Comment Text:
I’m writing in support of substantial deregulation of prediction markets generally. From a policy perspective it seems strange that it should be ok to harness the information aggregating powers of markets if it concerns the present value of future cash flows of a corporation but not for much more important questions to society. Nor is it clear to me from a legal perspective why betting on the price of tea in China is not a “game” but predicting political outcomes is.
In any case it’s not as if people don’t bet on real world important questions: hedge funds do it all the time. They just have to do it in opaque, convoluted, ways that the general public can’t usually benefit from. I recall a WSJ article many years ago about the Peso/Ruble exchange rate as a predictor of then candidate Trump’s election prospects. So we are going to have this happen anyway. It might as well be transparent and predictable so that the rest of society can benefit from it.
