Some people are describing current happenings as civil war but escalating sectarian violence is the term I’ve seen used more often, perhaps that is changing rapidly.
The point of this market is to predict whether US withdrawal would make the violence worse, regardless of what it is called. If deaths increased drastically as specified by the +CW stocks there would be no debating that a civil war had occurred or is ongoing.
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What is the impact U.S. withdrawal from Iraq as specified by http://news.us.newsfutures.com/market/market.html?symbol=USLEAV07 on Iraqi civil war (specified by lower bound of deaths published by http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ increasing by 40,000 or more between May 1, 2007 and Jan 1, 2008.
This is an improved version of http://home.inklingmarkets.com/market/show/2553
The improvement is that only post-April deaths are counted, disentangling the possibility that the number of deaths between now and April will impact both the probability of troop reduction and the probability of 100k total deaths at the end of 2008. I am interested in the impact withdrawal will have on Iraqi deaths, not vice versa or both at once!
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Adam Siegel, why is it that the Inkling link goes to the middle of that webpage??? And why is it that you cite only Reddit in the list of social favorites/bookmarks services? Why not Delicious and Digg too???
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Previous Blog Post: Irankling Study Group – by Mike Linksvayer
I don’t think it’s a marketing issue.
Basically, there’s no way to reliably measure how many people are killed in Iraq in a given month. Whether “40K” people or 700K people (that one loony estimate) or 20K people were killed is pretty much completely arbitrary.
Maybe inkling goes into finer detail somewhere, but regardless, why pay the time-information cost to dig all that up when I can just trade something with which I am much more familiar??
Alex, http://www.iraqbodycount.net/ does the work and is linked from the market description — no digging up information required.
Yes, measuring Iraqi deaths is highly contentious, but IBC at least uses a consistent methodology. The contract is interested in relative increase (or lack thereof).
Alex: Yes, it’s a marketing issue. If you’re going to have user-created prediction markets, you need publicity IN ORDER TO DRAW TRADERS. And since the media won’t do the tam tam, you need BLOGGERS to bring in their audience.
The link goes to the middle of the page only if you’re not logged into Inkling because their login form is at the bottom of the page and the cursor is positioned at the first login field. It doesn’t really make sense for the login form to be at the bottom of the page. It may even be a bug (unintended), as the equivalent content appears to the right side when logged in.