Hey guys,
This is the Manifold Markets official announcement regarding the drama over the last couple of days with this market:
Admittedly a lot of what I'm about to share isn't a definite answer/boundary but I wanted to provide some insight anyways into our internal discussion.
There are 2 main points of discussion to be had from this.
1) Do we take any action about the misresolved market?
2) Do we make any changes to our policy/mechanisms to minimise this behaviour going forward?
To answer the first point, we have decided that we will NOT be taking any action for the time being.
However, after careful consideration, we want to say that we might change the resolution of these markets to N/A if we do end up implementing a mechanism that allows us to retroactively change the resolution of a market. We partly want to implement this mechanism also for markets that were accidentally misresolved.
We will only make a final decision if this ends up being implemented (and will take into consideration the community's thoughts gathered on this market).
Regarding the second point, we are planning to make some changes to our policy to protect users from having similar bad experiences in the future. We still need to figure out how this looks but I will hopefully add an edit and comment once we have decided.
The first step is making sure Manifold has the right to fix the resolution of markets part of any official tournaments. Besides this specific case, we still need to figure out the line between complete user autonomy and protecting the user experience.
Resolution criteria:
Market resolves YES if we choose to change the resolution of either the Stone or Predictor market (this would include if we ran a script which effectively undid all the payments, and then cancel everyone's trade as if the market had been resolved N/A even if the front-end says it was still resolved to NO).
Market resolves to NO if by the end of January 2023 we haven't done the above.
Close date updated to 2023-04-28 10:29 am
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3.00To me, I think the better question would be if misresolutions are N/A-ed going forward. I don't think it's a good idea to change these past resolutions, which were done under a policy that clearly allowed them. BUT I do think it would likely be a good idea to make users who lost mana whole - don't take the mana away from those who profited, just do a one-time restoration of lost mana for these two markets, and then change the policy for the future. (In fact, I personally would be willing to fund the make-whole payments if for some reason Manifold didn't, but only if there is policy in place that prevents the same thing from happening again and again.)
In the ideal manifold-devs-have-infinite-time scenario, I think it might be cool to implement "resolution contracts" of some sort, to experiment with different mechanisms for ensuring that markets resolve honestly.
One type of contract might be "when I resolve this market, a 24-hour timer starts and <list of users> can N/A it in that time". And if a creator commits to that, the market gets a shiny badge and bettors are more likely to trust it. Possible other resolution contracts might be "automatically resolves to the result of this poll" or "automatically resolves N/A if this other market resolves other than N/A".
