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dmytryl's avatar

Like, 2 packages, so that it works just like Obama vs Romney did (not) work as expected?

I think what you need to convince people of, is that your ideas are not something reliant on magical thinking. There will only be others trading to profit from the manipulators if the required analysis is cost effective. You seem to neglect that nobody will put more effort into earning a dollar than they can get a dollar for elsewhere.

Also, it's not clear why exactly decisions on bundled students would be any better than just an exam to pass. And we humans value fairness anyway. One's ability to enter school should not depend on their skin colour.

You neglect that there's also insider info (any student can cooperate with those betting against him, and deliberately fail against expectations).

Actually, scratch that. There are corporations, those need to make all sorts of decisions, and they do not seem to employ prediction markets to do so. Which tells us that either a: prediction markets are not such a great idea and the corporations rightfully neglect to use them or b: the corporations that are being traded on do not end up adopting great ideas, in which case, prediction markets once again can not be expected to work very well either, as those rely on adoption of best methods by the traders.

I often notice that people with ideas seem to seek not the avenues most likely to result in success, but the avenues where the failure provides least information about value of their ideas. If colleges aren't adopting prediction markets for admissions, that's easily explainable as because they're biased and so on and so forth. If corporations don't, well, that threatens the value of the idea itself.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Yes. The markets are estimating chance of success, which means being from historically disadvantaged groups will hurt.

But universities consider more than just chance of success when they accept students. They could keep on accepting disadvantaged students with lower success probabilities even when those success probabilities come from a market rather than their own judgment.

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