Constant-function market makers (CFMMs), such as Uniswap, are automated exchanges offering trades among a set of assets. We study their technical relationship to another class of automated market makers, cost-function prediction markets. We first introduce axioms for market makers and show that CFMMs with concave potential functions characterize "good" market makers according to these axioms. We then show that every such CFMM on n assets is equivalent to a cost-function prediction market for events with n outcomes. Our construction directly converts a CFMM into a prediction market, and vice versa. Using this equivalence, we give another construction which can produce any 1-homogenous, increasing, and concave CFMM, as are typically used in practice, from a cost function. Conceptually, our results show that desirable market-making axioms are equivalent to desirable information-elicitation axioms, i.e., markets are good at facilitating trade if and only if they are good at revealing beliefs. For example, we show that every CFMM implicitly defines a proper scoring rule for eliciting beliefs; the scoring rule for Uniswap is unusual, but known. From a technical standpoint, our results show how tools for prediction markets and CFMMs can interoperate. We illustrate this interoperability by showing how liquidity strategies from both literatures transfer to the other, yielding new market designs.

This paper considers a principal-agent problem of delegation that features two types of information asymmetry. A principal delegates a task to the agent; the agent can first choose to acquire a costly signal, then takes an action. The signal is relevant to the final outcome and the best course of action. Both of these decisions are hidden from the principal, who only observes a final outcome -- a noisy function of both information and action. We call this problem Contracts with Information Acquisition.