Tuesday, November 03, 2009

Prediction markets for the upcoming Romanian Presidential election

I opened up two distinct markets (with the help of InklingMarkets-- hat tip to Al Roth, on Market Design), both active until November 21st (the first election round is on November 22nd, the eventual second one on December 6th) :

Sign up and trade!

PS1. Hope I didn't make any mistakes; I put these up in less than 5 minutes :-).

PS2. Although you might really not share this opinion, I 'conjecture' that, if the outcome is not clear in the first election round, the future President will eventually be the first round's runner-up. Wanna trade against that? See above :-).

8 comments:

skortzy said...

I agree with the conjecture :)

Sebi Buhai said...

Hey Skortzy> Fascinating, I knew intelligent people all should agree :-).

mircione2001 said...

Interesting prediction market question.

I wonder how many people need to vote in order to have a better rank.

Currently some of the candidates are shown with 8% but in reality they have no chance to win.

Sebi Buhai said...

mircione2001,
Each candidate started with equal chances, hence the equal stakes in the beginning. While I could have given them different priors, I think that is even unsafer, after all you do not want to influence a public prediction market with the organizer's priors (alternatively, which existent poll should you trust etc?). So, as in vast majority of cases, they all started with initial stakes.

Now, the rules of the prediction market are very simple (you can also find them explained in all detail under various links at the site where I created the markets). As a rule of thumb (their advice), you need 15-20 participants to get things "moving", so to speak. We are not that many yet. But this still seems to work somewhat. Of course you should simply follow your own priors. E.g., if you believe somebody's present chances are way too high, you could sell short the maximum number of stocks allowed etc.

Have a good trade! :-).

Sebi Buhai said...

lapsus calami: should have been "they all started with THE SAME initial stakes" at the end of the first paragraph in my comment above.

Anonymous said...

Can foreigners participate? :)
MM

Sebi Buhai said...

All foreigners are invited if they wish, even M&M's :-).
If you go for it: there is some information on the candidates in those wiki links under the stocks. The candidates who do not have a separate wiki link are not likely to matter anyway :-).

Nathan Kontny said...

Hey Sebastian. Thanks for publishing a couple markets! Hope your enjoying it. Let us know if you need anything.

-Nate