Contracts for "departure" of an official, does that include death?

Hello, I have a question regarding those contracts on the departure of a government official before a certain date. On the surface they appear to be contracts to predict if someone will resign or be forced out of office for whatever reason.

However, reading the terms of contract, it is not clear to me if someone "departs" office due to their own death (natural or otherwise) if that would trigger a contract payment, and which way.

One the one hand, you could argue that someone who dies while in office has clearly "departed" from this world and therefore contract should expire paid.

On the other hand, this would come suspiciously close to betting on the odds of someone's death, which has all kinds of negative connotations, ethical and even legal concerns.

So how to interpret these contracts? What is ipredict's policy?

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RadiataPine
What is ipredict's policy?

I think the official policy is don't ask don't tell.

When pollies die, generally they just don't depart. Their ghost lingers for a while. It then simply fades away.

Some of our contracts do mention health and death, and we have not taken any flack for that. The purpose is not to measure the likelihood of death - but a contract has to be clear on this given it is a small but not unreasonable possibility, and an unfortunate likelihood over a large enough contract space.

More recently we have defined contracts on departure for reasons including resignation, sacking. The including is meant in part to cover these sort of unpleasant eventualities.

More recently it was suggested we just use the phrase "departure for any reason whatsoever". Short and to the point.

Generally we will take the view that departure via illness or death will be relevant to a contract.

Does it include the Pope?

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It is difficult to predict, especially others' predictions.

dutching Wrote:
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> Does it include the Pope?
>

Have you read the thread on that?

Alan.

too bad there wasnt a contract on earthquakes, anyone bidding on chch would have profited off a natural disaster...

Told ya: [www.ipredict.co.nz]
Fortunately, we do have volcanoes also there; let's not miss.

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It is difficult to predict, especially others' predictions.

I took probabilty of death into account when trading contracts on the Pope and on Robert Mugabe given they were aged over 80 it was relevant.

I wouldn't get overexcited about the morals of death predictions on other politicians - they are going to have rounding error level effects on even the most sosphicated models.

You could highlight the possibilty that it could motivate someone with a big position to do a misdeed - but come on! The amounts of money traded on iPredict just don't even get close too enough to incentivise that sort of action. If you decided you wanted to make money that way - it'd pay better (and ultimately be less traceable) to offer your services direct - likely for less high profile targets.

t94xr Wrote:
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> too bad there wasnt a contract on earthquakes,
> anyone bidding on chch would have profited off a
> natural disaster...


I did profit on the natural disaster.. Paker got re-elected becasue of it.. after being totally out of the running beofre it.