Comment Text:
I write in support of continued legality of events futures markets such as Predictit.
These have proven to be a very valuable tool in the public understanding and prediction of events. DARPA has given multimillion dollar grants to prediction market projects in order to better understand how the use of such markets might aid in the formulation of intelligence.
Markets such as Predictit limit the dollar amounts involved, making it extremely unlikely that these markets would incentivize event manipulation. This is in contrast to sports betting markets, now legal, in which the reverse is true: sports betting dollar amounts have historically been high enough to introduce the possibility of corruption and event manipulation. While speculation on events such as war and assassination may seem macabre, in fact these are little more than pride markets - a place where individuals measure their expertise against a pool of public belief. Issues of freedom aside, the value of these markets, with wagers limited to a pride scale, far outweighs the drawback of possible corruption.
