🏅 Top traders

I think the prediction market folks largely agreed that NO was the correct resolution, but an interesting thing here is that when resolution is disputed, it is not resolved by polymarket folks. It is instead resolved by UMA holders, and they are apparently mostly a separate group that aren't necessarily prediction market people.

Here's a quick summary of how I understood the arguments:

NO argument is that Zelensky was not "exclusively" selected person of the year - seems very clear to me.

Some YES arguments I saw are a combination of the following:

• Intent and common sense should override technicalities, and the common sense interpretation is clear

  • Counterpoint: I'm not a fan of this argument for many reasons. If you ignore the rules, then what are they even for? And if you accept that common sense should override the rules in obvious situations, there's a slippery slope issue - what about slightly less obvious situations? And I think at the very least if you want to decide something along these lines you should resolve N/A.

• The market description contains a link "Read more about Person of the Year: https://time.com/poy" which is now an article on Zelensky only. Time published two separate articles, one for Zelensky and one for Spirit of Ukraine, but the way Time presents them is kind of confusing, and it is true that time.com/poy is a Zelensky only article.

  • Counterpoint: the market states that the resolution source is time.com so one shouldn't use only the data at time.com/poy for resolution, and should take into account the Spirit of Ukraine part as well.

• If you read the examples following the "exclusively" sentence, you could perhaps guess that the intent of this clause was that Zelensky must be named explicitly instead of as part of a group.

  • Counterargument: The language "exclusively" is clear and examples are not comprehensive, "Zelensky and [another person or group]" is also not exclusively Zelensky even though it wasn't given as an example.

Also, this isn't the first big disputed resolution. Check out https://www.metaculus.com/questions/7240/what-is-a-counterparty-risk-of-polymarket/#comment-100012 for the story of how UMA apparently misresolved a question on whether ETH would be above 1600.

Now, the interesting game theory and mechanism design part is in, how does UMA try to get users to vote on the "correct" resolution? I think there's two ways:

1) Those who vote the answer that ultimately wins get rewarded more UMA tokens, so you have a financial incentive to vote with the crowd. So it's really a Keynesian beauty contest, or a form of self-resolving market. And some of the UMA voters explicitly described choosing to vote YES in KBC terms - they chose YES because that's what they expected others to choose.

2) There's also a financial incentive for the decision to be seen as correct externally, because you are voting with the UMA governance tokens, and if people decide that UMA isn't a reliable resolution oracle then they'll stop using it and your tokens will be worth less.

Please note, that this market will resolve to "Yes" only if exclusively Volodymyr Zelenskyy is named as the TIME's Person of the Year.

That sounds pretty clear-cut. What arguments are they using to justify YES?

The UMA decision settled to YES, but polymarket has not resolved yet, not sure how the procedure works exactly.

I watched the debate unfold, there is some interesting game theory and mechanism design here, I'll probably post more about it later.

“Vladimir Zelensky and the blue and yellow flag twitter accounts”

Also, congrats to Metaculus for foreseeing these types of situations and writing good resolution criteria: https://www.metaculus.com/questions/10209/zelenskyy-named-time-person-of-the-year-2022/