Would anyone be interested in an EA prediction market, where trading profits were donated to the EA charity of the investor’s choosing, and the contracts were based on outcomes important to EAs (examples below)?
Will a nation state launch a nuclear weapon in 2017 that kills more than 1,000 people?
Will one of the current top five fast food chains offer an item containing cultured meat before 2023?
Will the total number of slaughtered farm animals in 2017 be less than that in 2016?
Will the 2017 infant mortality rate in the DRC be less than 5%?
While I’m generally in favor of the idea of prediction markets, I think we need to consider the potential negative PR from betting on catastrophes. So while betting on whether a fast food chain offers cultured meat before a certain date would probably be fine, I think it would be a really bad idea to bet on nuclear weapons being used.
For context (plausibly Mac already knows this): At least in the U.S., real-money prediction markets are apparently legal so long as the profits from successful bets do not go to the bettors (e.g. because they go to charity instead): see Bet2Give. As I understand it, Bet2Give didn’t become popular enough to be sustainable — perhaps because not enough players were motivated to participate given that they couldn’t actually receive monetary rewards for successful bets.
Would anyone be interested in an EA prediction market, where trading profits were donated to the EA charity of the investor’s choosing, and the contracts were based on outcomes important to EAs (examples below)?
Will a nation state launch a nuclear weapon in 2017 that kills more than 1,000 people?
Will one of the current top five fast food chains offer an item containing cultured meat before 2023?
Will the total number of slaughtered farm animals in 2017 be less than that in 2016?
Will the 2017 infant mortality rate in the DRC be less than 5%?
While I’m generally in favor of the idea of prediction markets, I think we need to consider the potential negative PR from betting on catastrophes. So while betting on whether a fast food chain offers cultured meat before a certain date would probably be fine, I think it would be a really bad idea to bet on nuclear weapons being used.
For context (plausibly Mac already knows this): At least in the U.S., real-money prediction markets are apparently legal so long as the profits from successful bets do not go to the bettors (e.g. because they go to charity instead): see Bet2Give. As I understand it, Bet2Give didn’t become popular enough to be sustainable — perhaps because not enough players were motivated to participate given that they couldn’t actually receive monetary rewards for successful bets.
My suspicion is that prediction markets on ‘boring’ topics will only take off if they are heavily subsidized.