Following up on our post on PredictWise, Richard Barker points to this fun site of market-based predictions. It’s subtitled, “Buy and sell stocks in future political and economic events.”
It’s based in New Zealand so you can bet on wacky propositions such as, “David Carter to be next High Commissioner from New Zealand to the United Kingdom.” They also have political events in the U.S. and other countries and science items such as, “NASA to announce the discovery of extraterrestrial life before 1 Jan 2017.” Whaaa….? They give this one a 9% chance of happening. Could that really be? Hmmm, maybe I should bet a few thousand on that. But I guess that’s the point, that the payoff would be low: betting $10,000 to win $1,000 isn’t so exciting. Also I’m guessing the market is not so liquid, so I probably couldn’t get much of a bet on this one in any case.
It’s far form certain that it is legal for the US residents to bet on such a market.
I think there is a nice comparison to be made between their ‘Judging Criteria’ and research hypotheses. Because of the nature of the game, the judging criteria need to be very concrete — this would map directly to preregistration of hypotheses, analytic designs etc.
The binary nature of the outcome (win/lose) also works as an analogy to the significant/non-significant question, though this probably is not a good thing.
‘Extra-extraterrestrial life’ might include microscopic evidence of fossilised bacteria on Mars (or even in a Mars-origin meteorite). This is not so unlikely. Though there might be dispute about whether this meets the ‘not originating on earth’ criterion. (I’m not offering to be the counter-party to your $10,000!).