The basic idea behind such information markets is that the pricing scheme of the market encourages the participants to buy or sell shares in accordance to their private information. Consider, for example, the security that pays $1 if the winner of the 2008 US presidential elections is democrat. An agent who privately believes with probability p that US will have a democrat president in 2008, wi...

Is it possible to implement practical Internet Polls that fulfill even the weakest security requirements? The technology available today would lead to a negative answer, because of the following practical constraints: standard, unmodified browsers are used, it is not economically possible to distribute certificates or even just user names and passwords, users connect from different workstations...

This thesis consists of two parts: an exploration of new measures of backbench opinion in the UK House of Commons, and an exploration of variance stabilising transformations of count data. In the first part, we consider the use of Early Day Motions (EDMs) as a means of gauging opinions of Members of Parliament (MPs) over a range of issues. A much used measure of opinion is that of cohesion; how...

US political reporting has become extraordinarily rich in polling data. However, this increase in information availability has not been matched by an improvement in the accuracy of poll-based news stories, which usually examine a single survey at a time, rather than providing an aggregated, more accurate view. In 2004, I developed a meta-analysis that reduced the polling noise for the President...