Background – 1
Wikipedia: “Prediction markets (also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives) are open markets where specific outcomes can be predicted using financial incentives. Essentially, they are exchange-traded markets created for the purpose of trading the outcome of events. The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is…Prediction markets can be thought of as belonging to the more general concept of crowdsourcing which is specially designed to aggregate information on particular topics of interest. The main purposes of prediction markets are eliciting aggregating beliefs over an unknown future outcome. Traders with different beliefs trade on contracts whose payoffs are related to the unknown future outcome and the market prices of the contracts are considered as the aggregated belief.”
ChatGPT in response to “What are Prediction Markets?”: “Prediction markets, also known as “information markets” or “event futures,” are exchange-traded markets created for the purpose of trading the outcome of events. The market prices can be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event occurring. Participants in the market can buy and sell contracts that represent the possible outcomes of an event, and the prices of these contracts fluctuate based on supply and demand. The market prices can be used to forecast the likelihood of future events, and can be used by organizations to make better decisions by aggregating the collective wisdom of market participants.”
Investopedia: “Prediction markets are similar to futures markets for commodities or other financial asset prices. In futures markets, traders bid up or down the price of a future contract based on their expectation of what the future price of the underlying asset will be. Prediction markets are just futures markets where the future event being traded upon is something other than the price of an asset at some point in the future. Prediction markets involve a collection of people speculating on a variety of events—exchange averages, election results, quarterly sales results, or even gross movie receipts. Robin Hanson, a professor at George Mason University, is an advocate of prediction markets. He makes the case for prediction markets by emphasizing the removal of reliance on self-interested punditry by so-called experts. “Instead, let us create betting markets on most controversial questions, and treat the current market odds as our best expert consensus. The real experts (maybe you), would then be rewarded for their contributions, while clueless pundits would learn to stay away,” Hanson says.”
Tyler Cowen (Mar 2021): “Prediction markets [are] contracts with payoffs contingent on some real-world event…In essence, [they] let people “bet” on some feature of the economy, thereby creating a new financial derivative. A prediction market in gross domestic product, or perhaps in local rates of unemployment, could be a useful means of hedging risk. If you are afraid that GDP will fall, you could “short” GDP in a prediction market and thus protect your overall economic position, because your bet would pay out if GDP came in lower than expected. Prediction markets are also a useful means of discovering information about what is likely to happen next. If you want to know who is likely to win the Super Bowl, is there any better place to look than the published betting odds? By the same reasoning, various interest rate futures markets offer clues about what the Federal Reserve might be planning. The value of having more and better public information is another reason to encourage prediction markets…For a prediction market to take off, it probably has to satisfy a few criteria: general enough to attract widespread interest; important enough to matter; and unusual enough not to be replicable by trading in existing assets. The outcomes also need to be sufficiently well-defined that contract settlement is not in dispute.”
Daniel E. O’Leary writes in a brief survey of prediction markets: “In prediction markets, participants buy and sell stocks. Each stock’s price is tied to a different event happening in the future. Information about the future is captured in the stock prices…The prices reflect the traders’ aggregated beliefs about the probability of their winning – a higher price means a higher perceived likelihood of winning…Although using play money makes it possible for many people to participate, one potential challenge for prediction markets that don’t use real money is gaining and maintaining interested participants. Despite using different devices to keep up engagement, such as leader boards indicating who has accumulated the biggest portfolio, there is literally no money on the table to keep participants interested in the market.”
