Scott Sumner’s nominal gdp market is in its early stages

Scott writes:

I’m finally ready to announce the first step in creating an NGDP future market.

And here he is quoting Robert Quigley-McBride from iPredict:

iPredict is a real-money prediction market run by Victoria University of Wellington. With over 8000 traders, iPredict is operated by students of the University with the purpose of forecasting social, economic and political events. iPredict has designed contracts for trading to allow forecasting of nominal GDP (NGDP). Traders will be able to buy and sell contracts paying $1 if NGDP falls within a particular range in a particular quarter.

An example contract would pay $1 if the US GDP for Q1 2014 were greater than or equal to $17,250 Billion and less than $17,500 Billion, based upon the [initial estimate for quarterly nominal GDP from] BEA Table in Section 1 – Domestic Product and Income, Table 1.1.5, Line 1. We would establish similar contracts spanning the intervals $250 Billion above and below the example contract, with two open ended intervals beyond those for outcomes above or below the ranges.

The set of contracts, for each quarter, will generate probability estimates for the different levels of NGDP, as well as providing a gauge of the traders’ uncertainty, or margin of error, on this estimate.

To support the accuracy of the forecasting, we wish to provide the market with an injection of liquidity. This will help by ensuring there is sufficient incentive for traders with beneficial information to bring it to the market. To support contracts for forecasting NGDP for the next 3 years, we will need to raise $1500. This will be used to provide a market maker on the contracts, which will ensure there is always a reasonable bid-ask spread, and that any trader wanting to bring information to the market can do so even if there is not necessarily another trader to take the other side in the trade.

The full post is here, and you will note that Scott also is looking for private funding.

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