Market Design

We pay for dialysis but not for transplants...

2012-01-28T05:34:00.000-05:00

The NY Times headlines one more inconsistency in health policy: For Illegal Immigrant, Line Is Drawn at Transplant

"He was also an illegal immigrant. So when his younger brother volunteered to donate a kidney to restore him to normal life, they encountered a health care paradox: the government would pay for a lifetime of dialysis, costing $75,000 a year, but not for the $100,000 transplant that would make it unnecessary."

German university admissions

2012-01-27T05:03:00.000-05:00

I'll be teaching the first class of the semester of Experimental Economics today, so readers of this blog may see more of the intersection between market design and experiments, like the following paper on the university admission system in Germany, and how it might be redesigned...

Implementing Quotas in University Admissions: An Experimental Analysis

Sebastian Braun

Nadja Dwenger

Dorothea Kübler

Alexander Westkamp

Abstract:
Quotas for special groups of students often apply in school or university admission procedures. This paper studies the performance of two mechanisms to implement such quotas in a lab experiment. The first mechanism is a simplified version of the mechanism currently employed by the German central clearinghouse for university admissions, which first allocates seats in the quota for top-grade students before allocating all other seats among remaining applicants. The second is a modified version of the student-proposing deferred acceptance (SDA) algorithm, which simultaneously allocates seats in all quotas. Our main result is that the current procedure, designed to give top-grade students an advantage, actually harms them, as students often fail to grasp the strategic issues involved. The modified SDA algorithm significantly improves the matching for top-grade students and could thus be a valuable tool for redesigning university admissions in Germany.

Experiments and market design in Switzerland in April

2012-01-26T04:17:00.000-05:00

Thurgau Experimental Economics Meeting (theem)

Institutions and Behavior

April 19-21, 2012 in Kreuzlingen (CH)

Organized by the Thurgau Institute of Economics at the University of Konstanz
Organizers: Urs Fischbacher, Lisa Bruttel, Gerald Eisenkopf, Ulrich Wacker

Download Call for Papers

Institutions are designed in order to create incentives for people to behave in a way desired by the designer of the institution. For example, legally enforced contracts allow interacting parties to rely on each other when trust alone is not a sufficiently solid foundation. However, we frequently observe that institutions do not induce the desired behavior. People question the fairness or legitimacy of an institution, or they exploit deficits in the design of institutions in an opportunistic way. Not knowing how people respond to institutional incentives creates also a difficult problem for the designer of institutions. This conference invites contributions investigating how institutions shape behavior and vice versa how institutions are actually designed. We welcome experimental, theoretical and empirical research from economics and other related disciplines.

Keynote speakers at the workshop:

Rebecca B. Morton

Rebecca B. Morton is professor of politics at the New York University. She is a leading researcher in experimental political sciences, in particular voting behavior and electoral processes. She has published in the best journals in both economics and political sciences. Her most recent publications focus, inter alia, on the decision making of swing voters and the behavior in standing expert committees. (http://politics.as.nyu.edu/object/RebeccaBMorton)

Frans van Winden

Frans van Winden is professor of economics at the Amsterdam School of Economics and at the Cognitive Science Center Amsterdam. Excellent publications document his main research interests in the fields of political economy, behavioral economics, neuroeconomics and experimental economics. In his recent projects he investigates, for example, the behavioral economics of crime and of social ties or compares tax regimes experimentally. (http://www.creedexperiment.nl/creed/people/winden)

If you would like to present your research at this meeting please submit a paper or an extended abstract here.

Here you can additionally register for the conference. The registration fee for the conference is 150 CHF including meals, coffee breaks, the conference dinner on Thursday evening and a social event on Friday evening.

February 1, 2012	Submission deadline
March 1, 2012	Notification of acceptance
March 15, 2012	Registration deadline for presenters
April 2, 2012	Registration deadline for non-presenting participants

theem is kindly supported by

Is economic repugnance closely related to biological disgust?

2012-01-25T05:20:00.000-05:00

Colleagues often send me articles related to this blog, but the one I have received the most copies of recently is yesterday's NY Times article: Survival’s Ick Factor, about recent studies related to the emotion of disgust, and its possible evolutionary significance in e.g. keeping people away from sources of infection such as feces.

Many people have sent me the article because of my own interest in ickonomics, aka repugnant markets and transactions. A repugnant transaction is one that some people want to engage in, and others think they shouldn't be allowed to. I'm willing to exclude the case of ordinary, pecuniary negative externalities. The issue that initially made all of this very salient to me is the ban, almost everywhere, on buying and selling kidneys (which generated my interest in kidney exchange). But I quickly realized that there are lots of repugnant transactions, and I began a 2007 article on the subject by asking why you can't eat horse meat in California. (It's against the law, passed by popular referendum in 1998.)

Which brings me to the point of this post.

I don’t think the kind of repugnance I study isfundamentally related to biological/evolutionary disgust. The reason there are lawsagainst eating horsemeat, for example, is that it isn’t innately disgusting, sosome people want to do it, and others don’t want them to. But there aren’t anylaws against eating feces…(sorry, yuck).

Now, I bet that your brain is economical, and that you might recruit some of the same neurons you use to feel disgust to remind you of things you don't like. So I'm not surprised that there are correlates between propensity to feel disgust and some political opinions, for example.

But, to come back to kidney sales, I can't see that the repugnance to selling transplant kidneys for money can be closely related to the disgust that may be inspired by transplantation itself (and the associated blood and guts), since transplantation itself is almost universally regarded as a good thing. That is, the part of the transaction that involves bodily fluids, and might inspire the kind of disgust that would keep you from contamination in other people's innards, isn't regarded as repugnant. Nor is kidney donation, which involves the surgical removal of a kidney. It's only the introduction of money into the transplant transaction that makes it repugnant. (And as we've recently seen with bone marrow, this repugnance to introducing money is alive and well, and crosses party lines.)

And I'm pretty sure there's no evolutionary disgust aroused by money (if only because money was invented pretty late in the evolutionary game...).

Is the market for professors of English becoming less thick?

2012-01-24T05:32:00.000-05:00

That's the question raised by a recent article on the job market organized by the Modern Language Association: Realities of the Endless Search

"The MLA meeting (until recently in late December and now in early January) has for decades been the primary place where search committees in English and foreign languages interviewed a large number of candidates and then selected a small group for campus visits. So the fall was the time for the initial vetting of the large pool to determine who was worthy of an MLA interview. Now, the schedule is much less firm. Susan Miller, English chair at Santa Fe College, a Florida community college, said that she has had searches in which money wasn’t available on the regular schedule, but then materialized late in the year. So the college advertised a job last March, "a really awkward time for a fall opening." But she said that the department didn’t want to lose its shot at the position, so it went ahead as soon as it could -- and in fact rushed the process, feeling that until someone had signed a contract, the position might disappear."

Justice department appeals recent court ruling allowing bone marrow donors to be compensated

2012-01-23T16:40:00.000-05:00

I recently posted about the 9th circuit court of appeals' decision to allow some bone marrow donors to be compensated: Paying bone marrow donors is now legal (depending on how it's done)
Here's the court's decision.

But it turns out that transactions mostly don't become illegal without someone finding them repugnant. Just in case you thought bone marrow had been accidentally included in the ban on compensating donors, the latest news (pointed out to me by Joseph Colucci) is that the Justice Department is contesting the recent court decision: Government fights court decision that says bone marrow donors may be paid .

"the Obama administration last week asked a San Francisco appeals court to overturn a recent decision that said bone marrow donors can be paid for what their bodies produce.
"A unanimous three-judge panel last month ruled for a nonprofit group, MoreMarrowDonors.org, that wants to encourage bone marrow donations by offering $3,000 scholarships, housing allowances or charitable donations to those who are matched with blood disease patients.
...
"When the transplant act was written in 1984, marrow extraction was painful. Needles thick enough to suck out the fatty marrow were inserted into a donor’s anesthetized hip bones, and the cells were taken from the marrow.
Today, a process called apheresis is used about 70 percent of the time. Donors are injected with a medication that accelerates blood stem cell production so there are more cells in the bloodstream. The donor sits for hours in a recliner as a machine collects the “peripheral” blood stem cells and recycles the blood back into the donor.
The donor group said the application of the organ transplant law violated the equal-protection clause, because there is no rational basis for government to treat donors undergoing apheresis differently from blood or sperm donors.
But the three-judge panel said there was no reason to reach the constitutional question. It is up to Congress if it wants to include blood marrow in its list of items that cannot be sold, the court said. But the apheresis method extracts only blood and thus there is no prohibition on paying for it, the court said.
“It may be that ‘bone marrow transplant’ is an anachronism that will soon fade away” as the blood extraction method replaces needle-extraction of bone marrow, Judge Andrew J. Kleinfeld wrote, “much as ‘dial the phone’ is fading away now that telephones do not have dials.”

The Justice Department and the National Marrow Donor Program have moved quickly to try to get the decision overturned.

