An experimental test of combinatorial information markets (2009)
Ledyard, John O., Hanson, Robin, Ishikida, Takahi
While a simple information market lets one trade on the probability of each value of a single variable, a full combinatorial information market lets one trade on any combination of values of a set of...
Economics - The promise of prediction markets (2008)
Arrow, Kenneth J., Forsythe, Robert, Gorham, Michael, Hahn, Robert, Hanson, Robin, Ledyard, John O., ...
The ability of groups of people to make predictions is a potent research tool that should be freed of unnecessary government restrictions.
Adverse Selection In Group Insurance: The Virtues of Failing to Represent Voters (2008)
Compared with non-union workers, union workers take more of their compensation in the form of insurance. This may be because unions choose democratically, and democratic choice mitigates adverse...
Location Discrimination in Circular City, Torus Town, and Beyond (2008)
Salop’s “Circular City ” model of spatial competition is generalized to higher dimensions, and to “transportation ” costs which are a power of distance. Assuming free entry, mill pricing is...
Catastrophe, Social Collapse, and Human Extinction (2008)
Humans have slowly built more productive societies by slowly acquiring various kinds of capital, and by carefully matching them to each other. Because disruptions can disturb this careful matching,...
FIVE NANOTECH SOCIAL SCENARIOS (2008)
Robert T, Marufu C. Zinyowera, Richard C. Moss, Robin Hanson
During the dotcom boom, popular discussions about the future of the internet often included claims of dramatic social implications; the “new economy ” was said to follow new rules (Kelly, 1998)....
Chapter 9 The Rapacious Hardscrapple Frontier Folk of Year Million (2008)
A hardscrapple life is one that is tough and absent of luxuries. It refers to the dish scrapple, made from whatever’s left of the pig after the ham and sausage are made, the feet pickled, and the...
Voters Can Have Strong Incentives to Become Informed, Or to Be Strategically Ignorant (2008)
The instrumental incentives of selfish voters to become politically informed seem to be diluted by low voter probabilities of being pivotal. This incentive dilution does not apply, however, to...
An experimental test of combinatorial information markets (2008)
John Ledyard, Robin Hanson, Takashi Ishikida
While a simple information market lets one trade on the probability of each value of a single variable, a full combinatorial information market lets one trade on any combination of values of a set of...
An experimental test of combinatorial information markets (2008)
John Ledyard, Robin Hanson, Takashi Ishikida
While a simple information market lets one trade on the probability of each value of a single variable, a combinatorial information market lets one trade on any combination of a set of variables,...
Logarithmic market scoring rules for modular combinatorial information aggregation (2007)
In practice, scoring rules elicit good probability estimates from individuals, while betting markets elicit good consensus estimates from groups. Market scoring rules combine these features,...
Ryan Oprea, Robin Hanson, David Porter, Dorina Tila, Chris Hibbert
We study experimental markets where privately informed traders exchange simple assets, and where uninformed third parties are asked to forecast the values of these assets, guided only by market...
When Do Extraordinary Claims Give Extraordinary Evidence? (2007)
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. But on uninteresting topics, surprising claims usually are surprising evidence; we rarely make claims without sufficient evidence. On interesting...
Shall We Vote on Values, But Bet on Beliefs? (2007)
Robin Hanson, For Their Comments, Tom Bell, Peter Boettke, Nick Bostrom, ...
Democracies often fail to aggregate information, while speculative markets excel at this task. We consider a new form of governance, wherein voters would say what we want, but speculators would say...
A Manipulator Can Aid Prediction Market Accuracy (2007)
Prediction markets are low volume speculative markets whose prices offer informative forecasts on particular policy topics. Observers worry that traders may attempt to mislead decision makers by...
Uncommon priors require origin disputes (2006)
In standard belief models, priors are always common knowledge. This prevents such models from representing agents ’ probabilistic beliefs about the origins of their priors. By embedding standard...
