Beschreibung:
Forecasts of macroeconomic variables as the inflation rate serve as important guidelines for the private as well as the public sector. At least central banks that adopted an inflation targeting regime are in urgent need of high quality inflation forecasts. Accurate inflation forecasts are also needed within private sector wage negotiations. In this paper we present a new method to predict future inflation via conducting electronic markets. We show at the example of a prototype market how the market data of such an experimental market can be used to generate predictions of the future inflation rate. We also show that the market data provide important evidence on the distribution of inflation expectations.