Why do people trade here? Not much liquidity, rather long-term market, not a famous creator.

My hypothesis: Because(!) there are no resolution criteria.

People see this and think "Free money! Obviously, Roblox will [x]." Depending on what they imagine the market might mean, x could be something like "still exist" (buy No) or "have declining player count" (buy Yes) or a myriad other things. Some might be smart and figure "A mod will resolve this in the end and the mod won't want to fight or cause trouble over this, so I'll just bet with the majority. If the market stays below 20% most of the time, the mod will assume most traders interpreted the market as asking [whatever leads to people buying No] and resolve accordingly."

Hardly anyone will bet on anything related to a real outcome in the real world. And if someone were to make a better market (Will Roblox have less than 1M players in 2027?), maybe a handful people will trade down to 2% and that market will disappear in meaninglessness.

My vision for a better Manifold: Come resolution time (or, preferably, much earlier), a mod looks at this and goes "Is it obvious that all traders have the same correct interpretation of this market?" and if the answer is No, just N/A the market.

(Tagging @dreev Those markets are what I have in mind when I advocate for way more N/A resolutions)

@Primer This is an interesting case study, and probably representative of a whole class of markets, as you say. For context, I should link to my "N/A is bad" manifesto. I think we're largely on the same page about the problems with N/A resolutions. I guess you're advocating that it's better to proactively resolve underspecified markets as N/A before it gets too agonizing later?

I guess we should keep this concrete and discuss this market in particular. So I think step 0 is to ask the market creator, @Dariusn9gL, to clarify what dying means? Traders can also chime in with what they assumed, but I think traders should understand that it was incumbent on them to clarify before trading and we need to defer to the market creator.

I do think it can be ok to trade in an underspecified market, caveat emptor. Maybe you think it's at least a 90% chance that Roblox has steady growth through 2027. Then buying "NO, won't die" is a good trade at 20% regardless of the definition of death the market creator intended.

PS, Thinking more about your worry, let me see if I understand: You're saying that a market like this can end up a bit like a self-resolving market. If traders keep the price very low then there's social pressure on whoever ends up resolving it to hew to the market consensus and resolve NO. That opens the door to, effectively, market manipulation where driving the price down is a self-fulfilling prophecy and thus a (cynically) profitable strategy.

I'm skeptical, just because there's so much risk. The causal connection between pushing the price down and the market resolving NO seems too tenuous for a rational trader to try to exploit. That's my conjecture, anyway. But I've lost a ton of mana in experiments in which I expected self-resolving markets could be devised to be robust to manipulation. So maybe don't listen to me. I'm not sure where the burden of proof should be on that.

What if we imagine the worst case of all: the market creator never clarifies anything and then shows up at the end of 2027 and says "I don't care about the financials, none of the cool people I know play Roblox anymore -- that's what I meant by dying, so this resolves YES." I guess I would say that traders got what they deserved? I don't know. That's not a great answer, but preemptive N/A doesn't strike me as clearly better.

Mainly I think the creator should have the chance to clarify what they intended. If they do, then all's well.

@dreev The self-fulfilling part is just a tangential concern, it's not meant to carry much argumentative weight. It's just one of many ways traders end up betting, which all have close to zero connection to what actually happens with Roblox. People trade on what the creator might have meant, or what clarifications they expect might be made, or how they anticipate mods to interpret the market, or...

I agree: If traders asked questions before trading, and if those questions resulted in clear criteria, it wouldn't be as bad. But that's not how reality plays out (see this very market with 21 traders).

Sure, "traders get what they deserve", but we agree that's far from optimal. But this also hits creators by taking away visibility, engagement and liquidity from better markets.

My high level argument:

1. Some markets become successful (traders, liquidity, visibility) not because they are valuable or interesting, and not despite they are bad, but because they are bad.

2. Neither creators can create, nor traders can bet on alternative markets, because the bad market took all the visibility, liquidity and engagement.

3. In the end the bad markets resolve (maybe after some heavy drama, nobody is wiser as the narket never tracked real world facts and the creator earned many trader bonuses).

"N/A always bad" means 3 is always correct, which means we look back and say "this was fine", creating all the wrong incentives.

If bad markets get N/A'd more often, it would become common knowledge that it's moot to trade in or create bad markets and the incentives are fine.

@Primer It belatedly occurs to me that we shouldn't have a meta discussion in an innocent third party's market. Moving my reply here: https://manifold.markets/dreev/how-bad-is-it-to-resolve-a-market-a#7k1n0v0y7qa