As a statistics expert, I know this is foolish. Just by luck, someone will do exceptionally well. But, that will mean nothing.
I was a mean statistical analyst (pun intended), and was often in the mode (again) to study and apply decision theory. Yes, someone could do “exceptionally well” just by luck — compared to others, who are also counting on luck. However, the point of the contest is to discover predictive tools. Prediction markets are one such tool — there are others. How many others, and which work the best? That’s what we may find out.
This is not an exercise in statistics... it is crowd-sourcing snitches by pretending to be an exercise in statistics.
They are basing this off of the success of political prediction markets like predictit or intrade where individuals may prosper or fail, but collectively, the markets seems to move in the correct direction to predict the outcome of the event.
Of course these markets will cease to work, when larger players, interested in the outcome of the event, start to game the system and skew the results in their favor by introducing biased or betting on themselves.