23 Nov 2024
prediction markets and the 2024 election link dump
Eric Neyman writes, in Seven
lessons I didn’t learn from election day, Many people saw the WSJ
report as a vindication of prediction markets.
But the neighbor
method of polling hasn’t worked elsewhere. More: Polling
by asking people about their neighbors: When does this work? Should
people be doing more of it? And the connection to that French dude who
bet on Trump
The
money is flooding in, but what are prediction markets truly telling
us? If we look back further, predicted election markets were
actually legal in the US from the 1800s to 1924, and historical data
shows that they were accurate. There’s a New York Times story of Andrew
Carnegie noting how surprisingly accurate the election betting markets
were at predicting outcomes. They were actually more accurate before the
introduction of polling as a concept, which implies that the
introduction of polling diluted the accuracy of the market, rather than
the opposite.
Was
the Polymarket Trump whale smart or lucky? Whether one trader’s
private polling tapped sentiment more accurately than the publicly
available surveys, or whether statistical noise just happened to
reinforce his confidence to buy a dollar for 40c, can’t be known without
seeing the data.
Koleman
Strumpf Interview - Prediction Markets & More 2024 was a huge
vindication for the markets. I don’t know how else to say it, but all
the polls and prognosticators were left in the dust. Nobody came close
to the markets. They weren’t perfect, but they were an awful lot better
than anything else, to say the least.
FBI
raids apartment of election betting site Polymarket’s CEO and seizes
cellphone, source says Though U.S. election betting is newly
legal in some circumstances, Polymarket is not supposed to allow U.S.
users after the Commodity Futures Trading Commission halted its
operations in 2022, but its user base largely operates through
cryptocurrency, which allows for easy anonymity.
Polymarket Explained: How Blockchain Prediction Markets Are Shaping the Future of Forecasting (Details of how Polymarket works including tokens and smart contracts.)
Prediction Markets for the Win
Just betting on an election every few years is not the interesting
part, though. Info
Finance is a broader concept. [I]nfo finance is a discipline
where you (i) start from a fact that you want to know, and then (ii)
deliberately design a market to optimally elicit that information from
market participants.
Bonus links
The rise and fall of peer review - by Adam Mastroianni
The Great Redbox Cleanup: One Company is Hauling Away America’s Last DVD Kiosks
Both Democrats and Republicans can pass the Ideological Turing Test