Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Who Will Win The Leaders' Debate?

One of the great things about prediction markets is their real-time evaluation of news events. Price changes in PM.LABOUR or PM.NATIONAL in response to news is like running a real-time poll. And a prediction market can tell you the political value of that news - a statistic not available from any other source, certainly not traditional polling or even, arguably, The Worm.

In view of that, iPredict will be measuring the performance of leaders in tonight's debate in the way that matters most: who's election chances go up during the debate, and whose goes down? That is, ultimately, the measure of any politician's performance.

Following the lead from InTrade, we will use the following method for determining the debate winner: the largest increase in absolute likelihood of being elected government. The before and after values will be calculated as the average market price for PM.NATIONAL and PM.LABOUR in the thirty minutes before the debate commences and the thirty minutes after the debate finishes.

The leaders' debate is on TV One at 7:00pm tonight.

No comments: