Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At that point they are no better than simply looking at the stocks (the predicted market). Are you assuming that prediction markets are only over stock prices? What about a market about the winner of the next US presidential election?
if you have a market where I can make tons of money of it, at which point do you expect me to start contributing to PACs just to win the bet? see the problem?
Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
151–160 of 180 posts
Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#152Augur will probably be used for betting but really it's a prediction market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market Prediction markets are an interesting tool for determining the most likely answer or result for almost any question. Some economists hope that we could use prediction markets to make difficult political decisions. Many companies already use them internally. Sadly there's only one prediction mar…
prediction markets are not well regarded academically , outside of the cristall ball economics. the academic consensus is that as soon as you create a second incentive (the prediction market itself) you lose all the insight you could gain from external factors. At that point they are no better than simply looking at the stocks (the predicted market). hence prediction markets are by definition, useless. the cristall b…
Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#153Augur will probably be used for betting but really it's a prediction market. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market Prediction markets are an interesting tool for determining the most likely answer or result for almost any question. Some economists hope that we could use prediction markets to make difficult political decisions. Many companies already use them internally. Sadly there's only one prediction mar…
A prediction market is an attempt to leverage a hypothesized predictive power of aggregated betting, so being used for being is essential to being prediction market.
> Some economists hope that we could use prediction markets to make difficult political decisions.
Political decisions aren't verfiable fact questions, so they aren't really subject to prediction markets. You could use them as a tool to get possible answers to fact questions supporting policy decisions, but there is no real compelling case for them being better than the best available other methods in most domains for that, and in any case getting answers on fact questions related to policy decisions isn't even the hard part of getting good policy decisions.
Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, and the only real crazy stuff that happened was people put up "death" or "assassination" contracts. Famous person X will die in 2018.... The problem with decentralized betting like this is who is the authority that determines who the winner is. External and honest oracles are hard.
Solving that problem is pretty much Augur's claim to fame. It's a combination of outcome reports by randomly-selected REP holders, possible disputes by bettors who post a bond and trigger a larger group of REP holders, and (after several escalating rounds of that) a potential fork of the whole thing on the theory that the version of REP that reports the truth will have more market value. (I think in that case REP hol…
This means a sybil attack can be launched by anyone behind the Augur project (assuming they set aside large reserves of REP for themselves, how would anyone know?), or anyone who acquired thousands of ETH in the presale for $0.50USD, or anyone with excessive capital can attack any Augur "prediction" and manipulate the outcome in their favor.
Augur essentially gives total power to manipulate "truth" though tokens / capital.
(edit, downvoting to suppress information? please explain why this post is wrong)
Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
prediction markets are not well regarded academically , outside of the cristall ball economics. the academic consensus is that as soon as you create a second incentive (the prediction market itself) you lose all the insight you could gain from external factors. At that point they are no better than simply looking at the stocks (the predicted market). hence prediction markets are by definition, useless. the cristall b…
> At that point they are no better than simply looking at the stocks (the predicted market). Are you assuming that prediction markets are only over stock prices? What about a market about the winner of the next US presidential election?
IIRC, those exist, were the focus of attention a few cycles back (because cherry picked just right they were arguably better than polling in the cycle preceding the attention), but as soon as media started paying attention to them, people started diverting money to them to manipulate the results, because there are plenty of people that care more about influencing the result of that question (and it's one where perceived likelihood influences the actual behavior that controls the result) more than predicting it.
That kind of thing is actually a significant problem in many of the areas where prediction markets have been hyped.
Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
prediction markets are not well regarded academically , outside of the cristall ball economics. the academic consensus is that as soon as you create a second incentive (the prediction market itself) you lose all the insight you could gain from external factors. At that point they are no better than simply looking at the stocks (the predicted market). hence prediction markets are by definition, useless. the cristall b…
Do you have citations for this? The academic papers I've read on prediction markets are (broadly) positive.
"How long would it be before you saw traders investing in a way that would bring about the desired result?"
As in, if one found a way to bet against your car remaining in tact and realized sabotaging your car was cost effective to manipulate their bet, then they reap the market pay out. Is this good?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_Awareness_Office#F...
Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#157Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
Do you have citations for this? The academic papers I've read on prediction markets are (broadly) positive.
you are probably reading crystal ball economists. do they also write about other means to pick stock besides analyzing the company?
I'm admittedly naive in this subject, but the name calling doesn't help.
On the second point - there is solid evidence that, yes there are ways to pick stock besides JUST analyzing the company - see Momentum investing https://www.aqr.com/Insights/Research/Journal-Article/Fact-F...
I've seen plenty of critics of the efficient market hypothesis, and Fama himself has said that the market is not efficient.
Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At that point they are no better than simply looking at the stocks (the predicted market). Are you assuming that prediction markets are only over stock prices? What about a market about the winner of the next US presidential election?
if you have a market where I can make tons of money of it, at which point do you expect me to start contributing to PACs just to win the bet? see the problem?
Re: Introduction to Augur, an open-source, decentralized betting marketplace
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
> At that point they are no better than simply looking at the stocks (the predicted market). Are you assuming that prediction markets are only over stock prices? What about a market about the winner of the next US presidential election?
> What about a market about the winner of the next US presidential election? IIRC, those exist, were the focus of attention a few cycles back (because cherry picked just right they were arguably better than polling in the cycle preceding the attention), but as soon as media started paying attention to them, people started diverting money to them to manipulate the results, because there are plenty of people that care…
What's the evidence for people putting in large amounts of money to influence betting on elections?
Isn't it making a bit assumption that people vote in a certain way because they see things in prediction markets?
Regular people are surely not checking odds on who is likely to win an election.