Polls, Markets, and Allocations Game theory represents one
important facet of decision science. In fact, decision science
deals with the entire subject of marketsfor goods, services, and
ideas, as well as labor. NSF-funded researcher Bob Forsythe, at
the University of Iowa, provides one example of efforts in this
area: His innovative Iowa Electronic Market, started in 1988,
offered speculators a "real-money futures market." This type of
market deals with abstract, but measurable, items. Participants
bet on what the price of an abstract item, such as pork bellies,
will be days, weeks, or months into the future. Between the time
the bet is placed and the point at which it is paid off, the
price of pork bellies will be influenced by a succession of
economic and political events, including elections and the stock
prices of firms in the pork industry. Forsythe's "market"
actually represented an effort to elicit more accurate
information from voters than opinion polls provided. Instead of
pork bellies, it focused o