Information aggregation and manipulation in an experimental market (2006)
Robin Hanson, Ryan Oprea, David Porter
Prediction markets are increasingly being considered as methods for gathering, summarizing and aggregating diffuse information by governments and businesses alike. Critics worry that these markets...
Causes of Confidence in Conflict (2006)
In a simple model of conflict, two agents fight over a fixed prize, and how hard they fight depends on what they believe about their abilities. To this model I add “preagents,” representing...
Justin Wolfers, Eric Zitzewitz, Colin Camerer, Robin Hanson, Ryan Oprea, Charles Plott, ...
Prediction Markets, sometimes referred to as “information markets, ” “idea futures ” or “event futures”, are markets where participants trade contracts whose payoffs are tied to a future...
The Informed Press Favored the Policy Analysis Market,” mimeo (2005)
The Policy Analysis Market (PAM), otherwise known (inaccurately) as “terrorism futures, ” burst into public view in a firestorm of condemnation on July 29, 2003, and was canceled within one day....
Fear of Death and Muddled Thinking – It Is So Much Worse Than You Think (2005)
Humans clearly have trouble thinking about death. This trouble is often used to explain behavior like delay in writing wills or buying life insurance, or interest in odd medical and religious...
Designing Real Terrorism Futures (2005)
In July 2003, the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) was described as terrorism futures, and immediately cancelled. While PAM was not in fact designed to be terrorism futures, I here consider five design...
Enhancing Our Truth Orientation (2004)
Humans lie and deceive themselves, and often choose beliefs for reasons other than how closely those beliefs approximate truth. This is mainly why we disagree. Three future trends may reduce these...
Drift-Diffusion in Mangled Worlds Quantum Mechanics (2003)
In Everett's many worlds interpretation, where quantum measurements are seen as decoherence events, inexact decoherence may let large worlds mangle the memories of observers in small worlds, creating...
Drift-diffusion in mangled worlds quantum mechanics (2003)
In Everett’s many worlds interpretation, where quantum measurements are seen as decoherence events, inexact decoherence may let large worlds mangle the memories of observers in small worlds,...
Warning Labels as Cheap Talk: Why Regulators Ban Drugs (2003)
One explanation for drug bans is that regulators know more than consumers about product quality. But why not just communicate the information in their ban, perhaps via a “would have banned ”...
When Worlds Collide: Quantum Probability From Observer Selection? (2003)
this paper I suggest how one can reconcile a many worlds approach with the Born rule, without introducing new fundamental physics and without changing decision theory. That is, I suggest how one can...
He Who Pays the Piper Must Know the Tune (2003)
He who pays the piper calls the tune, but how can he call for a tune that he will not recognize when he hears it? Previous models, of two candidates competing for a voter and of firm managers...
Combinatorial Information Market Design (2003)
Information markets are markets created to aggregate information. Such markets usually estimate a probability distribution over the values of certain variables, via bets on those values....
Disagreement as Self-Deception About Meta-Rationality (2002)
Tyler Cowen, Robin Hanson, Maureen Kelley, Tom Morrow, William Nelson, David Schmidtz, ...
comments and discussion. Honest truth-seeking agents, Bayesian and otherwise, should not agree to disagree. This result is robust to many perturbations. Such agents are "meta-rational...
Economic growth given machine intelligence, Hason (2001)
A simple exogenous growth model gives conservative estimates of the economic implications of machine intelligence. Machines complement human labor when they become more productive at the jobs they...
Heritability estimates versus large environmental effects: The IQ paradox resolved (2001)
William T. Dickens, James R. Flynn, Curtis Crawford, Mary Alice Fisher, Robin Hanson, Judith Harris
Some argue that the high heritability of IQ renders purely environmental explanations for large IQ differences between groups implausible. Yet, large environmentally induced IQ gains between...
Showing That You Care: The Evolution of Health Altruism (2000)
Robin Hanson, Joseph Farrell, Frank Forman, Richard Frank, Tim Freeman, Paul Gertler, ...
Human behavior regarding medicine seems strange; assumptions and models that seem workable in other areas seem less so in medicine. Perhaps we need to rethink the basics. Toward this end, I have...
