The issue is that this discourages popular bets, not just heavily-biased ones.
If you divide by ratio, and add a fixed number (e.g. 2) to the "for" and "against", there aren't really false positives, and true negatives (e.g. a reasonable bet where people just happen to all bet one side, or a biased one that doesn't get much attention) are unlikely - unless there are too many bets or people are gaming the system, that is.
This pari-mutuel system (I always knew the system but did not know the name) seems near canonical to me. And the incentives seem clear cut. It seems to me that if you feel the odds for or against any prediction are wrongly calculated, then if you submit money to push those odds towards the correct ratio, then you should, on average, expect a return.
... I maybe should actually run simulations to check that, that's just what my intuition is telling me as to how it would work.
I'm trying to understand what you are proposing and the motivations for it.
By ratio, I assume you mean the ratio of the pool for and the pool against? So if prop A has $100 and prop B has $10, then the ratio would be 110/10, or 11:1. So your procedure would be to add a fixed number to this? Either 112/12 or 13:3? or perhaps you meant Prop A $100/(110/10)+2 and Prop B $10(110/10)+2
So Prop A is ~11.1
Prop B is ~2.9
Am I understanding this right? What do we do with these numbers?
If you divide by ratio, and add a fixed number (e.g. 2) to the "for" and "against", there aren't really false positives, and true negatives (e.g. a reasonable bet where people just happen to all bet one side, or a biased one that doesn't get much attention) are unlikely - unless there are too many bets or people are gaming the system, that is.