Very early in the pandemic I wrote to Predictit, urging them to open prediction markets related to COVID-19. They replied that they are "not authorized" to do so, which I took to mean their board or university sponsors or someone considered it to be unethical.
That's a shame, because people have been able to consistently run their mouths about the pandemic for free. They can say any damn thing they want, and if they're wrong, they don't lose anything tangible and there are no rewards for being right.
Creating markets gives people an incentive to set aside their biases, it produces better information than just about any other means of aggregating information.
Conditional prediction markets are designed to structure markets so that it can be possible to compute the market's opinion of the result a proposed policy will have. Such markets could inform policy decisions better than any panel of experts.
If I were an eccentric billionaire (I hope one day to be one, but today I am just an eccentric), I would solicit academics from a variety of disciplines to create models of disease activity that contemplate the effects of various NPIs, vaccination rates etc, and then I would create an objective way to measure those models success or failure, and finally I would create a prediction market based on the success and or failure of those models.
This would provide a way to calculate a market's opinion about the likely impact of various policies, and thus would provide a way for advocates of varying policies to put (or not put) skin in the game when they opine about what the world should do.
