Are 24 Hour markets fair?

Well, I'll try.

1. I'm not saying because you live in such and such a place you can't vote on particular questions. I'm not even saying that you can't bet or request a cash out at any time, just that your request wouldn't be processed until that question re-opened, just the same as night traders do with real stock markets. But you'd be only betting on the closing figures, with no sense of what the "overnight" action's effect on opening "prices" would be. You would also be able to cancel a pending order at any time UNTIL the market re-opened.

2. Again, you would not be shut out of the Dow questions at all. But the time window when Dow questions were "active" would be less than 24 hours, would contain the Dow's hours (say 5am EST to 9pm EST, but closing totally at 4pm on the day in question), would allow night orders for the morning (ie bets and cash ins between 9pm and 5am EST would be recorded (and able to be cancelled until 5am) but not processed until 5am). If you live in Tokyo, this might be inconvenient, but less so than actually running a NYSE portfolio from there (ie our market is open longer hours than the NYSE).

The regional aspect is just that the events in a region (sports/stock market/political announcements/etc) tend to happen in local daytime, so if these group of questions "sleep" for awhile it should be when people in that region usually sleep. If you live in a particular region you can bet on any questions in all the regions, but those questions might be dormant for a portion of the time you are physically awake. There would always be questions open in at least two regions (of 3 or 4) at a time. The other idea about regions is that not only am I more likely to be awake when the important things happen locally (not me personally - I live in Toronto Canada but inhabit Tokyo hours) but I may have more interest and knowledge about these questions. For example, I don't vote on German football games as a rule.

The only reason I came up with "regions" was to stagger the "sleep" times of questions, so that there's always questions open. The reason for suggesting such down time was to address the issue of whether or not having markets, which are volatile both in their speculative nature and in reacting to outside information, open when the people most involved in them can't react to changes affecting those markets is potentially a bad idea.

It's a philosophical question mostly, but there's also the fairness aspect. Say the question is Will J Lo have babies by Sunday, and being a night owl I happen to catch the breaking news at 4am EST Friday that she's on the way to hospital. Is it fair that I (and a smallish number of Europeans and Asians) then dump lots of cash on Yes, if the majority of people betting on this question won't find out for 3 more hours. I know the expected likelihood has gone from say 30% to 80%, so I get in early on Yes sending the odds up to 45%, wait until everyone else hears and then sends the odds up to 90% (briefly), and double my money by cashing out, even though I have no idea whether it will turn out to be a false alarm. A closed market until 9am would have me and all the 7am newspaper readers and breakfast television watchers and texters and blog readers all at a same level of knowledge when the market opens, all gaining the same percent because all the early bets are processed as a block. Otherwise I get huge gains and they wake up to a market that's hardly worth betting on (money-wise) except for the first few in.

Individuals (unlike companies that can run shifts or operate foreign bureaus) have to sleep and feed. They cannot play a market 24 hours a day for weeks on end. They require their local stock exchange to work with that, and shut down sometimes, because a market becomes too risky for an individual if you can lose half your wealth overnight while you are sleeping. (Corporations can stay up and on top of it, but markets close for the sake of the small investor, among other reasons.) So why don't ours, for the same reason?

Good point! Well, maybe scrap the fixed regions and just make sure the closing time (if fixed) is in open hours. But it would work as is, like questions that suspend before the result occurs, like cutting off bets an hour before the stock exchange closes. Each question could have its own hours of inactivity (although it begins to get complicated - think of all the different times the creator has to enter and the bettor should check for before wagering money).

Anyway, I'm not sure that 24 hours are unfair. I'm just throwing the question out for discussion.