And that makes some people uncomfortable. The debate on Robin Hanson’s idea futures (prediction markets, decision-aid markets, decision markets, futarchy, etc.) is spreading from Overcoming Bias to other blogs. Here is Robin Hanson:
Nick, I never said there are prediction markets that don’t influence decisions. On modeling factors to get trade existing, I mean any one factor is enough. On coercivity, I proposed a mechanism for governance, and described how it can be applied in both voluntary and coercive contexts. I get that you hate coercive governance, and want me to rail against it, and refuse to offer it any assistance, but I didn’t discuss that because it isn’t directly relevant. I have discussed moral hazard; if you refuse to read my publications, how can you know what I have or haven’t commented on?
Nick’s answer:
This grossly mischaracterizes my position and my reason for raising the subject. In fact I have written that coercion is quite necessary for legal procedure. (Notice that I am providing links rather than vague general claims that I dealt with this issue somewhere, and you have to root through all my old obscure papers to find where I did). My objection here is not ideological, it is that when you add coercion to an economic transaction, the outcome is usually quite different than a voluntary transaction. You can’t model them the same way. Standard economics assumes voluntary transactions and I have found that economists usually make gross errors when modelling coercive transactions. You are sweeping this crucial factor entirely under the rug in the explanations you’ve written for the general public — if you are also, as it’s quite reasonable to suspect, neglecting this crucial factor in your papers, the output from these Holy Writs, without having read which Thou Shall Not Comment on the straightforward political proposal allegedly justified therein, the conclusions reached by these vaunted works are likely to be wrong.
As for those publications, I have read your *public* publications on futarchy, i.e. those written for the general intelligent public and not just for specialists who share your particular set of hidden economic assumptions. I’ve also read enough of your technical papers on other subjects to know that this is not a very worthwhile way to figure out what you’re up to. Like most academics, you are very poor at stating your assumptions — you have a set of hidden or tacit assumptions and hidden special meanings of words, presumably shared with the journal referees, which cannot be readily reverse-engineered by the intelligent layman. So, like most of the supporters of your proposal, I read your clearer restatements, in the form of blog posts and summaries. In the case of futarchy, the proposal you are making is clear enough, it is the justifications that are obscure. And in your statements to the general public from what I’ve seen you have not dealt at all with coercion or moral hazard, nor have you answered any of my objections here. If you had seriously dealt with these problems before it shoudn’t be so hard for you to answer my objections now, but instead all we’re getting from you is ad hominem argument.
