Invitation to participate in a prediction market on when Afghanistan will sign a BSA

[pakistani342]

I wanted to gauge if members of this forum who are interested in Afghanistan would like to participate in a prediction market on when Afghanistan will sign a the BSA.

For those who do not know what a prediction market is, here is a blurb from wikipedia.
"Prediction markets (also known as predictive markets, information markets, decision markets, idea futures, event derivatives, or virtual markets) are speculative markets created for the purpose of making predictions. The current market pricescan then be interpreted as predictions of the probability of the event or the expected value of the parameter. For example, a prediction market security might reward a dollar if a particular candidate is elected, such that an individual who thinks the candidate had a 70% chance of being elected should be willing to pay up to 70 cents for such a security."

Basically we'll ask the question When do you think Afghanistan will sign the BSA.

The different stocks could be (Kinda options like in a poll).

Jan 2014
Feb 2014
March 2014
April 2014
May 2014
After May 2014
Never

Each participant will be given some virtual dollars to trade these stocks.

The stock that is the most expensive in about two weeks will be considered the winner.

If there is interest, I or someone else here could set up the prediction market and we could participate.

Thoughts welcome. We could use a platform such as inklingmarkets.com to run the market.

 

[nangyale]

Humm an interesting idea.

I think at the current juncture Karzai will try his best to delay signing the BSA as much as he can. For him it will be best to leave it for the next president to sign this deal. Mainly because of two reasons.
1. He wants to bring a person of his liking in to the presidential palace. To do that he needs to have some leverage vis-a-vis the US (in order to force them not to manipulate the elections too much). The BSA gives him that.

2. He wouldn't want to be the Afghan who sell Afghanistan. If the US force another candidate on him, he can then go and claim to be the honorable Afghan who refused to bow to the power and wealth of a superpower.

So unless something unpredictable happen, my bet will be that the BSA will get signed once we have the new president in office.