Kalshi faces criminal charges in Arizona in prediction markets fight | Hacker News Reader

Kalshi faces criminal charges in Arizona in prediction markets fight

axios.com

the arizona AG is making the same argument ohio did — that event contracts on sports outcomes are functionally sports bets, regardless of what the CFTC says. but the interesting wrinkle here is criminal charges, not just a civil ruling. that's a major escalation. if other states follow with criminal enforcement rather than civil, it doesn't matter if kalshi wins the federal regulatory argument — no one's going to trade on a platform where their state AG might charge them as a customer

Why are these called prediction markets and not political / current evenets gambling?

Because the purpose of them is to accurately predict events. People often get better at accurately modeling reality when money is on the line. Prediction markets are designed around the idea that you can best make money if your predictions match reality, so if you bet something that doesn't match reality, people have a direct financial incentive to model reality better and take your money. Some people are absurdly good at it. The net result, in theory, is a financial incentive to get accurate answers about the world.

"Partisan Bias in Factual Beliefs about Politics," Quarterly Journal of Political Science 10(4), 2015.

"You Cannot be Serious: The Impact of Accuracy Incentives on Partisan Bias in Reports of Economic Perceptions", https://ideas.repec.org/a/now/jlqjps/100.00014127.html

So, we should call sports betting sports prediction markets?

Should we call roulette a wheel prediction market?

Like why does Kalshi need this information? Or are they just in fact trying to make money?

Consider, hypothetically, that you need to choose between a couple of different possible strategies for solving a problem. (Or, choose how much to invest towards each strategy.)

The vision of people who believe strongly in prediction markets is, for instance, that you could have a prediction market for "if we replace our CEO, will our revenue be higher in X years than the counterfactual where we kept our CEO?", and use that as input to the CEO's performance evaluation. Because people have to put their money where their mouth is, if you believe that a market is incorrectly priced, you can go make money on it.

Whether this works in practice remains to be seen, but it's an interesting vision.

Maybe Kalshi should charge fee for services rendered to the company who wants the prediction, rather than a fee for each contract then. Since you know, they’re providing a valuable service and not profiting on gambling

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