The ‘Outsider Trading’ Problem

There are worse things you could do than drive to a Parisian airport and mess around with a temperature sensor on the airfield—for only a few minutes! But why do that at all? To make money, maybe. This is the scheme that some mysterious person (or persons) reportedly carried out in April to win a bet on the prediction-market platform Polymarket, which allows people to wager on the highest temperature in Paris on any given day, not unlike weather derivatives. The popular version of the story…