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Zocalo in use at MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence
A few months ago I announced that my work on the Zocalo open source Prediction Market project is being supported by consulting contracts with two universities, but was unable to name the second one. I’m pleased to publicly announce that I’ve been working with Tom Malone of MIT’s Center for Collective Intelligence. [...]
CFTC Oversight May Not be a Boon.
I want to quibble with one of Dave Pennock’s comments on the CFTC request. Pennock wrote “It’s not often that an industry in its infancy cries out for more government oversight.”
It’s actually quite common. The term in the economics literature that includes this is regulatory capture. When there’s a regulatory body specific [...]
Safe Harbor Letter too Timid
This is an edited version of a post on pancrit.org commenting on the public letter advocating safe harbor for small-scale academic prediction markets. I can see why they limited their goals as they did, and I agree that everything they advocated should be legal, but I think they may have limited their objectives [...]
Conditional and Combinatorial Betting
After people have used Prediction Markets for a while and have gotten used to their ability to provide forecasts, they start thinking about different scenarios. Who would be the best Republican to face Clinton? How are the prospects for a market boom or crash effected by the winner of the election? How will poverty be affected by a proposed World Bank program? These kinds of questions can be posed in a number of ways using Prediction Markets. Markets can allow betting on conditional (if) or conjunctive (and) questions. Either one can be used to answer the what if questions, but they provide different choices to the bettors, and some make it easier for observers to decode the answers.
Integrating Book Orders and Market Makers
Dave Pennock gave a gentle introduction on his blog to the Market Scoring Rule invented by Robin Hanson. In the comments, Sid asked for an explanation of how to integrate the MSR with an order book. Dave asked me privately if I’d be willing to tackle that, and this post is the result.
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