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Comment by cjs_ac | Hacker News Reader

> These markets are also manipulable. In 2012, one bettor on the now-defunct prediction market Intrade placed a series of huge wagers on Mitt Romney in the two weeks preceding the election, generating a betting line indicative of a tight race. The bettor did not seem motivated by financial gain, according to two researchers who examined the trades. “More plausibly, this trader could have been attempting to manipulate beliefs about the odds of victory in an attempt to boost fundraising, campaign morale, and turnout,” they wrote. The trader lost at least $4 million but might have shaped media attention of the race for less than the price of a prime-time ad, they concluded.

Reminiscent of PG's essay about the submarine[0]: it's another way of attaching credibility to a 'news' item you're pushing.

[0] https://paulgraham.com/submarine.html

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>As this new kind of writing draws readers away from traditional media, we should be prepared for whatever PR mutates into to compensate. When I think how hard PR firms work to score press hits in the traditional media, I can't imagine they'll work any less hard to feed stories to bloggers, if they can figure out how.

I think it's safe to say they figured it out.

This is just implausible. Nobody with a brain is going to throw away 4 million on the speculative hope that a prediction market price is going to magically manipulate media coverage on the election.

That's a lot of money for an individual, but if the (dark) money originates from a donor or PAC, it's just another campaign expense.

It's still a lot of money from a donor or PAC for this kind of change. I find it remarkably hard to believe that lines moving on Intrade would have a bigger impact than an equivalent amount of money spent on battleground state television ads.

Not sure why you’re downvoted. Not only are you obviously right, nobody cared about prediction markets in 2012

People spend more money on sillier things on a regular basis.

It's not much different than other forms of advertising.

Compared to typical total advertising expenditures during a presidential election, my guess is that $4M is close to a rounding error.

Modern presidential campaigns are absolutely saturated with money, and everywhere they spend has diminishing returns. You might be able to spend $50-100M in ads and get some value from it, but a second or third $100M? By that point you've reached every possible voter many, many times and each successive ad can be zero or even negative value.

Given the immense sums of money, little to no accountability on how it's spent, and a finite list of traditional spending targets I expect campaigns have dabbled in all sorts of unusual approaches.

4 million is absolutely nothing for vested interests trying to steer a US presidential election.

The article suggests that if a candidate's odds of winning goes up on the gambling market, then his chance of winning in real life are improved. But they don't provide any evidence that this is actually the case. Maybe seeing the odds of one candidate rising is just as motivating to his supporters as it is to his opposition.

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