Right. Now the facts,
please:
TradeSports is a betting site, run from Dublin. People buy
contracts on all sorts of wagers (usually of a sporting nature),
including political outcomes. Go check their
website if you want to know where I
get the raw data that is the basis for this trivial exercise.
It happens that TradeSports sells daily betting contracts on the
state-by-state outcomes of the Bush
vs. Kerry event.
It is perhaps a not-unreasonable hypothesis that people around the
world who
probably want to make a few shekels on a bet are
less biased / engaged in wishful thinking about the outcome of the
election; they may care (or know) enough to study a state's
political situation sufficiently, and thus make a reasonable
assessment of its propensity toward Bush or Kerry. Whether
that hypothesis proves out is ... TBD on 2 November!
Anyhow, here is what leads to my
daily predicted
outcome that you can see on this graph (remember that 270
electoral votes are needed for either candidate to win)...
The inner product of the 51 element constant vector of
state electoral votes (50 states +
DC) and the weight vector derived from the time-varying contract
bid values as follows:
- For a given state contract <= $50 (i.e., Bush
will lose there, by definition) => weight = 0
- For a given state contract > $50 (i.e., Bush will
win there, by definition) => weight = 1
Note that, although the contract vector definitely changes from
day to day, the inner product might not change. In any case,
what you see is a plot of the "free market" electoral vote
prediction as a function of day until the election.
Forget
those stupid "opinion" polls!
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