Healthcare Reform Act Prediction Market

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."

Why reinvent the wheel?

[Jazari]

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]

Re:Markets aren't any good at prediction

[martin-boundary]

First: tulips were grown in increasing quantities.

Tulips are perishable goods, with a very long growing period, and a low rate of reproduction. They were considered valuable precisely because not everybody could grow them at will. That's why your analogy with printing money breaks down.

Second: people were trading options (yes, derivatives, oh my) on the futures market, and then government came out with a law that allowed people to drop contracts and only be liable for 3.5% of the value. You don't see how that can create a problem that later can be blamed on 'free market', where in fact there was no such thing again?

If the law considers a contract partially or fully unenforceable, then anyone entering into such a contract nevertheless is ignorant and a sucker. Why are we expected to believe that markets of such people are good at predicting things? Are they secret masochists?

By the way, 80 years of war, I always was wondering who in their right mind would fight wars for 80 years without government actively promoting them.

Off topic, but quite simple really. In the 17th century, most soldiers were mercenaries, whose motivation was money and pillage. Fighting wars was a career choice, basically, and soldiers frequently switched sides whenever their current employer was defeated, lost interest or didn't pay enough. It's best to think of them as criminal gangs terrorizing large parts of Europe.

There is a better market out there than this one..

[lord_mike]

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.