1. A big selling point of these markets is that there are theoretical commercial value to predictions- i.e. a company could get information of the likely success of their new product line ahead of time, to help them make strategic adjustments. However, Robin Hansen (one of the top economists working on betting markets) says, counterintuitively, that industries have been very luke warm about actually doing this in reality, for various psychological and economic reasons (he got into this in his econtalk interview I think)
2. Suppose bets on Augur start ramping up- How do we know these are real bets from real customers? The Augur company has immense funds on hand and its easy on blockchains to simulate fake volume through anonymous accounts. I have no reason to doubt the ethics of the Augur team, but it's unfortunate that if their marketplace starts taking off that it'll be so hard to tell how organic the growth is.
I think that the relevant term is liquidity
It also allows different predictions to be linked, so that you can bet on the outcomes of two events, or on the outcome of one event given a particular outcome of another event.
Augur initially planned to implement an automated market making scoring mechanism, but changed the dynamics[3] during alpha testing.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futarchy
[2] http://augur.strikingly.com/blog/augur-advisor-chat-with-dr-...
[3] https://augur.stackexchange.com/questions/104/why-did-augur-...
Wasn't obvious to me. Can't a prediction stand alone, as in real life?
Still a very cool platform. A lot of people use predictions.global to get a birds eye view of the markets.
https://predictions.global/
And the Discord channel is always busy. The mods there are very responsive.
https://discordapp.com/invite/faud6Fx