You don’t need to know that one and only one contract pays. However, if you don’t know that, then you can’t allow people to exchange $100 for a set of contracts (or vice versa). So you could have contracts on each person surviving, although you’d need to clarify carefully what did and didn’t count, in advance. And the strategy would be different, since there’s the chance no one survives, or multiple people survive. You could also have contracts on other stuff (e.g. who dies first, then second, etc, or what kills them, or what not).
Although in most slasher movies the virgin would just trade at $90 and everyone else super cheap...
I like it, that works well, so long as we have an airtight definition in advance of when this counts. Alternatively, we can know from our guide that the result won’t be ambiguous.
That works. Though now card price doesn’t actually reflect a character’s implied probability of surviving. Eg buying a card at $40 is a confident move if there’s a chance of two survivors, and always loses money if there’s 3.
Instead it’d be $100*p(surviving|1 survivor) + $50*p(surviving|2 survivors) + $33*p(surviving|3 survivors)… which makes it a lot harder to think about whether to buy or sell. Could make things more interesting though.
In addition to not being able to exchange $100 for a set of contracts, there’d be some awkwardness over determining where to set the starting trade value. Notice in the original article it’s initally $15 to sell and $20 to buy, reflecting the fact that a 6 character mystery implies a base probability of 16.6% for each character. If you naively started a slasher at $15 sell/$20 buy, someone who believes two survivors is likely would immediately bid all characters up to $30 sell/$40 buy.
Though you’re right, most slashers don’t try nearly as hard to surprise you as murder mysteries do. A movie that establishes a romance subplot 10 minutes in would immediately see those two characters bid up to at least $50.
You don’t need to know that one and only one contract pays. However, if you don’t know that, then you can’t allow people to exchange $100 for a set of contracts (or vice versa). So you could have contracts on each person surviving, although you’d need to clarify carefully what did and didn’t count, in advance. And the strategy would be different, since there’s the chance no one survives, or multiple people survive. You could also have contracts on other stuff (e.g. who dies first, then second, etc, or what kills them, or what not).
Although in most slasher movies the virgin would just trade at $90 and everyone else super cheap...
But yeah, the logic expands.
If more than one person “did it”, you could pay off that fraction of $100 to each. So if two did it, each card is worth $50 at the end.
I like it, that works well, so long as we have an airtight definition in advance of when this counts. Alternatively, we can know from our guide that the result won’t be ambiguous.
That works. Though now card price doesn’t actually reflect a character’s implied probability of surviving. Eg buying a card at $40 is a confident move if there’s a chance of two survivors, and always loses money if there’s 3.
Instead it’d be $100*p(surviving|1 survivor) + $50*p(surviving|2 survivors) + $33*p(surviving|3 survivors)… which makes it a lot harder to think about whether to buy or sell. Could make things more interesting though.
In addition to not being able to exchange $100 for a set of contracts, there’d be some awkwardness over determining where to set the starting trade value. Notice in the original article it’s initally $15 to sell and $20 to buy, reflecting the fact that a 6 character mystery implies a base probability of 16.6% for each character. If you naively started a slasher at $15 sell/$20 buy, someone who believes two survivors is likely would immediately bid all characters up to $30 sell/$40 buy.
Though you’re right, most slashers don’t try nearly as hard to surprise you as murder mysteries do. A movie that establishes a romance subplot 10 minutes in would immediately see those two characters bid up to at least $50.