Since we don’t have a double sided market, it makes sense to me that the initial prices should be weighted somewhat to discourage first investors from reaping ridiculous profits… For example, I created a market that was, “How far will the USA go in the world cup?” I could have given all six possible outcomes equal weighting… but that just would have allowed the first couple investors to reap windfall profits. (for the record, that market still created $7211.28 in wealth into the system… so I wasn’t perfect but I must have been close).

Does this logic make sense, or am I completely off base?

This makes sense. The market manager should do his best to set every share’s initial price at a right value according to his estimation of success probability. If the manager has no clue about starting values, he should put every price at 100 / (shares nb); not at 0.
Think at the money you’ll give away when liquidating as your own. ;)

All right, I’m guilty. I created a market without knowing all the nuts and bolts, namely setting intital prices. I saw while setting the Wimbledon market up the inital prices column, but I couldn’t find anything to click on to adjust them. Therefore all the stocks started out at about 16, giving the early players a hefty profit on one of the stocks. Am I missing something really obvious here? Any help would be appreciated…

I hear you guys on setting the prices again in this market type. It used to be there and we took it away because it was getting too complicated when we added the ability to add a new stock to a running market and the prices magically adjust downward. We also thought it would take out one more thing that people had to worry about. But I think we’ll be adding it back real soon. Sorry about the inconvenience. We had only the best intentions :)