
For example, a market creator can set a limit to 100mana, which would mean no single person can spend more than 100 mana total on the market (including orders).
Targets betting behaviour and reduces whales' influence.
Such update could allow fair competitions within a season. Currently going up in leagues is easier for those who have more mana. For a whale in bronze just a 1% increase is enough, while for a smarter but new player even 100% increase would not guarantee ranking up. I believe the ranking is fair in situations: everybody starts in equal conditions or their results are normalised (profit is divided by what they had at the start of a season).
🏅 Top traders
| # | Trader | Total profit |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Ṁ30 | |
| 2 | Ṁ12 | |
| 3 | Ṁ9 | |
| 4 | Ṁ9 | |
| 5 | Ṁ7 |
@ChristopherRandles Not quite sure that's the same thing as what is meant here, this seems arbitrary amount of limits in markets that can turn a profit.
@Fedor But is it the same as mana limited to 0 per person or even same as a limit of 1 mana.
Claim only requires 'an option' so if it is same as a mana limit of 0 or 1 mana per person/account.
But yeah, I didn't bet value up here. Probably claim creator thinking more like a limit of 500 mana per person and polls don't achieve equivalent of that. But if it creates an option equivalent to 0/1 mana per person limit, is that an option which is available?
So I really don't know which way to bet on this market until I see claim creator's response.
@ChristopherRandles poll is not a market. Completely different entities. If you set a mana limit to 0, the market would stay always at 50% no matter what people bet for, while poll (already "having a limit set to 0") moves to reflect the proportion of people, not the current price.
Why would this be a good thing for a prediction market?
If a "whale" makes an enormous bet and moves the odds, they're doing so because they think that the odds are inaccurate and their bet is moving the odds to a more accurate place. If they're wrong, they'll lose money and there's lots of potential for other predictors to make large profits by betting against them.
All in all, you would expect limiting bet size per user to make markets less accurate rather than more accurate.
@SimonGrayson many markets are self referential. Single human can just define the outcome. Instead of selfreferential being delisted they could recieve this feature.
Why would this be a good thing - prevent betting behaviour.
Sometimes a whale can bet and order so big, even on a regular market, that all people involved in the market cannot move the odds even by 1 %, because their combined savings are less than the market deepness. The "wisdom of the crowd" is annihilated. Delisting only worsens the situation, because enough people will not be accumulated to move the odds to the real value. "Well, of that whale is so overconfident, he'll lose more money" - that sanction still does not have positive impact on the odds representation.
@KongoLandwalker I've enjoyed some of the self referential markets (and even created some myself) but Manifold have made it very clear that they are not what this site is supposed to be for and they're not about to introduce features which benefit the self referential markets at the expense of the "real" predictive markets. And that goes doubly so for delisted markets!
On the real prediction markets, I think we disagree about how this would go in reality. If a whale has moved the odds so far that others in the market can't correct the odds then that's (1) a losing bet from the whale that will stop them being a whale if they do it regularly (2) huge profit potential for everyone else in the market and (3) a signal for other whales to come into the market and gain even more profit.
Do you have any examples of real predictive markets (rather than self referential or fun markets) which you think would have been improved by individual bet limits?
@SimonGrayson I agree with your (1), but it works longterm, it does not have effect on the very same market where the bet was made. Such mistakes will still happen. Whale can be overconfident and still win, which only in average will lose him money, which takes time. I hope that small markets have features to have faster reaction to events.
I think all markets with small amount of traders would benefit and become more adaptive. "Another whale" might never appear, because the platform is overloaded.
Let's say i don't value that manamoney. (I really don't). I have technical opportunity to enter some small market, buy it full, and at the end sell most of those if unfortunate. I lost money, but i managed to make the probability plot non representative for the duration.
There were 3 market on whether Isaac would lose trustworthy badge. I bought them before he bought bots and mana. The events to really show there is high probability of that did not happen yet, but i moved the probabilities up to 60 percent (which made the plots highly unrepresentative for some time between my bet and his actions). I got lucky for all that drama to happen, but also I made MORE people talk about taking his badge away (people saw the rapid change, but didn't notice it was just one human at the time). Because of the possibility to do that I made those markets self referential. The plot of the market started to affect the real event. When community "votes" up to 80%, the Manifold would obviously take a look and by that make that true (or probably true), even if bot manipulation was not taking place.
If i had no possibility to bet more than 100, the plots of the markets would show a rise only AFTER his bold actions, and the plots would be more accurate, not showing just my confidence.
Making probability plots more accurate and less affected by single humans than they are now is my wish.
*I cannot find the markets through Embed for some reason, I'll do it later.
@SimonGrayson https://manifold.markets/jack/will-isaacking-lose-his-trustworthy-ec06dc536f2c?r=S29uZ29MYW5kd2Fsa2Vy
You can look at the overlaps of the moved percentage intervals and see that i buy, then markets drops, then i buy again, steadily raising the number. After 60% people and bots stopped resisting.
And I am not a whale. The market was just very small at the time.
@KongoLandwalker I think your bets to 60% were not obviously wrong at the time. The post by SirSalty mentions the api-key-botting that had not yet taken place, but also mentions the overall poor handling of the market, which had. And I think it was insightful to realize that whatever trick Isaac might use might get them in trouble. I think you made a good bet and it paid off.
I agree that many prediction markets (and many predictions) can be self-fulfilling to some extent. But I think this is true regardless of whether a prediction is by a few whales or many minnows.
Plus if a size-limited market becomes popular, what's to stop me making a size-unlimited duplicate of it?
@MartinRandall I didn't think "whatever trick he uses will get him in trouble". I was sure he will be banned because he was banning (for imaginary reasons) people (including me) from conversation on his markets.
If I remember correctly, that was not the reason why his badge was taken. I got lucky.
@MartinRandall ok. That just didn't look specific enough. I expected "abuse of authority". Poor handling is too soft for what he did.
@KongoLandwalker Let me steal some words from Isaac himself - even though whales can manipulate markets and push odds out of whack, eventually the mana will always end up in the hands of the best predictors.
(he said that when he was on top, of course)
I don't agree with it, but you sparked that fun memory of when he said that so confidently a few weeks before he blew his account up. I got reminded of it by this
The "wisdom of the crowd" is annihilated.'
I'm still blocked too 😄
@Gen the thing everybody talks about is "eventually". Somewhen much later or even in time-> infinity. That is true, but i interested in making real time plots better
@KongoLandwalker Yeah, no I agree. It's total bullshit to plan for "eventually". Markets would be more accurate if everyone's balances were regularly reset, but it's fun to win and easier to win if everyone (especially bad predictors) have bigger balances that you can take from
Edit: used clearer language