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Prediction markets, also known as betting markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures or event derivatives, are open markets that enable the prediction of specific outcomes using financial incentives. They are exchange-traded markets established for trading bets in the outcome of various events. [1] The market prices can indicate what the crowd thinks the probability of the event is. A typical prediction market contract is set up to trade between 0 and 100%. The most common form of a prediction market is a binary option market, which will expire at the price of 0 or 100%. 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.
Before the era of scientific polling, early forms of prediction markets often existed in the form of political betting. One such political bet dates back to 1503, in which people bet on who would be the papal successor. Even then, it was already considered "an old practice". [2] According to Paul Rhode and Koleman Strumpf, who have researched the history of prediction markets, there are records of election betting in Wall Street dating back to 1884. [3] Rhode and Strumpf estimate that average betting turnover per US presidential election is equivalent to over 50 percent of the campaign spend.
As far back as 1907, Francis Galton found that the median estimate of a group can be more accurate than individual expert estimates. [4] This is now known as the wisdom of the crowd. [5]
Economic theory for the ideas behind prediction markets can be credited to Friedrich Hayek in his 1945 article "The Use of Knowledge in Society" and Ludwig von Mises in his "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth". Modern economists agree that Mises' argument combined with Hayek's elaboration of it, is correct. [6] Prediction markets are championed in James Surowiecki's 2004 book The Wisdom of Crowds , Cass Sunstein's 2006 Infotopia, and Douglas Hubbard's How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business. [7] The research literature is collected together in the peer-reviewed The Journal of Prediction Markets, edited by Leighton Vaughan Williams and published by the University of Buckingham Press.
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Prediction markets are based on the theory that individuals with financial stakes in an outcome can collectively predict it more accurately than any single expert. Even if participants are not highly informed, the collective wisdom emerges from their shared incentive to avoid financial loss. Eric Zitzewitz, an economics professor at Dartmouth, explains "Financial markets are generally pretty efficient, and the evidence suggests that the same is true of prediction markets. There’s no virtue-signaling in an anonymous market when you’re betting and that "what you’re seeing with the market is some average of all of those different opinions, weighted by their willingness to put their money where their mouth is." [15]
The ability of the prediction market to aggregate information and make accurate predictions is based on the efficient-market hypothesis, which postulates that asset prices are fully reflecting of all publicly available information. For instance, according to the efficient-market hypothesis, existing share prices always include all the relevant related information for the stock market to make accurate predictions.
While prediction markets tend to perform better than polling for prediction of election outcomes, a study found that belief aggregation of participants that are asked to quantify the strength of their belief can beat prediction markets. [16] When market participants have some intrinsic interest in trying to predict results, even markets with modest incentives or no incentives have been shown to be effective. When the group is more optimistic they will 'bet' more in aggregate than the pessimists, raising the market price. The movement of the price will reflect more information than a simple average or vote count. Research has suggested that prediction markets' greater accuracy lies largely in superior aggregation methods rather than superior quality or informativeness of responses. [16]
James Surowiecki raises three necessary conditions for collective wisdom: diversity of information, independence of decision, and decentralization of organization. [17] In the case of a predictive market, each participant normally has diversified information from others and makes their decision independently. The market itself has a character of decentralization compared to expertise decisions. For these reasons, a predictive market is generally a valuable source to capture collective wisdom and make accurate predictions.
Prediction markets can aggregate information and beliefs of the involved investors and give a good estimate of the mean belief of those investors. The latter have a financial incentive to price in information. This allows prediction markets to quickly incorporate new information and makes them difficult to manipulate. [18]
The accuracy of prediction markets has been studied by numerous researchers:
Due to the accuracy of the prediction market, it has been applied to different industries to make important decisions. Some examples include:
Although prediction markets are often fairly accurate and successful, there are many times the market fails in making the right prediction or making one at all. Based mostly on an idea in 1945 by Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, prediction markets are "mechanisms for collecting vast amounts of information held by individuals and synthesizing it into a useful data point". [25]
One way the prediction market gathers information is through James Surowiecki's phrase, "The Wisdom of Crowds", in which a group of people with a sufficiently broad range of opinions can collectively be cleverer than any individual. However, this information gathering technique can also lead to the failure of the prediction market. Oftentimes, the people in these crowds are skewed in their independent judgements due to peer pressure, panic, bias, and other breakdowns developed out of a lack of diversity of opinion.