“The panel’s ruling rests on legal errors of exceptional importance, threatens to disrupt current patient care and undermines Congress’s clear policy of encouraging voluntary bone marrow donations,” the Justice Department said in asking the full U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit to rehear the case.
The donor registry, which last year matched 5,000 patients with unrelated donors, said in a statement that the decision could have “unexpected and disastrous consequences” for patients.
The panel’s decision in Flynn v. Holder noted that there are obvious reasons for prohibiting selling organs or even blood marrow cells, which requires a precise genetic match. “Congress might have been concerned that every last cent could be extracted from sick patients needful of transplants, by well-matched potential donors making ‘your money or your life’ offers,” the opinion said.
The donor registry said its experience is that “a donor system that relies on the human desire to help others is far superior to one that focuses on self-gain.”
Mitchell and Institute for Justice lawyer Jeff Rowes got both more and less than they wanted from the 9th Circuit decision. Mitchell said the ruling indicates that his group could directly pay donors rather than offering scholarships or charitable donations.
Rowes, meanwhile, said he had hoped the court would look at the constitutional question and whether the government had a rational basis for including bone marrow in its list of organs. His group is eager for the Supreme Court to weigh in on that test, which he said is “code for the government gets to do whatever it wants.”
Depending on what the 9th Circuit does with the government’s appeal, he still might get the chance."

***********
Background:

Who better than Kim Krawiec to blog about the legal decision to allow compensation for bone marrow donors under some circumstances (if the marrow is gotten from the blood rather than the bone).

She points to an article by Harvard Law prof I. Glenn Cohen in the New England Journal of Medicine, Selling Bone Marrow — Flynn v. Holder, which says that the ruling is a narrow one, that is unlikely to impact the debate about compensation for other kinds of donation. (That was of course under the assumption that the court's decision will stand...)

The true meaning of "fashion forward." Coordinating dates in NY, London, Paris, and Milan

2012-01-23T05:18:00.000-05:00

The fashion forward among you will probably be as relieved as I am to know that New York Fashion Week Finally Has An Official Start Date: September 6th

The back story comes to me via Assaf Romm and Dvorah Marciano. They write as follows.

"So Fashion Week is a concept invented in NYC around1943 (back then it was called "Press Week") when there wasnot enough French fashion coming from across the ocean due to the Germanoccupation. Around 1993 it took its current form in which there are a lot offashion people and media coming to one place to plan their Fall/Spring buys andso on. Furthermore, the Fashion Week was copied by many other cities.Specifically, the main events are the Fashion Weeks in NYC, London, Paris andMilan. These events take place consecutively twice a year (around Februaryfor the Fall collection, and around September for the Spring collection of nextyear):

http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/fashion/2006/02/how_the_runway_took_off.html

"It should be mentioned that these Fashion Weeks compete onfashion buyers, media coverage and even models. For example:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/09/20/london-fashion-week-losing-models-milan-_n_971347.html

"Apparently, scheduling the Fashion Weeks between the bigfour cities is an ongoing saga, with dates moving earlier and earlier (...I don't have specific data yet). That's why theysigned a three-year agreement in 2008 to determine schedules. Obviously,recently there were some issues with Milan moving its dates to coincide withthe NYC and London weeks in September 2012. And it seems like Paris also joinedin to the fight:

http://fashionablyjust.com/2011/12/fashion-week-wars-volume-xxxxiiiiii/

"Finally, it looks like today a final agreement has beenreached: [see top of post].

"To conclude, this looks like a great unraveling story,because you obviously cannot move Fashion Weeks too early (well, according toDvorah, you just cannot introduce new fashion too early, orotherwise it wouldn't be fashionable by the time it reaches the consumers....).Also, it seems like fashion highly depends on information. That is, fashion isa form of art, and it is determined by current events ..."

And here's the International Fashion Week Dates Agreement of 2008

Games 2012, World Congress of the Game Theory Society, July 22-26.

2012-01-22T05:07:00.000-05:00

The fourth World Congress of the Game Theory Society, Games 2012, will be held Sunday July 22 - Thursday July 26, 2012 at Istanbul Bilgi University, in Istanbul, Turkey.

The plenary speakers are Paul Milgrom, Jean-Francois Mertens, Parag Pathak, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson, and there are and 32 semi-plenary speakers

The deadline for submission of papers is February 1.

Internet dating not working for you? Hire a wingman or wingwoman

2012-01-21T05:21:00.000-05:00

I'm sure there's a Shakespeare comedy about this latest twist on the dating game...

On a Wingman and a Prayer: Singles Bow to Cupids-for-Hire

"As romantics grow weary of the digital dating game, so-called wingman and wingwoman services are taking them back in time. Such outfits, which popped up in cities like Boston and New York as long as eight years ago, are promoting the old-fashioned tête-à-tête. They're gaining traction at a time when Internet dating sites are attracting fewer visitors.

"Susan Baxter, founder of "Hire a Boston Wingwoman," says she launched her business specifically because her friends were fatigued by online dating. She sensed a good niche.

"You go to meet [the person] and realize their picture was taken 10 years ago and that they are not who you thought," says Ms. Baxter, 32 years old. Paired with a confident wingwoman, her customers "can see prospective partners right away, and know right then and there if there is chemistry."

"Ms. Baxter, whose fees start at $130, insists that clients who go out with a pro have better odds of success than those who troll with an untrained male buddy. Often, the friend "says stupid stuff, like 'my friend thinks you're hot,'" she says.

"The service's slogan: "We're better at hitting on women than you are."

Pre-K blues

2012-01-20T05:36:00.000-05:00

If attendance at a public school is in principle a right, complicated by shortages of good places, attendance at pre-kindergarten is just complicated. And the demand for pre-K is expanded by the fact that a student who gets into a school's pre-K program is often guaranteed a place in its Kindergarten program as well, so that even parents who feel their toddler is too young for school may be sorely tempted by the chance to avoid a difficult matching process at a later age.

A NYC mom writes about the difficulties of getting into pre-K (and the subsequent difficulties of forming a parent co-op): The Pre-K Underground

"Everyone knows that getting into private preschool in New York City can be absurdly cutthroat and wildly expensive, but getting into public pre-K is not any easier. For the current school year, there were 28,817 applicants for 19,834 slots in the city’s public pre-K programs. Those numbers do not tell the entire story. The school on our street had 432 applicants — for 36 seats. With 12 children fighting for each slot, lots of families shared our predicament."

Why can't college athletes be paid?

2012-01-19T05:24:00.000-05:00

The NY Times Sunday Magazine on how anomalous it is that we regard paying college athletes as repugnant: Let's Start Paying College Athletes

"The hypocrisy that permeates big-money college sports takes your breath away. College football and men’s basketball have become such huge commercial enterprises that together they generate more than $6 billion in annual revenue, more than the National Basketball Association. A top college coach can make as much or more than a professional coach; Ohio State just agreed to pay Urban Meyer $24 million over six years. Powerful conferences like the S.E.C. and the Pac 12 have signed lucrative TV deals, while the Big 10 and the University of Texas have created their own sports networks. Companies like Coors and Chick-fil-A eagerly toss millions in marketing dollars at college sports. Last year, Turner Broadcasting and CBS signed a 14-year, $10.8 billion deal for the television rights to the N.C.A.A.’s men’s basketball national championship tournament (a k a “March Madness”). And what does the labor force that makes it possible for coaches to earn millions, and causes marketers to spend billions, get? Nothing. The workers are supposed to be content with a scholarship that does not even cover the full cost of attending college. Any student athlete who accepts an unapproved, free hamburger from a coach, or even a fan, is in violation of N.C.A.A. rules."

Boston school choice politics

2012-01-18T04:48:00.000-05:00

The Globe reports that Boston Mayor Menino has weighed in on the long running debate on the size of the zones in which school choice should operate: Menino vows change in school assignment system

"Mayor Thomas M. Menino vowed last night to radically change Boston’s school assignment lottery, taking aim at a system forged in the racially charged days of busing and pledging to create a plan that will send more children to classes closer to home.

"In his annual State of the City address, Menino decried a system that “ships our kids to schools across our city’’ and tears at the fabric of communities. The school-day Diaspora prevents bonds from developing among neighbors, Menino said, because parents do not car pool and their children are less likely to play together.

"As recently as 2008, Menino made the same promise in another State of the City address. At that time, the mayor said he would not “pour dollar after dollar into gas tanks’’ as he vowed to “rethink our school assignment zones.’’ In last night’s speech, he acknowledged past efforts, but promised that this year would be different.

"He is ordering Superintendent Carol R. Johnson to appoint a citywide task force to design a new system and determine how it should be implemented.
...

"Councilor Tito Jackson said after the speech: “I want to know what the radical change is. I know what the problem is.’’

"Jackson said that all parents want the same opportunities for their children, but lamented that schools in his Grove Hall neighborhood lack advanced classes offered elsewhere. “The problem is we need quality schools across the city,” Jackson said, adding, “We’re not there yet.’’
...
"In 2009, Johnson proposed five student assignment zones, but the plan collapsed under public scrutiny, mostly because of a lack of good-quality schools.

"Since then, the School Department has closed several low-performing schools, expanded some high-performing schools, and improved support for schools in a swath of the city that includes much of Roxbury and Dorchester. Administrators have also made fundamental changes at 11 state-designated underperforming schools, and some show signs of a turnaround.

“The Boston public schools have come a long way in the last 20 years,’’ Menino said in last night’s speech. “I’m committing tonight that one year from now Boston will have adopted a radically different student assignment plan, one that puts a priority on children attending schools closer to their homes.’’

Market design courses here and there

2012-01-17T04:51:00.000-05:00

Here are some courses I know about this semester (or one of the upcoming quarters), please feel free to add more in the comments or by email so I can update...

