{"id":24,"date":"2004-10-29T11:39:51","date_gmt":"2004-10-29T19:39:51","guid":{"rendered":""},"modified":"2015-10-12T17:18:00","modified_gmt":"2015-10-13T01:18:00","slug":"manipulating_futures_markets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/2004\/10\/29\/manipulating_futures_markets\/","title":{"rendered":"Manipulating futures markets"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\n<a href=\"http:\/\/www.marginalrevolution.com\/marginalrevolution\/2004\/10\/prediction_mark.html\">Alex Tabarrok writes<\/a> about the apparent attempts to manipulate the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tradesports.com\/jsp\/intrade\/contractSearch\/searchPageBuilder.jsp?z=1074780296994&amp;grpID=70\">Bush re-elected contract at Tradesports.com<\/a> (which just dropped to exactly 50!), and CNBC has mentioned the same report today (with a denial from George Soros that he is responsible).\n<\/p>\n<p>\nI want to warn people not to treat the failure of this manipulation as strong evidence that manipulation won&#8217;t have much effect on the reliability of the prices. If an experienced trader such as Soros tried to engage in this kind of manipulation, he would use a much more patient and cost-effective strategy than quickly driving the price down from 55 to 10.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nTo estimate the harm done by manipulation, we need to look at careful studies of how accurate markets have been, plus experiments such as the one <a href=\"http:\/\/hanson.gmu.edu\/biastest.pdf\">Robin Hanson arranged<\/a>. Note also that Robin&#8217;s attempt at a <a href=\"http:\/\/hanson.gmu.edu\/biashelp.pdf\">theoretical argument on this subject<\/a> is unconvincing because it unrealistically assumes that traders aren&#8217;t risk-averse.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Alex Tabarrok writes about the apparent attempts to manipulate the Bush re-elected contract at Tradesports.com (which just dropped to exactly 50!), and CNBC has mentioned the same report today (with a denial from George Soros that he is responsible). I want to warn people not to treat the failure of this manipulation as strong evidence [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[17,18,15],"tags":[124],"class_list":["post-24","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-if","category-investing","category-us","tag-prediction-markets"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p80O1l-o","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":361,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24\/revisions\/361"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bayesianinvestor.com\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}