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James's avatar

Great writeup, very interesting results! Congrats on completing it, and congrats to the winners.

I work at Manifold and helped run the tournament. Was surprised that political leaning was so important to the results!

The final calibration was definitely underwhelming, but I think it's not all due to the effect of people trying to take risky bets to win the top prizes. Another factor was a limited supply of currency with which to bet.

One condition of the tournament was that everyone began with a fixed amount of currency: S$ 1000. Each market has an AMM (automated market maker) which was also started with about S$ 2000 liquidity. As a player, you might not want to spend all your balance moving the probability from 85% to 95% if you could make more profit in another market. On the main Manifold site, you can buy more currency, and also there are automatic loans that return you your currency to bet again, which both help.

See also "Opportunity costs are critical" in this writeup: https://blog.polybdenum.com/2023/08/01/how-i-came-second-out-of-999-in-the-salem-center-prediction-market-tournament-without-knowing-anything-about-prediction-markets-and-what-i-learned-along-the-way-part-1.html

The effect of limited currency meant users did not bet probabilities as far as they would have, which matches the worse calibration at the extremes.

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Scott Alexander's avatar

What's your explanation for why, aside from the midterms, conservatives did better? Was there some event where Republicans did surprisingly well which you should also exclude?

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