Scott Kominers at Chicago (now): Topics in Matching and Market Design

Eric Budish at Chicago Booth (in the Spring): Market Design

Paul Milgrom at Stanford (now): Theory and Practice of Auction Market Design

Mike Ostrovsky at Stanford GSB isn't teaching his topics in market design course this year, but writes: "I will teach the basic first-year course, which coversmany standard market design topics (auctions, matching, etc.). There is nolinkable webpage yet (the class begins in the Spring quarter, in April), butthe description is available on this page:

http://www.gsb.stanford.edu/research/courses/phdecon.html.The course is MGTECON 602; here is the description, copied from past years:"This course covers auction theory, matching, and related parts of theliterature on bargaining and pricing. Key papers in the early part of thecourse are Myerson and Satterthwaite on bargaining, Myerson on optimalauctions, and Milgrom and Weber's classic work. We then turn to markets inwhich complicated preferences and constraints, limitations on the use of cash,or variations in contract details among bidders play an important role. Emphasisis on matching markets such as the National Resident Matching Program and assetauctions such as the spectrum auctions."

Parag Pathak at MIT writes (from Ankgor Wat) that "Ihave a course but the web page isn't up yet - its an undergrad course calledmarket design 14.19 at MIT. I'll send over the specifics when it is up(we still don't start for a couple weeks)"

Paywalls create conflict of interest between newspapers and journalists

2012-01-16T05:50:00.000-05:00

Journalists, like academics, want their writing to be read. Newspapers, like academic publishers, like to be paid for what they sell. Journalists, like academics like to make their papers available on the web. A recent email from the editor of the Boston Globe Ideas Section makes this clear:

"As you may know, this fall the Globe launched a spiffy new web site devoted exclusively to the newspaper. You may also have noticed it means Ideas is now behind a paywall. However, we have a "one click free" policy from any outside links -- and to provide you those links, and an easy way to keep up with Ideas, we've started a Boston Globe Ideas Facebook page. We also have a Twitter feed, @globeideas. Of course we'd love it if you subscribed to Bostonglobe.com -- but we're also making it easy for you to read and share Ideas stories for free by following one of our accounts."

The culture of science, and its absence. The dog that hasn't barked in many years in the Arab world

2012-01-15T05:38:00.000-05:00

In connection with my series of posts on the market for universities, and how easy or hard they may be to transplant, the following long and interesting article caught my attention. It suggests that the decline in science in the Arab world coincided with the end of a period in which foreign writings (in this case Greek) were often translated into Arabic: Why the Arabic World Turned Away from Science

"As Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, an influential figure in contemporary pan-Islamism, said in the late nineteenth century, “It is permissible ... to ask oneself why Arab civilization, after having thrown such a live light on the world, suddenly became extinguished; why this torch has not been relit since; and why the Arab world still remains buried in profound darkness.”

Just as there is no simple explanation for the success of Arabic science, there is no simple explanation for its gradual — not sudden, as al-Afghani claims — demise. The most significant factor was physical and geopolitical. As early as the tenth or eleventh century, the Abbasid empire began to factionalize and fragment due to increased provincial autonomy and frequent uprisings. By 1258, the little that was left of the Abbasid state was swept away by the Mongol invasion. And in Spain, Christians reconquered Córdoba in 1236 and Seville in 1248. But the Islamic turn away from scholarship actually preceded the civilization’s geopolitical decline — it can be traced back to the rise of the anti-philosophical Ash’arism school among Sunni Muslims, who comprise the vast majority of the Muslim world.

To understand this anti-rationalist movement, we once again turn our gaze back to the time of the Abbasid caliph al-Mamun. Al-Mamun picked up the pro-science torch lit by the second caliph, al-Mansur, and ran with it. He responded to a crisis of legitimacy by attempting to undermine traditionalist religious scholars while actively sponsoring a doctrine called Mu’tazilism that was deeply influenced by Greek rationalism, particularly Aristotelianism. To this end, he imposed an inquisition, under which those who refused to profess their allegiance to Mu’tazilism were punished by flogging, imprisonment, or beheading. But the caliphs who followed al-Mamun upheld the doctrine with less fervor, and within a few decades, adherence to it became a punishable offense. The backlash against Mu’tazilism was tremendously successful: by 885, a half century after al-Mamun’s death, it even became a crime to copy books of philosophy. The beginning of the de-Hellenization of Arabic high culture was underway. By the twelfth or thirteenth century, the influence of Mu’tazilism was nearly completely marginalized.

In its place arose the anti-rationalist Ash’ari school whose increasing dominance is linked to the decline of Arabic science. With the rise of the Ash’arites, the ethos in the Islamic world was increasingly opposed to original scholarship and any scientific inquiry that did not directly aid in religious regulation of private and public life. While the Mu’tazilites had contended that the Koran was created and so God’s purpose for man must be interpreted through reason, the Ash’arites believed the Koran to be coeval with God — and therefore unchallengeable. At the heart of Ash’ari metaphysics is the idea of occasionalism, a doctrine that denies natural causality. Put simply, it suggests natural necessity cannot exist because God’s will is completely free. Ash’arites believed that God is the only cause, so that the world is a series of discrete physical events each willed by God.
...
"The greatest and most influential voice of the Ash’arites was the medieval theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali (also known as Algazel; died 1111). In his book The Incoherence of the Philosophers, al-Ghazali vigorously attacked philosophy and philosophers — both the Greek philosophers themselves and their followers in the Muslim world (such as al-Farabi and Avicenna). Al-Ghazali was worried that when people become favorably influenced by philosophical arguments, they will also come to trust the philosophers on matters of religion, thus making Muslims less pious. Reason, because it teaches us to discover, question, and innovate, was the enemy; al-Ghazali argued that in assuming necessity in nature, philosophy was incompatible with Islamic teaching, which recognizes that nature is entirely subject to God’s will: “Nothing in nature,” he wrote, “can act spontaneously and apart from God.”

Sorcery as a repugnant transaction--and a capital crime

2012-01-14T05:11:00.000-05:00

The Saudi's seriously don't like sorcery: Saudi Woman Beheaded for 'Witchcraft'

"A Saudi woman was beheaded after being convicted of practicing "witchcraft and sorcery," according to the Saudi Interior Ministry, at least the second such execution for sorcery this year.

"The woman, Amina bint Abdulhalim Nassar, was executed in the northern Saudi province of al-Jawf on Monday.

"A source close to the Saudi religious police told Arab newspaper al Hayat that authorities who searched Nassar's home found a book about witchcraft, 35 veils and glass bottles full of "an unknown liquid used for sorcery" among her possessions. According to reports, authorities said Nassar claimed to be a healer and would sell a veil and three bottles for 1500 riyals, or about $400.
...

Luther said that a charge of sorcery is often used by the Saudi government as a smokescreen under which they punish people for exercising freedom of speech.

"Nassar was not the first person to be executed for alleged witchcraft by the Saudi government this year. In September, a Sudanese man was publicly decapitated with a sword in the city of Medina after he was found guilty of the same crime."

Assisted suicide: the British debate continues

2012-01-13T05:45:00.000-05:00

Allow assisted suicide for those with less than a year to live

"The independent Commission on Assisted Dying, whose members include several prominent peers and medics, wants GPs to be able to prescribe lethal doses of medication for dying people to take themselves."

Even the name of the Commission makes clear why assisted suicide is often regarded as a repugnant transaction, and why the discussion of how doctors may reasonably treat terminally ill patients is so fraught.

Peter Singer on suicide

2012-01-12T04:51:00.000-05:00

Suicide, and doctor-assisted suicide, remains a subject of (repugnant transaction) controversy. Here's Princeton's Peter Singer: A Death of One's Own

"A friend told Clendinen that he needed to buy a gun. In the United States, you can buy a gun and put a bullet through your brain without breaking any laws. But if you are a law-abiding person who is already too ill to buy a gun, or to use one, or if shooting yourself doesn’t strike you as a peaceful and dignified way to end your life, or if you just don’t want to leave a mess for others to clean up, what are you to do? You can’t ask someone else to shoot you, and, in most countries, if you tell your doctor that you have had enough, and that you would like his or her assistance in dying, you are asking your doctor to commit a crime.

"Last month, an expert panel of the Royal Society of Canada, chaired by Udo Schüklenk, a professor of bioethics at Queens University, released a report on decision-making at the end of life. The report provides a strong argument for allowing doctors to help their patients to die, provided that the patients are competent and freely request such assistance.

"The ethical basis of the panel’s argument is not so much the avoidance of unnecessary suffering in terminally ill patients, but rather the core value of individual autonomy or self-determination. “The manner of our dying,” the panel concludes, “reflects our sense of what is important just as much as do the other central decisions in our lives.” In a state that protects individual rights, therefore, deciding how to die ought to be recognized as such a right.

"The report also offers an up-to-date review of how assistance by physicians in ending life is working in the “living laboratories” – the jurisdictions where it is legal. In Switzerland, as well as in the US states of Oregon, Washington, and Montana, the law now permits physicians, on request, to supply a terminally ill patient with a prescription for a drug that will bring about a peaceful death. In The Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg, doctors have the additional option of responding to the patient’s request by giving the patient a lethal injection.

"The panel examined reports from each of these jurisdictions, with the exception of Montana (where legalization of assistance in dying occurred only in 2009, and reliable data are not yet available). In The Netherlands, voluntary euthanasia accounted for 1.7% of all deaths in 2005 – exactly the same level as in 1990. Moreover, the frequency of ending a patient’s life without an explicit request from the patient fell by half during the same period, from 0.8% to 0.4%."

