Payments for election-related actions

 Buying votes is illegal, but other election related offers may seem odd but are legal.  

The Guardian has the story.

‘There are certain things that we don’t allow to be sold’: why vote buying in the US is illegal. by George Chidi

"Last week, Tesla CEO Elon Musk offered a $47 payment to people who refer registered voters in swing states to sign a petition supporting free speech and gun rights. The billionaire’s political action committee is using the petition to gather contact information in a last push for support of Donald Trump’s campaign.

"Responding to that offer, card game company Cards Against Humanity, long a Musk foe, announced it will pay up to $100 to each person who didn’t vote in 2020, who apologizes for that, makes a plan to vote and posts in public the phrase “Donald Trump is a human toilet.” Residents of swing states can earn the most money.

"The card game company told the New York Times that more than 1,150 people had been paid through the program as of Wednesday afternoon.

"Vote buying in illegal under US law, but Cards Against Humanity’s site claims that it is “exploiting a legal loophole to pay America’s blue-leaning non-voters”.

"The Guardian talked with Richard Hasen, a professor specializing in election law and director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at the UCLA School of Law, about the legality – if not the propriety – of these offers.

Q:"I want to get a sense from you about where the line is. What’s legal and what’s not? What are we looking at with Trump buying $100 worth of groceries for somebody at the store, or Musk with this $47 thing, or the reaction by Cards Against Humanity to that? How much of this is legal, and how much isn’t?

A: "It’s all legal. The Cards Against Humanity one comes closest, but there’s a pretty bright line. You cannot pay someone to vote, to register to vote, to vote in a particular way in a federal election. Elon Musk is not paying anyone to vote. He’s paying for leads. I mean, if he’s actually going to pay people to vote, that’s a different question.

Italy criminalizes surrogacy from abroad

 Italy has banned its citizens from accessing surrogacy in other countries where it is legal.  It will be interesting to see how they enforce this. (But of course gay couples will have fewer opportunities to skirt the law than couples who could pretend to have had a pregnancy..)

The NYT has the story:

Italy Criminalizes Surrogacy From Abroad, a Blow to Gay and Infertile Couples. The new law was pushed by the party of Giorgia Meloni, Italy’s conservative prime minister. by Emma Bubola

"Italy passed a law on Wednesday that criminalizes seeking surrogacy abroad, a move the country’s conservative government said would protect women’s dignity, while critics see it as yet another crackdown by the government on L.G.B.T. families, as the law will make it virtually impossible for gay fathers to have children.

"Surrogacy is already illegal in Italy. But the government of Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni has vowed to broaden the ban to punish Italians who seek it in countries where it is legal, like in parts of the United States."

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Earlier:

Thursday, August 22, 2024  Surrogacy under continued attack in Italy

Proof of human

 TheTuring test was to see if computers could pass for humans, but as AI increasingly passes those tests, there may be increasing demands for humans to prove their humanity.  World (renamed from Worldcoin this week) plans to attack that task, in a privacy preserving way (i.e. you verify that you are human without identifying yourself).

Reuters has the story:

 Sam Altman's rebranded Worldcoin ramps up iris-scanning crypto project, By Anna Tong, October 17, 20242

"SAN FRANCISCO, Oct 17 (Reuters) - - Worldcoin, a cryptocurrency project founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, said on Thursday it was rebranding to World Network and was ramping up efforts to scan every human's iris using its "orb" devices.

"Its core offering is its World ID, which the company describes as a "digital passport" to prove that its holder is a real human and tell the difference with AI chatbots online"

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Two snapshots I took at their event on Thursday:

"Market Design and Regulation" at Washington University, Oct 26 (but registration today)

 I'll be giving a public talk at Wash U in St. Louis on Saturday Oct 26, but here's a call for registration that suggests registration may close today. 

"Public Lecture with Al Roth (Stanford University); "Market Design and Regulation"

"Al Roth won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012. All who are interested in hearing Al Roth speak are invited to register.

"Registration will close on October 18, 2024. Registration is required to attend.

"Professor Roth will give highlights of market design that he pioneered such as kidney exchange and school choice in the first half of the talk. In the second half, Professor Roth will talk about controversial markets that may include topics such as blood plasma, abortion, IVF and surrogacy, marijuana, guns, digital data, etc. "

 

Opioids and transplantable organs

 Here's a paper that looks at how overdose deaths have joined automobile fatalities as a major source of deceased organ donations.

