How will loans be implemented on June 1st?

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Ṁ3018

resolved Jun 1

100%92%

No loans

0.1%Other

1.4%

$20 per market as before

0.4%

Larger (eg M$ 100) loans, only available on longer-term markets (eg 3+ months away from closing)

0.1%

Larger loans proportional to your current portfolio value (eg loan limit = 2% of portfolio)

0.6%

A button you have to click on to opt-in to the loan

1.1%

Loans only available to power users (eg a subscriber, or person with >10 bets made, or >14 days on the site, or through an obscure user setting)

0.1%

Loans scale with the market

0.4%

Same as before but with a higher default loan amount

Some fraction of your bet in every market is paid up front & the rest is a loan. The farther the close date, the lower your up front payment is as a fraction of your bet.

1.9%

Amount of loan scales with the time of question resolution, maybe in increments.

0.0%

Option is only available when the user's balance is M$ 0

0.0%

Daily limit to how many questions you can receive loans for.

Manifold Markets recently removed per-market loans — a feature that let you bet up to M$ 20 in every market through a loan that you pay back when the market resolves. Will we bring loans back by June 1st, and if so, how? I will award partial credit to earlier answers that were close, and the most accurate answer.

This question is managed and resolved by Manifold.

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See my comment at https://manifold.markets/jack/how-should-manifold-encourage-tradi#uYRhKPnWe2Au9gjlgs4y

I had the same idea! Spending M$ to upvote this regardless of whether it gets implemented before market close.

The stated issue was the feature overwhelming new users. Limiting loans to users without any funds ensures new users don't see it until they have already gotten some experience, and makes the feature easy to comprehend because it tells a very simple story. "Oh, you ran out of money? Well you can borrow temporary funds in the meantime."

A slightly misleading story, mind you, but one that's simple to grasp.

One of the perks of loans is they enable new users to keep making bets instead of investing M$ 1000 and forgetting about the site while they wait for 11:59:59 December 31, 2022. Limiting frequency would further promote users forming a Manifold habit rather than a engaging in a single Manifold binge. Same logic as daily Wordles or daily quests in free-to-play games.

E.g. If the market closes in 1 hour, and you bet M$ 100, then your upfront payment would like M$ 99 with a loan of M$ 1. If the market closes in 1 year, and you bet M$ 100, your upfront payment might be M$20 with a loan of M$80.

I liked this too, I thought it was a good way to allow people to participate in clearly mispriced markets with long resolution times while still giving to participants with proven track records.

$100 maybe

(kind of a digression, I should start a market on whether we'll do a subscription plan) What's nice about a subscription-based plan is that it reminds traders that our platform exists, and aligns us with continuing to deliver value to our traders (instead of eg encouraging a single large bet, losing all your money, and then churning). But allowing people who want to buy info to do so (either market subsidy or api access or sth) also makes a lot of sense! It's a bit of a question of how to divide the "gains from trade" here; platform + question creator + trader generate positive externalities in the form of forecasts & enjoyment; how do we allocate those?

Yeah, mostly for new users it seems weird/buggy for the balance to not change. I think the opt-in user toggle could make sense!

Want to briefly clarify, when I said some combination I meant and/or and not necessarily some version of both required :)

Scaling to be larger based on how long term the market is and/or gurgenklas’s proposal to scale with market liquidity seem better to me than this.

Why would opt-in be better? When would the user not want the loan? Is the idea that it’s confusing to trade and not see your balance change? I think if this was done, there should also be a toggle on your profile to allow you to opt-in by default on every market.

I intuitively like some combination of this option and only making it available to power users (but not paid subscribers!). Could also scale the size of the loan based on how far out market resolution is.

Would be ~weakly against monetization via subscription plan as opposed to other routes. Seems to me the route that makes the most sense is whoever wants the information paying, rather than the users of the platform. This seems both most incentive compatible and best from a user growth perspective.

It is silly that two markets on the same issue should have larger loans than one market that consolidates all bets.

Would short this one if I could 😛

@Austin You have the power to implement shorting, do you not?

Common request from power users/whales are to make loans more meaningful, they want a larger say in longer term markets.

(yes, we've been thinking about a subscription plan. straw proposal: $10 per month gets you M$ 1000 + a fancy badge + loans)

Scott mentioned he would have tried this first; mea culpa, since it was my idea to make them an always-on default.

This one has the advantage of being fairly easy to implement, we could do it in 10 minutes if we wanted.

I liked the freedom to bet on long-term markets, and honestly thought it was a great system.

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