Who did the Superbowl half-time show?
Unless you have been living in a cave* you will probably be aware that the lead performer was one Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, a Puerto Rican rapper who performs as “Bad Bunny”. The story is complicated a bit because of prediction markets. The idea of prediction markets is that they can predict the future by letting experts get paid for integrating all the information about a question and betting correctly.
There are reasons to be somewhat skeptical. The best way to make money out of a prediction market is to have inside information, but if that is too common then no-one sensible who doesn’t have inside information will bet and lose, so the incentives go away. It’s not clear how well they can work in practice. On the other hand, two US companies, Kalshi and Polymarket, have discovered that gambling can be rebranded as a prediction market, with less regulation, lower minimum age for participants, and more favorable tax treatment. It’s possible that sports gamblers will also help rescue prediction markets by providing uninformed money.
The other problem with prediction markets about complicated questions is deciding whether the event happened. According to Business Insider, quite a number of people had bet on predicted whether Cardi B would do the Superbowl half-time show. You and I and probably many of those people might have expected this binary yes/no question to be easy to resolve. In fact, Kalshi and Polymarket resolved it in opposite directions. The complication is that Cardi B (along with various other well-known performers) was there on stage, so that precise definitions are going to matter.
It’s possible that some fiendishly clever people predicted this confusion and correctly predicted that Kalshi and Polymarket would split on the question and extracted a big win. If so, go them! Otherwise, whether any hypothetical smart money won or lost would depend on the luck of which market it chose.
* “on Mars, with your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears” as the Simpsons’ Sideshow Cecil put it
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »