There was a German Nobel Prize 'stock exchange' a few years back, and now Nautilus have "an online fantasy contracts market", the Nautilus Nobel Exchange.
For five Nobel categories -- Chemistry, Economics, Literature, Medicine, and Physics -- you can buy 'contracts' on potential winners (though they offer far too few of the serious contenders, and not just in literature), with the person holding the most contracts of actual laureates after these are announced emerging as winner.
The way it seems to work is that each new player gets $10,000 to invest, and can put that on candidates who all started off with a 'value' of $100. Each time someone buys a contract in candidate X, the value of that contract goes up -- and the corresponding values of all the other candidate-contracts in the same field decline by a commensurate amount (the more candidates there are to spread the money across, the less the decline; if there were only one other candidate then the decline would be equal to the increase for candidate X, if there were two other candidates, each would decrease by .5 of X's increase, etc.).
Each candidate starts out with 10,000 'house' contracts, so whatever the current contract number is, minus ten thousand, tells you how many entering players bought contracts: mid-day yesterday, for example, there were 18,207 Haruki Murakami contracts -- meaning over 8000 contracts had been purchased over the course of the game. (He is by far the favorite among all the contenders, making his contract way over-priced.) Meanwhile, Dacia Maraini contracts number an even 10,000 -- it seems someone purchased some at some point, but I assume they since have dumped them. Even Ko Un only has 10,013 contracts.
There were less than 600 players playing along when I checked yesterday, but with the vast majority of prices hovering around $100 you can still load up on your favorites. Still, it looks to be hard to amass more that 100 contracts for almost anyone at this point -- suggesting the game will ultimately either be really close (a lot of people holding about 100 contracts in the one contender they bet everything on) or won by an early entrant who was able to generate enough cash through trading to buy more than 100 contracts in his or her favorite.
Interesting, too, that volume is highest in the Medicine category (414k when I checked yesterday), followed by Literature (372k), with Economics dead last (222k). But a big problem remains the lack of candidates -- many serious ones are missing.
(Oh, and: yes, of course I'm playing along. Contracts on eight contenders in three fields, for now. After a few hours yesterday mine ranked 196th out of 581 portfolios; if a lot more entrants buy into Literature (and don't all plump down on Murakami ...) I should do okay, at least in the cash-value portion of the game; once it's down to how many winning-laureate-contracts you're left holding, who knows ... ?)
The way it seems to work is that each new player gets $10,000 to invest, and can put that on candidates who all started off with a 'value' of $100. Each time someone buys a contract in candidate X, the value of that contract goes up -- and the corresponding values of all the other candidate-contracts in the same field decline by a commensurate amount (the more candidates there are to spread the money across, the less the decline; if there were only one other candidate then the decline would be equal to the increase for candidate X, if there were two other candidates, each would decrease by .5 of X's increase, etc.).
Each candidate starts out with 10,000 'house' contracts, so whatever the current contract number is, minus ten thousand, tells you how many entering players bought contracts: mid-day yesterday, for example, there were 18,207 Haruki Murakami contracts -- meaning over 8000 contracts had been purchased over the course of the game. (He is by far the favorite among all the contenders, making his contract way over-priced.) Meanwhile, Dacia Maraini contracts number an even 10,000 -- it seems someone purchased some at some point, but I assume they since have dumped them. Even Ko Un only has 10,013 contracts.
There were less than 600 players playing along when I checked yesterday, but with the vast majority of prices hovering around $100 you can still load up on your favorites. Still, it looks to be hard to amass more that 100 contracts for almost anyone at this point -- suggesting the game will ultimately either be really close (a lot of people holding about 100 contracts in the one contender they bet everything on) or won by an early entrant who was able to generate enough cash through trading to buy more than 100 contracts in his or her favorite.
Interesting, too, that volume is highest in the Medicine category (414k when I checked yesterday), followed by Literature (372k), with Economics dead last (222k). But a big problem remains the lack of candidates -- many serious ones are missing.
(Oh, and: yes, of course I'm playing along. Contracts on eight contenders in three fields, for now. After a few hours yesterday mine ranked 196th out of 581 portfolios; if a lot more entrants buy into Literature (and don't all plump down on Murakami ...) I should do okay, at least in the cash-value portion of the game; once it's down to how many winning-laureate-contracts you're left holding, who knows ... ?)