Add parimutuel docs

docs/learn/parimutuel.md

@@ -0,0 +1,154 @@
+---
+id: parimutuel
+title: Parimutuel
+---
+
+## Overview
+
+The term _parimutuel_ refers to a particular market making and payout mechanism
+used on Zeitgeist for extra casual markets.
+
+These are "losers pay winners" market makers: Any informant can bet any amount
+at any time. Their bet amount goes into the _pot_ and they receive tokens which
+represent their share of the pot. After the market is resolved, the entire pot
+is distributed amongst those who wagered on the outcome that materialized,
+proportional to what their share of the pot is.
+
+Although parimutuels work with scalar markets, Zeitgeist currently only supports
+parimutuel for categorical markets.
+
+## Example
+
+Let's imagine a simple prediction market based on a horse race. There are five
+horses running in this race: A, B, C, D and E. People are placing bets on which
+horse they believe will win.
+
+Suppose that at this point, the total amount of money wagered on these horses is
+as follows:
+
+- A: $200
+- B: $300
+- C: $100
+- D: $250
+- E: $150
+
+Altogether, the total pool of money that's been wagered is $1,000.
+
+If you bet on Horse A, and Horse A wins, for each dollar you bet, you'd get the
+total bets on all horses ($1,000) divided by the total amount bet on Horse A
+($200). So for every dollar you bet, you would get $5 back - this includes the
+return of your original dollar plus $4 in winnings. If you bet $100, then you'd
+receive a total of $500 from the pot. The market predicts the probability of A
+winning the race as 20% (or 1:4).
+
+Similarly, if you bet on Horse B, and Horse B wins, for each dollar you bet,
+you'd get the total bets on all horses ($1,000) divided by the amount bet on
+Horse B ($300). So for every dollar you bet, you would get roughly $3.33 back -
+this includes the return of your original dollar plus about $2.33 in winnings.
+The market predicts the probability of B winning the race as 30%.
+
+And so on for the rest of the horses...
+
+### Advantages and Disadvantages
+
+Unlike automatic market makers (AMM) or continuous double-auction (CDA), the
+parimutuel market maker does not require any liquidity, and shares the property
+of AMM that it can fill any order at any time. It is essentially a "bring your
+own liquidity" market maker.
+
+However, it does suffer several disadvantages compared to the other mechanisms
+on Zeitgeist:
+
+- The odds are not fixed when tokens are bought. For example, if an informant
+  fills an ask at a price of 0.33 on an order book, then they know that they'll
+  get a 300% payoff if they're right. That's not the case at a parimutuel. If
+  more people buy your outcome, your payoff gets worse. This makes it impossible
+  to properly reward traders that have moved the price in the right direction
+  and have done so early and incentivizes informants to withhold information
+  until close to the end of the market.
+
+  But a particularly vexing symptom of this problem is that, if a market becomes
+  trivialized (some outcome $X$ has materialized before the end of the market)
+  and at least two agents have bet on the winning outcome, then it's a winning
+  strategy to keep pumping more money into the market to dilute the other
+  agent's stake.
+
+- No selling of contracts. Once you've bought a contract, you have to hold it.
+  You can't just take back your bet. This means that parimutuels are really only
+  suited for markets which resolve very quickly.
+
+As such, parimutuel markets are perfectly suited for short-lived markets where
+the market's outcome is published at a predefined time or where odds are
+considered comparatively stable.
+
+## Parimutuel Markets on Zeitgeist
+
+### Betting
+
+Every parimutuel market uses a special account as the pot. If an informant
+places a bet, they send `x` units of collateral to the pot and receive `x` units
+of the corresponding type of _parimutuel shares_. Informants must observe a
+minimum bet size defined in the parimutuel pallet when placing their bets.
+
+<!-- TODO External fees to be defined in the general section on Zeitgeist markets in a later PR. -->
+
+External fees are paid when users buy parimutuel shares in the usual fashion: If
+Alice buys parimutuel shares for a certain amount of collateral, then the
+external fees are deducted from this amount before the rest of the transaction
+is executed. The amount Alice is left with after fees are deducted must satisfy
+the minimum bet size requirement.
+
+### Claiming Rewards
+
+Suppose an informant holds $x$ units of the parimutuel share for the outcome
+$A$. If the market resolves to some outcome not equal to $A$, then the
+informants shares are completely worthless; if the market resolves to $A$, then
+the informant receives $xr$ units of collateral from the pot, where $r$ is the
+ratio between the amount wagered on $A$ and the total amount wagered on any
+outcome. A detailed outline of the math is presented further below.
+
+If the unlikely event occurs that the winning token has a total issuance of zero
+but the pot is not empty, each informant can redeem _any_ parimutuel share for
+its original price, one unit of collateral. This avoids confusion on markets
+with very low participation ("I bet $100 on A, no one else was interested, B won
+and now my money is gone?! Why?").
+
+## Details: Expected Payoff in Categorical Markets
+
+If you believe an outcome has a probability p of occurring, then the fair return
+on a winning bet should be $1/p$. This is because, over many repetitions, you'd
+expect to win once every $1/p$ times. For example, if you believe that
+$p = 0.25$, then fair odds would be 4:1. This means for every dollar you bet,
+you'd expect a return of $4 on a win.
+
+We consider a denote the amount wagered on each outcome $i$ by $w_i$. In the
+parimutuel system, the return for each dollar bet on $i$ is
+$r_i = \sum_k w_k
+/w_i$. For this return to be considered "fair" based on your
+belief about the outcome's probability, it should match the inverse of your
+believed probability. In other words, if you think there's a 25% chance of an
+outcome, you'd expect the system to give you 4:1 odds (or a return of $4 for
+every $1 bet) for it to be a fair bet.
+
+If the system offers odds that are better than your believed probability, then
+you'd consider the bet to have positive expected value (you expect to make a
+profit in the long run). If the odds are worse, then the bet has negative
+expected value (you expect to lose money in the long run).
+
+In essence, for a bet to be "fair", the expected value should be zero: you
+neither expect to make nor lose money in the long run. This happens when the
+system's offered odds match your personal beliefs about the probability of the
+outcome.
+
+Long story short, given a pot balance $w$, the return $r_i(w)$ of a fair bet on
+$i$ would match the inverse of the probability $p_i(w)$ of $i$. Thus, the
+prediction/spot price of $i$ is $p_i(w) = r_i(w)^{-1}$.
+
+## Bibliography & Further Reading
+
+- Abraham Othman, Tuomas Sandholm, David M. Pennock, Daniel M. Reeves,
+  [A practical liquidity-sensitive automated market maker](https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221445031_A_practical_liquidity-sensitive_automated_market_maker),
+  ACM Transactions on Economics and Computation 1(3), pp. 377-386 (2010)
+- D. M. Pennock, "A dynamic pari-mutuel market for hedging, wagering, and
+  information aggregation," in Proceedings of the 5th ACM Conference, 2004. DOI:
+  10.1145/988772.988799

sidebars.js

@@ -22,6 +22,7 @@ const sidebars = {
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         "learn/liquidity",
+        "learn/parimutuel",
         "learn/using-zeitgeist-markets",
         "learn/betting-strategy",
         "learn/market-rules",