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liortulip OP t1_jamy3hj wrote

Good morning everyone. The visualization above shows market odds from Kalshi (a prediction market) on possible outcomes for the ongoing supreme court case Biden v. Nebraska. SCOTUS is currently deciding whether or not to permit Biden’s student debt relief, which has been contested by several states.

The probabilities shown reflect the odds at which market participants are currently willing to enter a trade. For example, if the visualization shows that a particular outcome has 80%, it means that there are some traders willing to take 1:5 odds ($0.20 reward per $0.80 invested) that outcome will happen, and that there are are other traders willing to take 5:1 odds that the outcome will not happen (there’s no “house” in these prediction markets - they function like an exchange where participants match with each other). As these markets are public, the theory of the “wisdom of the crowds” is that more accurate predictors will be more confident and thus move the price towards the true probability.

I’d love to hear what you all think, and your feedback on the illustration. Also, I wanted to give enormous credit to my friend Osub - he’s the designer who made this.–Disclaimer: I am a prediction markets enthusiast and an engineer who works at Kalshi on these forecasts. If you have any technical questions about how these figures were computed, please feel free to ask.

Data

Kalshi markets' price history, accessible through their api

Washington Post

Tools

Figma, copy.ai

Edit: Apologies for the typo, Prelogar is not a supreme court justice - she is the Solicitor General.

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farquadsleftsandal t1_jan2m2y wrote

Hey OP, have you used Kalshi to trade contracts before?

I find this interesting and was thinking about trying it

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liortulip OP t1_jan2uu7 wrote

Haha I'm kind of biased here because I'm a software engineer at Kalshi :) Don't want to plug haha, but if you have any questions about it just LMK!

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Linearts t1_jaq3w4r wrote

I haven't used Kalshi specifically, but I used PredictIt (a similar, competing website) during the 2020 election and made $200 off overconfident Trump supporters who kept buying his shares even when Biden was leading the polls by large margins.

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Eascen t1_jan75wo wrote

This is speculation, not data and doesn't belong here IMO.

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thatthatguy t1_jankfis wrote

Data regarding people’s perceptions is data none the less. OP even gave us a good explanation of what the data means, which I appreciate.

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liortulip OP t1_jan99ov wrote

Hey u/Eascen, yeah you're totally right, this is data from speculation - I thought it was beautiful but of course that's subjective. I'm always fascinated by this stuff because I think it's interesting that non-experts can collectively produce more accurate predictions than any one individual, and just how that pattern seems to hold across a wide range of fields. Has some philosophical implications :)

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