First, we have a contract, US.BNKE.2FEB, that pays off at $1 if Ben Bernanke is reappointed as Chairman of the Federal Reserve on or before 11:59 PM 2 February. That contract is now at $0.57: a 57% chance that Bernanke is reappointed.
Next, we have two conditional
US.NOTBNKE.DOW pays out at 1 cent for each 20 points the Dow closes above 9500 on 2 February if and only if Bernanke is NOT reappointed.
US.BNKE.DOW pays out as above, but only if Bernanke IS reappointed.
The current prices [updated 9:30] are $0.39 for Dow | Confirmation and $0.18 for Dow |~Confirmation. Since p(Confirmation) is 0.57, the prices are reckoning on a Dow at 10,868 if he's confirmed and 10,337 if he's not. The Dow's now at 10,603. So, the market's not figuring on much of a move either way.
Good job Matt on getting these out! I'd love to see some on housing prices conditional on a land tax and unemployment rates conditional on the various minimum wage stocks.
These are really conjunctive (x AND y) claims, not conditional (x IF y) claims. To implement conditional claims, you need to refund the bettors money if y doesn't come true. Wolfers has a good article in which he draws conclusions about conditional probabilities based on conjunctive bets, but making conditional bets available is also useful. Both Hanson [http://hanson.gmu.edu/combobet.pdf] and McCluskey [http://usifex.com/] have designs that make this possible.
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