Prediction markets work. The infrastructure around them doesn't.

Markets that aggregate real-time probability estimates on elections, policy, and geopolitical events have the potential to meaningfully improve how institutions make decisions. But that potential depends on infrastructure that doesn't exist yet — reliable data, rigorous contract standards, and independent quality controls. Without it, prediction markets remain too fragile and too easily manipulated to serve the public interest.

Bellwether is a research institution at Stanford building that infrastructure. We don't operate an exchange. We build the data layer, design the market standards, and conduct the research that the entire category needs to be worthy of the trust people are starting to place in it.

Why a research lab builds this

Independence, rigor, and no conflicts of interest.

Most prediction market infrastructure is built by the platforms themselves — companies with financial incentives to present their markets in the best possible light. Bellwether is built at Stanford's Hall Lab, housed within the Hoover Institution. We don't operate an exchange, we don't make money from trading, and we have no financial interest in which direction a market moves. That independence is the product.

Academic rigor changes how you build. We define accuracy before we measure it. We research the failure modes before we design the standards. We build for the hardest cases first, because that's where trust breaks down.

Our research doesn't get published and go stale. It runs as a live system, maintained at the speed of the phenomena it studies.

Team

Andrew B. Hall

Principal Investigator
Davies Family Professor of Political Economy, Stanford GSB
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution
andrewbenjaminhall.com →

Elliot Paschal

Research Fellow
Stanford Graduate School of Business
[email protected]

Vania Chow

Research Fellow
Stanford University
[email protected]

Supported By

This research is supported by the Hoover Institution and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Stanford GSB Hoover Institution Polymarket Kalshi

Built at Stanford. Free for research.
Open for partnerships.

The Tape API is live. If you're a newsroom, researcher, or builder working with prediction market data, we'd like to hear from you.