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Part 4: Policy Formulation and Modelling; International audience; Reliable and timely information about current economic and environmental conditions is crucial for policy makers to take decisions and for steering agents’ expectations formation about the state of the economy. While the usefulness of monitoring expectations, opinions and sentiments of economic agents is undoubted, one can argue that existing indices are based on a selected number of surveys and a low monitoring frequency resulting in a partial view of more complex dynamics. In this paper we present a web based tool based on the concept of Information Markets that can be used to aggregate expectations on policy indices and provide accurate and timely information to policy makers and policy modellers.

Part 6: Innovative Technologies; International audience; Participatory governance entails converting citizens from passive users of administrative decisions into active participants of political procedures. Public institutions and organizations can benefit from methods and tools able to aggregate and interpret information dispersed among citizens. In this paper we explore the use of Information Aggregation Markets (IAMs) for citizen engagement. We identify the benefits of IAMs and explain how markets can be used to aggregate citizens’ opinions and views on policy issues. Furthermore we report on two real life cases where we deployed IAMs to assist the decision making processes of public organizations. The positive feedback from participants and decision makers provides empirical evidence on the benefits of IAMs as a method for engaging citizens in public policy decision making.