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I dont have the link on hand, but someone dumped $7 million onto prediction markets overnight, betting against Kamala. People are suspecting Elon. The swing is artificial knee jerk, but your sentiment is genuine.
Remember, Kamala was never supposed to get this far. 2020 was peak woke and Biden felt pressured into choosing a minority. Kamala had the perfect optics - woman, blackish, indianish, well educated, compliant, could signal as woke but fundamentally centrist.
She was the perfect puppet and therefore a good VP candidate. But the same thing makes her a horrible presidential candidate. Off the top of my mind, every other primary candidate did better than her. Pete, Warren, Bernie.... are all articulate and sharp (whether I agree with some of them or not).
IMO, the deepstate chooses bumbling idiots because they are easy to control. Kamala is perfect.
I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. Isn’t the obvious use case for election prediction markets to hedge agains unfavorable election outcomes? Why do we assume that people betting on Trump are Trump supporters? Shouldn’t, for example, Israeli settlers be betting big on Kamala to win so that they have money to relocate if Trump loses and they get kicked out of the West Bank? DEI consultants betting on Trump so they have insurance against losing their cushy jobs?
Sometimes actual sports betting is used to hedge against unfavorable sports outcomes. Houston's "Mattress Mack" is famous for promotions like "Buy furniture today, and if [local sports team] wins, I'll give you your money back," which he's been known to fund by betting accordingly in Vegas.
I could imagine doing this with political outcomes ("If Kamala wins, I expect to have higher taxes"), but I can't imagine the market is liquid enough to support doing this for anyone large enough to care about hedging. But maybe it will be possible in the future.
That's fucking genius. Unethical, but genius.
This is the kind of chaotic neutral thinking that we need more of in American entrepreneurship. Fuck Bay Area CS grads trying to come up with robo-dildo-taxis. I want dangerously unstable fly-over people using corporate treasury funds to seed fund a local strip club.
...Are these a real thing, or did you just give the porn industry a free idea?
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What's wrong with that? I mean it's exactly as playing white elephant as the VC types funding uber for furniture psychics apps to cash out at IPO using low interest loans. Just benefits the common man a little.
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Why unethical?
Responding to @hydroacetylene and @Lizzardspawn.
I'm alright with it! And I'm not sure it's illegal on its own.
It's definitely unethical in that, if that company has a board, there are probably terms that limit what corporate treasury funds can be used on (gambling is a no no). If the owner has sole ownership of everything, it's okay so long as gambling winning come back in as revenue to the company, I think. There's probably some tax gotchas.
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I don’t think these prediction markets are big enough to hedge against catastrophic geopolitical outcomes, whatever one’s views and hopes. $7 million moved the market noticeably toward a Trump victory. I’m not sure how a bunch of Otzma Yehudit hardliners could offset the cost of having to leave their settlements without driving down the expected return.
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Just like prediction markets can be assassination markets, so too can they interfere with normal democratic processes if taken too seriously. If there are people who will cut their losses and stop donating to their preferred candidate when that candidate's odds get too low, then manipulating a market can become positive EV even if you're inflating the price of your candidate's shares above where you believe they should be.
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You're assuming the people gambling on elections are using it as an investment vehicle or hedge and not just, y'know, gambling. Most people betting on prediction markets are idiots trying to get rich, not people making rational choices.
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I'd disagree that she was centrist. She was simply the only option. Clyburn didn't demand a minority. He demanded a black person. IIRC Biden already promised a woman.
Who else could it be?
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If someone wanted Trump to win, wouldn't they want to manipulate the market in the opposite direction, to make it look like they're in danger of losing? I'd be less likely to vote for my preferred candidate if I thought they had it in the bag.
As Patton once said, "Americans love a winner and will not tolerate a loser. Americans play to win all the time." If you think your candidate is probably going to lose, then you're less likely to vote at all. There are a lot of people who would be motivated to vote if they thought their candidate had a good chance of winning. Who wants to be on the losing team?
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Elon (or presumed anon billionaire) doesn't want to make money off the bet. They want to influence public opinion towards their intended candidate. Movements in betting markets trigger articles titled : 'why kamala is losing ground to Trump - 6 policy fails of the Biden govt'. Additionally, these articles actually draw eyeballs when there's an idle curiosity for why Kamala is losing ground.
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Then why don't you vote for a third party that aligns further with your preferences? People like to be a part of a movement, they want to have a good chance of winning instead of "throwing their vote away."
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This is the question I always have in mind when I see ideologues of any stripe popularize poll numbers that show their preferred candidate for an upcoming election in the lead and denigrate polls that show the opposite. There's certainly a "celebrate the home team winning" aspect that I understand - when the Red Sox have a good record or have a big lead against the other team, I, too, like to remind other Red Sox fans of this if the context is appropriate, and we both have a positive experience from it.
