This is a fabulous, if trivial, example of what proper prediction markets can do. We run a betting exchange, and one of our long term goals is to make universa

This is a fabulous, if trivial, example of what proper prediction markets can do. We run a betting exchange, and one of our long term goals is to make universal prediction markets(+) a reality. These are pretty much the crystallisation of "Seldon Mathematics" - a way to accurately predict the probability of a sociologically meaningful event happening. Now, there are of course caveats. Prediction markets depend on having sufficiently large numbers of people making and taking bets on the event. Because in the world of betting the prediction markets are (at best) a niche of a niche, to become accurate these things require user base of tens to hundreds of millions of people. At that scale the tail end of user base - the people who do happen to care about their particular prediction markets - becomes large enough. Interestingly enough, prediction markets could also allow to experiment with certain theoretical market making models. The markets run for a very long time, and for that reason WILL be affected by all kinds of external factors. My personal favourite is something along the lines of liquidity-sensitive pricing [0]. EDIT: link layout fixed +: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prediction_market 0: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Practical-Liquidity-Sensitive-Automated-Market-Othman-Pennock/72de958e664c0d3d053de62343a646b3da83f8ab https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/A-Practical-Liquidity-...