In a year, will I believe that scandal markets on powerful individuals are a beneficial way of penalising bad community behaviour and net good overall?
25
closes Nov 15
51%
chance

Feel free to convince me and try and make money.

State of the discussion:

  • Powerful people should be held to account (95%)

  • There should be a way to profit (even to charity) for people coordinating information (80%)

  • Markets on this have the right incentives (80%)

  • It's easy to damage reputations by quoting the markets regardless of what they say

  • They cause stress to those they are about

  • Jackson argues that scandal markets might harm the reputations of prediction markets in general

    • The early assassination markets were by the US Government, these are by a private company.

Get Ṁ500 play money

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Stralor avatar
Pat Scott🩴bought Ṁ40 of NO

the problem with scandal markets is how they often create further scandal and can be targeted haphazardly. the damage they do to their targets and to the platform aren't worth it when they can be wielded against innocents.

JacksonWagner avatar
Jackson Wagner

I think that the biggest case against scandal markets isn't any of your three bullet points, but rather the idea that scandal markets might drag down all of prediction markets -- scandal markets might themselves become a scandal (like how early attempts to use prediction markets at US intelligence agencies were torpedoed by the accusation of being "terrorism markets"). And in a broader sense, if the #1 application of prediction markets is "exposing the wrongdoing of powerful and influential people", then prediction markets might quickly make a lot of powerful enemies! It is in this sense that I worry that scandal markets might be net-negative. But this doesn't seem to meet your resolution criteria since you might still believe they are a "beneficial way of handling community behavior", even if that good effect comes at the expense of the wider prediction markets / forecasting ecosystem.

1 reply
Conflux avatar
Confluxbought Ṁ100 of YES

@JacksonWagner I'm a bit skeptical that scandal markets are effective in actually getting scandals publicized, since I don't think insider trading is particularly likely or would be noticed. My hesitance with the "powerful people will bring down scandal markets" take is that if a scandal market for a powerful person is high and they get mad, then either they'll have a scandal, in which case it will look good for scandal markets; or there would be money lying on the ground for that powerful person. I mostly believe that scandal markets are likely to be mildly net positive, though they could conceivably be quite net positive or net negative.