Friday, August 03, 2007

I bet it was a fix

There's a mildly interesting story in the papers about how a "betting market" is investigating funny dealings on a tennis match where someone lost to a substantially worse player, in suspicious circumstances. Of course this is precisely the principle behind the sadly abandoned "Policy Analysis Market" - that for a price, even crooks will part with their information. Nevertheless. we should not ignore the chicken and egg problem, that if it was not for the betting market, there would have been no incentive for anyone to throw the match. Similarly, trading futures on the life of a specific politician gives people the chance to make two killings with one bullet.

One thing you can be sure is that no-one would ever pay a British tennis player to lose a match - why bother when they do it so reliably for free :-)

1 comment:

guthrie said...

This reminds me of the film "Casino Royale", where the reason the baddie is gambling is because bond managed to sabotage his attempts at share rigging.