Combined monthly trading volume on Polymarket and Kalshi reached approximately $12 billion in a single month, according to data cited by Piper Sandler and reported by The New York Times a more than 400% increase from the prior year. By early 2026, combined monthly volume across both platforms had grown to over $24 billion, according to Pew Research Center analysis. The scale of these markets has prompted serious questions about whether prediction markets are simply forecasting tools or something more powerful. Research on economic forecasting, including work published through Stanford Graduate School of Business and in peer-reviewed behavioral economics journals, suggests that publicized predicted outcomes can influence the behavior of the people being predicted, even before any real-world outcome has occurred. A separate working paper on prediction market reflexivity argues that under certain conditions, these markets function as coordination mechanisms capable of producing self-fulf...