Accurate predictions are essential in many areas such as corporate decision making, weather forecasting and technology forecasting. Prediction markets help to aggregate information and gain a better understanding of the future by leveraging the wisdom of the crowds. Trading prices in prediction markets thus reflect the traders' aggregated expectations on the outcome of uncertain future events and can be used to predict the likelihood of these events. This book demonstrates that markets are accurate predictors. Results from several empirical studies reported in this work show the importance of designing such markets properly in order to derive valuable predictions. Therefore, the findings are valuable for designing future prediction markets.

The 7th Workshop on e-Business (WeB 2008) was held on December 13, 2008, in Paris. As a pre-ICIS workshop, it provided an open forum for e-business - searchersandpractitionerstoshareresearch?ndings,explorenovelideas,discuss success stories and lessons learned, and map out major challenges with regard to the design of e-business systems. The workshop theme was "Designing e-Business Systems: Markets, Services and Networks." With WeB 2008 having been located in Europe, we wanted to highlight the increasing importance of the design science approach for infor- tionsystemsresearch,which hasa longtraditionin theEuropeanIS community. We received a large number of submissions that addressed key issues speci?c to the workshop theme as well as e-business in general. Based on a rigorous review process, a total of 31 full papers and 30 research-in-progresspapers were accepted for presentation at the workshop, covering a broad range of technical, empirical, managerial,and economic aspects of e-business. Of the 31 full papers, 17 selected papers are contained in this volume of Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing. We hope that you will ?nd them an interesting read and that you will bene? t from the authors' ?ne contributions.