Polymarket Launches Institute to Advance the Science of Prediction Markets

New research initiative will fund independent academic fellowships and expand access to market data to support the study of prediction markets as information infrastructure

NEW YORK, July 29, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Polymarket, the world's largest prediction market, today announced the launch of the Polymarket Institute, a first-of-its-kind research initiative created to advance independent academic study of prediction markets and their role in forecasting, decision-making and information discovery.

Prediction markets increasingly serve as real-time signals for how people assess uncertainty across elections, geopolitics, economics, technology, sports and culture. Journalists use them to track changing public expectations. Researchers study them as forecasting systems and market-design laboratories. Policymakers and institutions look to them as one input for understanding risk, probability, and public belief.

As usage grows, the category requires stronger academic infrastructure to evaluate how these markets function at scale. That includes independent research, open data access, and reproducible methods for studying how information moves through markets, how prices function as probabilistic signals, and how market design affects accuracy, liquidity, and reliability.

The Polymarket Institute will support that work through academic fellowships and public data infrastructure focused on the core questions shaping the field. Its research agenda will include forecast quality, information flows, market microstructure, resolution integrity, cryptography and security, artificial intelligence and technology progress, elections, and macroeconomic forecasting.

Brian Jabarian, Assistant Professor at Carnegie Mellon University's Heinz College of Information Systems and Public Policy, will serve as Scientific Director to provide independent scientific leadership and guide the Institute's research agenda. Kai Brusch, Head of Data at Polymarket, will serve as Managing Director of the Institute.

The Institute will operate under established academic norms, including transparency across data availability, method replicability and outcomes. Polymarket will not sponsor predetermined research conclusions or require researchers to validate any specific view of prediction markets. Fellows and affiliated researchers will maintain independence in research questions, design, analysis, and publication rights, with no requirement to co-author with Polymarket. Fellows, like all other research collaborators at the Institute, will be required to adhere to academic norms and will not be authorized to engage in any trades on Polymarket or similar platforms during their fellowship or with the Institute.

"Prediction markets are becoming an important part of the information ecosystem, and the field needs serious research infrastructure to match that growth," said Kai Brusch, Managing Director of the Polymarket Institute. "The Institute will fund independent academic work, expand access to market data and give researchers the tools to study these markets with rigor, measure their performance and understand how they function at scale."

"The science of prediction markets is still in its earliest chapters, and that is precisely what makes it worth pursuing with institutional rigor," said Brian Jabarian, Scientific Director of the Polymarket Institute. "Prediction markets can help answer some of the defining questions of this era: how information forms, how uncertainty gets measured and how markets can help society understand complex developments in artificial intelligence, technology, politics and the economy. The Institute gives researchers the data, structure and independence needed to test those questions in the field."

The Institute will launch with the Polymarket Science Fellowship, a global fellowship program for doctoral researchers studying prediction markets, forecasting, information economics, market design and related fields. Fellows will receive funding and access to Polymarket data to conduct independent academic research across priority areas including artificial intelligence and technological progress, information flows, market integrity, cryptography and security, market microstructure, elections and macroeconomic forecasting.

Fellows will participate in regular research workshops and pursue publishable work that strengthens the academic understanding of prediction markets. The program gives researchers access to real-world market data while preserving independence in research design, analysis and publication.

Polymarket will also expand access to public market data, including market discovery, order books, historical time series, on-chain aggregates and trading activity through a suite of APIs. The Institute will publish data, code and replication materials on public repositories where appropriate, allowing researchers to verify, challenge and build on its work.

The Polymarket Institute advances Polymarket's mission to make markets a real-time source of information about the events shaping the world. Through independent research and open data infrastructure, the Institute will help strengthen the scientific foundation for prediction markets as a category of information infrastructure.

About Polymarket

Polymarket is the world's largest prediction market platform, where participants trade on the outcomes of real-world events. By harnessing the wisdom of the crowd and the efficiency of markets, Polymarket generates real-time probability estimates that have proven to be among the most accurate forecasting tools available. Polymarket's markets span global politics, economics, science, technology, sports, culture, and more, attracting hundreds of thousands of participants worldwide. Polymarket US operates as a CFTC-regulated designated contract market under the Commodity Exchange Act. For more information, visit polymarket.com.

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SOURCE Polymarket