But there’s one critical difference: Bill Gates and his entrepreneur-peers started with an idea, took extraordinary personal and financial risk, and were lucky enough to build meaningful companies (most fail, please remember). Corporate managers, on the other hand, are neither tasked with creating whole new industries nor required to take those risks, but they want to be paid as if they did.
The alternatives - holding the investments at historical book value or having them appraised in the traditional manner - may offer familiar comfort, but they are not suitable for this purpose.
Forecasts and forecasters are essential lubricants to the wheels of global commerce, and prediction markets may very well change them, all for the better.
Before prediction markets, the firm - and specifically its stakeholders - bore the risk of failure if decisions like that were made poorly, whereas now business leaders can manage their upside and their risk with uncanny accuracy. But only if they try.