Do I understand correctly that adding a subsidy is effectively a form of charity as it isn't returned in full after market resolves?

@MrLuke255 correct

I'm not sure I would call it charity. You're increasing the incentive to bet on the market, which hopefully leads to a more accurate probability. You could do that out of charity or because the market is decision relevant for you personally.

@jskf In theory, yes. But can you point to any examples of markets which are "decision relevant"?

It should make market volume more prominent, regardless if subsidized or just traded much.

The question seems vague. Are we talking about:

• incentives for the market creators to add initial liquidity?

• incentives for third parties to add liquidity via subsidy to other creator's markets?

• incentives/opportunities for traders to find and trade in high liquidity markets?

• all of the above?
  
  Would these be tools available to the intrinsically motivated, or would these be extrinsic incentives in the form of mana bonuses, or some other return on mana?
  
  Maybe this is providing a sort or prioritization by market elasticity? This could run into the social media / google search algorithm issue where small novel markets are buried never to be discovered by other parties, and the recommendations become something of the same big market makers all the time.
  
  If markets remain open and tradable after the resolution is known such that they are no longer predictive then the traders will extract all liquidity from the market, leaving nothing for the subsidy provider. Markets that close earlier, lose the property of reflecting updated status as they get frozen in time sometime before the resolution was public knowledge. This might be a reason to allow market creators to be able to establish resolution criteria that could be retroactively applied, as in the market might continue trading after information is known but the market creator will be able to roll back the non-predictive trades made after the resolution became public knowledge. (this seems extremely powerful and potentially abusable)
  
  I feel like the answer is YES, but cautiously so. There is added value to be had, but I perceive trade offs to be made, and carefully evaluated to make sure there is a net positive value add for the population of traders and market creators that Manifold Markets wishes to cultivate.

A big YES.

1. Subsidies encourage effort to create better quality markets.

2. The amount of subsidy makes it attractive to trade on a market, and for an observer, provide a more resilient analysis.

3. As long as the market either incentivizes action such as via making change in the world, or by high-quality information gathering, there are few things which are more attractive than subsidies.

4. They indicate that a market is worth looking at, regardless of the number of traders. If I knew a market was important, and I had limited budged, I'd spent it on subsidizing it, than boosting it.

5. As things are today, the title is limited w.r.t chars allowed and I'd rather put "$10,000M subsidy" in the title to indicate "value" to traders than write a more descriptive title, and this isn't a good thing.

Are the above motivated by intrinsic personal values or extrinsic expected value of return on mana?

Yeah I think this is way more important that the # of traders in the market, if you're making UI prioritization choices. I only care about how many traders are in a market because of how much subsidy they add.

Would the common metric between market liquidity and market subsidy be then market elasticity?