The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets.
[1] PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market,[2] a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists.
In a small (less than 2 percent) section of two such screens, Polk had included as colorful examples of possible miscellaneous items an assassination of Yasser Arafat, a missile attack by North Korea, and the overthrow of the king of Jordan.
Within less than a day, the Pentagon announced the cancellation of PAM, and by the end of the week John Poindexter, head of the DARPA unit responsible for developing it, had offered his resignation.
[2] CNN reported the program would be relaunched by the private firm, Net Exchange,[4] that helped create it, but that the newer version "will not include any securities based on forecasts of violent events such as assassinations or terror attacks".