alt Hacker NewsWhy would prediction markets do a better job of predicting hurricanes than, say, meteorologists, weather stations, and satellite information?
All evidence I’ve seen shows mainstream prediction markets devolve quickly into gambling and related corruption while predicting nothing other than conventional wisdom. especially about real-time facts. The prediction markets on the NBA Finals game four this year were completely useless.
"Better" depends on the application but more precisely it would be "real time" and may include things that are measured but rarely if ever published. A prediction market doing poorly might be a negative result, "this is a martingale and our ability to forecast is limited." That would be my suspicion for a sports event but it could also mean that the participants are gamblers and so not making useful predictions, entirely possible.
The other value proposition would be that you could hedge your risk against all sorts of things that would otherwise be very difficult, like someone who sells funnel cakes hedging the risk of poor at the state fair due to rain. I think that's potentially interesting but was always far fetched and is definitely not as common as gambling.