This is intended more as a place for discussion than a market. I'm tentatively planning to resolve equally to the mechanism I end up using for https://manifold.markets/jack/will-biden-be-president-on-915-reso, and the mechanism(s) that I would ideally use for other new self-resolving markets (which may be the same or different answers). I'll look at answers as broad ideas, I'm not expecting them to spell out all the details exactly.

In the answers I'll be adding the main ideas I've been considering so far.

Motivation: First, why even bother with self-resolving markets? Because there are many ambiguous, hard-to-resolve questions that can't easily be answered by objective criteria. One solution is for the author to subjectively resolve, but this can lead to disagreement and potential bias. Another is to take a poll. Or, you can have the market collectively decide - a "self-resolving" mechanism which usually means resolving to the market probability. However, there are many concerns about how well such mechanisms work and how reliable they are especially against price manipulation.

Issues and goals

One of the most obvious issues with the simplest form of resolve-to-market-probablity is that the market can become completely disconnected from the question it is trying to answer (Keynesian beauty contest), because unlike a normal prediction market the payouts aren't actually based directly on the question. This can sometimes be addressed by adding rules like "if it looks like the market isn't answering the intended question then the author will override it" or by sometimes resolving the market based on external data, possibly probabilistically (like in https://manifold.markets/jack/did-hans-niemann-cheat-against-magn or https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3681/will-it-turn-out-that-covid-19-originated-inside-a-research-lab-in-hubei/).

Another major issue with this simple rule is it can encourage last-minute trading to push the price up or down, making the resolution unreliable due to high potential for manipulation and/or volatility. So people have explored many different mechanisms to avoid that, and that will be my main focus here.

Some of the goals I have in mind (which cannot necessarily all be satisfied together):

• Use objective rules. For many questions, subjective criteria like "the market doesn't look like the price has suddenly changed too much" are fine, but it's better if it can be operationalized into an objective criteria to prevent any potential ambiguity or bias, without making that gameable. And in particular for high-stakes markets like the current Biden market I want it to be 100% objective.

• Be as robust as possible against gaming and manipulation. For many questions, that's not a big issue, but for some questions like https://manifold.markets/jack/will-biden-be-president-on-915-reso it becomes much more important.

• Be easy for the author to run the operations, and easy for traders to understand how it's working.

• Be fair. And moreover, it's also highly desirable for the fairness to be publicly verifiably. E.g. a mechanism based on generating a random number may be fair if run honestly, but a dishonest operator could cheat without detection; whereas using a public randomness beacon ensures it is both fair and verifiably fair.

• Resolve in a timely fashion, and ideally with a predictable duration.