Showing posts with label prediction markets. Show all posts
Showing posts with label prediction markets. Show all posts

Wednesday, August 8, 2018

Repugnant prediction markets on a blockchain (Augur)

Augur is a decentralized (i.e. unmoderated) prediction market, built on a blockchain.  Somewhere there is a fundamental law of internet that says that anonymity leads to bad manners, and for a prediction market, that means death pools.

Here's the story from CCN, a news service that focuses on cryptocurrencies and blockchains:

Assassination Markets Let Augur Users Gamble on Trump Murder

"this market exists, and, though not the most popular bet on Augur, more than 50 shares have been traded on it as of the time of writing. Similar markets, moreover, exist for a number of other public figures, allowing users to gamble on whether 96-year-old actress Betty White and U.S. Senator John McCain — who has been diagnosed with brain cancer — will survive until Jan. 1, 2019."
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Earlier, see

Monday, September 7, 2009

HT: MR

Wednesday, September 28, 2011

Harvard Nobel Prediction Market

Ran Shorrer asks me to post the following announcement:

It's that time of the year again!

The recipients of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics will be announced soon, which means there's little time left for you to place your bets in the Harvard Nobel Prediction Market! Put your economics training to the test and see if your predictions can bring you fame and riches. Previous participants have walked away with sizable winnings and bragging rights.

To enter, fill out this Google Form or print and mail this paper form. Betting closes at 11:59pm EST, October 9th, 2011. Online payments should be received by the same deadline, and payments by mail must be post-marked by October 9th, 2011. Cambridge economists may also give the payment to Brenda Piquet or put the money in Daniel Pollmann's Littauer mailbox.

Submit online payments to johnczhou@gmail.com from your Amazon Payments account. To pay IN CASH, mail the printed form and the sum of your bets to

Daniel Pollmann, Littauer Center, Harvard University,
1875 Cambridge St, Cambridge MA 02138 

Check our website on Sunday, October 9th for the most popular choices, as well as for the winners soon after October 10th.
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Update

Al Roth  -  10:40 AM  -  Public
A commenter asks if this is legal--does anyone know?
  -  Comment  -  Share
Mallesh Pai's profile photo
Mallesh Pai - Probably not- intrade had to move out of of the US for legality reasons- and they're the biggest prediction market I know... (I'm guessing +David Pennock will know more).
10:47 AM (edited)   
David Pennock's profile photo
David Pennock - Not technically legal in the US, but neither are office pools. No one would ever be prosecuted for betting in this. The operator of the market might worry more, but I highly doubt something on this scale on this topic would be prosecuted. Look up betcha.com for the worst-case scenario but that was sports betting, a clear no-no.
11:02 AM   

Sunday, December 19, 2010

Prizes for solutions to problems

An Australian firm, Kaggle, hosts problem solving and prediction competitions, and describes itself this way: "Kaggle is an innovative solution for statistical/analytics outsourcing. ...Companies, governments and researchers present datasets and problems - the world's best data scientists then compete to produce the best solutions. At the end of a competition, the competition host pays prize money in exchange for the intellectual property behind the winning model."

One of their current competitions requires participants to predict travel time on Sydney's M4 freeway from past travel time observations.

Other approaches for eliciting solutions to problems by offering prizes are found at Innocentive, and Challenge.gov, both of which list problems for which people can offer solutions for evaluation.

Sunday, December 6, 2009

DARPA Red balloons at MIT

The DARPA network challenge has been won by the MIT team: MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest

"On MIT's Web site, a link was posted inviting people to sign up to help find the balloons and urging them to invite their friends. It said the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team "is interested in studying information flow in social networks, so if we win, we're giving all the money away to the people who help us find the balloons!"
It detailed a chain for giving away the money, beginning with $2,000 given to each person who first sent in the coordinates of each balloon.
"We're giving $2,000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that's not all -- we're also giving $1,000 to the person who invited them. Then we're giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on..." it said."

Here are some of the details from the MIT site linked to above...
The Challenge
This Saturday, December 5th, DARPA will be deploying 10 large, red weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the United States. (more info) DARPA is giving $40,000 to the first team of people to find all 10 balloons. Join the MIT team, invite your friends and you can win money, help science, and help charity! (see how it works) .

Tuesday, November 3, 2009

The DARPA network challenge

DARPA will pay $40,000 to whoever (whichever team) first reports the locations of ten weather balloons to be inflated December 5, around the U.S. Here is the announcement: DARPA Network Challenge.

Noam Nisan has some thoughts on this at AGT, and points out that very quickly some people started to offer to share the prize among those who would notify them of individual balloon's locations, conditional on the team formed in this way winning. Here's a wiki for people to share market design ideas on how to form a winning team.

Note that this is an aggregation of information problem a little like a prediction market, even though it is for postdiction rather than prediction...

