Zvi
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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’s some strong praise there. It’s great to hear and I hope I can live up to it. I think I’m one of the strongest at some aspects of analysis, and this task here plays into a lot of my strengths including my trading and market making experience. In other ways, I’m not as strong. I
really enjoy doing this type of analysis not only on games but on real world situations, problems, mechanisms, business opportunities, and so forth. If I could get fairly compensated for that type of consulting I’d love to do it, but alas the consulting business is mostly a self-selling business and the internal corporate politics business as far as I can tell—you get advice like “never improve things more than 10%, and if you do improve it more make sure to hide it.”
In much more promising news, I’m exploring a potential game design opportunity, but it’s too early for me to say more than that yet.
I’ll check out the guide, looks cool at first glance.
Robin explicitly said “the person with the most money wins” and that’s the most natural way of viewing it as a game. Of course, there’s nothing *wrong* with doing it the other way, and it creates more accurate (realistic?) prices and markets, as I note. But it’s important to note that *as a game* it’s more interesting to try and get the most money, than it is to simply make good trades. If it’s normal trading you’re all tactics and no strategy. This way you get both, plus the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat.
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.
On Robin Hanson’s Board Game
You Play to Win the Game
Unknown Knowns
I’ve seen it, and my reaction was “that’s very interesting and clever, I’m glad someone figured that out and wrote it up, but man is that way too complex to actually work.”
Chris Pikula Belongs in the Magic Hall of Fame
Experience both as a participant, and as someone who has run prediction markets in the past. This is people’s revealed preference. Quick resolution is important to people on a different order of magnitude than you’d expect—people would happily pay much higher fees in order to not have to wait.
Subsidizing Prediction Markets
Tidying One’s Room
Full reply would be its own post, which is in my drafts folder in an early stage. I thought I was clear that subsidy is V, in its own way, so that won’t be a problem. It can help with the other problems either by subsidizing those solutions directly in some cases (e.g. if the market doesn’t resolve, you pay everyone for the time value of their money with the subsidy) or by simply offering a sufficiently big prize that people disregard the other factors.
You can, of course, throw money at the problem, and a sufficient amount will get people to go for it anyway, although solving or minimizing the problems here makes that much cheaper. A more interesting question is how to efficiently do that.
Non-anonymous trading is very different, and is not robust to cheating.
Seems like linking to the wiki is a good thing to do here, then? Seems about right.
Agreed that I could (and probably still should) work on the formatting a bit, and consider adding references to other posts; if people have suggestions for what we should link to, I’ll consider adding that.
https://predictions.global/ will give you the money at stake (unless people are doing wash trades to make the site or market look better, which would of course never ever happen in crypto land, no sir) and current bid/offer. That gives you a good idea of what’s available. Beyond that, you can try to install the app if you like, but commentary in such places? Good commentary? I don’t have anything for you, sorry.
What types of players did you test the game on, and how many games did they each play?
I can think of many other games where this distortion effect doesn’t happen with new players, as they don’t think about the game ending or the strategic layer, then picks up as players gain experience and improve. So this result isn’t that surprising for players on their first game, especially if they’re not hardcore game players. But it would be surprising if it was a stable equilibrium.