Currently, options in a free response question will split off from "Other" at an equal probability (or approximately equal) to the "Other" option itself, while also increasing the overall probability of "Other" + new option when you add them. For example, the first answer added always starts out at 50%, and if you add a second option before trading on it, then the probability of "Other" + second option will be about 2/3, increasing from the 50% that "Other" was at before you added it. This leads to a problem where users are not incentivized to add new options to a free response market, especially early on. The old free response markets were very flawed, but the one benefit they had was that new options started out at a small probability, so users were encouraged to submit options that they actually thought might pay out. Now, in most free response markets, it is a terrible idea to submit an option in order to bet YES on it (esecially early on), since there is likely no option that's more than half as likely as all "Other" possibilities combined to pay out. Of course, users could submit options in order to bet NO on them, but that creates a perverse incentive where users are incentivized to submit options that they think are extremely unlikely to be chosen (or even just nonsensical options), rather than options that they actually think are plausible. Users might also submit options with no intention of betting on them, simply because they think they're plausible, but this costs Ṁ25 to do, and the user isn't compensated for it in any way, so there is an incentive against this.

One way to fix this problem would be to give users some sort of prize for submitting an option that turns out to be correct. To simplest way to do this would be some amount of mana given to the user who submits the option that is ultimately chosen, or gets split proportionally among the users who submit the options if multiple are chosen. However, something else like a badge or trophy for submitting enough correct answers would also count.

There is a Discord thread about this and other ways to potentially improve incentives for free response markets here: https://discord.com/channels/915138780216823849/1142225031422820412

For other possibilities about ways to improve incentives, see:

/JosephNoonan/will-manifold-give-users-who-submit

/JosephNoonan/will-manifold-add-a-quest-for-addin

/JosephNoonan/will-options-in-free-response-quest