Students don't understand shorting

Clermeont vs. Munster games was today. For weeks now the sum of the probabilities of all the outcomes has been significantly greater than 100%. That suggests students didn't get how shorting works. There was easy money on the table.

Incentives

I secured another 6 iPod shuffles as prizes for this semester. Volumes have been really low.

I also decided to put in some sporting questions to try to get students interested. At least now I can check the logs and see if students who come to bet on sports, stay to bet on other things. That will be a useful result.

CIT is offering to support staff (in some unspecified ways) who want to do PhDs. I applied. I toyed with the idea of abandoning ship. But I might as well stick with this topic now.

But I still need a more specific focus.

CIT PM markets cashed out

I finally cashed out all my markets from semester 1 and gave out the last three iPod shuffles. One of the winners was an Erasmus student who had gone home so I gave a prize for 4th place. Interestingly the Erasmus student had already won one anyway.

I have reset everyones cash balance to $5000. There is a school of thought that says successful people should have a bigger say because they were right before. I actually agree, but in this case I think the reset will help get the participation rates up.

I'm going to do much the same as before but on a slightly wider scale. So the students should have more things to bet on. I think the more I ask them to do the more they will do.