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Comment by sd9 | Hacker News Reader

Yes but in this case, tens or hundreds of people know the outcome months in advance. I'm very surprised that the market doesn't immediately converge to 100% for one candidate. The winner is not really a forecastable 'random event' in that by the time the show is airing, it's not being pulled from a distribution.

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In theory, an insider willing to take any positive-expectation bet would drive the market price arbitrary close to the correct answer, but in practice they might be under NDA and want to avoid getting caught, or they limit their bet amount for other reasons, so the market ends up dominated by gamblers placing uninformed bets.

Indeed, I'm just surprised.

Maybe the people who could take advantage of these markets are just not sufficiently aware of their existence.

I predict that in 5 years "who wins Survivor" will be completely dead though, because the markets will have become common knowledge and there'll be enough people willing to violate their NDAs/whatever for the money.

You say in practice, NDAs. What we've seen so far: classified military ops, people with access to Presidential speeches...

In none of those cases did the market converge as a result of the insider betting, it was only discovered with hindsight that someone had placed a suspiciously well-timed large bet. So that's where "they limit their bet amount for other reasons" comes in. I guess it's difficult to get a large loan for "I know a secret that will allow me to double my money in a few days, honest!" so they have to make do with their savings instead.

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