Forking in effort-intensive Schelling game systems

On the comment that equity markets aren’t a Keynesian Beauty Contest because you can make long term gains based on a true evaluation of value, I just have to point out the Keynes addresses that argument literally in next the paragraph after he introduced the concept of a Keynesian Beauty Contest (it is in Chapter 12, page 100).

If the reader interjects that there must surely be large profits to be gained from the other players in the long run by a skilled individual who, unperturbed by the prevailing pastime, continues to purchase investments on the best genuine long-term expectations he can frame, he must be answered, first of all, that there are, indeed, such serious-minded individuals and that it makes a vast difference to an investment market whether or not they predominate in their influence over the game-players. But we must also add that there are several factors which jeopardise the predominance of such individuals in modern investment markets. Investment based on genuine long-term expectation is so difficult to-day as to be scarcely practicable. He who attempts it must surely lead much more laborious days and run greater risks than he who tries to guess better than the crowd how the crowd will behave; and, given equal intelligence, he may make more disastrous mistakes … Furthermore, an investor who proposes to ignore near-term market fluctuations needs greater resources for safety and must not operate on so large a scale, if at all, with borrowed money—a further reason for the higher return from the pastime to a given stock of intelligence and resources.

That said, I agree with the general point that the more incentivized a fundamentals based approach is, the further you get from a “pure” Keynesian Beauty Contest and the less likely you are to have pathological effects. Ultimately in Kleros, the connection to fundamentals comes from the fact that people will want to have a version of the token that is being used by people that want their disputes arbitrated, otherwise the token holders won’t have the opportunity to earn arbitration fees. Specifically, if the token forks, you want to be on the side that people will want to use to get their disputes arbitrated. Those users will be unlikely to use a system that is producing miscarriages of justice, but they may also be unlikely to use a very marginal fork that only got a few percent of the community. On a general dispute resolution platform like Kleros, if the side that you don’t agree with wins a dispute, that outcome could be anything from “a miscarriage of justice” to “something on which reasonable people could disagree.” (This is a possible contrast with Augur where results are typically more clear cut.) Then, with this forking proposal, individual token holders can weight how blatantly wrong they think an outcome is versus how signficant the resulting fork would be.