The probability that the Huffington Post and Digg get rewarded by a Mashable Open Web Award is strictly 0%, since they were eliminated from the remaining of the competition, 2 days ago. Still, as of today (Friday, December 5, 2008, 9:00 am ET), HubDub gives to these outcomes, respectively, a 13% and 15% chance of happening. Absurd.
HubDub should develop a new functionality for its traders: the possibility of selling short any event derivative. I wanted to do just that yesterday, to take advantage of this absurd situation —but wasn’t able to.
-
Post Scriptum: There is a reason David Perry is working with Robin Hanson (the inventor of MSR) to improve the Consensus Point software. If you want to be taken seriously as a forecaster, your tool should be technologically advanced. David Perry is a smart man.
-
We actually had shorting developed when we first launched but we didn’t switch it on. The reason we didn’t switch it on was because we were concerned about confusing new users. It appears to only be a problem in a small number of markets but still we do plan to introduce it at some point in the not too distant future.
Aside from convenience, what’s the difference between “shorting Digg and Huffington”
and a “place a stake to win on everything but those two”?
Won’t they have the same payoffs?
It is not just convenience. (I deleted my previous comment for this one.) It is also that short-selling Digg or HuffPost would be a winning trade at 100%. Whereas, in the no-short-selling-allowed scenario, when you buy out everything but the ones that have been eliminated from the competition, you will lose money on 2 out of 3 event derivatives in each of these Mashable sets of prediction markets.
This Sunday, Digg is at 4% and HuffPost at 16%. There is a serious problem, there.