Opioids and Organs: How Overdoses Affect the Supply and Demand for Organ Transplants by Stacy Dickert-Conlin, Todd Elder, Bethany Lemont, and Keith Teltser, American Journal of Health Economics, 2024

"Abstract: As the incidence of fatal drug overdose quadrupled in the US over the past two decades, patients awaiting organ transplants may be unintended beneficiaries. We use Vital Statistics mortality data, merged with the universe of transplant candidates in the US from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients, to study the extent to which the growth in opioid-related deaths affects the supply of deceased organ donors and transplants. Using two separate identification strategies, we find that opioid-related deaths led to more than 26,000 organ transplants in the US between 2000 and 2018. We find that transplant centers are increasingly recovering organs from overdose victims for transplant, with the association between opioid-related deaths and organ donors more than doubling between 2000 and 2018. We also present evidence that transplant candidates are more willing to use organs from those who died of opioid-related causes when organ shortages are relatively severe."

"The share of donors dying via overdose is now as large as the share killed in motor vehicle accidents, a sobering reflection of the opioid epidemic that produced a fourfold increase in annual overdose deaths between 1999 and 2019 (CDC 2020)."

NBER market design workshop at Stanford, tomorrow and Saturday

 Tomorrow and Saturday, market design at Stanford...

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2024   DATE October 18-19, 2024

LOCATION SIEPR, Stanford University, Koret-Taube Conference Center, 366 Galvez Street

ORGANIZERS Michael Ostrovsky and Parag A. Pathak

  Format: 35 minute presentation, followed by 10 minute discussion.

Friday, October 18

9:00 am Continental Breakfast

9:30 am Designing Dynamic Reassignment Mechanisms: Evidence from GP Allocation, Ingrid Huitfeldt, University of Oslo, Victoria Marone, University of Texas at Austin and NBER, Daniel C. Waldinger, New York University and NBER

10:15 am Dynamic Matching with Post-allocation Service and its Application to Refugee Resettlement, Kirk C. Bansak, University of California, Berkeley, Soonbong Lee, Yale University, Vahideh Manshadi, Yale University, Rad Niazadeh, University of Chicago, Elisabeth Paulson, Harvard University

11:00 am  Break

11:30 am  Social Learning in Lung Transplant Decisions, Laura Doval, Columbia University, Federico Echenique, University of California, Berkeley, Wanying Huang, Monash University, Yi Xin, California Institute of Technology

12:15 pm  Endogenous Priority in Centralized Matching Markets: The Design of the Heart Transplant Waitlist, Kurt R. Sweat, Johns Hopkins University

1:00 pm Lunch

2:00 pm  Mechanism Reform: An Application to Child Welfare, E. Jason Baron, Duke University and NBER, Richard Lombardo, Harvard University, Joseph P. Ryan, University of Michigan, Jeongsoo Suh, Duke University, Quitze Valenzuela-Stookey, University of California, Berkeley

2:45 pm  The Competitive Core of Combinatorial Exchange, Simon Jantschgi, University of Oxford, Thanh T. Nguyen, Purdue University, Alexander Teytelboym, University of Oxford

3:30 pm  Break

4:00 pm  "Bid Shopping" in Procurement Auctions with Subcontracting(slides), Raymond Deneckere, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Daniel Quint, University of Wisconsin-Madison

4:45 pm Ads in Conversations: Market Thickness and Match Quality, Martino Banchio, Bocconi University, Aranyak Mehta, Google Research, Andres Perlroth, Google Research

5:30 pm Adjourn

7:00 pm  Group Dinner  Il Fornaio Palo Alto, 520 Cowper Street, Palo Alto, CA

Saturday, October 19

8:30 am Continental Breakfast

9:00 am Dynamic Auctions with Budget-Constrained Bidders: Evidence from the Online Advertising Market, Shunto J. Kobayashi, Boston University, Miguel Alcobendas, Yahoo Research

9:45 am The Welfare Effects of Sponsored Product Advertising, Chuan Yu, Harvard University

10:30 am Break

11:00 am An Empirical Analysis of the Interconnection Queue, Sarah Johnston, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yifei Liu, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Chenyu Yang, University of Maryland

11:45 am  Iterative Network Pricing for Ridesharing Platforms Chenkai Yu, Columbia University, Hongyao Ma, Columbia University

12:30 pm  Lunch and Adjourn

New fellows of the Econometric Society

Congratulations to the 42 newly elected Fellows of the Econometric Society. That's up from 29 new Fellows elected in 2023, which is a step towards the goal (about which I blogged last year*) of electing more Fellows.  But elections depend on recognition that isn't equally available to every specialty and geography, so there are still many nominees and others who would be jewels in the crown of the Society.

