Foresight Exchange Rules and Judging

Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 Foresight Exchange Rules and Judging

ALLOWANCE: players get start, and a 'allowance' each Monday morning.
ALLOWANCE CAP: players receive a weekly allowance of , until they have reached a lifetime cap of . This is unaffected by fees paid or received, or money made on trading.
Players get their allowance in weekly payments so that they don't blow their initial bank roll before they know how to play the game. This rule allows new players to eventually catch up with more experienced players. It also allows players to maintain their scores without them being constantly driven towards 1.000 by new allowance payments.
CLAIM CREATION: the owner must name a judge (different from the owner) at claim creation [owner and judge must be subscribed to fx-propose, or get subscribed]. There is a waiting period of at least 7 days during which there can be no trading on the claim and the judge considers changes to the wording. It is in the judge's best interest that the claim be worded as clearly possible. Once the judge's approval has been given (and the claim wording is locked in for the life of the claim), all players (excluding the judge but including the owner) may trade on the claim. Until the claim is created, the owner of the claim makes the wording changes, may change the judge, or withdraw the proposed claim (but lose the fee).
Wording needs to be locked in to close a loophole in the current system, wherein a claim owner can change a claim to benefit his investment in it. Preventing an owner from investing would not work, as he could accomplish the same thing with an accomplice. Since claims wording will be locked at the outset, the above measures were taken to get the wording as bullet-proof as possible before locking it in.
One objection to a seven day waiting period is that it precludes very short term claims. This is a feature, not a bug. FX is for resolving long standing controversies. If the claim can't survive a seven day waiting period it doesn't need to be on FX.
there is a (funny money) fee to start a claim ( for judging, and transaction cost)

Judging

A judge may enter a judgement by entering payoff on YES coupons in range [0,1], decimals allowed. NO's pay at 1-YES (include a note requesting the judge to familiarize himself with the fx-discuss archive on the claim before entering judgment). In addition to existing code for closing claims, change claim status from ACTIVE to RETIRED (so it gets picked up on that page), and attach list of player payoffs to closure announcement. Pay judge & notify him of same by email.

Ethics

[this section was suggested by Greg James].

FX is essentially unregulated, but has the ideal of simulating a real-life FX that would use real money. Aspire to this ideal when deciding whether a given behaviour is hip or not. Thus, price-fixing consortia are allowed, since they would exist in a real market, but schemes to get more money out of the server are not, since they exploit an artifact of our simulation.

The following guidelines are intended to compensate for our allowance system, which would not be duplicated in RL:

You may only control one IF account.
You may not trade with the purpose of transferring money between accounts.

These are not "rules" because they are not enforceable. Because FX is self-regulating, users are allowed to report suspicious activity to the FX administrators.

Penalties for rule violations are completely at the whim of the FX administrators, and may include (FX money) fines, coupon fines, and account deletions.