Regarding the inconsistency of the market estimate of R0 being 1.48 but the market not anticipating a massive surge in cases...
How does the R0 market resolve if there is never any relevant review of the question? If R0 is less than 1, then the current outbreak is likely to fizzle, and it may be impossible or not worth the bother to establish what R0 is. So the market may effectively be giving the expected value of R0 conditional on it being greater than 1.
Regarding the inconsistency of the market estimate of R0 being 1.48 but the market not anticipating a massive surge in cases...
How does the R0 market resolve if there is never any relevant review of the question? If R0 is less than 1, then the current outbreak is likely to fizzle, and it may be impossible or not worth the bother to establish what R0 is. So the market may effectively be giving the expected value of R0 conditional on it being greater than 1.
Maybe the market is predicting that R0 will be >1, but isolation and contact tracing will be enough to prevent a wider outbreak?
It’s a fair point, but I would expect reasonably often in the R0=1 scenario for there to eventually be a review of what happened.
Maybe there is some way to link the money invested in prediction markets and the cost of answering questions which are unstudied