"The Society is pleased to announce the election of 42 new Fellows of the Econometric Society. The 2024 Fellows of the Econometric Society follow.

Jerome Adda, Bocconi University 

Cristina Arellano, Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Costas Arkolakis, Yale University

John Asker, University of California, Los Angeles (Secondary affiliation: Australasia)

David Atkin, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Paul Beaudry, University of British Columbia

Sascha O. Becker, University of Warwick and Monash University

Sandra E. Black, Columbia University

Estelle Cantillon, Universite Libre de Bruxelles

Alessandra Casella, Columbia University

Thomas Chaney, University of Southern California

David Dorn, University of Zurich

Janice Eberly, Northwestern University, Kellogg School of Management

Kfir Eliaz, Tel Aviv University

Erica Field, Duke University

Andrea Galeotti, London Business School

Francisco Gallego, Pontificia Universidad Caatolica de Chile

Maitreesh Ghatak, London School of Economics (Secondary affiliation: Asia)

Olivier Gossner, CNRS - CREST; London School of Economics

Ayşe Ökten İmrohoroğlu, University of Southern California

Henrik Kleven, Princeton University

Kala Krishna, The Pennsylvania State University

Jeanne Lafortune, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile

Francesco Lippi, LUISS University; Einaudi Institute for Economics and Finance

Deborah J. Lucas, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Annamaria Lusardi, Stanford University

N. Gregory Mankiw, Harvard University

Kalina Manova, University College London

Elena Manresa, New York University

Enrique G. Mendoza, University of Pennsylvania (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Ismael Y. Mourifie, Washington University in St Louis (Secondary affiliation: Africa)

Barry Nalebuff, Yale School of Management

Andrew Newman, Boston University

Efe A. Ok, New York University

Guillermo Ordonez, University of Pennsylvania

Maria Petrova, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

Mar Reguant, IAE-CSIC; Northwestern University

Diego Restuccia, University of Toronto

Andrés Rodríguez-Clare, University of California, Berkeley (Secondary affiliation: Latin America)

Andrea Weber, Central European University

Luigi Zingales, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Gabriel Zucman, Paris School of Economics; University of California, Berkeley

Finally, the Society would like to express its gratitude to the members of the 2024 Fellows Nominating Committee: Jan Eeckhout (chair), Mariacristina De Nardi, Marcela Eslava, Richard Holden, Yuichi Kitamura, Yaw Nyarko, and Nathan Nunn."

 

As I wrote last year, Congratulations again to the new Fellows, who have received the carefully considered and frugally awarded applause of their peers. 

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*Last year:

Tuesday, October 10, 2023

Econometric Society Fellows (2023), procedures, and some thoughts on prizes in general

Medical aid in dying comes up for a vote in England

 The upcoming vote on legalizing medical aid in dying in England and Wales has attracted controversy along lines that will be familiar to readers of this blog, concerning both fundamental values and slippery slopes.  But a comment by British Cardinal Vincent Nichols introduces an argument that I hadn't heard stated so clearly before, about the religious significance of suffering.  But first, here's the background, from the BMJ.

MPs set for historic vote on bill to legalise assisted dying in England and Wales,  by Clare Dyer, 07 October 2024  BMJ 2024;387:q2191

"A bill to legalise assisted dying for terminally ill people in England and Wales is expected to be introduced in the House of Commons on 16 October.

...

"Hundreds of terminally ill people from the UK have travelled to the Swiss clinic Dignitas to end their lives. But friends and relatives who help them are at risk of prosecution for assisting a suicide, which carries a maximum prison sentence of 14 years.

...

"Surveys of public opinion show that about two thirds of the public support allowing assisted dying. The BMA dropped its opposition in 2021 to take a neutral position on a change in the law."

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And here is a story about objections from a religious point of view, from the senior Catholic official in England.

UK’s top Catholic bishop urges faithful to lobby MPs to oppose assisted dying  by Hayden Vernon Sat 12 Oct 2024 

"The archbishop of Westminster continued: “The suffering of a human being is not meaningless. It does not destroy that dignity. It is an intrinsic part of our human journey, a journey embraced by the eternal word of God, Christ Jesus himself. He brings our humanity to its full glory precisely through the gateway of suffering and death.”

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Earlier:

Friday, March 1, 2024

Medical aid in dying--the ongoing debate in Britain