Executives seeking new sources of insight for planning ahead have long been promised help from increasingly expert gatherers of data.

Their sophistication in analysing information is encouraging new kinds of industry and company-specific prediction markets. These are intriguing potential tools for corporate use that offer the kind of “wisdom of crowds” that operates in the way that, say, a stock exchange reflects expectations of companies’ earnings, or in how the gambling odds on horse races and political elections reflect punters’ collective predictions of the outcomes.

The idea behind prediction markets for companies is that the accumulation of informed opinion will be more accurate than the best guesses of ex-ec-utives. They have been billed as a way to tap communities of employees, consumers and experts to generate in-sights into issues affecting businesses and their operations, from product delivery schedules to marketing and quarterly sales.