When the Salem Center and CSPI launched our forecasting tournament in August, one of the rules said that to be eligible for prizes, individuals would need to take our Google Survey within one week of signing up. The following is the relevant section.

Anyone can create an account and bet, but you must take this Google survey within one week of signing up in order to be eligible for prizes. All other questions are optional, but you must leave your real name and Manifold Markets username. If you want to be anonymous regarding when we publicly disclose winners and the leaderboard, that’s fine, but we’ll need your name for security purposes. Survey results will be used for research purposes but otherwise kept completely confidential.

Thus far, we’ve had 1,288 individuals sign up for the tournament, but only 500 survey takers. Recently, we received an inquiry from a trader who started out not taking the tournament too seriously, but became more interested as time went on. He failed to initially take the survey, but wants another opportunity.

I don’t like making changes in the midst of the competition, as it seems unfair to those who have played by the rules. But I now realize that there’s a way around the original concern that motivated the one week rule. The reason that I did not want to have an open-ended invitation to take the survey was that it could bias any later data analysis – if people could start playing and then only fill out the survey if they did well, then we would lose a lot of information on unsuccessful traders.

The obvious way out of this, which I should’ve seen before, is to give people the opportunity to fill out the survey after the one week time period has expired, but consider them separately for the purposes of data analysis. I believe this would solve the problem. Thus, for those of you who have been playing but have not taken the survey yet, I would encourage doing so now. The survey near the end asks you to tell us anything else you’d like to say, and it would help if you could just note that you’re taking it late, and maybe explain why if you’d like. We’ll check on our own end to see who is a late taker when conducting data analysis at the end.

Furthermore, this shouldn’t directly hurt many people in the competition, since, as implied in the original rules, participants will be judged relative to all traders, not simply relative to those who take the survey. Perhaps it makes some people who wouldn’t have otherwise been all that active play a larger role in the betting markets, but this is unavoidable.

We appreciate your support, patience, and cooperation as we continue to try to make the Salem Center/CSPI forecasting tournament as interesting and enjoyable as possible. Please leave any comments below regarding the rules change or anything else having to do with the tournament.