forgive my ignorance but how is this different than playing the numbers with the local bookie? A University is doing this????
Yeah, its an academic project - or a subset of an academic project, more accurately. It is perfectly legal, and there is no profit made by the university; it is no different than a commodities futures exchange on which participants trade for future contracts to buy or sell goods based on a trader's expectation of the difference between today's prices and the prevailing market price at contract expiration. ... if at the expiration of the contract period the market has moved in the direction expected by today's trader, the trader "wins" ... if not, the trader does not. "Events Futures" have been around for about a dozen years, tracking everything from the Fed Funds Rate to the course of economic expansion. All in all, their "accuracy", or error rate, has been significantly superior to that evidenced by traditional polling and forecasting methods, strikingly so as the scheduled end of the study period approaches. A couple years ago, there was talk of a government-sponsored futures market dealing with such things as threats to national security. The idiotarians shouted it down.
The sports books, of which there are many, have an enviable track record when it comes to picking political events, too. It would appear folks playing with their own real money tend to think about things a bit more than do folks who merely answer the phone or place checkmarks in survey question boxes. Thats not very surprising.
And yes, the trendings of the futures markets and of the sports books is very good for "our side" ... has been for quite a while. Most of the pollsters amd pundits were caught off guard by the results of the '02 mid-term elections, for instance. The books and the futures markets were not. The "Real Money Guessers" have been going "our way" since and before that, right along with the actual electoral results.
Professors usually don't break kneecaps when you don't pay up?