[extropy-chat] Real money betting markets

[Robin Hanson]

On 12/23/2004, Hal Finney wrote:
>Now, from ten years of playing the play-money IF game, Foresight
>Exchange, www.ideosphere.com , I will say that it is much harder than you
>might think to create good, bettable and judgeable claims. ...

I agree that there are real costs to creating good claims.  The cost of
creating the first claim on a topic can be higher than the cost of creating
later related claims on a topic, and so there are potential scale economies.

I've been toying with how one might create set of claims to cover a wide range
of possibilities regarding dark matter/energy (DME).  News about DME seems to
be the most likely big news in physics/cosmology over the next ten years or so,
and I have heard several physicists express private skepticism about the
supposed "consensus" on these topics they read about in the newspapers.

Assuming DME will be composed of various particles, one could bet on various
physical properties of these particles, such as their number density, mass,
spin, and charges.  One might denote these as yet unknown particles via their
relative mass.  That is M1 = the one that contributes the largest mass 
fraction,
M2 = the one that contributes the second largest mass fraction, and so on.

Haven't thought about this very much yet though.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323