In case you missed it, there've been some fascinating experiments with self-resolving markets on Manifold lately. The idea of a self-resolving market is that sometimes it's hard or impossible to pin down unambiguous resolution criteria for a prediction. In that case resolving to the consensus of the market participants may make sense. And from a prediction market perspective, the obvious way to define "the consensus of the participants" is the market price. See also Keynesian beauty contests. It's weirdly self-referential but maybe there are conditions in which we expect it to work?

We've seen one spectacular failure -- https://manifold.markets/jack/will-biden-be-president-on-915-reso -- in which an exciting tug-o-war was waged that had little connection to what the market was purportedly predicting.

But I conjecture that that was mostly about the hard(ish) end date. In setting up the experiment we knew that a known end date opens the market up to price manipulation at the last second and we tried to mitigate that with a random close time, but it was a random close time within a small window. It was still possible to temporarily manipulate the price for profit.

So this is an experiment to see how close we get to the truth if the market self-resolves as follows:

1. The market won't close before the end of October (when the true outcome is known).

2. The market will then stay open until the market price fully quiesces, meaning it stays the same (to the nearest whole percent) for two business days in a row. The market then resolves to that price.

3. But if a market participant wants to go on vacation or something, they can just ask in the comments to not let the market close before they return. We want to only resolve to a genuine consensus probability.

4. If we go all the way [through] November without the market stabilizing then it resolves N/A. That would be a shame but not necessarily bad, in general, in terms of the market price being informative, if it's oscillating around some estimate of the underlying truth.

Point 3 might be silly and unscalable, I'm not sure. It's an experiment. But if it did make sense, one can imagine ways to make it scale to larger markets. The answer might be to stick to a strict definition of quiescence and traders can just use trading bots or limit orders while they're away. (Or we could just say that checking in every other business day isn't that onerous, suck it up.)

Point 4 may open up an unfortunate loophole in that a participant can force the price to oscillate if they don't like the outcome. I think liquidity fees could solve that (which may be important anyway, since it's a very valuable property of markets that liquidity increases with trading volume!) because then it would get more and more expensive to keep the price oscillating. For this experiment, we'll just take the risk that that happens. Since everyone gets their money back in that case, the risk is arguably not so bad.

UPDATE: From the comments, pinning down the criteria for quiescence:

If the market price stays the same or oscillates between consecutive integer percents from noon pacific to noon pacific two business days later (so at least 48 hours, longer over weekends and holidays) then that counts as the market quiescing. I plan to add comments warning us as we approach the end of the window and plan to say yes to requests to temporarily lengthen the window (assuming they're based on real-world reasons like vacations).

PS: The official Schelling Point is 95%. Or oscillating between 94% and 95%.