Will "league ownership" need major changes to its payout system?

Question

New hackathon project from James and Ian just dropped:

[image]I think the idea is really cool and I like that it encourages people in leagues to talk to each other, as well as have a single person who's responsible for mentoring them. (I'd advise renaming "owner" to "mentor", as it clarifies their intended role -- to help out others in the league and give them advice on how to proceed)

That said, I think this payout structure is seriously bad for Manifold economics, subject to exploits and shenanigans, and as currently written the most likely thing is that we'll end up wanting to patch this. For reference, currently:

Different league users bid for ownership over the course of 1 day. The winning bid is burned by Manifold, and the winner becomes the "owner"

At the end of the league, the Manifold prints or deducts mana from the owner, equal to the total profits calculated by the league.

Things that bother me about this structure:

It represents an unbounded liability to Manifold and unknown inflationary effect. As a person who takes my salary in mana, you might imagine I care a lot about the sanctity of mana's value.

It gives league participants a lot of control over league owners; owners can get screwed over if one participant chooses to artificially tank profits

(more minor) the bidding time is short and relatively uninformed.

Will we end up changing this system, or wishing that we had changed this system? Resolves to some TBD metric -- definitely resolves YES if arguments lead to us changing the system before the final payout, and also resolves YES if some kind of poll or consensus among Manifold team and community finds that it was a bad setup.

Modifications I might suggest:

Impose some kind of scaling (eg logarithmic) or hard cap on how much the owner can win or lose. We can always switch to the full 1:1 match next month, if things look good

Changing it to be some kind of "league vs league warfare" similar to clans in games, where the most profitably league in each tier wins a fixed prize (eg owner gets 10k mana, and others get 2.5k)

Manifold Markets · Accepted Answer

Yes — resolved on Aug 11, 2023 by Manifold Markets prediction market.