This study successfully establishes the principal component analysis with discriminant analysis (PCA-DA) model to assess the accuracy of contracts in the prediction markets ex ante based on the highest-price criterion. Trained by the xFuture data (7,274 contracts of future events) from...

President Ma Ying-Jeou's strategy to engage Taiwan in regional market integration calls for the use of the cross-strait Economic Cooperation Framework Agreement (ECFA) with China as a pathway to join the East Asian economic integration. This article reviews the ECFA and discusses its potential...

This forward-looking volume offers insights into the globalization of the Chinese economy and its accession to the WTO. The contributors provide updated accounts of recent developments in the Chinese economy and examines the implications of China's accession for the rest of the world.

This paper devises a methodology to compare the accuracy of prediction markets and polls. The data of the Exchange of Future Events (xFuture) for Taiwan’s 2006 mayoral elections and 2008 presidential election show that the prediction markets outperform the opinion polls in various indices of...

Buildings consume more than one third of the world’s total primary energy. Weather plays a unique and significant role as it directly affects the thermal loads and thus energy performance of buildings. The traditional simulated energy performance using Typical Meteorological Year (TMY) weather...

Space heating is the largest energy end use, consuming more than seven quintillion joules of site energy annually in the U.S. building sector. A few recent studies showed discrepancies in simulated space-heating energy use among different building energy modeling programs, and the simulated...

Several trends in the insurance and financial services industry, including demutualizationconsolidation, and deregulation, have attracted increasing attention from investors and financial analysts. This paper investigates the accuracy of the earnings forecasts of financial analysts for insurance...