The Iowa Electronic Markets are making me nervous. I don’t think they have ever been wrong:
Winner Take All shares are Obama 61% and Romney 36%.
http://iemweb.biz.uiowa.edu/quotes/Pres12_quotes.html
You mentioned Iowa, and then the winner take all shares.
Do the quotes only apply to Iowa, or to the whole shootin’ match?
If it’s the whole shootin’ match, I don’t think that’s very accurate.
Things are way too close to support those kind of lop-sided figures.
The Colorado professors using an economic model have never been wrong either, and they have picked Romney. Why focus on a single thing - betting?
Plausibly, I think IEM or Intrade could easily be gamed by someone with a big stack, simply for the sake of saying their candidate was “winning”.
“I don’t think they’ve ever been wrong.” Wrong when? In mid-October? Or the day before the election? People need to stop looking toward Intradea nd other things like that in October.
Is 2004 chopped liver?
That market always reflects establishment conventional wisdom. If I remember correctly, it was favoring Kerry on election day 2004 until substantial results started coming in. It is less helpful than polls in discerning which way the election is heading. It is a very lagging indicator.
I can’t cite the post now, but I will bookmark this and reply later.
There was a poster there that admitted manipulating the Bush/Kerry IEM market in 2004 and making a bundle doing it.
iEM is always right AT THE END. The prices converge as the polls close. It isn’t necessarily correct until then.