s a stock market capable of predicting the next football world champion? Answering this question, researchers and students of the Institute of Information Systems and Management (IISM) at the Universität Karlsruhe (TH), the Chair for Electronic Commerce at the University of Frankfurt a.M. and the University of Passau have joined. They successfully started

last week
with the international forecasting market
www.STOCCER.com
for the FIFA World Championships in Germany.

Football fans from all over the world trade stocks and by doing so, forecast the outcome of the tournament.

Within this experiment, the researchers under the direction of Professor Dr. Christof Weinhardt (IISM) assume, that stock prices in the prediction market reflect all information available within the market. Virtual stock markets are information markets where upcoming events are being traded as “virtual stocks”. In similar experiments, there searchers were able to show that prediction markets often generate a better result than traditional opinion polls. The reason as Mr. Weinhardt says is that “not the personal opinion of a single trader but the preferably most realistic estimation of the situation is honoured”.

But why of all things do the researchers deal with the prediction of the football world champion? The simple answer to that is that millions of football fans will joinworldwide from June 9 to July 9 2006. By this means the researchers expect several thousand traders – ambitious aims as Mr. Weinhardt states, “but not unrealistic, as the project and all its appearance is arranged in international dimensions”. STOCCER is the first forecasting market built for traders from all over the world. The entire internet presence is offered in German, English, Spanish and French. For that reason the team built up an international editorial office that keeps traders informed with up-to-date news - multilingual.

Furthermore the traders are confronted hands-on with the functionality of stock markets. Within the well known area of soccer, the participants learn how supply and demand determine the price of stocks and how this information can be used to increase the value of a securities account by selling and buying stocks. Due to the virtual setting, contingent losses are much better absorbable than in reality. The participation in STOCCER is free and only virtual money is traded.

In STOCCER the most successful traders have the chance to win prizes with a total value of more than 6000 Euro (~USD 7659, ~GBP 4063). These prizes are provided by the sponsors Union Investment and EnBW. Patron of the project is Bernd Hoelzenbein, a FIFA World Cup Ambassador and soccer world champion of 1974.


Source: pressemitteilung.ws