I knew they did not prohibit it, but I am surprised they are actively encouraging it. In any real-money market, doing anything analogous would almost certainly be grossly illegal. I have significant restrictions on my real-life trading, and I just work at a company that sells information about the market, but doesn’t actually run it. I’ve found the practice of people betting in their own markets on manifold to predictably result in unfair resolutions, and so I do judge people who do it, and I judge more harshly if they don’t actively disclose the fact. I came to manifold on the expectation that it was trying to be like a real-money prediction market, and just couldn’t because of laws in the US. As I see them diverging more and more from the standards of real markets, I become more and more disappointed. But you do make a fair point that perhaps I should judge Manifold more than the market makers if they are actively encouraging such bad behavior.
I knew they did not prohibit it, but I am surprised they are actively encouraging it. In any real-money market, doing anything analogous would almost certainly be grossly illegal. I have significant restrictions on my real-life trading, and I just work at a company that sells information about the market, but doesn’t actually run it. I’ve found the practice of people betting in their own markets on manifold to predictably result in unfair resolutions, and so I do judge people who do it, and I judge more harshly if they don’t actively disclose the fact. I came to manifold on the expectation that it was trying to be like a real-money prediction market, and just couldn’t because of laws in the US. As I see them diverging more and more from the standards of real markets, I become more and more disappointed. But you do make a fair point that perhaps I should judge Manifold more than the market makers if they are actively encouraging such bad behavior.
Manifold also explicitly encourages insider trading; I think they’re just not trying to emulate real-money markets.