- Most significantly, most scientific research focuses on things that are actually amenable to guesses with a normal distribution, like "amount of jellybeans in a jar" or "length of the border between country A and country B". An IPO is a binary choice where it either goes public or not. There is no correct value to converge to.
- It has been shown that as bettors gain more information about the bets of others, predictions lose accuracy and bettors converge to a consensus value instead. It seems to me that online prediction markets would be extremely prone to this as the bets of other people are all there in the market price.
- Prediction markets generally become more accurate as the diversity of the bettor pool grows. The users of polymarket and Kalshi heavily skew towards young men from certain socioeconomic groups, who may be biased towards one or the other outcome.
In the case of an OpenAI IPO, it seems likely multiple of these would converge as people start to fall prey to groupthink because "everybody knows that they'll IPO soon" in their local media bubble.