But unlike professional sports, elections are things that the fans actually have pretty direct input on the outcome of. So one would think that a committed fan of a particular politician or party would try to behave in a way as to increase the odds of their preferred team winning. Which, I think, would lead one to the exact opposite of the abovementioned behavior; present the polls that show your favorite team losing as the most dependable, most reliable polls that everyone needs to be paying attention to all the time, and present the other ones as fake and flawed and maybe even part of a conspiracy theory to keep people on your side complacent.
But I also see an argument for the opposite case, that, as one Osama Bin Laden said, IIRC, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, they instinctively side with the strong horse." So presenting your favored politician as "stronger" in the polls could actually lead other people into learning that they genuinely, in good faith, agree with that politician's ideology, and thus they become more likely to vote for them.
I admit I haven't looked hard, but I've yet to see any empirical evidence for which factor is stronger and by how much. As it is, the fact that it feels really really good to celebrate your favorite
teampolitician being in the lead (certainly it feels far better than "celebrating" the opposite) makes me highly skeptical of any evidence or arguments that such celebration also conveniently helps your favoriteteampolitician win in the upcoming election.Or they might feel “it is a lost cause” so why bother voting
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Everyone likes a winner. Making your side look good inspires enthusiasm and demoralizes the other side. Much bigger bump than making your side incrementally more afraid.
Any yet Trump won in 2016 despite the common wisdom being that Clinton would likely win.
I think that there are effects in both directions.
If I think that the election result is already predetermined with a very high probability, I am less inclined to vote strategically. So if a candidate is polling at 80% in a state, I will vote for whomever I like most in general, while if two candidates are both polling at 45%, I am much more likely to the one of them whom I consider the lesser evil.
I am sure that the impulse to pick the side of the winner also exists in people. In the ancestral environment, picking the winning side of a group-internal conflict was likely conductive to reproductive success, while habitually backing the underdog was not. Rationally, this matters a lot less in representative democracies where what you do in the voting booth stays in the voting booth.
Personally, I am mildly disinclined to vote for a winning candidate. Statistically speaking, I tend not to be a huge fan of most administrations, and if it is all the same, I would rather be able to say "I voted for Kodos" than sharing the responsibility.
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Exactly.
The expected value theory here is symmetric. If you're close to 50/50 odds then your vote has a relatively high chance of making a huge impact, and you should make absolutely sure to cast it. If you're at 90/10 or 10/90, then whatever; why bother making your margin of victory a tiny bit larger or your margin of defeat a tiny bit smaller?
The psychological theory here is what's asymmetric. Social Desirability Bias tells you that if you agree with the majority and high-status leaders of Our Tribe then you are in sync with the community and safe and loved, whereas if you agree with the outnumbered and low-status dissenters from Our Tribe then you are a traitor and a risk and what are you even still doing here anyways? Best to hop on the bandwagon.
It's weird to see people blowing money on prediction markets to that end, though. They used to be such a niche nerd idea, mostly talked about among small groups who saw expected utility maximization as a goal and biases as obstacles inherited from our less-evolved ancestors, but I guess they're now just as fertile a target for hoary advertising tricks as "people who didn't even get up to stretch during the commercial breaks" used to be.
As I understand it, social desirability bias as a theory is meant to suggest why people may respond to, say, questionnaires in ways that may make them seem in harmony with favored social norms, eg if you ask someone directly (even anonymously) how many units of alcohol do you drink per day they may round down by one or more, if they're a heavier drinker. To do otherwise would give a feeling of hedonistic depravity (disfavored) even if true. This creates considerable noise in self-reported data, and is why parallel forms (similar but not exact) questions are sometimes used within in one questionnaire (and why Cronbach's alpha is used in analysis). Surveys of this sort are very difficult to do even passably well if one wants any data close to reflective of reality.
In this case--voting--it may apply but I would argue only within one's own imagined society. In other words so-called red tribe types will vote red because their people vote red. It's arguably not about some larger percentage of the population, it's about whom you value socially. I suppose you could tell some "blue triber" that the vote is 99% Trump and argue that they will be swayed to vote Trump to stay in sync, but I'm not so sure that wouldn't be very inconsistent across a large population.
edit: of to if
Polarization these days is strong enough that I wouldn't expect that bias to make a huge difference, it's true, only a difference on the margins. But we're on the margins again with this election, aren't we? +3% Harris nationally, but Trump's leading in a couple swing states he lost last time, probably within one swing state's electoral votes of winning. I could easily imagine a decent number of undecided voters being swayed (or just persuaded not to stay home) by the belief that one candidate or the other is socially acceptable or at least not too socially unacceptable.
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