Consensus By Identifying Extremists (1998)
Given a finite state space and common priors, common knowledge of the identity of an agent with the minimal (or maximal) expectation of a random variable implies "consensus", i.e., common...
Patterns of Patronage: Why Grants Won Over Prizes in Science (1998)
Prizes were a common way to patronize basic research in the eighteenth century. Science historians say grants then won over prizes because grants are a superior institu-tion. If different patron...
Long-Term Growth as a Sequence of Exponential Modes (1998)
A world product time series covering two million years is well fit by either a sum of four exponentials, or a constant elasticity of substitution (CES) combination of three exponential growth modes:...
Must early life be easy? the rhythm of major evolutionary transitions (1998)
If we are not to conclude that most planets like Earth have evolved life as intelligent as we are, we must presume Earth is not random. This selection effect, however, also implies that the origin of...
Attempts to model interstellar colonization may seem hopelessly compromised by uncertainties regarding the technologies and preferences of advanced civilizations. If light speed limits travel speeds,...
On voter incentives to become informed (1996)
Before an election, two candidates choose policies which are lotteries over electionday distributive positions. I find conditions under which there exist mixed-strategy probabilistic-voting...
By direct calculation we find that for the experiment the refinement process terminates in three periods (T = 3) and that at the beginning of the third period if all the players are fully rational...
The above mentioned article (McKelvery and Page 1990) errs in calculating the consequences of myopicrational responses to the payoffs used in the experiments it describes. This invalidates the...
Eliciting Objective Probabilities via Lottery Insurance Games (1993)
Since utilities and probabilities jointly determine choices, event-dependent utilities complicate the elicitation of subjective event probabilities. However, for the usual purpose of obtaining the...
Reversible Agents Need Robots Waste Bits to See, Talk, and Achieve? (1992)
this paper will describe several different types of fundamental entropy costs that agents must apparently pay, including costs to achieve goals states, to observe a changing world, to run...
Even adversarial agents should appear to agree (1991)
Descriptors: coordination, autonomy, actions, beliefs Distributing authority among autonomous agents can induce inconsistency costs if the agents act as if they disagree. If we define an agent’s...
Bayesian classification with correlation and inheritance (1991)
Robin Hanson, John Stutz, Peter Cheeseman
The task of inferring a set of classes and class descriptions most likely to explain a given data set can be placed on a firm theoretical foundation using Bayesian statistics. Within this framework,...
Bob Kanefsky, Robin Hanson, Richard Kraft, John Stutz
This paper describes a Bayesian method for constructing a super-resolved surface model by combining information from a set of images of the given surface. We develop the theory and algorithms in...
Designing real terrorism futures
In July 2003, the Policy Analysis Market (PAM) was described as terrorism futures, and immediately cancelled. While PAM was not in fact designed to be terrorism futures, I here consider five design...
Uncommon Priors Require Origin Disputes
In standard belief models, priors are always common knowledge. This prevents such models from representing agents’ probabilistic beliefs about the origins of their priors. By embedding...
For Bayesian Wannabes, Are Disagreements Not About Information?
Agree, Bounded rationality, Common belief, Disagree,
Adverse selection in group insurance: The virtues of failing to represent voters
Compared with non-union workers, union workers take more of their compensation in the form of insurance. This may be because unions choose democratically, and democratic choice mitigates adverse...
An experimental test of combinatorial information markets
Ledyard, John, Hanson, Robin, Ishikida, Takashi
While a simple information market lets one trade on the probability of each value of a single variable, a full combinatorial information market lets one trade on any combination of values of a set of...
A Manipulator Can Aid Prediction Market Accuracy
Prediction markets are low volume speculative markets whose prices offer informative forecasts on particular policy topics. Observers worry that traders may attempt to mislead decision makers by...
Logarithmic Market Scoring Rules for Modular Combinatorial Information Aggregation
In practice, scoring rules elicit good probability estimates from individuals, while betting markets elicit good consensus estimates from groups. Market scoring rules combine these features,...