Werner Antweiler

Yeah, it's essentially like any other futures market where you can buy and sell shares in a contract.

And the basic idea is that you're predicting events in the future by trading on the outcome of a particular event, like an election or the invention of a new drug potentially, but mostly it's sports events.

And so in that sense, it's very similar to betting.

Yeah, the main difference is that you can trade it continuously.

So before the event happens, you can actually go and sell your shares or buy new shares.

And the information that you have about the event reflects the prices.

So it's basically different than placing a bet because you can still change your position any time until the event happens.

Yeah, we ran it for about 20 years.

We ran prediction markets for elections in British Columbia and at the federal level in Canada.

And we wanted to find out how these prediction markets work and what is actually working well, what is not working well.

The basic appeal of these markets is that it's crowdsourcing information different from public opinion polls.

It's really asking people to put...

their money where their mouth is.

It's basically harnessing the wisdom of the crowds by aggregating all that wonderful information when people aren't just asked about, now, what do you think is going to happen, but where they really have to put money into their beliefs.

And that is the appeal of these markets.

Yeah, so actually we ran different types of markets.

One was very much like a futures market where we were trading in the outcome for predicting the seed share in the House of Commons.

And that is a continuous number.

But people are attracted to these what we call binary option contracts, an all or nothing contract where you either win or you lose.

And so basically, like the majority government who forms the next government.