Will partial resolution of yes/no markets be supported by 2022-11-01?
21
22
178
resolved Nov 1
Resolved
NO
This market resolves Yes if Manifold adds a feature to support partial resolution of yes/no markets by close. It resolves No if not. Suppose there is a market "How many times will Donald Trump tweet in 2023?", which resolves to 0 if there are no tweets, 100 if there are 100+ tweets, 50 if there are 50 tweets, and so forth. When the market opens we know it will resolve between 0 and 100. If Trump tweets 50 times in August then we learn that it will resolve between 50 and 100. Partial resolution would allow the market creator/resolver to set the minimum resolution to 50% and immediately pay out 50% of "No" shares. The market will continue to be open for trading in the 50-100% range. No doubt this will take some fancy math. If there was a market for "what proportion of the Spice Girls will be alive in 2050?", then if one of the Spice Girls died, this could be partially resolved, setting the maximum to 80%. So we could have partial resolution in both directions. Though perhaps not both at once, depending on how hard the math is. An example market that could be partially resolved to 50-100%: https://manifold.markets/MartinRandall/will-existing-markets-be-converted Benefits: improves prediction accuracy, reduces fear of improper resolution. Costs: user confusion, opportunity cost. Unknowns: how to handle liquidity, how to handle N/A resolution. Small print: I will not trade in this market. I will handle edge cases according to my best judgment, feel free to ask resolution questions in comments.
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Currently I think this is less likely to happen than 62%:

  • Numeric/range markets are the clearest use case and don't seem to be a priority.

  • Currently less focus on this type of feature.

  • Loans make this less important and more complicated.

Now that scalar markets are implemented in terms of YES/NO markets, this feature is less hacky.
bought Ṁ40 of YES
Very sensible. The obvious implementation is that setting the resolution to a minimum of 40% makes every YES token buff your bankroll by M$0.4 while you hold it. I see a bunch of ways to handle liquidity, depending on whether partial resolution is supposed to update the price automatically.
bought Ṁ50 of YES
Example: I want to ask "Will Manifold hit 500 DAU in the next 100 days?" and set up a YES/NO market. Then, each day that this does not happen, each holder of a YES share transfers 1%, or M$0.01, to a NO holder. But on any day it does happen, the market resolves, with NO holders paying YES holders the rest. If the criteria settles on day 60, a NO holder from Day 0 would have received M$0.60, and pay back M$0.40. A NO holder who bought in on Day 30 would have received M$0.30, and pay out M$0.40 too.
sold Ṁ44 of NO
@Austin Selling my NO because that is a good use case which would not be better served by scalar markets.
I must confess I don't quite understand how this feature would make markets more accurate. In both the Trump tweeting and the deceased pop star case, wouldn't market participants just automatically shift the effective min/max of the market by betting based on new information?
@MattP The partial return of funding to bettors on the market allows them to reinvest. It might also improve liquidity and fees but that is less clear to me and might change over time.
bought Ṁ10 of YES
@Yev hm what's your leading proposal on scalar markets? I think we're currently leaning towards bucketized, exclusive multi-category CFMM markets to represent scalars
bought Ṁ100 of NO
This feature is only useful if you use PROB as a poor person's scalar market. Actual scalar markets (with partial resolution) will be make this feature unnecessary.
@Yev I think prob is a middle income person's scalar market and just needs some UI tweaks.
predicted YES
One worry - with partial timed resolutions, the specific resolution time starts mattering a lot. Eg if the resolution is weekly, and a partial resolution was supposed to happen on 5/20, but the market creator is on vacation for 2 days and the protest ends on 5/21, then people can get rewarded for jumping in on that. Maybe you could resolve this using "who owned the shared as of exactly 5/21"? Marking each share with a timestamp might be kind of annoying, but our ledger should be able to reconstruct the state of ownership as of any point in time without such timestamping
bought Ṁ20 of YES
Oh that's super cool! Reminds me also of my proposal for trendcasting https://manifoldmarkets.notion.site/Proposal-Trendcasting-36321d16185543ad93d6e9484f8718c4
Another use case: a "how many days until X (eg, the protest ends)" market, which resolves 0-100% based on the number of days it takes. That can have an increasing 1% partial resolution every day until the event happens.
bought Ṁ5 of YES
Oh dang, this is really interesting! I think the math works out okay - since every YES + NO share was minted by paying in M$1, we could just send out the M$0.5 to each NO holder, and then now a NO share represents the chance it resolves to 50%. Need to think a bit more about whether the incentives are still aligned (if I had bought YES shares at 33%, what does it mean once the floor is raised?) One more benefit that is actually quite important is that it reduces the amount of time that bettors have their capital locked up - faster resolution means that One more idea I've wondered about, similar to this: Continuous resolution of markets e.g. you could have a prediction on "How many DAU will Manifold have by the end of the 2022", but actually pay out the market every week. This might work better for Free Response markets where you have buckets for scalars, because the continuous resolution solves the DPM problem of later traders capturing gains of earlier traders https://kevin.zielnicki.com/2022/02/17/manifold/