Journal article
Price dynamics in political prediction markets
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, Vol.106(3), pp.679-684
01/20/2009
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.0805037106
PMCID: PMC2630077
PMID: 19155442
Abstract
Prediction markets, in which contract prices are used to forecast future events, are increasingly applied to various domains ranging from political contests to scientific breakthroughs. However, the dynamics of such markets are not well understood. Here, we study the return dynamics of the oldest, most data-rich prediction markets, the Iowa Electronic Presidential Election "winner-takesall" markets. As with other financial markets, we find uncorrelated returns, power-law decaying volatility correlations, and, usually, power-law decaying distributions of returns. However, unlike other financial markets, we find conditional diverging volatilities as the contract settlement date approaches. We propose a dynamic binary option model that captures all features of the empirical data and can potentially provide a tool with which one may extract true information events from a price time series.
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Price dynamics in political prediction markets
- Creators
- Saikat Ray Majumder - Northwestern UniversityDaniel Diermeier - Northwestern UniversityThomas A. Rietz - University of IowaLuis A. Nunes Amaral - Northwestern University
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - PNAS, Vol.106(3), pp.679-684
- Publisher
- Natl Acad Sciences
- DOI
- 10.1073/pnas.0805037106
- PMID
- 19155442
- PMCID
- PMC2630077
- ISSN
- 0027-8424
- eISSN
- 1091-6490
- Number of pages
- 6
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 01/20/2009
- Academic Unit
- Finance
- Record Identifier
- 9984380423402771
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