The Attention Gap

The finding Prediction markets do not reprice on the news you would expect. Put 618 news sources on one scoreboard, does the price move at all after a story lands, and the four biggest wires come out under the line with three niche specialists above it. What that measures is not the newsroom. It is where the market’s attention already sits. Across 476,000 scored pairs the price had moved a cent or more an hour later 15.2% of the time, the 1.0x line. Score each source against the same markets the others wrote into and 15% of the separation is left, with the order broken. What sorts these names is mostly which markets they write into. The market reprices where its attention already is, not where the pecking order says it should be. The Attention Gap · Vera Research The method Fifty-six days of Polymarket data ending 25 June 2026: 86,060 stories matched to 3,434 markets, 476,000 scored pairs from 618 sources. Each pair records one bit. An hour after the story landed, had the price moved by a cent or more? A source’s score is its share of moved pairs over the all-source share of 15.2%, with thin records pulled toward that share. No magnitude and no direction: the population is every sc...