Karl Rove resigns abruptly.
Chris F. Masse August 13th, 2007
Makes him look like he is guilty of something, then.
Wall Street Journal + Portrait-Interview - The WSJ coverage of his resignation seems biased to me.
New York Times + NYT Editorial
I haven’t seen any Karl Rove prediction market at InTrade and NewsFutures. Am I correct?
UPDATE: NewsFutures was floating a Karl Rove event derivative… which turned out not to be predictive. Resignation prediction markets are rarely predictive, in my experience.
Karl Rove will resign from the White House.
UPDATE #2: Emile Servan-Schreiber…
Chris, how exactly do you define “predictive”? If your criterion is “last trading price above 50%”, that would betray a very limited understanding of the nature of both probability and binary markets. That’s a debate you and I have had ever since the first days of chrisfmasse.com a propos the 2004 US presidential election.
To your credit, I don’t think anyone has yet proposed a good way of assessing the “predictiveness” (predictivity?) of a single binary market after the fact. It is a very difficult question. Does anyone here have an answer?
#1. What I see on the NewsFutures chart above is that the probability of Karl Rove resigning went to about 20% previous to the official announcement in the WSJ, indicating that it was more likely than not that he’d stay at the White House. So, in terms of absolute accuracy, that particular prediction market failed.
#2. Emile-Servan-Schreiber is right that, scientifically, we should assess a series of identical prediction markets, not just one, if we want to determine whether this market-based technology has merit. (And we should assess them comparatively to competitive institutions’ predictions.) Overall, the NewsFutures prediction exchange is indeed predictive.
NEXT: Does this prediction market chart look predictive to you? + Jed Christiansen strongly believes that Chris Masse has a bad understanding of probabilities.
Chris, how exactly do you define “predictive” ? If your criterion is “last trading price above 50%”, that would betray a very limited understanding of the nature of both probability and binary markets. That’s a debate you and I have had ever since the first days of chrisfmasse.com a propos the 2004 US presidential election.
To your credit, I don’t think anyone has yet proposed a good way of assessing the “predictiveness” (predictivity?) of a *single* binary market after the fact. It is a very difficult question. Does anyone here have an answer?