One of the main constraints and limits of the wisdom of crowds is that some prediction questions require specialized knowledge that majority of people do not have. Due to this lack of knowledge, the crowd's answers can sometimes be very wrong. [26]
The second market mechanism is the idea of the marginal-trader hypothesis. [25] According to this theory, "there will always be individuals seeking out places where the crowd is wrong". [25] These individuals, in a way, put the prediction market back on track when the crowd fails and values could be skewed.
In early 2017, researchers at MIT developed the "surprisingly popular" algorithm to help improve answer accuracy from large crowds. The method is built off the idea of taking confidence into account when evaluating the accuracy of an answer. The method asks people two things for each question: What they think the right answer is, and what they think popular opinion will be. The variation between the two aggregate responses indicates the correct answer. [27]
The effects of manipulation and biases are also internal challenges prediction markets need to deal with, i.e. liquidity or other factors not intended to be measured are taken into account as risk factors by the market participants, distorting the market probabilities. Prediction markets may also be subject to speculative bubbles. For example, in the year 2000 IEM presidential futures markets, seeming "inaccuracy" comes from buying that occurred on or after Election Day, 11/7/00, but, by then, the trend was clear.
There can also be direct attempts to manipulate such markets. In the Tradesports 2004 presidential markets there was an apparent manipulation effort. An anonymous trader sold short so many Bush 2004 presidential futures contracts that the price was driven to zero, implying a zero percent chance that Bush would win. The only rational purpose of such a trade would be an attempt to manipulate the market in a strategy called a "bear raid". If this was a deliberate manipulation effort it failed, however, as the price of the contract rebounded rapidly to its previous level. As more press attention is paid to prediction markets, it is likely that more groups will be motivated to manipulate them. However, in practice, such attempts at manipulation have always proven to be very short lived. In their paper entitled "Information Aggregation and Manipulation in an Experimental Market" (2005), [28] Hanson, Oprea and Porter (George Mason U), show how attempts at market manipulation can in fact end up increasing the accuracy of the market because they provide that much more profit incentive to bet against the manipulator.
Using real-money prediction market contracts as a form of insurance can also affect the price of the contract. For example, if the election of a leader is perceived as negatively impacting the economy, traders may buy shares of that leader being elected, as a hedge. [29]
These prediction market inaccuracies were especially prevalent during Brexit and the 2016 US presidential elections. On Thursday, 23 June 2016, the United Kingdom voted to leave the European Union. Even until the moment votes were counted, prediction markets leaned heavily on the side of staying in the EU and failed to predict the outcomes of the vote. According to Michael Traugott, a former president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, the reason for the failure of the prediction markets is due to the influence of manipulation and bias shadowed by mass opinion and public opinion. [30] Clouded by the similar mindset of users in prediction markets, they created a paradoxical environment where they began self-reinforcing their initial beliefs (in this case, that the UK would vote to remain in the EU). [30] [31] Here, we can observe the ruinous effect that bias and lack of diversity of opinion may have in the success of a prediction market. Similarly, during the 2016 US Presidential Elections, prediction markets failed to predict the outcome, throwing the world into mass shock. Like the Brexit case, information traders were caught in an infinite loop of self-reinforcement once initial odds were measured, leading traders to "use the current prediction odds as an anchor" and seemingly discounting incoming prediction odds completely. [32] Traders essentially treated the market odds as correct probabilities and did not update enough using outside information, causing the prediction markets to be too stable to accurately represent current circumstances. [33] Koleman Strumpf, a University of Kansas professor of business economics, also suggests that a bias effect took place during the US elections; the crowd was unwilling to believe in an outcome with Donald Trump winning and caused the prediction markets to turn into "an echo chamber", where the same information circulated and ultimately lead to a stagnant market. [34]
Prediction markets can yield better estimates of the mean opinion across a population than opinion polls. A study found that for the five U.S. presidential elections between 1988 and 2004, prediction markets gave a more accurate estimate of the voting result than 74% of the studied opinion polls. [35] On the other hand, a randomized experiment from 2016 obtained that prediction markets were 12% less accurate than prediction polls, an alternative method for eliciting and statistically aggregating probability judgments from a crowd. [36]
Prediction markets in the United States are overseen by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission. [37]
Because online gambling is outlawed in the United States through federal laws and many state laws as well, most prediction markets that target US users operate with "play money" rather than "real money": they are free to play (no purchase necessary) and usually offer prizes to the best traders as incentives to participate. Notable exceptions are the Iowa Electronic Markets, which is operated by the University of Iowa under the cover of a no-action letter from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and PredictIt, which is operated by Victoria University of Wellington under cover of a similar no-action letter. [38]
Some kinds of prediction markets may create controversial incentives. For example, a market predicting the death of a world leader might be quite useful for those whose activities are strongly related to this leader's policies, but it also might turn into an assassination market. [39]
Some prediction websites, sometimes classified as prediction markets, do not involve betting real money but rather add to or subtract from a predictor's reputation points based on the accuracy of a prediction. This incentive system may be better-suited than traditional prediction markets for niche or long-timeline questions. [43] [45] These include Manifold, [46] Metaculus, and Good Judgment Open.
