The True Believers hypothesis rings false because that would be a frankly ridiculous belief to hold. Sometimes people profess ridiculous things, but very few of them put their money where their mouth is on prediction markets. [1]
I’ve seen some pretty mispriced markets. At one point in 2019, PredictIt had Andrew Yang at 16% to win the Democratic presidential primary. And in 2020, Donald Trump was about 16% to become president even after he had lost the election. But the sorts of people who bet on prediction markets are not the sorts of fundamentalist Christians who think that Jesus Christ has a high chance of returning this year.
yes, no one would put a large amount of money (say, $10,000) on let’s say a 1-year time horizon, “joe biden going to prison”, “barack obama going to prison”, “nancy pelosi, bill clinton, and hillary clinton going to prison”, “trump being put in office prior to the 2024 election”, and if someone did make such a bet, they wouldn’t be motivated by listening to a christian minister who regularly makes political / religious prophecies. surely no one would do that.
i don’t know why anyone who posts on a forum devoted to outright fringe beliefs and atypical personality traits (i say with all love and kindness, not to say that any of us are bad or incorrect for these beliefs, merely that they are objectively abnormal) is going to come out and make bold claims that there exists no such weirdo who is willing to do X for Y reasons.
the main point about the time value of money is interesting enough on it’s own, but the interesting, nerd-crack explanation is probably just not true. there are probably just crazy people who bet on the return of jesus christ.
yes, no one would put a large amount of money (say, $10,000) on let’s say a 1-year time horizon, “joe biden going to prison”, “barack obama going to prison”, “nancy pelosi, bill clinton, and hillary clinton going to prison”, “trump being put in office prior to the 2024 election”, and if someone did make such a bet, they wouldn’t be motivated by listening to a christian minister who regularly makes political / religious prophecies. surely no one would do that.
i don’t know why anyone who posts on a forum devoted to outright fringe beliefs and atypical personality traits (i say with all love and kindness, not to say that any of us are bad or incorrect for these beliefs, merely that they are objectively abnormal) is going to come out and make bold claims that there exists no such weirdo who is willing to do X for Y reasons.
the main point about the time value of money is interesting enough on it’s own, but the interesting, nerd-crack explanation is probably just not true. there are probably just crazy people who bet on the return of jesus christ.
Empirically, the “nerd-crack explanation” seems to have been (partially) correct, see here.