IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ris/iosalg/0007.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The extent of price misalignment in prediction markets

Author

Listed:
  • Rothschild, David

    (Microsoft Research)

  • Pennock, David M.

    (Microsoft Research)

Abstract

We study misaligned prices for logically related contracts in prediction markets. First, we uncover persistent arbitrage opportunities for risk-neutral investors between identical contracts on different exchanges. Examining the impact of several thousand dollars of transactions on the exchanges themselves in a randomized field trial, we document that price support extends well beyond what is seen in the published order book and that arbitrage opportunities are significantly larger than purely observational measurements indicate. Second, we demonstrate misalignment among identical and logically related contracts listed on the same exchange that cluster around moments of high information flow, when related contracts systemically shut down or fail to respond efficiently. Third, we document bounded rationality in prediction markets; examples include: consistent asymmetry between buying and selling, leaving the average return for selling higher than for buying; and persistent price lags between exchanges. Despite these signs of departure from theoretical optimality, the markets studied function well on balance, considering the sometimes complex and subtle relationships among contracts. Yet, we detail how to improve prediction markets by moving the burden of finding and fixing logical contradictions into the exchange and providing flexible trading interfaces, both of which free traders to focus on providing meaningful information in the form they find most natural.

Suggested Citation

  • Rothschild, David & Pennock, David M., 2014. "The extent of price misalignment in prediction markets," Algorithmic Finance, IOS Press, vol. 3(1-2), pages 3-20.
    • Handle: RePEc:ris:iosalg:0007
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. James Schmitz & David Rothschild, 2019. "Understanding market functionality and trading success," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 14(8), pages 1-28, August.
    2. Lohrmann, Christoph & Luukka, Pasi, 2019. "Classification of intraday S&P500 returns with a Random Forest," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 390-407.
    3. Reade, J. James & Vaughan Williams, Leighton, 2019. "Polls to probabilities: Comparing prediction markets and opinion polls," International Journal of Forecasting, Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 336-350.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    markets; prediction markets; arbitrage; inefficiency;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • C00 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - General - - - General
    • C10 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric and Statistical Methods and Methodology: General - - - General
    • C58 - Mathematical and Quantitative Methods - - Econometric Modeling - - - Financial Econometrics

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ris:iosalg:0007. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Saskia van Wijngaarden (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.iospress.nl/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.