(Why am I offering you an obviously-positive-EV bet? To increase variance in my profits for league-position purposes.)
Clarification: if SPY closes at $ABC.DE, the relevant digit is E.
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Note for posterity:
I made a market whose fair price was clearly 20% and made a large limit order on NO at 19%. Thus people could buy YES at 19%, probably losing their money but getting slightly positive EV.
I feel bad about ruining the two big YES betters (they both lost much of their mana), especially because they seem to have misunderstood the market, buying YES up to 40% and 71% when the fair price was 20%. I wish I'd instead bet with some rich people who (1) wouldn’t have made that mistake and (2) can easily afford to make high-risk slightly-positive-EV bets. Some ideas for improvement in situations like this: (1) add warnings and explanation in the description or comments? (2) tag some rich people right after setting up the market so one of them will bet against me?
@ZachSteinPerlman
Thanks for the sentiment, no harm done. You are right that we initially misunderstood the question - I thought I am betting on the last digit being odd or even and you are extraordinarily generous 😄. After we realized this, I still went all in because I was fed up with the amount of time spent on Manifold and was fine with an either-or scenario.
@ZachSteinPerlman There's also a question of whether betting just to increase variance in profits to probably do better in Leagues is unsporting/inappropriate. I think it's OK since the vibe from Manifold currently seems to be "exploit edge cases and weird incentives; go for it!" But it's plausibly inappropriate, and it's certainly not universalizable-- if everyone did it, everyone would be worse off, roughly. And regardless I'm potentially taking League prizes and promotion away from someone who kinda deserves them more...
At least maybe this will demonstrate a substantial problem with the League system...
Pretty sure this is not a situation where Kelly betting is relevant. But don't want to get into a debate now. See e.g. Kelly betting vs expectation maximization.