I attended a fairly interesting talk at PARC last week by Bernardo Huberman. He claimed to have created something that sounds like a hybrid between a survey and an idea futures market.
It involves selecting a small group of people (the minimum for it to work well is about 9 people). It includes some market-like trading between participants, but the results are apparently better than what markets would produce under similar conditions, because it does additional calculations such as adjusting for measured risk aversion of each participant, and has something that treats private information (i.e knowledge available to only one participant) differently from public information. At least some of the time Huberman gives participants monetary incentives to get the right answer.
This approach has an advantage over idea futures markets that bad guys are less likely to be able to manipulate it by spending money to produce inefficient prices, because the organization running the system exercises more control over who participates and how much influence each one has. Not that I think idea futures markets suffer any significant problems due to forms of manipulation like this that require the manipulator to transfer unbounded amounts of money to those who are trying to make the market prices accurate, but the difficulty of analyzing the problem has made such markets susceptible to criticism by demagogues. Also, markets tend to foster some secrecy (as traders want to maintain their advantage), while a more survey-like approach makes people less likely to have a stake in having better information than others, since they’re less likely to be involved in future surveys.
Huberman’s approach does have some disadvantages. It presumably requires the person who wants the accurate information to pay for it (with some associated public goods problems in many cases), whereas idea futures markets can often be financed by small commissions on trades. Also, Huberman’s approach probably fails to select the most informed participants in a number of circumstances, thereby failing to extract information that an open market would be able to extract.
A paper covering the most interesting parts of Huberman’s work is available here.
You might also want to see a related criticism of idea futures markets by Manski at http://www.faculty.econ.northwestern.edu/faculty/manski/prediction_markets.pdf, although that paper doesn’t do a very good job of analyzing whether any alternative is better.