News & Events  Singing Penguins Help MBA Students Learn About
Markets  Singing. Dancing. Cartoon penguins.  Hollywood thinks
that's a formula for movie gold, but how about America's movie-
going public? Tom Gruca, a business professor in the Tippie
College of Business, is using Friday's release of the movie
"Happy Feet" as a chance for graduate marketing students to
learn about the operation of prediction markets by forecasting
whether the heavily promoted movie will be bust or boffo.  The
students in Gruca's first-year MBA marketing management class
and the second-year strategy class are trading futures contracts
in the real-money Iowa Electronic Markets to predict the movie's
first-month domestic box office revenues. The students' grades
on the project are based on a report detailing their forecast as
well as how their investments in the IEM perform. Every first
and second year student in the MBA program was provided $10
trading accounts and they can add more of their own money if
they want, up to the market