/bohaska/will-the-singaporean-government-wor

/Bayesian/will-the-singaporean-government-wor-d66b44df51c4

Same as these market, but with with a close date at the end of April (a month later).

Yes, the Singaporean government has actually sent Manifold an email asking about that, see the Thursday standup meeting for more info.

Here's the email they received, according to Manifold (I suspect some parts are comments from Manifold, but I'm not too sure):

We are a team from Open Government Products (https://www.open.gov.sg/), a unit of the Singapore government that builds products for the public good.

We are trying to jumpstart prediction markets in Singapore and our goal is to find an initial, small-scale use case, prove its success, and gradually scale it up. We are doing this as part of our hackathon, during which our business-as-usual work is suspended for a month and we can explore new product ideas.

We hope to work with Manifold to demonstrate that Manifold markets is capable of accurately predicting answers to questions that Singaporean policymakers are interested in. The hope is, having done this, it would be easier to persuade agencies to deepen their involvement with us. My colleagues and I are willing to put up our own money for this proof of concept.

Specifically, we would like to check with Manifold:

• How can we ensure that the questions we post will garner sufficient interest from the community?

• How much money should we put up to achieve this and what are the exact mechanics to do so?

• What would a reasonable timeline look like? (Our demo day is on 1 Feb, so ideally we would like to achieve some results before that)

Preliminarily, we have identified the following metrics as good candidates to create a market in:

1. Housing data

• Resale flat prices (published daily): https://beta.data.gov.sg/collections/189/datasets/d_8b84c4ee58e3cfc0ece0d773c8ca6abc/view

• Market rental rates of flats (published monthly): https://beta.data.gov.sg/collections/166/view

• Property transactions records (published daily): https://beta.data.gov.sg/collections/55/view

2. COVID-related data (published weekly): https://beta.data.gov.sg/collections/522/view

• We were advised that it's probably in bad taste to create a market on the number of COVID-19 deaths, but the rest should be fine.

Separately, I wonder if Manifold has tried building something closer to an actual futures market, where the "market price" reflects the best estimate of a continuous variable that the market is trying to predict (need not be price, could be e.g. total fertility rate or COVID numbers or housing transaction volumes). I understand this could be achieved somewhat right now by using multiple choice where the values are bucketed, but the idea is to have a headline figure that directly predicts what the most likely outcome and could fluctuate like stock prices — this seems most useful for decision-makers.

Resolves YES if there is evidence of markets being created before the closing date about Singapore on behalf of the organization referred to in this email.