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Austin Chen's avatar

Hi Zvi - Austin from Manifold here. Thanks for linking to us, even if you think we're "a mess"! Do you mind expanding on that (we're always interested in feedback!) My guesses are that you're talking about the fact that we're play money atm, or perhaps our dynamic parimutuel market making mechanism.

Also: I'd be interested in setting up Manifold markets for all 41 of these questions, especially if at some later date you plan on posting your judgement of the resolution (as you and Scott already do for yearly calibrations and Covid posts).

Finally: "multiple binary markets with different date thresholds" is one simple way to make these work as full-fledged markets, but it feels like it might be a lot of overhead for a trader to bet on... Plus it'd spread the liquidity even thinner; just 3 different dates (eg 1mo, 3mo, 6mo) would lead to 120 markets.

One improvement might be to use multi-category exclusive buckets (e.g. 0-1mo, 1-3mo, 3-6mo, 6+mo) on a single market for each question. I'm wondering if anyone has an incentive-compatible market design that lets people simply post their true prediction about a date and get paid out according to how correct they were?

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Liam's avatar

I don't see how you can have a useful market on global nuclear war or something with a sufficiently high probability of leading to it. The correct choice is always to bet that it won't happen: if it doesn't, you collect your money, and if it does, your counterparties have been vaporized and can't pay.

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