Comment Text:
In its 10 year history, PredictIt has made these crowdsourced probabilistic forecasts available to the public, and makes anonymized trade data available to researchers who study patterns in the data.
Research shows that these forecasts are generally accurate and are generally more accurate than polling, especially earlier in a race. This is because polls are a snapshot in time, but prediction markets allow users to weigh the effect of factors (the criminal conviction of a presidential candidate, for example) that have not yet fully resonated with voters.
Because of its accuracy, PredictIt data is widely cited by media, campaigns, and financial institutions, and even appears on the Bloomberg Terminal.
The research also shows that PredictIt makes users more likely to seek out factual information about current events. Users who build trading strategies around factual events tend to do better than those who trade based on their ideologies or misinformation. In an era where both liberal and conservative commentators are alarmed at the public’s acceptance of fake news and misinformation, these markets are one of the few mechanisms left for incentivizing the accumulation of true and accurate information (an antidote to fake news).
