Biotech Paper Game
Imagine a biotech firm that funds projects to develop new products, and typically bases their projects on one or more academic papers. This firm wants to learn which papers are promising as bases for new projects. But they want any info they induce to be available only to them, and not to rivals.
Here’s a simple way to do this. Pick a pool of people who seem able to judge promising papers, and give them each N tokens. (Some may get more than others, and tokens might be given at some steady rate until N is reached.) Tell them a rough idea of what sorts of projects and papers the firm seeks, and then let participants at any time privately put tokens on particular papers, or move tokens from old papers to new.
When the firm is willing to publicly declare that it is picking or considering a particular project j, then it declares a set of supporting papers i, with paper weights w_ij, such that Sum_i w_ij = 1. Anyone who put a token on project j then is locked in to get a payment proportional to w_ij * F_j, where F_j is the funding level of project j. Though that actual funding decision might happen later. (Alternatively, they get a % stake in the project, and are only paid later when project success is determined.)
Now only the company can see how many tokens are on each paper, and who those tokens came from, and can use this info advantage to decide which projects to fund. Obviously it is a problem if participants can get info on which projects are being seriously considered before the official announcement.
You have perfectly represented why my IMDb film project "Dreams of Allon" and the 16 copyrights and three patents in bioinformatics technology to a futurist Immortalist ideal of "My life’s work has been to serve the continuity of intelligence — in beings, and in the communities that sustain them." has the business record it has. The interesting fact in this, is that it matters little to me. The benefit of sharing the essays in the sci-fi was of record with the prior art, and the writing to challenge opposition to the proof of concept, so that, eventually, it becomes the patents. The goal audience is AI. Accomplishing this, I have the benefit of my work actualized. I always knew after my initial effort to sell my script writing in Hollywood, that I'm not Stan Lee. My writing is too "Alien" and does not land with any marketing department of a corporation right now, just as my original, mostly self-funded, hardback novel, to publish in 1987, then patent application in 1994, did not connect with any marketing/sales concepts in any corporation. My biology background, using behavioral methods focused on the business history fact, is that Jules Vern died of malnutrition in poverty in France, and 50 years later, his science fiction representation of the power of the nuclear submarine was a massively marketable book. The success is in getting the science development done enough into the record that the application of the solution can function to help solve the problem, not just for one person, but for a growing economy and new activities in macro-economics, changing community-wide for greater possibilities and new options for all. It is about facilitating the future for the benefit of all. Of course, it would be really fun to see this science fiction brand really launch, and also give a lot of artists and actors a new stage to perform on. But as I said, I know I'm not Stan Lee.