Author Archive | Dale Carpenter

The graph is of the last hour of the Giants’ season, as viewed through the Tradesports.com prediction market. This Giants fan thanks Eugene and the rest of the Conspiracy for letting me guest-blog the past week about my book Predictocracy and about prediction markets. I hope that I have persuaded you at least that prediction […]

In describing normative markets in my book, I outline the possibility of prediction market-based legislative, judicial, and even executive power, but only for heuristic value. Nonetheless, it is fun to indulge in political science fiction and imagine a government run by prediction markets. I hope that this exercise can convince people that prediction markets are […]

In my last post, I described and gave a general argument for normative prediction markets. If a prediction market forecasts an evaluation by someone to be selected randomly from a body of very educated people (somewhat analogous to the federal judiciary, though perhaps selected in a way that makes it more representative), it will be […]

Suppose that you are a member of a large group that has a large number of decisions to make. It might seem that you have two basic choices. First, allow everyone to vote on every decision. This approach produces high representativeness (at least if everyone votes), but the votes will be based on little information. […]

So far, my posts have implicitly assumed independence between forecasts and decisions. Now, let’s consider some ways in which we might structure prediction markets to forecast the decisions themselves and their consequences, so that the forecasts might influence the decisions. (1) Markets predicting decisions. A market that predicts a decision might end up affecting the […]

Prediction markets may seem inadequately deliberative. On the election markets, for example, participants trade, but do not ordinarily explain their trades. Decision makers in deliberative bodies, in contrast, seek to persuade one another. Group deliberation, however, has its own perils, including the danger that polarization will move a group to extremes, as Cass Sunstein has […]

The most important objection to governmental use of prediction markets is the danger that third parties might manipulate them. If officials deciding whether to expand a highway use a prediction market to forecast traffic in 20 years, road builders might be willing to lose money on the market if in doing so they can change […]

From the comments, it seems that some readers would find empirical evidence more persuasive than theoretical arguments. Consider the figure below. It aggregates a total of 145,388 trades on Major League Baseball games in 2005. Each contract would pay off $10.00 if the specified team won the game. The x-axis represents different transaction prices, and […]

I promised to start by addressing some common criticisms of prediction markets. What better way to start than by attacking my friend, GW colleague, and now co-conspirator Orin Kerr? Orin has at least twice (in 2005, and earlier this month) endorsed the criticism that the election markets don’t seem to do much more than track […]

Thanks, Eugene! I am pleased to be a guest conspirator, and I’m looking forward to writing about Predictocracy. I imagine most readers here are familiar with prediction markets, so I’ll start with only a brief explanation of how prediction markets usually work (a longer explanation from my book is here). In a prediction market, traders […]

I’ve never thought Ron Paul’s presidential candidacy was serious enough to merit much attention. But I have to acknowledge that it has caught fire on the Internet and that he’s done surprisingly well in the voting so far. He’s raised substantial money and has gotten support from some very serious bloggers and other commentators. Ilya […]

It’s David Wippman, now a vice provost at Cornell. It’s an outstanding choice, and a very good sign for the future of the law school.

Yesterday the House passed the Employment Non-Discrimination Act. The vote was 235-184, with 35 Republicans in favor and 25 Democrats against. It’s the first time either house of Congress has ever passed a gay civil-rights bill. Ted Kennedy is expected to introduce ENDA in the Senate soon. Some Senate Republicans are predicting it has a […]

For the past six months, I’ve been serving on the University of Minnesota Law School’s dean search committee. We’ve now announced the five finalists for dean. In alphabetical order, they are: Nora Demleitner, Interim Dean and Professor of Law, Hofstra Law School Gregory Hicks, Interim Dean and Professor of Law, University of Washington Law School […]

A brief statement from the Office of Management and Budget released this afternoon says that Bush’s advisors will recommend that he veto the Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), H.R. 3685, the first-ever federal bill that would protect gays from employment discrimination. The bill has not been voted on in the House; no action is scheduled yet […]