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[Admin] Resolving this to YES per community demand, thanks to @Jack for flagging

Why has this not resolved yet?

@AndrewHebb looks like the market creator has not been active for around a month.

Assuming for the sake of argument that the creator is not coming back to resolve anytime soon, it presents an example of what seems to be a general problem with the site design.

If you look at the FAQ, Manifold doesn't seem to have any real mechanism for situations where someone with active (unresolved) markets stops playing for whatever reason.

You can make ad hoc requests for a forced resolution in exceptional circumstances (which theoretically could be granted here since the resolution criteria are clear and objective), but otherwise it seems to be caveat emptor, with reputational effects over time supposedly deterring delayed and failed resolution (ie no one will continue to trade in markets created by those who fail to promptly resolve).

Problems:

1. In the near to medium term, the site is still new, so outside of a few megacreators, there's no way any reasonable trader could have enough reputational information on most market creators, so caveat emptor can't do much work, even assuming the incentives are generally strong enough on both sides in a play money environment for average traders to research creators and for casual creator-users to care about their reps.

2. Even long-term, when more creators have established track records, this system will then make it hard for new creators without established reputations to gain traction (at a minimum, volume and liquidity, hence accuracy, will be limited because no one would risk tying up a large portion of capital in some unknown's market if they fear resolution risk--eg in this case, I currently have M600, or 20% of my whole stash, stuck in limbo). In practice, this would undercut the stated ethos and major selling point of this site (ie Dynamism--"Anyone can create markets in Anything!")

@SujeetMehta General procedure as far as I understand it is if it's been a week with the market clearly supposed to resolve without any response from the author, ask the admins on discord to resolve it and they are usually pretty good about it (doesn't require exceptional circumstances).

It's definitely still a pain for everyone involved, but I don't think it's quite as bad as you might think.

There are a lot of proposed ideas to address this in a more scalable, prompt, and automatic way. I think it's likely to happen this year. For example: https://manifold.markets/jack/will-it-be-possible-to-dispute-and is a broad idea to let the community resolve markets to override the author, which works equally well in cases where the author has disappeared and abandoned the market. https://manifold.markets/Austin/will-manifold-set-abandoned-questio was an idea to automatically resolve or N/A markets if abandoned.

@jack thx for the info re the Admin discord. Hopefully it is formalized in the Help or FAQs at some point.

I also looked at your links and the various proposals and agree with Gigacasting that the N/A idea is clearly terrible (as Austin himself notes) due to lost profits and opportunity costs (basically you end up having effectively made an interest free loan). Worse than status quo

The other ideas all have their pluses and minuses but all seem better than status quo (ie worth a try).

@SujeetMehta It's described in https://help.manifold.markets/community-guidelines under "Resolving markets"

Should resolve yes.

@tob Please resolve 🙂

Looking at the reference graph, the sharpest ever drops of 0.67 in the last five years took at least around two weeks.

better hope it's a warm winter

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