More Presidential Decision Markets!
Wow. Under "politics," next to the "US Pres. Decisions" section I announced Friday, Intrade.com now has an "Impact of next Pres." section, with markets for conditional estimates of these four parameters:
eco growth to be at least 2.5% over the next three years,
unemployment rate to be less than 5% at end of 2011,
number of violent crimes in 2010 to be less than in 2007, and
Democrats to control House of Rep’s after 2010 mid-terms,
given each of these seven candidates: Clinton, Obama, Edwards, McCain, Giuliani, Huckabee, Romney. Cool! I don’t see any orders in these markets yet though, so it is hard to tell how much liquidity they will have.
Added: This is a research initiative of the University of Westminster.
I'm echoing Chuck. More efficient information aggregation should not be confused with more accurate price discovery. The latter is the real goal. I'm not convinced that a marketplace of ideas is NECESSARILY made more efficient by a marketplace of payoff derivatives on those ideas than by the same effort expended on trying to make the idea exchange more efficient in the first place.
Perhaps you should evaluate the potential for bias in your love of decision markets. Check out the markets failure to predict Clinton's loss in Iowa and her success in New Hampshire.
What's supposed to impress me here?
http://krugman.blogs.nytime...