Economics of the dark side...

2012-01-11T05:26:00.000-05:00

Karim Sadrieh is hosting a conference on the dark side of the (economic) force:

Magdeburg Workshop on Anti-Social Economic Behavior 2012

January 13, 2012

Faculty Center

Faculty of Economics and Management

University of Magdeburg

Germany

The M-WASEB 2012 is a gathering of experimentaleconomists pioneering the new field of anti-social economic behavior. Theworkshop intends to stimulate and to coordinate the research in this youngfield with exciting academic presentations and discussions on a relaxedschedule.

Many of the scholars in the small and internationallydispersed group of experimental economists, who are active in the field ofanti- social economic behavior and motivation, will present their newestresearch on the "Dark Side" of human nature. The list of the speakersincludes Klaus Abbink, Monash University Michèle Belot, Oxford UniversityEnrique Fatas, University of East Anglia Sascha Füllbrunn, Luxembourg School ofFinance Benedikt Herrmann, European Commission, Joint Research Centre, IspraHenrik Orzen, University of Mannheim Yoshi Saijo, University of Osaka MarinaSchröder, University of Madgeburg Christiane Schwieren, University ofHeidelberg Daniel Zizzo, University of East Anglia

The workshop will take place at our faculty center at theUniversity of Magdeburg on Friday, Jan13, 2012, with arrivals on the evening before (Jan 12, 2012) and departures onthe day after (Jan 14, 2012).

If you are interested in participating, please, contactMarina Schröder (marina.schroeder@ovgu.de)as soon as possible. Note, however, that due to the very limited capacity ofour venue, we unfortunately can only offer very few seats for additionalaudience.

Looking forward to the advancement of research onanti-social behavior, yet sincerely wishing you all the best for the year2012,

karim

-----------------------------------------

Prof. Dr. Abdolkarim Sadrieh

Chair in E-Business

Faculty of Economics and Management

University of Magdeburg

Postbox 4120, 39016 Magdeburg, Germany

+49 391 67-18492 (fax: -11355)

http://www.ww.uni-magdeburg.de/e-business

Denver's new school choice plan: communication is paramount

2012-01-10T04:11:00.000-05:00

One of the challenges of introducing a new market design is communicating effectively with participants. Even a strategy-proof system that makes it safe to list your preferences straightforwardly may cause parents to worry whether this is the case. The new school choice system in Denver is dealing with this:Denver Public Schools' new school choice system stressing out some parents

"Denver Public Schools is rolling out a new school-choice process that centralizes school enrollment, and parents are feeling the stress of learning the new ropes.

...
"The process is still not entirely clear to me," said Tracy Edwards- Konkol, a parent of a fifth-grade daughter in the market for a middle school.

...
"Edwards-Konkol has delayed her return of the new four-page application — due Jan. 31 — that requires parents to submit a list of their top five school choices in order of preference.

...
"A line in the application that states that enrolling at a school other than the neighborhood school means forefeiting that guaranteed seat — has some parents thinking twice about choice.

"Fearing that not getting into the first- or second-pick school would place her child at the end of the line to get into their own — likely full — neighborhood school, Edwards-Konkol considered not even applying at Denver School of the Arts, her daughter's first choice.

"When I downloaded the form and saw that line, I panicked," Edwards-Konkol said. "Several parents I've talked to in fact are now looking at this new school in Stapleton because there might be more room at that school. Parents are looking for a safe school."

"But DPS director of choice and enrollment Shannon Fitzgerald said that understanding is incorrect.

"Even if the neighborhood school is not included in the list of top-five choices, if there was no room to enroll the child at the five preferred schools, the child would still have a guaranteed spot at their home school.

"Every student is allowed to hold a spot at one school at any given time," Fitzgerald said.

"It's only when a student is actually placed or enrolled at another school of choice that the neighborhood seat would be offered to a student from outside the neighborhood, she said."

Revising the size of Boston school choice districts?

2012-01-09T05:33:00.000-05:00

School choice in Boston mostly focuses on allowing families to choose a school in the school zone that they live in. The Globe reports that the city is thinking of having more, smaller zones.

Boston careful in school-assignment overhaul: Prior 2 attempts faced heated public opposition

"The city is currently divided into three regions, providing parents and students a choice of roughly two dozen elementary, middle, and kindergarten-through-eighth-grade schools. (High schools are open to students across the city.)

"When the three zones were implemented in 1989, replacing a court-ordered forced-busing plan to desegregate the city’s schools, the creators anticipated that as schools improved academically the three zones would be replaced in a few years with nine smaller assignment areas.

"But every attempt to create smaller zones over the last two decades has failed because there have not been enough high-quality schools to go around. Some neighborhoods, such as West Roxbury, have a strong selection of solid-performing schools, while Roxbury and some other areas have a concentration of the worst-performing schools in the state.

That reality will loom over the process as the School Department again assesses the feasibility of creating smaller zones."

New AEA conflict of interest disclosure rules

2012-01-08T08:32:00.000-05:00

Economics becomes a bit more like medicine. Let's hope these rules work better in Economics...

PRESS RELEASE
January 5, 2012
American Economic Association Adopts Extensions to Principles for Author
Disclosure of Conflict of Interest

At its meeting today, the Executive Committee of the American Economic Association adopted extensions to its principles for authors’ disclosures of potential conflicts of interest in the AEA’s publications. The added principles are:

(1) Every submitted article should state the sources of financial support for the particular
research it describes. If none, that fact should be stated.

(2) Each author of a submitted article should identify each interested party from whom he or she has received significant financial support, summing to at least $10,000 in the past three years, in the form of consultant fees, retainers, grants and the like. The disclosure requirement also includes in-kind support, such as providing access to data. If the support in question comes with a non-disclosure obligation, that fact should be stated, along with as much information as the obligation permits. If there are no such sources of funds, that fact should be stated explicitly. An “interested” party is any individual, group, or organization that has a financial, ideological, or political stake related to the article.

(3) Each author should disclose any paid or unpaid positions as officer, director, or board member of relevant non-profit advocacy organizations or profit-making entities. A "relevant” organization is one whose policy positions, goals, or financial interests relate to the article.

(4) The disclosures required above apply to any close relative or partner of any author.

(5) Each author must disclose if another party had the right to review the paper prior to its circulation.

(6) For published articles, information on relevant potential conflicts of interest will be made available to the public.

(7) The AEA urges its members and other economists to apply the above principles in other publications: scholarly journals, op-ed pieces, newspaper and magazine columns, radio and television commentaries, as well as in testimony before federal and state legislative committees and other agencies.

School choice: what makes schools popular in Boston

2012-01-08T05:36:00.000-05:00

One of the benefits of a strategy-proof school choice mechanism is that it yields meaningful data on parent preferences. The Boston Globe has a story describing some of those preferences, as revealed through the rankings of schools submitted for the school choice algorithm. (The reporter, Akilah Johnson, thinks that some good schools are being missed, and that the poorest families often fail to participate in the school choice system.)

Popularity matters in school lottery: The district’s hidden gems struggle to gain attention from parents.

""The principal of Higginson-Lewis K-8 School and one of her first-grade teachers stood amid a swirl of school-shopping families at the Showcase of Schools, waiting to deliver their sales pitch.
...
"It’s like being a Hilton Hotel in between two Ritzes,’’ Simmons, the first-grade teacher, said of the schools to her right and left, Hernandez K-8 and Kilmer K-8, both with more applicants than prekindergarten seats. The inverse is true at Higginson-Lewis, making it one of the least sought-after schools in Boston - at least according to a school district tally akin to a judge’s score sheet.

"The city uses a lottery system that was intended to give all students access to high-achieving classrooms, regardless of neighborhood or life circumstance. But families fixate on a collection of well-known, fiercely sought-after schools, largely ignoring those with lesser reputations. And over the past two decades, popularity has often become a proxy for quality, making it even harder for schools to get off that second rung.

"Popularity is driven by parents with time, inclination, and sometimes the means to enter the school lottery early, armed with information and expectations. Their preferences create a system of prized schools, and those in low demand - schools whose reputations have suffered because they are in higher-crime neighborhoods, serve predominantly poor students, and have, in some cases, test scores lower than average.
...
"Each year, the district creates a “demand report’’ to help inform parents’ decisions. It shows how many parents listed a school among their top three picks. Parents look at the list and seize on schools they like, but also immediately see the schools they want to avoid, schools they often know little about.
...
"The answer lies in who is, and who is not, choosing a school and when they choose. Popular schools have become synonymous with the choices of white middle-class families, principals and families say. And the demand report reflects the choices of families who choose early.

"Oliver said parents of color and those in low-income communities “don’t always go in to make choices when the lottery starts. We have a lot of people who can’t make a commitment until June or even Labor Day.’’
...
"The lottery system was created in the name of giving parents more choice. Still, Boston’s dreams of equal access to quality remain deferred, with many of the least-selected schools lacking racial and economic diversity. The Higginson-Lewis has only 10 white students in a school of about 425, and Marshall has just eight white students in a school of 713.

