The elite evaluator story discussed in my last post is this: evaluators vary in the perceived average quality of the applicants they endorse. So applicants seek the highest ranked evaluator willing to endorse them. To keep their reputation, evaluators can’t consistently lie about the quality of those they evaluate. But evaluators can charge a price for their evaluations, and higher ranked evaluators can charge more. So evaluators who, for whatever reason, end up with a better pool of applicants can sustain that advantage and extract continued rents from it.
This is a concrete plausible story to explain the continued advantage of top schools, journals, and venture capitalists. On reflection, it is also a nice concrete story to help explain who resists prediction markets and why.
For example, within each organization, some “elites” are more respected and sought after as endorsers of organization projects. The better projects look first to get endorsement of elites, allowing those elites to sustain a consistently higher quality of projects that they endorse. And to extract higher rents from those who apply to them. If such an organization were instead to use prediction markets to rate projects, elite evaluators would lose such rents. So such elites naturally oppose prediction markets.
For a more concrete example, consider that in 2010 the movie industry successfully lobbied the US congress to outlaw the Hollywood Stock Exchange, a real money market just then approved by the CFTC for predicting movie success, and about to go live. Hollywood is dominated by a few big studios. People with movie ideas go to these studios first with proposals, to gain a big studio endorsement, to be seen as higher quality. So top studios can skim the best ideas, and leave the rest to marginal studios. If people were instead to look to prediction markets to estimate movie quality, the value of a big studio endorsement would fall, as would the rents that big studios can extract for their endorsements. So studios have a reason to oppose prediction markets.
While I find this story as stated pretty persuasive, most economists won’t take it seriously until there is a precise formal model to illustrate it. So without further ado, let me present such a model. Math follows. Continue reading "Elite Evaluator Rents" »
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