Decision Markets for Continuously Reflected Collective Decisions

The application of the market metaphor to forecasting uncertain future events exhibits appealing characteristics such as forecast accuracy and being considered attractive by most users. Based on the demonstrated success of such so called prediction markets as an accurate forecasting mechanism, the market metaphor has been applied to related domains such as decision making and decision support in order to benefit from its attractive characteristics. However, not all of those characteristics still hold in these application areas. We currently develop Liquid Decision Making (LDM), a market based approach for group decision making. This article reports on three design principles that we devised to address the aforementioned challenges, namely the principles of a collaborative decision making situation, a personal involvement of the participants with the decision at hand and dual incentives provided to the users. A prototypical implementation of this LDM mechanism has been tested for decision making in a scenario building seminar. There, participants gathered, categorized and ranked driving factors for their relevance for scenarios to be developed for the topic of personalized mobility in 2050. In this setting, the design principles of the mechanism were deemed to be viable for addressing the challenges of attracting and retaining participants. Keywords—decision making; market design; incentives