What if your boss, rather than dismissing you off hand when you suggested a different way of doing something, let you bet on the fact that your idea was better. And paid you if you were right.

That is the premise of prediction markets - a tool companies are increasingly using to make better decisions by allowing employees to trade in a mock stock market based on information they have about the business.

They work a little like a futures market. Say a company wants to release a new product but is unsure whether a launch date can be achieved. It creates a market for a prediction that the product will launch in a given month. Employees are then given a fixed amount of a mock currency they then use to trade contracts in that future.

Those who think it is likely the product will launch in that month will buy the future, and the price goes up. Those who don't, sell, sending the price down.

At the end of the trading period, the value of the contracts that have been bought and sold are tallied, and those traders who have been most successful are given cash prizes or bonuses.

The company benefits since the final 'price' reflects a broadly based forecast of the likelihood that a given launch date can be achieved.

Several large American firms - including Google, GE, Hewlett-Packard, and Best Buy - have begun using prediction markets to help make assessments about all kinds of projections, including how customer numbers will grow, what demand will be for a product, and when it will launch.

Companies can also set up more complex trading systems which allow employees not only to trade in a given prediction but also to make their own estimates of when they think a product will launch, say, and trade contracts in that future.

Two recent reports - by McKinsey, the management consultancy, and Forrester, the analyst - have suggested that such markets are likely to grow in importance, particularly as the technology which facilitates them becomes cheaper and more widespread.

The advantages, exponents say, are many: the trading system gives employees an incentive to share information they have that may be valuable: although the currency is artificial, the cash rewards are real.

A market also aggregates knowledge more efficiently, as employees can - in effect - give feedback to their boss by trading more or less aggressively on information they have. The social and cultural issues which may have prevented an employee from sharing information are also, in theory, swept aside, because all trades are anonymous.

Companies that have used prediction markets say they provide more accurate information about aspects of their business than could be learnt by more traditional methods, such as polling employees or consulting outside experts.

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