Comment by vovavili
11 hours ago
At the moment being, Polymarket has an enormous reputational incentive against behaving like a predatory gambling company. People rely on it as a kind of decentralized alternative to New York Times. Distorting this effect would be very short-sighted.
I believe they are incentivized to discourage insider bets and essentially "rigged" wins. I do not think they will ever be able to control the problem of insiders leveraging guaranteed knowledge to take money for the poor suckers who don't know the game they are playing. Maybe that's too pessimistic, but at this point I don't see how anything but a pessimistic view is warranted.
Rigged wins aren't a real problem. Everyone knows that sports betting apps are rigged, and it doesn't affect them at all. In fact, the latest explosion of customers has been accompanied by even more blatant rigging in the form of unwinnable multi-leg parlays. Hasn't slowed them down.
> Rigged wins aren't a real problem.
Aren't a problem for whom, exactly? I'm not commenting here with concern about the prediction market businesses, founders, or shareholders. I'm concerned for the suckers who are and will continue to be taken advantage of. Forgive me for not abandoning all empathy for those suckers just because they don't realize they're being mugged. These prediction markets are zero-sum, with the connected and resourced taking yet more from those with less.
That's like me complaining about Wall St. tampering with bond ratings on sub-prime mortgages, and you telling me "Don't worry, the banks will be fine." I don't care about the banks, they have enough people looking out for them, and their golden parachutes will catch them on the way down anyway.
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Putting bounties on insider knowledge is the ideological justification for these kinds of betting markets, so I doubt they’re going to stop this kind of thing
That's true for now. A part of me hopes that one day prediction markets will have the same set of technical constraints, norms and laws that make the stock market mostly work. Let's wait and see.
And online sports books have the same reputational incentives, but don't seem to be suffering any damage.