Gensyn deepens prediction market research with new experts

Prediction markets are one of the few mechanisms that reliably turn private information into legible, actionable signal. By pricing a contract on an uncertain event and allowing people to trade against their own information, prediction markets do something that no ordinary survey or committee can: pay people for being right and charge them for being wrong.

At Gensyn, our work teaching machines to predict the future depends on this exact mechanism. Our information marketplace, Delphi, creates training signal from settled markets – which we use to improve our predictive intelligence systems.

But getting prediction market mechanisms right is a difficult task, full of design problems with deep mathematical structures – such as liquidity provisioning and settlement mechanisms. Getting the structure wrong produces a market that looks functional, but aggregates nothing.

That’s why we are investing in prediction market research as a core focus area at Gensyn, and why we are excited to welcome two of the field’s leading theorists.

Two researchers at the foundations of the field

Rafael Frongillo, Head of Research. Rafael joins Gensyn as Head of Research, where he will set the direction of our prediction market and information elicitation agenda. He is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. Before Boulder, he was a postdoc at Microsoft Research NYC and then at Harvard's Center for Research on Computation and Society, working with Yiling Chen and Yaron Singer in the EconCS group. He completed his Ph.D. in theoretical computer science at UC Berkeley under Christos Papadimitriou, funded by an NDSEG Fellowship.

Bo Waggoner, Researcher. Bo is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado Boulder and joins Gensyn as Researcher. His research focuses on eliciting and aggregating information, with work in the fields of Theoretical Machine Learning, Economics and Computation, and Theoretical Computer Science. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Harvard in 2016 and did postdocs at the University of Pennsylvania’s Warren Center and Microsoft Research, New York City before starting at CU-Boulder in 2019.

Rafael and Bo have collaborated for years and bring a shared prediction market research program that will drive a significant portion of our lab.

What we’re building

Rafael and Bo’s arrival expands Gensyn’s prediction market research beyond our current scope, increasing our focus on theoretical foundations such as settlement mechanisms, scoring rules, socially useful markets, and automated market maker design.

This work is pivotal to Gensyn’s mission. Information elicited from well-designed prediction markets run at scale can have useful outcomes for information consumers, and becomes the training signal for the next generation of predictive intelligence.

We publish our research openly. To follow our prediction market research, visit gensyn.ai/research.