A 2006 study found that real-money prediction markets were significantly more accurate than play-money prediction markets for non-sports events. [47]
A combinatorial prediction market is a type of prediction market where participants can make bets on combinations of outcomes. [48] The advantage of making bets on combinations of outcomes is that, in theory, conditional information can be better incorporated into the market price.
One difficulty of combinatorial prediction markets is that the number of possible combinatorial trades scales exponentially with the number of normal trades. For example, a market with merely 100 binary contracts would have possible combinations of contracts. These exponentially large data structures can be too large for a computer to keep track of, so there have been efforts to develop algorithms and rules to make the data more tractable. [49] [50]
Election prediction markets are a type of prediction market in which the ultimate values of the contracts being traded are based on the outcome of elections. The main purpose of an election stock market is to predict the election outcome, such as the share of the popular vote or share of seats each political party receives in a legislature or parliament.
Before World War II, election betting was widespread in the U.S., dating back to George Washington’s election and becoming organized by Lincoln's era. Though often illegal, it operated openly through “betting commissioners” who held stakes and charged a 5% commission. New York was the hub, with activity shifting from poolrooms to the Curb Exchange (precursor to AMEX) and Wall Street offices. By the 1930s, wagers involved large sums from anonymous business and entertainment figures. In some elections, the volumes traded rivaled those of stocks and bonds, with daily odds reported in major newspapers like TheNew York Times. [51]
The CFTC has attempted to restrict election markets, arguing they resemble gaming rather than the financial derivatives it oversees. It previously allowed limited academic use, such as with PredictIt, but withdrew support in 2022 and became involved in litigation with the project. The CFTC also targeted Polymarket, a crypto-based prediction market, resulting in the company moving offshore and paying a $1.4 million fine. [52]
In October 2024, prediction market Kalshi won a lawsuit against its regulator, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, with a federal appeals court in Washington allowing it to revive the first fully regulated election prediction markets in the United States. Kalshi's court victory over the CFTC opened the market for election markets. [12] [13] [14]
Spread betting is any of various types of wagering on the outcome of an event where the pay-off is based on the accuracy of the wager, rather than a simple "win or lose" outcome, such as fixed-odds betting or parimutuel betting.
A prediction or forecast is a statement about a future event or about future data. Predictions are often, but not always, based upon experience or knowledge of forecasters. There is no universal agreement about the exact difference between "prediction" and "estimation"; different authors and disciplines ascribe different connotations.
The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), part of the FutureMAP project, was a proposed futures exchange developed, beginning in May 2001, by the Information Awareness Office (IAO) of the United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), and based on an idea first proposed by Net Exchange, a San Diego, California, research firm specializing in the development of online prediction markets. PAM was shut down in August 2003 after multiple US senators condemned it as an assassination and terrorism market, a characterization criticized in turn by futures-exchange expert Robin Hanson of George Mason University, and several journalists. Since PAM's closure, several private-sector variations on the idea have been launched.
A hedge is an investment position intended to offset potential losses or gains that may be incurred by a companion investment. A hedge can be constructed from many types of financial instruments, including stocks, exchange-traded funds, insurance, forward contracts, swaps, options, gambles, many types of over-the-counter and derivative products, and futures contracts.
Robin Dale Hanson is an associate professor of economics at George Mason University and a former research associate at the Future of Humanity Institute of Oxford University. He is known for his work on idea futures and markets, and he was involved in the creation of the Foresight Institute's Foresight Exchange and DARPA's FutureMAP project. He invented market scoring rules like LMSR used by prediction markets such as Consensus Point, and has conducted research on signalling. He also proposed the Great Filter hypothesis.
The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations, published in 2004, is a book written by James Surowiecki about the aggregation of information in groups, resulting in decisions that, he argues, are often better than could have been made by any single member of the group. The book presents numerous case studies and anecdotes to illustrate its argument, and touches on several fields, primarily economics and psychology.
The Iowa Electronic Markets (IEM) are a group of real-money prediction markets/futures markets operated by the University of Iowa Tippie College of Business. Unlike normal futures markets, the IEM is not-for-profit; the markets are run for educational and research purposes.
