Our final predictions: probabilities for every seat

K and I have been using betting markets to make our predictions. We wanted to share the probabilities associated with the Coalition, ALP and independent winning each seat. Here is a link to a pdf which lists the probabilities for each seat.

Since predictions based on individual seat probabilities are always subjective (do you predict a candidate will win when they have > 70% probability of victory? 80%? 90%?) and prone to misinterpretation, we don’t intend to make predictions about who will win in all 150 seats. As we discussed in a previous post, it is easy to jump to wrong conclusions with these odds. In particular, just because a party has the highest probability of victory for a particular seat doesn’t necessarily mean the market is confident they’ll win: for instance, if Labor has a 51% chance of victory in a seat, the market still expects them to lose roughly half the time. This is why counting up the number of seats in which Labor has > 50% probability of victory is a bad way of estimating the number of seats they are likely to win.