Donor lotteries are a good case study; they seem great (I sent my donations last year to the EA Funds lottery) but also very underutilized, which should be a warning sign for other kinds of weird altruistic schemes. I’m wondering how much of this is lack of promotion, and how much that the arguments in favor are too hard to grok. I’m also hopeful that the “skill” aspect of a prediction market makes it more attractive than a straight lottery.
3 -- There’s two kinds of incentive alignment, I think?
First, there’s “do I win the most points for putting down accurate prediction”, and I think both proper scoring rules & prediction markets do a reasonable job of this? Possibly proper scoring rules do even better than markets here.
Second, there’s “why do I care about points”, which afaict is much harder to get right outside of prediction market settings. (This might be not standard usage of “incentive-alignment”, for which I apologize). Metaculus, for example, is a positive-sum system, and it’s not obvious how to pay people for good predictions through that. Metaculus does run cash tournaments on specific topics; my vague understanding is that the tournament structure encourages high-variance bets, in order to have a better shot at top prizes?
As a novice to the forecasting space, I’m sure I’m missing a lot of options; I’m very curious about which forecasting incentive structures work well in your experience!
Thanks for the kind words!
Donor lotteries are a good case study; they seem great (I sent my donations last year to the EA Funds lottery) but also very underutilized, which should be a warning sign for other kinds of weird altruistic schemes. I’m wondering how much of this is lack of promotion, and how much that the arguments in favor are too hard to grok. I’m also hopeful that the “skill” aspect of a prediction market makes it more attractive than a straight lottery.
3 -- There’s two kinds of incentive alignment, I think?
First, there’s “do I win the most points for putting down accurate prediction”, and I think both proper scoring rules & prediction markets do a reasonable job of this? Possibly proper scoring rules do even better than markets here.
Second, there’s “why do I care about points”, which afaict is much harder to get right outside of prediction market settings. (This might be not standard usage of “incentive-alignment”, for which I apologize). Metaculus, for example, is a positive-sum system, and it’s not obvious how to pay people for good predictions through that. Metaculus does run cash tournaments on specific topics; my vague understanding is that the tournament structure encourages high-variance bets, in order to have a better shot at top prizes?
As a novice to the forecasting space, I’m sure I’m missing a lot of options; I’m very curious about which forecasting incentive structures work well in your experience!