Commentary on Predicting Crime
9 Pages Posted: 29 Jul 2015
Date Written: 2010
Abstract
The market mechanisms proposed in Predicting Crime offer many virtues. The authors describe several of these—unbiased information collection; incentives that encourage disclosure; opinions weighted by conviction; information aggregation; instantaneous and continuous feedback—and convincingly argue that these structural features stand to help prediction markets outperform alternative institutions in forecasting the interplay of crime rates and crime polices. In that, Predicting Crime adopts an economic point of view and speaks in terms of practical experience. After all, similar structural features have already appeared in other successful prediction markets, such as those offering trading in claims about the weather, flu outbreaks, or box office returns. By contrast, this Comment adopts a legal point of view and speaks about as-yet theoretical disputes.
Keywords: Prediction markets, regulation, First Amendment, crime rates
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