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Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

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101–110 of 167 posts

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#102
post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take a look at the user's history, it's more obvious in context. It has a lot of claude-specific tells which are noticeable if you've spent time working with claude. AI-generated comments are against the HN guidelines https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated

Maybe the guidelines should be changed? Something about: don’t complain about comments just because they’re AI.

no fuck that. We should definitely complain about AI written content, and we should ban anyone who wants to keep people ignorant of time wasting bs comments.

As a side note, the AI popularized usage of the word 'clean' to denote proper is physically revolting to me.

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#103

[flagged]

Could you please not post generated comments to HN? It's not allowed here. See https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html#generated and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47340079. We ban accounts that do this and I don't want to ban you, so please write everything that you post to HN by hand.

Of course, it's impossible to know for sure what was LLM processed or not, but we're getting complaints about some of your posts and, upon inspection, the complaints seem justified.

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#104

> the top 1% of users capture 76.5% of profits This seems to be similar to OnlyFans, and the economy at large...

these apps should load with this pie chart showing your likelihood of ever making a profit based on what they know about you. "YOU WILL LOSE MONEY ON THIS APP". Like the cigarette packs.

MLMs were forced to do this but it doesn't seem to change their recruitment ability.

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#105
post #2

We study trading gains and losses on Polymarket, the largest prediction market. Using 588 million trades ($67 billion in volume), we show that the gains are highly concentrated: the top 1% of users capture 76.5% of profits. Successful traders provide liquidity using limit orders that resolve favorably relative to realized outcomes while unsuccessful traders take liquidity using market orders. Monthly performance is w…

The spreads on most markets always seemed like a hint that polymarket transferred wealth from the impatient that don't really understand how it works, to those that play mostly as patient market makers with just an educated guess.

The problem is that volume is generally too low to make significant money.

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#106
post #62
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, do we want the economy to be stable? Not in a 'oh the rich don't so they control the media and so we don't' sorta way. But like in a 'lets educate people on the pluses and minuses, debate a while, and then come to an informed conclusion' sorta way. Like, deep down, does the average person actually want a stable economy? Because it seems to me that there is an even split historically between the folks that wan…

I have a dumbed down version of this question as variant of the Voight-Kampff test (Bladerunner) that goes like this. You have 2 choices for how the world is shaped, pick 1: A. You have a modest but comfortable home, a job that pays you enough so that you have what you need and can afford occasional luxuries (e.g., an annual holiday abroad), have good health insurance, access to education and childcare, etc. Everybod…

Seems like you left out the "millionaire next door." There are a lot of people who want to save up enough money to retire. Some of them want to retire early. This doesn't involve any mansions or extravagant living, but it does mean investing well.

How many people think multiple mansions is a realistic option for them? Not that many, I'd expect.

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#107
post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a dumbed down version of this question as variant of the Voight-Kampff test (Bladerunner) that goes like this. You have 2 choices for how the world is shaped, pick 1: A. You have a modest but comfortable home, a job that pays you enough so that you have what you need and can afford occasional luxuries (e.g., an annual holiday abroad), have good health insurance, access to education and childcare, etc. Everybod…

Seems like you left out the "millionaire next door." There are a lot of people who want to save up enough money to retire. Some of them want to retire early. This doesn't involve any mansions or extravagant living, but it does mean investing well. How many people think multiple mansions is a realistic option for them? Not that many, I'd expect.

Many Americans consider themselves to be temporarily distressed millionaires ;-)

I'm not trying to knock "personal ambition", the test was for who would knowingly and willingly choose to subjugate everybody else to misery if it meant that they could gorge themself on a firehose of wealth and power.

Basically, it is: are you a sociopath?

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#108
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

insider trading on events probably wouldn't show any trends, right? These are point in time events (they call them markets), but they are finite and short lived. An insider would be a one and done thing, so it would be pretty hard to spot them or trend any sort of month over month insider scheming imo. Also... > We study trading gains and losses on Polymarket, the largest prediction market This is not a natural thing…

Not meant to sound like AI, but most academic journals limit abstracts to 100 words, so they rarely feel natural... I agree: insiders are hard to study because they are finite and short-lived. We're pretty confident there are insiders out there trading on Polymarket; however, our conclusion is that they don't account for a significant fraction of the total trading gains on the platform.

When the abstract is limited, you don't add useless qualifiers like "the largest prediction market"

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#109
post #35
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, power laws are everywhere. The exact shape of each distribution varies, however, and little is known empirically about the distribution of trading profits in financial markets.

Yeah if you look at the Boltzmann Wealth Model, where every actor gives away 1 dollar to a random person, and you repeat this, then if you start with an equal wealth distribution, you end up with an exponential wealth distribution. That shows how strong exponential curves are :) A few "lucky" individuals become very wealthy, while the vast majority of people end up with very little or nothing. The effect is so strong…

I believe a power law acts differently from an exponential distribution. I think wealth distribution is commonly approximated by a Pareto distribution.

In your model, the exponential distribution is caused by the fact that you cannot go below zero; otherwise, it would be a normal distribution.

I don't agree with your opinion about laws against power laws, but that is another matter.

Re: Who wins and who loses in prediction markets? Evidence from Polymarket

#110
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not meant to sound like AI, but most academic journals limit abstracts to 100 words, so they rarely feel natural... I agree: insiders are hard to study because they are finite and short-lived. We're pretty confident there are insiders out there trading on Polymarket; however, our conclusion is that they don't account for a significant fraction of the total trading gains on the platform.

When the abstract is limited, you don't add useless qualifiers like "the largest prediction market"

Some people feel strongly about defining jargon when using it - an article on here [1] the other day about Capture The Flag (CTF) hacking puzzle competitions was full of comments comparing the article didn’t say what CTFs were.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48157559

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