“People will come to visit and they will say: ‘How many white students are in the class? I don’t want my child to be the only one,’ ’’ said Oliver, the Higginson principal.
...
"Middle-class parents often aren’t willing to send their children to a school next to Malcolm X Park in Roxbury or on a street sandwiched between Geneva Avenue and Bowdoin Street in Dorchester, where neighborhood violence has, at times, landed on the school’s doorstep.
...
"School choice is “pretty complicated stuff, and people are always eager to come up with pretty simple solutions,’’ said Curt Dudley-Marling, a Boston College professor who studies patterns of school failure and success. “It always seems to me that it’s rigged for parents who have the most resources.’’

"Not all families have the benefit of active parent groups that organize school tours to help families vet their options, which in Boston could mean as many as 20 public school options, not including charters. Single parents, families new to the country, parents of disabled children, or families struggling with the demands of life often are unable to investigate every option.

“I can’t imagine they have time, much less the resources, to go to fairs and all these things,’’ Dudley-Marling said. Instead, they, like most people, default to what they have heard within their circle of influence."

A quarter century since the founding of the Economic Science Association

2012-01-07T05:28:00.002-05:00

At the ASSA meetings in Chicago:
Jan 07, 2012 10:15 am, Hyatt Regency, Skyway 260
History of Economics Society/Economic Science Association

Reflecting on Twenty-Five Years of the Economic Science Association (B2)

Presiding: HARRO MAAS (University of Utrecht)

Historical Perspective on ESA's First Quarter Century

ANDREJ SVORENCIK (University of Utrecht)

The Prologue to ESA from Today's Perspective

JOHN KAGEL (Ohio State University)

Structural Changes to ESA in 1995-1997: The Journal and International Meetings

THOMAS PALFREY (California Institute of Technology)

Making ESA International

MARTIN WEBER (University of Mannheim)

Discussants:

VERNON SMITH (Chapman University)

STEVEN MEDEMA (University of Colorado-Denver)

Market design at the ASSA meetings in Chicago

2012-01-06T05:38:00.016-05:00

First, good luck to all those on the job market at the ASSA meetings going on in Chicago now.

The ASSA meetings aren't only a job market, however, and there are a number of sessions in which papers on matching and market design are being presented . These are the ones I noticed on scanning the program:

Jan 06, 2012 12:30 pm, Hyatt Regency, New Orleans
Transportation & Public Utilities Group

Auction Design (L9)

Presiding: ERIC RALPH (Federal Communications Commission)

Auction Design for Universal Service

LARRY AUSUBEL (University of Maryland)

Procurement auctions to supply broadband over differing regions with quality differentiation

GIUSEPPE LOPOMO (Duke University)

LESLIE MARX (Duke University)

SANDRO BRUSCO (State University of New York-Stony Brook)

Distributing Universal Service Subsidies by Competitive Bidding

THOMAS HAZLETT (George Mason University)

Discussants:

GREG ROSSTON (Stanford University)

***********

Jan 06, 2012 2:30 pm, Hyatt Regency, Columbus EF
American Economic Association

Incentives and Matching in Marriage and Dating Markets (J1)

Presiding: GARY BECKER (University of Chicago)

Matching with a Handicap: The Economics of Marital Smoking

PIERRE-ANDRÉ CHIAPPORI (Columbia University)

SONIA OREFFICE (University of Alicante)

CLIMENT QUINTANA-DOMEQUE (University of Alicante)

Peer Effects in Sexual Initiation: Separating Demand from Supply

SETH RICHARDS-SHUBIK (Carnegie-Mellon University)

[Download Preview]

Terms of Endearment: An Equilibrium Model Of Sex and Matching

PETER ARCIDIACONO (Duke University)

ANDREW BEAUCHAMP (Boston College)

MARJORIE MCELROY (Duke University)

[Download Preview]

Dating Market Incentives to Improve Physical Appearance

LORENS HELMCHEN (George Mason University)

TIMOTHY CLASSEN (Loyola University Chicago)

Discussants:

SCOTT CUNNINGHAM (Baylor University)

JEREMY FOX (University of Michigan)

ALOYSIUS SIOW (University of Toronto)

JOHN CAWLEY (Cornell University)

************

Jan 06, 2012 2:30 pm, Hyatt Regency, Regency D
American Economic Association

New Challenges for Market Design (A1)

Presiding: MURIEL NIEDERLE (Stanford University)

Individual Rationality and Participation in Large Scale, Multi-Hospital Kidney Exchange

ITAI ASHLAGI (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

ALVIN E. ROTH (Harvard Business School)

Holdout in the Assembly of Complements: A Problem for Market Design

SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS (University of Chicago)

ERIC GLEN WEYL (University of Chicago)

[Download Preview]

Improving Efficiency in Matching Markets with Regional Caps: The Case of the Japan Residency Matching Program

FUHITO KOJIMA (Stanford University)

YUICHIRO KAMADA (Harvard University)

[Download Preview]

Price Controls, Non-Price Quality Competition, and the Nonexistence of Competitive Equilibrium

JOHN WILLIAM HATFIELD (Stanford University)

CHARLES R. PLOTT (California Institute of Technology)

TOMOMI TANAKA (Arizona State University)

[Download Preview]

Discussants:

PARAG PATHAK (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

THOMAS PALFREY (California Institute of Technology)

PAUL MILGROM (Stanford University)

MURIEL NIEDERLE (Stanford University)

********

Jan 07, 2012 8:00 am, Hyatt Regency, Columbus KL
American Economic Association

Price Theory and Market Design (D4)

Presiding: ERIC BUDISH (University of chicago)

Market Power Screens Willingness-to-Pay

ERIC GLEN WEYL (University of Chicago)

JEAN TIROLE (Toulouse School of Economics)

[Download Preview]

The Form of Incentive Contracts: Agency with Moral Hazard, Risk Neutrality, and Limited Liability

JOAQUÍN POBLETE (London School of Economics)

DANIEL SPULBER (Northwestern University)

[Download Preview]

A Supply and Demand Framework for Two-Sided Matching Markets

EDUARDO M AZEVEDO (Harvard University)

JACOB LESHNO (Harvard Business School)

[Download Preview]

Multilateral Matching

JOHN WILLIAM HATFIELD (Stanford University)

SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS (University of Chicago)

[Download Preview]

Discussants:

PIERRE-ANDRE CHIAPPORI (Columbia University)

DAVID SRAER (Princeton University)

THEODORE BERGSTROM (University of California-Santa Barbara)

ALI HORTACSU (University of Chicago)

**********

Jan 08, 2012 8:00 am, Hyatt Regency, Atlanta
American Economic Association

Advance in the Theory of Contests and Tournaments (C7)

Presiding: RON SIEGEL (Northwestern University)

Head Starts in Contests

RON SIEGEL (Northwestern University)

[Download Preview]

Contests with Endogenous and Stochastic Entry

QIANG FU (National University of Singapore)

QIAN JIAO (National University of Singapore)

JINGFENG LU (National University of Singapore)

[Download Preview]

Sequential All-Pay Auctions with Head Starts and Noisy Outputs

ELLA SEGEV (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

ANER SELA (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

[Download Preview]

The Optimal Design of Rewards in Contests

TODD R. KAPLAN (University of Exeter and University of Haifa)

DAVID WETTSTEIN (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

[Download Preview]

Discussants:

RON SIEGEL (Northwestern University)

QIANG FU (National University of Singapore)

ELLA SEGEV (Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)

TODD R. KAPLAN (University of Exeter and University of Haifa)

**********

Jan 08, 2012 10:15 am, Hyatt Regency, Wrigley
Econometric Society

Economics of Internet Markets (L1)

Presiding: JONATHAN LEVIN (Stanford University)

Multidimensional Heterogeneity and Platform Design

ANDRE FILIPE VEIGA (Toulouse School of Economics)

ERIC GLEN WEYL (Univerity of Chicago)

Price Discrimination in Many-to-Many Matching Markets

RENATO DIAS GOMES (Northwestern University)

ALESSANDRO PAVAN (Northwestern University)

Social Advertising

CATHERINE TUCKER (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Sales Mechanisms in Online Markets: What Happened to Internet Auctions?

LIRAN EINAV (Stanford University)

CHIARA FARRONATO (Stanford University)

JONATHAN LEVIN (Stanford University)

NEEL SUNDARESAN (eBay Research)

Discussants:

PRESTON MCAFEE (Research Yahoo!)

JONATHAN BAKER (American Universityi)

**********

Jan 08, 2012 1:00 pm, Hyatt Regency, Columbus CD
American Economic Association

Designing Effective School Choice Mechanisms (I2)

Presiding: DIANE SCHANZENBACH (Northwestern University)

School Choice, School Quality and College Attendance

DAVID DEMING (Harvard University)

JUSTINE HASTINGS (Brown University)

THOMAS KANE (Harvard University)

DOUGLAS STAIGER (Dartmouth University)

[Download Preview]

Charter School Entry and Student Choice: The Case of Washington, D.C.

MARIA M FERREYRA (Carnegie Mellon University)

GRIGORY KOSENOK (New Economic School-Moscow)

[Download Preview]

Promoting School Competition through School Choice: A Market Design Approach

JOHN W. HATFIELD (Stanford University)

FUHITO KOJIMA (Stanford University)

YUSUKE NARITA (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

[Download Preview]

From Boston to Shanghai to Deferred Acceptance: Theory and Experiments on A Family of School Choice Mechanisms

ONUR KESTEN (Carnegie Mellon University)

YAN CHEN (University of Michigan)

Discussants:

KEVIN STANGE (University of Michigan)

JUSTINE HASTINGS (Brown University)

ONUR KESTEN (Carnegie Mellon University)

FUHITO KOJIMA (Stanford University)

Philosophy job market

2012-01-05T05:20:00.001-05:00

Inside Higher Ed reports that a social reception called "the smoker" at the Philosophy job market meetings plays a semi-official role in hiring, with some interviews continuing there in the evening: Something’s Smoking. The story records that aspects of this make some women candidates uncomfortable.

