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Healthcare Reform Act Prediction Market 185

An anonymous reader writes "The Wisconsin School of Business is running a prediction market study on the U.S. Supreme Court's decision on the Healthcare Reform Act. By participating you will not only be helping university students, you will also get to express your opinion and compete with others to show that you have the most accurate prediction."
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Healthcare Reform Act Prediction Market

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  • By participating you will not only be helping university students, you will also get to express your opinion and compete with others to show that you have the most accurate prediction."

    So basically, participating gets me bragging rights. But who would I brag to? In any case, I think this study is a simple 'wisdom of the crowds' experiment and they should just come out and say it. "helping university students" is a poor reason to participate. Most places when they do a "count the number of pennies in the jar" game, offer to give the jar to the person with the closest answer. So... where's the jar?

    • by Chris Burke ( 6130 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @06:46PM (#39566985) Homepage

      Most places when they do a "count the number of pennies in the jar" game, offer to give the jar to the person with the closest answer. So... where's the jar?

      Um... the Supreme Court? Guess correctly and you can take home your very own Justice!

    • by Hatta ( 162192 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @06:50PM (#39567033) Journal

      Market forces won't work if there's no incentive to be right. It's tempting for ideologues to sign up and just vote the way they want it to go, instead of the way they think it will go.

      • by jfengel ( 409917 )

        The way I think it will go is not at all the way I want it to go. I'll be stunned if I'm wrong, but I would place very large bets that I'm not.

  • by martin-boundary ( 547041 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @06:37PM (#39566919)
    If they were, we wouldn't have recurrent crashes and bubbles on Wall Street.

    /Enough said.

  • by Jazari ( 2006634 ) on Tuesday April 03, 2012 @07:05PM (#39567173)
    InTrade already has a market running on this issue, where you can bet real money: https://www.intrade.com/v4/markets/contract/?contractId=745353 [intrade.com]
  • When I first went on 20 minutes ago, it was showing that it would be found constitutional....now...there is a huge surge to unconstitutional....

  • The site seems to be a waste of energy when alternative sources exist with a much greater volume of activity. The prime example that comes to my mind is the Iowa Electronic Markets [uiowa.edu]. I understand the Big Ten rivalry, but why reinvent the wheel? Do they honestly expect to get valuable commentary in conjunction with the votes?

  • There aren't that many possibilities, really. The scotus can toss it out entirely, let it stand, or remove just some parts of it. They aren't going to rewrite it (that's not their job). Similarly they can't just make their own law in its place. Any other proposed solution is likely even further from the realistic possible outcomes.

    Hence the notion of "most accurate prediction" is rather absurd in this case. You get it right, or you don't. The options essentially boil down to A, B, and C. If you a
  • by lord_mike ( 567148 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2012 @12:27AM (#39568831)

    It's called Fantasy Scotus:

    http://www.fantasyscotus.net/healthcare-case-predictions/ [fantasyscotus.net]

    These guys have been doing this for years, and it's meant for lawyers and other legal eagles to participate. They have a very good success rate and have markets for all the cases that are being heard. The participants are people in the know, which makes their predictions more reliable than a typical political prediction site.

  • There are 9 Supreme Court Justices, 5 appointed by Republican Presidents. Is there enough doubt that they will vote the law down to justify this prediction effort?

  • The Healthcare reform law will probably be voted as unconstitutional while the Patriot Act will continue to exist. How upside down is that?

  • To my understanding, the Supreme Court is involved because it may be unconstitutional to require citizens to buy anything.

    Yet, I was required to buy auto insurance by every state I lived in.

    Do state laws not need to be constitutional ?

There's no sense in being precise when you don't even know what you're talking about. -- John von Neumann

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