loose the fee. Thus good strategies are rewarded, bad ones are not rewarded but cost an extra fee. Augmented GDP and other indicators give a measured value to the state of the country.

Physics: Faster-Than-Light Signals and Special Relativity; popular science articles by Ashtekar

Two things to link: The frenzy about findings and non-findings at the LHC pose a good reason to think about the possible implications. Therefore, an article by R.Geroch on the consistency of faster than light signals (e.g. neutrinos measured at the LHC) and special relativity (for example, due to partially breaking Lorentz invariance for neutrinos, but not all the other particles). There is also a blog post on FTL-neutrinos.

Moreover there is a bunch of popular science articles by A.Ashtekar (who is one of the founders of loop quantum gravity).

Resources on Prediction Markets

Prediction Markets might be useful in modern politics - gathering crowd information (expected outcomes) and filtering experts from the crowd (i.e. successful traders in the market).

Just a bunch of links to read on the matter:

• Prediction Markets im Journal of Economic Perspectives.
• Combinatorial Prediction Markets at oddhead blog. Overview about types of combinatorial markets and the problems with handling them
• Betting on Ideas in Communications of the ACM
• Internet-Based Virtual Stock Markets for Business Forecasting

CSR Rating Agencies: What is Their Global Impact?

At SpringerLink's JOURNAL OF BUSINESS ETHICS you'll find an interesting article on CSR Rating Agencies: What is Their Global Impact?

Epigenetic Effects of Tobacco: Increased sensitivity for drug addiction

A continuously updated blog post on the effects of tobacco and modern additives to human brain/bodies.

I really don't understand why there isn't a huge debate about a reevaluation of all drugs under the guidelines of modern drug research instead of this "legalize everything" debate. Stuff like Krokodil (see some effects after usage, even once or a few times at the google image search but be advised: very graphic ..) just isn't anything you should offer to try even under the assumption that people are behaving rational.