Lest economists feel smug, this paragraph caught my eye, and reminded me of interviews in the hotel suites (and sometimes simple hotel rooms when those run out) at the ASSA meetings:

"Rebecca Kukla, a philosophy professor at Georgetown University, said the event was socially problematic for women, not unlike another former practice at some APA conferences (and those of other disciplinary meetings) where job candidates were interviewed in hotel rooms and sometimes had to sit on a hotel bed while being interviewed. That practice was stopped a few years ago, and interviews are now held in suites or in ballrooms."

Scientific misconduct: fraud, plagiarism and all that

2012-01-04T05:21:00.000-05:00

A good article on scientific fraud and plagiarism by Charles Gross in The Nation (of all places), focusing on the case of Marc Hauser, but looking at the phenomenon much more widely: Disgrace: On Marc Hauser

"The first formal discussion of scientific misconduct was published in 1830 by Charles Babbage, who held Newton’s chair at Cambridge and made major contributions to astronomy, mathematics and the development of computers. In Reflections on the Decline of Science in England and on Some of Its Causes, Babbage distinguished “several species of impositions that have been practised in science…hoaxing, forging, trimming, and cooking.” An example of “hoaxing” would be the Piltdown man, discovered in 1911 and discredited in 1953; parts of an ape and human skull were combined, supposedly to represent a “missing link” in human evolution. Hoaxes are intended to expose naïveté and credulousness and to mock pseudo wisdom. Unlike most hoaxes, Babbage’s other “impositions” are carried out to advance the perpetrator’s scientific career. “Forging,” which he thought rare, is the counterfeiting of results, today called fabrication. “Trimming” consists of eliminating outliers to make results look more accurate, while keeping the average the same. “Cooking” is the selection of data. Trimming and cooking fall under the modern rubric of “falsification.” Scholarly conventions and standards of scientific probity were probably different in the distant past, yet the feuds, priority disputes and porous notions of scientific truthfulness from previous centuries seem contemporary.
...
"Scientists guilty of misconduct are found in every field, at every kind of research institution and with a variety of social and educational backgrounds. Yet a survey of the excellent coverage of fraud in Science and recent books on the subject—ranging from Horace Freeland Judson’s The Great Betrayal: Fraud in Science (2004) to David Goodstein’s On Fact and Fraud: Cautionary Tales From the Front Lines of Science (2010)—reveals a pattern of the most common, or modal, scientific miscreant. He is a bright and ambitious young man working in an elite institution in a rapidly moving and highly competitive branch of modern biology or medicine, where results have important theoretical, clinical or financial implications. He has been mentored and supported by a senior and respected establishment figure who is often the co-author of many of his papers but may have not been closely involved in the research.
...
"The serious involvement of the government in policing scientific misconduct began only in 1981, when hearings were convened by Al Gore, then a Congressman and chair of the investigations and oversight subcommittee of the House Science and Technology Committee, after an outbreak of egregious scandals. One was the case of John Long, a promising associate professor at Massachusetts General Hospital who was found to have faked cell lines in his research on Hodgkin’s disease. Another case involved Vijay Soman, an assistant professor at Yale Medical School. Soman plagiarized the research findings of Helena Wachslicht-Rodbard, who worked at the NIH. A paper Wachslicht-Rodbard had written about anorexia nervosa and insulin receptors had been sent for publication review to Soman’s mentor, Philip Felig, the vice chair of medicine at Yale. Felig gave it to Soman, who ghostwrote a rejection for Felig. Soman then stole the idea of Wachslicht-Rodbard’s paper and some of its words, fabricated his own supporting “data” and published his results with Felig as co-author.
...
"the section on Plagiarism in the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association says, ‘The key element of this principle is that an author does not present the work of another author as if it were his own. This can extend to ideas as well as written words.’

Salaries and perks in academic hiring

2012-01-03T05:48:00.000-05:00

In Texas, a law school dean has recently resigned amidst issues of pay equity: Univ. of Texas law school dean resigns after pay battle.

Earlier, he wrote a very illuminating letter about how competitive offers involve housing loans as well as salary.
"Common to the compensation packages offered by other schools to the candidates that we have undertaken to recruit have been non-salary commitments with substantial financial entailments. We, too, have frequently included non-salary commitments, in the form of one-time loans. These have been accompanied with a promise on our part to defray the costs of repaying the loan in annual installments of five or seven years, provided that the recipient of the loan remains on our faculty. Typically, these loans are aimed at the purchase of a home, and have helped to settle our new colleagues and their families in Austin. In exchange for these loans, I have asked and received from the recipients a moral commitment to remain members of our community for at least five years. "

I've written before about how money often factors into whether a transaction is viewed as repugnant. That discussion is often about whether money is explicitly part of the transaction or not. But pay equity is an issue that touches on repugnance as it relates to income inequality, etc.

HT: Kim Krawiec at FL

Frontiers of Market Design conference in Switzerland in May

2012-01-02T05:41:00.003-05:00

Frontiers of Market Design: Matching Markets Conference (note the Jan 10 submission deadline...)

May, 20-23, 2012

(Sunday 3 p.m. - Wednesday 12 a.m.)
Centro Stefano Franscini
Monte Verita, Ascona, Switzerland

You can find the registration link here, and more details at the conference web site above.

During the registration process you can upload a paper or extended abstract if you wish to present it during the conference. Alternatively, you can send your paper or extended abstract to this conference e-mail address.

The submission deadline is January 10, 2012. Acceptance decisions will be communicated by the end of January.

Organizers

Itai Ashlagi
Péter Biró
Federico Echenique
Bettina Klaus
Flip Klijn
Alvin Roth
Markus Walzl

Conference pictures from Jerusalem: Bob Aumann, Hilary Putnam, Eyal Winter, Avishai Margalit, Abraham Neyman, Sergiu Hart, Danny Kahneman, Ehud Kalai, Ed Lazear, and Manny Yaari

2012-01-01T04:38:00.010-05:00

Pictures from the conference in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Rationality Center in Jerusalem. (Click to enlarge...)

Bob Aumann and Hilary Putnam

Abraham Neyman

Avishai remembering Edna Margalit

Eyal Winter

Danny Kahneman

Sergiu Hart

Ed Lazear

Ehud Kalai

Manny Yaari and Eyal Winter

Marriage markets in transition

2011-12-31T05:42:00.001-05:00

There was a time when the generalization that husbands tended to be older, taller, more educated and higher earning than their wives covered more of the marriage market than it does today, as the educational and earnings attainments of women are rising, along with ages of first marriage. There's some academic work on this, and also discussion in the press, of which this is an example:
They Call It the Reverse Gender Gap

"The emergence of this cohort of high-earning young women and the increasing number of female breadwinners are transforming gender relationships, upending patterns of matchmaking, marriage and motherhood, creating a new conflict between the sexes, redefining the word “breadwinner” and inspiring tracts on the leveling of men’s roles.
...
“Some of these women had learned the hard way that when they went to bars, they were better off lying about what they did — saying that they were a cosmetologist or music teacher rather than a software consultant or lawyer,” Ms. Mundy said.

"Faced with a shrinking pool of men on their level, some young women are settling and marrying “down,” but others will jump on planes for “dating excursions” to cities like New York, San Francisco and Boston where the male market is more promising.
...
"This state of affairs is not confined to the United States. The trend is global. Japanese and South Korean men are importing brides from poorer Asian countries with traditional attitudes about marriage. In Spain, Ms. Mundy said, she found high-achieving women marrying men from progressive Northern European countries like Sweden, while Spanish men seek out immigrant wives from more conventional Spanish-speaking countries."

Matchmaking on a plane

2011-12-30T01:38:00.002-05:00

On those long overseas flights, picking a seatmate is a bit like picking a roommate, and KLM is on the case: Mile-high matchmaking: airline to let you choose your neighbour via Facebook

"The "meet and seat" service would allow passengers to see the Facebook or LinkedIn profiles of other flyers, who are also using the opt-in service, when selecting their seat."

HT: Ben Greiner

Three-way kidney exchange makes it to more hospitals

2011-12-29T01:12:00.003-05:00

Innovations diffuse, and the ability to do three-way kidney exchanges is showing up at more hospitals, as this story from North Carolina shows: Three given the gift of life for Christmas

"GREENVILLE, N.C. - Three people in the east were given the gift of life this Christmas.

"Doctors from Pitt County Memorial Hospital announced today what is believed to be the first successful six-person kidney exchange in the Carolinas.

"Chief of Transplant Surgery, Dr. Robert Harland says its the culmination of a process that has taken more than a year.

"Each of the recipients had a willing donor who was not a match, so by swapping donors they were all able to get the transplant."

More details of the three way exchange are given in this story.

For background papers, see

Saidman, Susan L., Alvin E. Roth, Tayfun Sönmez, M. Utku Ünver, and Francis L. Delmonico, " Increasing the Opportunity of Live Kidney Donation By Matching for Two and Three Way Exchanges," Transplantation, ,81, 5, March 15, 2006, 773-782.
Roth, Alvin E., Tayfun Sonmez , and M. Utku Unver, "Efficient Kidney Exchange: Coincidence of Wants in Markets with Compatibility-Based Preferences," (May, 2005. NBER Paper w11402), American Economic Review, 97, 3, June 2007, 828-851.

