Kalshi Needed a Bigger Win from the Mamdani Race

New York city’s mayoral race was an ad campaign made in heaven for prediction market Kalshi Inc., with flashy billboards in Times Square, on subway trains and at street corners mapping the unlikely rise of Zohran Mamdani. Less successful is the platform’s study of minute-by-minute pricing of that race to test one of the main claimed benefits of prediction markets — that they promote better decision-making by aggregating the wisdom of crowds with more accuracy and precision than polls, expert opinion or financial markets.

Consider a candidate making a major policy speech. Her staff can try to gauge the effect through the reactions of expert observers, straw polls, social media postings and scientific polls; all four have known problems.