Manifold questions are resolved by their authors. Currently, Manifold gives full control over determining the correct resolution to their authors, although the admins do step in for markets that have been abandoned.

I proposed a system where authors still resolve markets, but there is a mechanism for others to dispute the resolution, in which case it is decided by the community or by admins somehow. I believe such disputes would be extremely rare. I think this keeps most of the benefits of author resolution, while removing the blatant misresolutions. I'll discuss this approach in more detail below.

Resolves to the percentage of YES votes in this poll on Nov 20. I highly encourage you to also comment explaning your thinking. I am especially interested in discussion of reasons this may be a bad idea.

See also

Long post. Tl;dr I think being able to dispute misresolutions would probably work well, and disputes would be very rare.

I think it would work better than relying on author reputations. There has been a lot of talk about building better features for people to track author reputations. I think building a solid reputation system would be very hard - it would take a lot of effort and probably not solve the problems super well. I think building a solid dispute-resolution system would quite possibly be easier and would likely make the platform work better overall.

There are many reasons motivating author resolution - as @DavidChee explains here

• Many questions are subjective and oftentimes you need to subjectively interpret what happened to decide how to resolve the question. As David says "questions come up where someone has to make a call and it makes sense that the person creating the market is the best person to do so."

• It allows for personal markets e.g. "Which book will I like best?"

• It allows far more questions to be created than if all questions had to be resolved by the admins.

• On many other prediction platforms, after an author creates a question it is out of their hands, and sometimes this means that it resolves in a way that they didn't intend, which might be good for the predictors but bad for the author (it depends a lot on the scenario, of course). Manifold's approach gives authors autonomy and control.

On the other hand, some downsides are:

• Misresolutions - these are very rare, but they do happen

  • Authors sometimes make mistakes resolving the market that more experienced resolvers could have avoided - this is very rare, I'd estimate a couple markets a month out of all the markets on Manifold. This can be addressed by supporting undo of market resolutions.

  • Authors sometimes deliberately resolve incorrectly to grab the traders' mana, or to troll them. This is extremely rare, I estimate <5 in Manifold's entire existence. But when it does happen, it makes everyone extremely mad, and I think the fear of it happening may create disproportionate fear for traders.

  • Authors sometimes interpret a question far differently than the consensus viewpoint.

  • It seems like newer users might be scared away from predicting on Manifold because they might think authors are unreliable and don't know which ones are reputable.

• Abandoned markets and late resolutions.

• Many disparate approaches by authors to question resolution mean less consistency for predictors, although it also gives freedom for experimentation with different approaches to see what works best.

A resolution system where authors resolve markets, but they can be disputed and overriden by the community or admins in case of misresolution, would resolve one of the main issues with the author-only resolution.

The other big issue, abandoned markets, could potentially also be resolved by this mechanism, or by a different mechanism such as automatic resolution after a long enough delay (something like this). (The rate of misresolutions is extremely small. If I had to prioritize, dealing with abandoned markets better would come first)

See optimistic oracles for some inspiration on similar resolution mechanisms that allow one actor to propose a resolution, and for other actors to dispute a resolution.

One big question is, just how clear does the incorrectness of the resolution have to be for it to be disputed? The most recent example that inspired me creating this market was 100% clear: https://manifold.markets/stone/will-there-be-a-report-button-withi. But there are others that are less clear - see https://manifold.markets/jack/what-markets-were-intentionally-and-cfda0f20db47 for some examples - and if there is a dispute mechanism, you can imagine that authors who want to fraudulently misresolve would try to find a less obvious way of doing it. And what about cases where the author makes a huge profit because they interpret it one way and everyone else interprets it differently? It might not be clear whether it's a scam or not, and whether it should be overriden or not.

Author autonomy is one thing you might lose if resolutions can be disputed. I don't know how important this is to authors. To me personally, I see my markets as a collaboration with the community anyway, and take community consensus as an important input in my resolutions.

Note that you could implement this system just by admins taking action after discussing with the community. It doesn't have to be a formalized system built into the platform. The main thing is to figure out the rules and make those reasonably clear. The only feature that has to be implemented in software is the ability to undo a resolution.