Similar to a futures market on a stock exchange, traders will buy and sell “stock,” which are statements about possible future information security events that exchange members will evaluate, according to an article in MIT’s Technology Review magazine.
Traders will buy and sell the shares, which will include statements such as "the volume of spam e-mail will increase by 10% in the third quarter of 2011," based on their confidence about the future outcome, the article said. The traders’ goal would be to increase the value of their information security portfolio – buying and selling of the stock would determine its value.
"If you're Verizon, and you're trying to pre-position resources, you might want to have some visibility over the horizon about the projected prevalence of mobile malware," Greg Shannon, chief scientist of the CERT program at Carnegie Mellon's Software Engineering Institute, told the magazine. "That's something they'd like to have an informed opinion about by leveraging the wisdom of the security community."
The pilot will employ software and services provided by Consensus Point, a Nashville-based company that has developed employee-driven prediction markets for General Electric, Best Buy, Qualcomm, and others.
Consensus Point Chief Executive Officer Linda Rebrovick said the goal of the project is to attract about 250 information security experts, although the organizers are still deciding how to compensate for correct answers. "There will be some combination of rewards and financial incentives for participating", Rebrovick told the magazine.