@Austin is planning on providing some large liquidity subsidies to real-world useful markets (e.g. elections, LK-99, nuclear war; anything where the info is highly relevant to many non-Manifold users.)

Submit markets that would be good to subsidize as an answer here. Once the first wave of those subsidies goes out, I'll resolve to all of them in proportion to the subsidy they recieved.

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None of the submitted answers were subsidized at any point, so that's easy.

Hmm, how should I count "first wave"?

Not sure how public-interest this is, but it looks like the debate will go ahead and there are basically no traders, would there be much love for subsidising this, or is it too niche?

IMO the things the nuclear war markets need are only partly subsidies. They would also benefit strongly from increased resolution at the extremes, and from standing limit orders on NO at moderate-to-low prices (5%-20% sorts of ranges). Or a special-rules AMM that only provides liquidity in the 0-20% range so that it can be a little more parsimonious with its budget.

@EvanDaniel I think the best markets to subsidize are ones that

  • Are of interest to the general population. e.g. if I'm in an unrelated conversation with someone who's never heard of prediction markets, they might mention some future event, and I'd be able to say "hey, there's a big Manifold market on that, let's check how likely it actually is".

  • Don't already have lots of traders. The LK-99 market got popular all on its own, and people had plenty incentive to do research. What we want instead is to find markets that have the potential to be big, but haven't been "discovered" yet.

  • Markets where deep research is needed in order to make good bets, and the normal trader subsidies are not enough to incentivize people to do that.

I don't think limit orders are (relatively) helpful, general liquidity serves the same purpose without the arbitrary market skew caused by limit orders.

Extreme probabilities are definitely something that Manifold needs a technological solution for, I don't think subsidies help there.

Sorry if this wasn't clear -- I don't have time to be making the decisions about which to subsidize and how much, myself. I'm more interested in proposals from people to do this, eg "I, Isaac, would be happy to provide this as a service this month, to manage a budget of 100k mana with a 5k bonus to me for handling it"

@Austin Yeah that's what I figured; this market is just a way for whoever ends up doing that to find markets for you.

I'd be happy to do that, no payment required.

@Austin Is the idea that people would be trying to recoup the subsidies? If they start the month with M$100,000, do you want them to eventually get most of that back? I would assume not, but your usage of the word "budget" made me want to confirm.

What's your goal with the project? What will you be looking for to tell if it succeeded or not?

@Austin I think I could do a good job with this. I would also recommend @jack, who I still think should be Supertrustworthy-ish as was once proposed. Maybe this could be part of that position?

Obligatory market: