Awards Expose What Markets Measure

High‑profile award races (like NBA Rookie of the Year) are useful experiments: statistical models, voter ballots, and prediction markets can point in different directions because they answer different questions — impact, narrative, or popularity. Observing late swings and market prices reveals whether markets track objective merit or collective attention and sentiment. — If prediction markets often reflect attention and narrative rather than objective performance, policymakers, journalists, and bettors should treat them as social‑signal indicators, not ground‑truth forecasters.