Paul Rhode

Paul Rhode appears in Before Kalshi and Polymarket there was the Iowa Electronic Markets as Coleman Strumpf’s colleague and the researcher who pointed out that the Iowa Electronic Markets were not the first political prediction markets. The episode says Rhode found newspaper stories from October and November 1924 about election markets.

Rhode’s contribution is mainly historical framing. By pushing the inquiry before the 1988 Iowa experiment, he helps turn prediction markets from a modern academic invention into a recurring institution inside Election Betting Markets and broader Prediction Market History.

Source Position

• Rhode is used as the source’s evidence-triggering figure rather than as a platform operator.
• His newspaper evidence widens the scope from modern markets to early 20th-century and older election betting.
• The source uses his work to explain why the media later treated prediction markets as novel after older practices had disappeared from public memory.

Connections

• Coleman Strumpf - colleague whose historical prediction-market research Rhode helped redirect.
• Election Betting Markets and Prediction Market History - concepts extended by his evidence.
• Iowa Electronic Markets - modern project whose novelty the older evidence complicates.