Couples on the job market

2011-12-28T01:20:00.000-05:00

Some blogospheric debate about hiring couples (centered on law schools, but generally applicable) is flagged by Dan Filler at the Faculty Lounge: here is an argument that it's a bad thing ("cronyism") to make special efforts to hire couples (and also to promote your students, incidentally). And here is a counterargument.

While I'm on the subject, the newsletter of the Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession (CSWEP) published a set of interviews (in Fall 09) on Navigating the Job Market as Dual Career Economists

Progress in the national kidney exchange pilot program

2011-12-27T05:50:00.003-05:00

There is recent modest but welcome progress in the effort to organize a Federally sponsored kidney exchange on the national level in the United States.

Ruthanne Hanto, who moved from NEPKE to UNOS this summer writes:
"15 transplants from sept 2011-dec 2011

Compared to 2 transplants oct 2010 - aug 2011

Progress

Happy New year!"

Here's the most recent UNOS press release dated Dec. 6:

"From September to mid-November, 10 transplants took place through the OPTN's national kidney paired donation (KPD) pilot program. Five more transplants are scheduled to occur by the end of 2011.

A six-way, non-directed donor chain was identified in August. Four of the transplants occurred between September and mid-November. The remaining two transplants are scheduled to take place by early December.
A non-directed donor chain resulted in three transplants in September, and a separate three-way exchange also was completed in September. An additional three-way exchange is scheduled to occur in December.
A free informational brochure has been developed to provide basic information to potential donors and recipients about the national program. Order printed copies of the brochure now >
Currently there are 86 transplant centers participating in the pilot program. For additional information about the program, or to seek information about participating, please consult the KPD page on the OPTN Web site or contact Ruthanne Hanto, RN, MPH, Program Manager, at kidneypaireddonation@unos.org. "

Rationality in Jerusalem

2011-12-26T04:57:00.002-05:00

The Center for Rationality at the Hebrew University is 20...December 28-31

CONFERENCE
The 20th Anniversary of the Center for the Study of Rationality
December 28-30, 2011
Program
Wednesday, December 28
Wise Auditorium, Edmond J. Safra Campus
9:30 – 10:00 Menahem Ben-Sasson, President – Opening Remarks
10:00 – 10:30 Menahem Yaari – Welcome
10:30 – 11:30 Ehud Kalai – “Learning and Stability in Small and in Large Games”
11:30 – 11:45 Break
11:45 – 12:45 Edward Lazear – “Rationality in Policy Making”
12:45 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:00 Alvin Roth – “Rationality and Irrationality in Market Design”
15:00 – 15:15 Break
Alumni Lectures in Elath Hall, Feldman Building, 2nd floor, Edmond J. Safra Campus
15:15 – 15:45 Florian Biermann – "Task Assignment with Autonomous and Controlled Agents"
15:45 – 16:15 Igal Milchtaich – "Representation of Finite Games as Network Congestion Games"
16:15 – 16:30 Break
16:30 – 17:00 Ro'i Zultan – "My Rational Journey from Psychology to Economics"
17:00 – 17:30 Nir Dagan – "A Coalitional Theory of Oligopoly" Thursday, December 29
Wise Auditorium, Edmond J. Safra Campus
10:00 – 10:15 Sarah Stroumsa , Rector – Opening Remarks
10:15 – 10:30 Avishai Margalit – "Edna Ullmann-Margalit's Contribution to the Study of Rationality"
10:30 – 11:30 Daniel Kahneman – "Cognitive Limitations and the Psychology of Science"
(talk in memory of Edna Ullmann-Margalit)
11:30 – 11:45 Break
11:45 – 12:45 Sergiu Hart– "Risk and Rationality"
12:45 – 14:00 Lunch
14:00 – 15:00 Avi Wigderson – "Randomness"
15:00 – 15:15 Break
Alumni Lectures in Elath Hall, Feldman Building, 2nd floor, Edmond J. Safra Campus
15:15 – 15:45 Eilon Solan – "Attainability in Repeated Games with Vector Payoffs"
15:45 – 16:00 Oscar Volij – "Some Memories"
16:00 – 16:15 Break
16:15 – 16:45 Uri Resnick – "Rationality and Foreign Policy Planning"
16:45 – 17:15 Motty Amar – "Reputable Brand Names Can Improve Product Efficacy"
Friday, December 30
Wise Auditorium, Edmond J. Safra Campus
10:00 – 11:00 Hilary Putnam – "Naive Realism and Qualia"
11:00 – 11:15 Break
11:15 – 12:15 Robert J. Aumann – "Who Are the Players?"

Choices confronting live kidney donors

2011-12-25T05:58:00.015-05:00

The choices confronting a live kidney donor aren't simple. Here's the story of a priest who wanted to be a non-directed donor to start a chain of many transplants, but decided to give to one of his parishioners instead. (One wonders if the two of them couldn't have been easily included in a chain...my guess is that this option wasn't proposed to them...)
Faith Matters: Thankful for his good health, Memphis priest willingly shares in 'act of gratitude'

"On Dec. 16, 2009, Father Val sat at his kitchen table and read a newspaper article about 13 patients who received new kidneys from donors they didn't know. It was the world's largest kidney exchange. "It's not like I'm doing anything courageous," one of the donors told The Associated Press. "If I don't donate, who will?"
...

". . . In the beginning of this process I knew that I wanted to donate a kidney and was very open to placing this donation on the National Kidney Registry for my kidney to be given to an undesignated recipient in need of a transplant. During the testing process, however, I realized that a Cathedral parishioner with a serious kidney illness might need a kidney donor."
...
". . . I knew that Ed already had a prospective kidney donor. I later learned that, during the medical tests, the prospective kidney donor found out that he was not a suitable candidate to donate a kidney. At the same time I learned how serious Ed's kidney failure is. Presently his kidneys are functioning only at 11%. As soon as I received word that I passed all the medical tests and am able to be a living kidney donor, I went to Ed and Jerri. Before that they had no idea that I was interested in being a living kidney donor. I then asked Ed if I could be his kidney donor."
*********

And here's the story of another donor who started a non-directed donor chain through the Alliance for Paired Donation: The Miracle of Life: How One Woman Turned Tragedy into the Ultimate Gift

What would the national kidney foundation like you to donate?

2011-12-24T05:04:00.000-05:00

Advertisement seen at St. Louis airport

Foreign universities in Qatar

2011-12-23T05:49:00.001-05:00

A story* about University College London setting up an outpost in Qatar makes clear some of the difficulties, and how they are addressing them.

"For several years American institutions have been a part of Qatar’s Hamad bin Khalifa University, the gas-rich Gulf state’s attempt to create a world-class institution in Doha. But now, in the surreal complex of buildings – some resembling giant white eggs, another an octagonal Aztec temple – the first British boxes of books are being unpacked.

"From August 2012, students will be able to enroll in master's courses at University College London Qatar. By focusing on archaeology and museum studies in a region where much of the study of antiquity is conducted, UCL thinks it can attract the caliber of academic needed to establish a credible center of research.
"Six American universities – Northwestern, Georgetown, Carnegie Mellon, Cornell, Texas A&M and Virginia Commonwealth – and one French business school, HEC Paris, have already set up shop at Hamad bin Khalifa University, which used to be known as Education City until it was renamed in May to honor Qatar’s Emir.

"How to convince the best academics to come to Doha "was one of the main questions when we talked to the U.S. universities three to four years ago," says Thilo Rehren, the director of UCL-Q, now in his new office on the second floor of Georgetown University’s state-of-the-art building. "They still have some problems recruiting good staff. They still have people at the end of their careers and others probably looking for a bit of sunshine," he says.

"For many subjects, for example the visual arts, Qatar is "not the center of the earth," Rehren acknowledges. But for museum studies, "it pretty much is," he argues. "You don’t have to fly seven hours to get to Syria or Egypt."

"So far, four faculty members are in situ. Later this year two Ph.D. students will fly in to join them, and they will be followed by three to five more in the course of the year. Over the next 12 months, the plan is to expand the number of research staff to eight, in addition to three postdoctoral students.

"All staff costs are covered by the Qatar Foundation and the Qatar Museums Authority. UCL is also going to train staff at the authority, who have "little formal training but years of experience," Rehren says."

*Times Higher Education, via Inside Higher Ed

Early admissions statistics

2011-12-22T05:10:00.000-05:00

This year's early admissions offers have been made (under both early action and binding early decision programs), and here are a few accounts of the results, which reflect Harvard and Princeton's renewed presence in the early part of the market.

Harvard College Admits 18 Percent of Early Applicants
"Harvard College announced Thursday that it has accepted 18 percent of the 4,231 early applicants to the Class of 2016. These 772 students mark the first group to be admitted early since the College eliminated its early admission process four-years ago."

