The Football Oracle STOCCER - Economists run a virtual stock market for the Football World Championship 2006

Is 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 join

worldwide 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.

More Information:
Stefan Luckner
Institute for Information Systems and Management (IISM)
Phone +49.721.608-8383
E-Mail info@stoccer.com
Online www.stoccer.com

STOCCER is a joint venture project of three chairs at the University of Frankfurt/Main and the University of Karlsruhe (TH). It is supported by the The German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). All parties are engaged in subjects around electronic markets. Thus, it is possible to accces available experiences and competences for the realisation of the project STOCCER.


University of Karlsruhe (TH), Chair for Information Management and Systems

At present, the Chair for Information Management and Systems is engaged in three fields: (1) Market Engineering, (2) Spontaneous and self-organizing markets, and(3) Sector markets. Market Engineering deals with a structured approach for designing electronic markets from the conceptual design to the implementation of prototypes.

The chair possesses a long experience in the construction of market models for electronic markets. Some STOCCER markets are operated based on the chair's meet2trade platform.

Link: http://www.iw.uni-karlsruhe.de


University of Karlsruhe (TH), Chair for Information Services and Electronic Markets

The Chair for Information Services and Electronic Markets deals with the application of forecasting markets to predict the outcome of elections, as well as information services and matters of optimizations in electronic markets. Notably expertise exists in the implementation of efficient and large information systems.

A part of the STOCCER markets works upon the psm platform developed by the chair.

Link: http://www.em.uni-karlsruhe.de


University of Frankfurt, Chair for Business Administration, esp. Electronic Commerce

For several years, the Chair for Business Administration, especially Electronic Commerce, has been engaged intensively in the design and development of virtual stock markets (VSMs) as well as in the application as an instrument for market research.

In this context, pilot projects were successfully completed in collaboration with various enterprises. In the project "Market research based on virtual stock markets", sponsored by the German research foundation DFG, an advancement of trading software and its application as an instrument for gathering information for the development of new products is being researched.

In addition, a research focus - closely related to VSMs -, is set on the design and development of on-line transaction mechanisms. This research is supported by the German

Ministry of Education and Research in the project "Reverse Pricing" which analyzes and optimizes these transaction mechanisms as an alternative instrument of sales and distribution.

Link: http://www.ecommerce.wiwi.uni-frankfurt.de/

Stefan Luckner
Institute for Information Systems and Management (IISM)
Phone +49.721.608-8383
E-Mail info@stoccer.com
Online www.stoccer.com

This release was published on openPR.