I’m not sure a formal metric is necessary. Maybe you could just have a “controversy” page associated with each user, where people can complain about how particular questions were resolved, and e.g. post evidence like “An anonymous account bought $10k worth of No when the probability was at 92%, and then an hour later that day the question resolved Yes!” Someone who is really trying to scam people would probably pretty quickly accumulate a pretty damning controversy page that anyone could see at a glance was pretty damning.
The exception to this would be “grey area” questions where it totally is subjective how it should go. For those questions they can make profit via anonymous accounts without anyone being able to tell what’s happening. But hopefully this isn’t a huge deal. For comparison, people will resolve many grey area questions in a biased way anyway, e.g. “Will Trump attempt to illegally hold on to power if he loses the 2020 election?” would probably be resolved positive if a Democrat created the question and negatively if a Republican did. If the amount of bias/noise introduced by illicit profit-making is no bigger than the “baseline” amount of bias/noise inherent in the system, then maybe it’s not worth worrying about.
Originally I was going to suggest paying the question creators 1% of the proceeds of each question. However I think that might not be necessary. They are getting rewarded by having their questions answered, after all.
We do actually pay out the question creators! Right now it’s 4% of profits. We don’t do a great job of making this understandable in the UI though—and predictably (heh) most of our creators are more interested in the question outcome than in earning transaction fees.
A controversy page is interesting—kind of like Airbnb or Amazon reviews, but on a seller rather than on a product.
I’m not sure a formal metric is necessary. Maybe you could just have a “controversy” page associated with each user, where people can complain about how particular questions were resolved, and e.g. post evidence like “An anonymous account bought $10k worth of No when the probability was at 92%, and then an hour later that day the question resolved Yes!” Someone who is really trying to scam people would probably pretty quickly accumulate a pretty damning controversy page that anyone could see at a glance was pretty damning.
The exception to this would be “grey area” questions where it totally is subjective how it should go. For those questions they can make profit via anonymous accounts without anyone being able to tell what’s happening. But hopefully this isn’t a huge deal. For comparison, people will resolve many grey area questions in a biased way anyway, e.g. “Will Trump attempt to illegally hold on to power if he loses the 2020 election?” would probably be resolved positive if a Democrat created the question and negatively if a Republican did. If the amount of bias/noise introduced by illicit profit-making is no bigger than the “baseline” amount of bias/noise inherent in the system, then maybe it’s not worth worrying about.
Originally I was going to suggest paying the question creators 1% of the proceeds of each question. However I think that might not be necessary. They are getting rewarded by having their questions answered, after all.
We do actually pay out the question creators! Right now it’s 4% of profits. We don’t do a great job of making this understandable in the UI though—and predictably (heh) most of our creators are more interested in the question outcome than in earning transaction fees.
A controversy page is interesting—kind of like Airbnb or Amazon reviews, but on a seller rather than on a product.