Prediction markets company NewsFutures (2000-2010) evolved into Lumenogic (2010-2019), "a consulting firm that specializes in developing and customizing online systems for large organizations to use to gather so-called Collective Intelligence from their employees", which in turn became Hypermind.
Trend following or trend trading is a trading strategy according to which one should buy an asset when its price trend goes up, and sell when its trend goes down, expecting price movements to continue.
A prediction game is a game which allow users to guess at the outcome of future events. Prediction games are generally operated online and are free for users to play. Points are awarded to players who most accurately predict the outcome of an event, and those points are converted into cash prizes.
The wisdom of the crowd is the collective opinion of a diverse and independent group of individuals rather than that of a single expert. This process, while not new to the Information Age, has been pushed into the mainstream spotlight by social information sites such as Quora, Reddit, Stack Exchange, Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and other web resources which rely on collective human knowledge. An explanation for this phenomenon is that there is idiosyncratic noise associated with each individual judgment, and taking the average over a large number of responses will go some way toward canceling the effect of this noise.
Intrade.com was a web-based trading exchange whose members "traded" contracts between each other on the probabilities of various events occurring. After having been forced to exclude US traders in 2012, on 10 March 2013 Intrade suspended all trading, citing possible "financial irregularities". For a time after the suspension, the intrade.com website stated that they were working on a relaunch of the site, called "Intrade 2.0", but as of August 2014 it states that "It appears very unlikely now that Intrade will resume trading services in the way it had operated previously", and announced plans to close all accounts and refund monies by 31 December 2014.
The simExchange is a web-based prediction market in which players use virtual money to buy and sell stocks and futures contracts in upcoming video game properties. The main purpose of the web site is to predict trends in the video game industry, particularly how upcoming products will sell and how they will be received by the critics. For those who do not participate in the prediction market, the web site is a database of sales forecasts and game quality forecasts that are updated in real-time. The web site also features a number of "Wisdom of the crowd"-type content collaboration and aggregation tools, including means for sharing information, articles, images, and videos about the games.
Political forecasting aims at forecasting the outcomes of political events. Political events can be a number of events such as diplomatic decisions, actions by political leaders and other areas relating to politicians and political institutions. The area of political forecasting concerning elections is highly popular, especially amongst mass market audiences. Political forecasting methodology makes frequent use of mathematics, statistics and data science. Political forecasting as it pertains to elections is related to psephology.
iPredict was a New Zealand prediction market that offered prediction exchanges on current events, political issues and economic issues. iPredict was jointly owned by the New Zealand Institute for the Study of Competition and Regulation and Victoria University of Wellington. The site launched on 9 September 2008 and closed 1 December 2016.
Augur is a decentralized prediction market platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. Augur is developed by Forecast Foundation, which was founded in 2014 by Jack Peterson, Joey Krug, and Jeremy Gardner. Forecast Foundation is advised by Ron Bernstein, founder of now-defunct company Intrade, and Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin.
A superforecaster is a person who makes forecasts that can be shown by statistical means to have been consistently more accurate than the general public or experts. Superforecasters sometimes use modern analytical and statistical methodologies to augment estimates of base rates of events; research finds that such forecasters are typically more accurate than experts in the field who do not use analytical and statistical techniques, though this has been overstated in some sources. The term "superforecaster" is a trademark of Good Judgment Inc.
Kalshi Inc. is an American financial exchange and prediction market based in Lower Manhattan, New York City, offering event contracts. Launched in July 2021, it offers a platform where both retail and institutional traders can place trades on various future events, including economic indicators, weather patterns, awards, as well as political and legislative outcomes. The platform enables users to trade on yes-or-no questions, with contracts priced based on the market's estimated probability of an event occurring. The exchange provides contracts that pay out $1 for correct selections. In October 2024, Kalshi received approval to reintroduce election markets, allowing users to wager on political outcomes, such as congressional control and presidential elections.
Manifold, formerly known as Manifold Markets, is an online prediction market platform. Users engage in competitive forecasting using play money called 'mana', as well as 'Sweepcash,' which can be withdrawn for real money, or donated to charity. Topics on Manifold have included the 2024 United States presidential election and the Oscars. Sweepstakes are US only and 18+. All states are eligible except Washington, Michigan, Idaho, and Delaware.
Polymarket is an American cryptocurrency-based prediction market, headquartered in Manhattan, New York City. Launched in 2020, it offers a platform where investors can place gamble on various future events, including economic indicators, weather patterns, awards, as well as political and legislative outcomes. Participants can deposit USDC cryptocurrency through the Polygon blockchain network and trade shares that represent the likelihood of specific outcomes occurring in the future.
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