Archive for 'Applications - Law'
Legal Reasoning
One context in which a deliberative prediction market for predicting a decision might be useful is in the legal system. In subsequent chapters I consider the use of prediction markets by governmental agencies, trial courts, and legislative bodies to help assess and even make decisions, but another approach is to use such a market to […]
Trial by Market
Robert Frost once wrote, “Modern poets talk against business, poor things, but all of us write for money. Beginners are subjected to trial by market.”19 Frost, of course, was not claiming that beginning poets literally were put on trial but that market forces would provide a metaphorical trial of their work. The quotation emphasizes that […]
Small Claims Court Adjudication
Whatever the merits of using prediction markets to accomplish adjudication, no legislature seems likely to adopt it even for a subset of cases, at least unless it has already proved to be a cheap and accurate means of resolving disputes. The best chance for application of the approach would be in the private sector. Participants […]
The Litigiousness Punishment Market
The use of prediction markets to set subsidies for other prediction markets is one example of a general strategy: when a particular prediction market design seems to have some problem or to leave open some question, use another prediction market to solve the problem. Infinite recursion, of course, is impossible. We would need to determine […]
Market-Based Discovery
There is at least one more objection to using prediction markets for adjudicative tasks that can easily be answered with the creation of more prediction markets. The objection is that a major function of the litigation system is to oversee the discovery process. Prediction markets will not reach accurate outcomes if they do not have […]
Criminal Justice
Prediction markets seem less likely to be justified for criminal adjudication than for civil adjudication. In the criminal context it may be more important to have individuals judged by juries of their peers, because a criminal jury verdict achieves some expressive or educative function. As long as prediction market verdicts appear less legitimate than traditional […]
Restatements of the Law
The market-based legislature, then, appears to illustrate that prediction markets pass the test that I stipulated: they provide a theoretical substitute for some of our most important institutions. The mechanism might provide some advantages over existing institutions, though I make no claims about the relative magnitude of advantages and disadvantages. Admittedly, the market-based legislature does […]