I've heard that one. Great joke.

lol, that's a good one!

That's a dangerous assumption. I freely admit that I would manipulate a prediction market if I thought it would make a policy impact.

An extension of b) is that you might spot an inconsistency or other error in the public information that people seem generally unaware of.

Another way to think about it is: you don't need insider knowledge, you can get an advantage in all kinds of ways. For instance, there are innumerable biases in how people think about stuff -- you can find lists of them all over the place. If you can manage to be less biased than other market participants, that's an advantage. You have access to the same info as everyone, you just use it better because you're less biased.

If you can bring information to bear that the market doesn't include, that's an advantage regardless of whether or not it's 'insider' knowledge. It's often the case that key info is sitting out there in plain sight, but for one reason or other -- often due to the aforementioned biases -- people don't include it in their worldviews. That's alpha for you.

Just to be clear, I'm fully supportive of prediction markets :). I think people should be able to bet on whatever they want.

I think it could work better if participation was incentivized. So that the expected return of participating is positive (not a zero sum game). This requires the organizer of the market to have an innate interest in generating a market based prediction... But this could be better than paying for an expert opinion, potentially

It reminds me of comic books back in the day, when I used to read comic books, and the storyline spread across a zillion different comics. It's kind of a cool vibe here, I think :)

weird, can't edit comments right now 🤔