would bet on his model being 98% correct, so it may be time to retire this argument. MarkS November 3, 2012 at 9:09 pm Allan: asymmetric utility! Obama is currently at 6.62 on intrade, so to "cash in 100 grand" I would have to put up 200 grand. I would have to send it to some people in Ireland, and trust that they're not going to misplace it, or collect it and disappear, or whatever. I just don't have that much trust in whoever owns/runs intrade. (If it was the feds offering T-bills, that would be another story. Or Vanguard. Or Fidelity. Well, maybe not Fidelity!) And my negative utility for losing 200 grand is WAY bigger (in magnitude) than my positive utility for an extra 100 grand. Allan Marlow November 3, 2012 at 9:50 pm Ok, lets finish the argument with this note. If you project 98% and the underlying assumptions have a p% probability of being wrong (prob of polls biased, etc.), then you should report 98% * p as your final result, with the caveat that p could be large. That would be a different story. What I don't like is the degree of intellectual dishonesty in all this. By the way, 98% * p = 64% MarkS November 3, 2012 at 10:22 pm Allan: your accusation of "intellectual dishonesty" is ludicrous. Everyone acknowledges the possibility of unquantifiable "systematic error" (e.g., the polls are just wrong, Republican voter suppression works, etc) in the models; see, e.g., Drew's