They knew of Robin Hanson's work around futarchy[1], and interviewed him[2].

Augur initially planned to implement an automated market making scoring mechanism, but changed the dynamics[3] during alpha testing.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy

[2] http://augur.strikingly.com/blog/augur-advisor-chat-with-dr-...

[3] https://augur.stackexchange.com/questions/104/why-did-augur-...