Build your own prediction market

Build your own, using the platform at http://inklingmarkets.com/

Tuesday, October 6, 2009

Market prediction and the Challenger disaster

Michael Trick has a post on Models, Information, and Market Rationality which shows a graph of the stock prices of Morton Thiokol, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, and Rockwell, in the hours after the Challenger disaster.
"The stock price for all of the companies immediately dropped 7-8% after the disaster. Within an hour, three companies went back up to being just 2-3% down, while one company further decreased: Morton Thiokol. The company responsible for the O-ring (of Richard Feynman and ice water fame): Morton Thiokol. It is certainly provocative that the market seemed to know something immediately that took an investigation months to determine. ...
But, as Bryan reminds me, this was not exactly a mystery to everyone at the time: the engineers involved strongly suspected early what the issue was and later fed that information to Feynman. So the information was out there and perhaps that information leaked out to the market in the immediate aftermath of the explosion. So perhaps it is not so mysterious after all. And there may well be other explanations for the larger drop off by Motton Thiokol."

Prediction markets and Olympic cities

Over at MidasOracle.org the word is that Chicago won’t have the Olympics in 2016, despite the predictions of a number of well known prediction markets.

"The Chicago candidacy, which was favored by the prediction markets ...is the one that fared the worst."

"The prediction markets are not able to forecast which country will get the Olympics. The IOC is a close aristocratic group that does not leak information. Hence, it is not possible to aggregate information." (emphasis in original)

I guess President Obama also thought that Chicago had a good chance.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Jury design

How to design a committee to determine when a probability is "beyond a reasonable doubt?" That's the task facing juries in criminal cases. (Juries are like prediction markets for the past: they are charged with determining probabilities ex post.)

In all but two States, the rule is that unanimous agreement is required. But the States aren't unanimous. A current challenge to a non-unanimous Oregon conviction raises the question: Guilty by a 10-2 Vote: Efficient or Unconstitutional?

"...Oregon is one of only two states that does not require juries to reach unanimous verdicts in criminal cases. Like Louisiana, it allows convictions by a vote of 10 to 2.
In a pair of decisions in 1972, the Supreme Court said that was all right, that the Constitution does not require states to insist on unanimity.
But the decisions, one each from Oregon and Louisiana, were badly fractured and internally inconsistent. They concededly ignored the historical record and made assumptions about jury behavior that have been called into question by more recent research."
...
"According to the Oregon Criminal Defense Lawyers Association, most felony convictions in the state are the products of nonunanimous juries. Oddly, misdemeanor convictions still require a unanimous vote, though from a six-member jury. That means, the association said in a brief supporting Mr. Bowen, that prosecutors face a lighter burden in more serious cases.
Oregon does require a unanimous vote in first-degree murder cases, and Louisiana requires it in capital cases.
A unanimity rule would seem to reinforce the requirement that prosecutors prove their cases beyond a reasonable doubt. Two jurors out of 12, if you do the math, represent about 17 percent of the panel. That’s a fair amount of doubt."

Monday, March 9, 2009

Prediction markets: why aren't they used more?

While prediction markets have a distinguished history, and are currently used in some interesting applications, the Economist magazine writes: Prediction markets: An uncertain future, A novel way of generating forecasts has yet to take off.

"NOT SO long ago, prediction markets were being tipped as a fantastic new way to forecast everything from the completion date of a vital project to a firm’s annual sales. But although they have spread beyond early-adopting companies in the technology industry, they have still not become mainstream management tools. Even fervent advocates admit much remains to be done to convince sceptical managers of their value. “It’s still a pretty evangelical business,” says Leslie Fine of CrowdCast, one of the firms that provide trading platforms for companies keen to pool the collective wisdom of their employees."

The Economist has some hypotheses about the difficulties so far:
"A big hurdle facing managers using prediction markets is getting enough people to keep trading after the novelty has worn off. "...
"Another reason prediction markets flop is that employees cannot see how the results are used, so they lose interest. "...
"Bosses may also be wary of relying on the judgments of non-experts."

At Crowdcast (formerly Xpree) they have a market design hypothesis. They blog in response to the Economist article:
"we believe prediction markets are not yet mainstream because the current solutions rely on mechanisms designed for the stock market, not for the enterprise."

(N.B. A blog that follows prediction markets is Midas Oracle .ORG )

Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Prediction markets--history

Historical Political Futures Markets: An International Perspective by Paul W. Rhode, Koleman Strumpf - #14377 (DAE)

Abstract:

Political future markets, in which investors bet on election outcomes, are often thought a recent invention. Such markets in fact have a long history in many Western countries. This paper traces the operation of political futures markets back to 16th Century Italy, 18th Century Britain, and 19th Century United States. In the United States, election betting was a common part of political campaigns in the antebellum period, but became increasingly concentrated in the organized futures markets in New York City over the postbellum period.

http://papers.nber.org/papers/W14377

Thursday, October 2, 2008

Prediction Markets at Best Buy

Best Buy is running one of the largest internal corporate prediction markets. The experiment raises interesting questions about incentives for managers whose projects are "listed" on the market, as well as questions about how to design simple interfaces that thousands of non-experts can use.

"When executives at electronics retailer Best Buy Co. want to know if a new product or idea is likely to succeed, they can seek the opinion of rank-and-file employees by turning to the company's "prediction market."

The market, called TagTrade, allows Best Buy's workers to trade imaginary stocks based on answers to managers' questions. The market's judgment has often proved to be more accurate than the company's official forecasts."

(subscription required to see full article)