Yale: "Though Harvard and Princeton reinstated early admission policies this fall for the first time in four years, Yale still received the greatest number of early applicants and posted the lowest acceptance rate among the three schools.
Yale admitted 15.7 percent of its early action applicants for the class of 2016 on Thursday evening — a slight increase from last year’s early acceptance rate of 14.5 percent, Dean of Undergraduate Admissions Jeffrey Brenzel said in a Saturday email. The total number of early applicants to the University declined about 18 percent from last year as Harvard and Princeton again allowed applicants to apply via single-choice early action. But Yale's program remained the most competitive this admissions cycle, with Harvard accepting 18 percent of its early applicants and Princeton admitting 21 percent.
...
"Cornell is the only Ivy League school not to have released its early admissions decisions yet. Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth and the University of Pennsylvania accepted 19 percent, 20.4 percent, 25.8 percent and 25.4 percent of their early applicants respectively, and Stanford admitted 12.8 percent of its early applicants."

Princeton: "The University has offered admission to 726 students out of a pool of 3,443 candidates for the Class of 2016, or 21 percent, through its new single-choice early action program. Decisions for early action admissions were released online Thursday afternoon."
"These students are expected to make up between 31 and 36 percent of the total number of applicants who will be admitted to the incoming freshman class."

Dartmouth: "The 465 students, who were informed of their acceptance via an online notification system at 3 p.m. on Dec. 9, will comprise approximately 40 percent of the class. The Class of 2016 will include approximately 1,110 students, which is comparable to size of the Class of 2015..."

Penn: "Despite receiving fewer applications than last year, Penn’s early decision acceptance rate declined by almost 1 percent, from 26.1 percent to 25.4 percent this year, Dean of Admissions Eric Furda announced Friday.
...
"Penn’s early decision applicant pool dropped from 4,571 last year to 4,526 this year.
"This year’s admitted students will comprise approximately 47 percent of the class, according to Furda.
...
"Furda explained that Princeton and Harvard universities’ early action programs this year “have had an impact” and that he expects some of the students who applied to those schools to apply to Penn in the regular decision round."

Stanford: "Stanford offered admission to 755 students who applied under early action this fall, with an acceptance rate of about 12.8 percent. The University received 5,880 early action applications for the Class of 2016, nearly reaching last year’s record 5,929 applications."

And binding early decision...

Duke: "This year, a record 2,641 students applied under Duke's Early Decision program, a 20 percent increase over last year's number. Those who apply via this process know they want to attend Duke and commit to enroll at the university if they receive an offer of admission in December.
"Students admitted through Early Decision this year will represent 38 percent of next fall's incoming class, which is expected to include 1,705 students. "

Columbia: "The number of Early Decision applications received by Columbia dropped 5.68 percent this year, a decrease that the Office of Undergraduate Admissions said was impacted by changes in the early application policies of “peer institutions.”

This year, Harvard University and Princeton University restored their early admission programs, which allow prospective students to apply early to only one college.

“The decrease in applications was influenced by decisions made by our peers, Harvard and Princeton,” Jessica Marinaccio, director of undergraduate admissions for Columbia College and SEAS, said.

Two Dutch TV presenters have each other for dinner

2011-12-21T05:45:00.000-05:00

Joshua Gans more or less dares me to blog about the following repugnant transaction: Dutch TV presenters cause cannibalism storm after eating each other's flesh:

"In a shocking twist to television cookery shows, two Dutch presenters are filmed eating each other's flesh for a TV show due to be aired on Dutch television."

I'm sure it will prompt lots of discussion (is it against the law? should it be? how about other transactions between consenting adults? how about the doctors who assisted in the small surgeries?), even if it turns out to be a hoax. (I can't help recalling a previous Dutch television hoax, about a dying woman who would choose on air to whom to donate her kidneys...)

Debate over school choice

2011-12-20T05:56:00.024-05:00

Yesterday's post discussed how it is difficult to create effective schools in poor neighborhoods: first class physical facilities aren't enough. However, school choice isn't uniformly seen as helping: recent editorials in Boston and New York have championed the idea of returning to something more like neighborhood schools. The theme seems to be that school choice is a poor substitute for having uniformly excellent local schools.

The Boston Globe ran a series of four editorials.

1. Boston Globe editorial: School-assignment plan — a relic in need of a full overhaul
"whenever officials reassess the Boston school-assignment plan, the busing crisis remains the touchpoint. Segregation was the original sin of the Boston schools - the conscious failure to invest in schools in poor, black neighborhoods - and remains the most oft-cited reason why the city should resist proposals to return the system to its neighborhood roots.
"Boston’s punishment is a daunting, time-consuming assignment process that drives away thousands of families - some to charter schools, some to Metco, and many out of the city entirely. It’s a plan that doesn’t remotely provide desegregation - with some schools more than 99 percent minority - but that officials are reluctant to change for fear of upsetting the fragile political equilibrium that sustains it.
"What remains is a system where students travel on buses to schools far from their homes, a daily migration that deprives them of playmates, consumes precious hours that could be devoted to learning, and costs the city $73 million - about 10 percent of the schools budget - for transportation alone.
"In addressing the sins of the past, the current assignment plan also masks the sins of the present. A formula so complicated that only the most sophisticated parents understand it, the plan combines parental choice, the luck of the lottery, and a built-in preference to keep siblings together. But it’s hard to escape the conclusion that the whole buckling contraption is designed to make up for the fact that about half of Boston’s schools rank in the bottom fifth on statewide tests."

2. Boston Globe editorial proposing smaller zones which "would give families a smaller range of choices, but make them more meaningful": Let students stay near homes — but offer choice as needed

3. Globe editorial on a successful pilot school: Leadership and flexibility, not buses, improve schools

4. Last in the series, Globe editorial imagining how a system of largely neighborhood schools should work: Future of Boston schools must reflect city’s transformation
""The Boston of the 1970s is long gone. What’s needed now is a return to normality, to a system where most kids go to school near their homes, and follow a predictable path to middle school. Those who seek a different experience - through the performing arts, two-way bilingual education, or intensive math and science, among other subjects - can find exciting options through magnet schools. Choice should be used to highlight the varied programs available in a big, urban system - not as a way to scramble the map, sending children on an hours-long odyssey in search of better principals and teachers."

The Bay State Banner summarizes their view of this debate: Superintendent to take on school assignment process
"The current school assignment process has been roundly criticized by parents in neighborhoods throughout the city. While many in the white community, including many city councilors, advocate for a return to a neighborhood schools system, where seats in any given school would be reserved for children who live in close proximity, many parents in the black community say they want better choices for their children."

NY Times op-ed: Why School Choice Fails, in which a Washington D.C. mom writes about how the process of closing failed schools left her neighborhood without any neighborhood schools.

And here's a NY Times letter in support of school choice: Does School Choice Improve Education?
"If access to high-performing schools has to come down to a number, better it be a lottery number than a ZIP code."

Swimming pools and school performance in Boston

2011-12-19T05:07:00.001-05:00

Schools' physical facilities aren't so highly correlated with their reading scores...To put it another way, building a modern new building in a poor crime-infested neighborhood isn't enough to do the job. But different aspects of a school appeal to different families (which is the idea behind promoting school choice...)
Inequities among Boston’s schools: Gaps in facilities, test scores, safety complicate the process

"The Perkins Elementary School in South Boston is barely visible behind rows of nondescript brick buildings inside the Old Colony public housing development. Students make do without the most basic amenities, eating breakfast and lunch at their desks, taking gym classes at a Boys & Girls Club, and checking out books at a neighborhood library.

"About three miles away in a crime-ridden Dorchester neighborhood, the Holland Elementary School stands like a beacon. Nestled among fruit trees, Holland sports two cafeterias that serve freshly prepared meals, an indoor basketball court, an Olympic-size heated swimming pool, a soundproof music room with red and white electric guitars, and a library with more than 7,000 books.

"The stark differences between these two schools extend well beyond their facilities. Perkins, with its bare-bones surroundings, often propels students in early grades to great academic heights on standardized tests, while Holland struggles to get students to understand reading and math fundamentals.
...
""An impressive facility often does not equate with a stellar academic program. Other schools with meager facilities, such as Bradley in East Boston, Hale in Roxbury, and Mozart in Roslindale, had some of the highest reading and math scores on last spring’s Massachusetts Comprehensive Assessment System exams in the third grade. By contrast, some schools with swimming pools - such as Hennigan in Jamaica Plain, Marshall in Dorchester, and Mildred Avenue in Mattapan - landed in the bottom.
...
""The disparities add an agonizing layer to the school-selection process, underway for the next school year, as parents weigh what matters most for their child’s education and happiness: A nice building or solid academics? An outstanding music program or rigorous science instruction? A school near home or one with an after-school program?

"THE UNEVEN distribution of great facilities and programs underpins Boston’s elaborate school-lottery system, which was designed to give students a chance of getting into the best schools, and is also the reason the process is so harrowing. Some students win, gaining access to one of the city’s best schools, while other deserving students are consigned to schools with poor records of achievement, substandard facilities, or both.

“The reality is there are not enough good schools,’’ said Kim Janey, senior project director for the Boston School Reform Initiative at Massachusetts Advocates for Children, a Boston nonprofit."
...
"As Tarso Ramos, a Roxbury father, scouted schools at one of the city’s annual “showcase of schools,’’ held last month at a Jamaica Plain school, he had already conceded that he and his wife may not find the dream school for their son.

“It’s like a series of trade-offs,’’ Ramos said of the school-selection process. “So you figure out the right mix and what you can live without.’’

Nonsimultaneous kidney exchange chains simplify the logistics

2011-12-18T05:24:00.000-05:00

There are lots of good reasons why nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donor (NEAD) chains are a good idea, and they have become common since the first one, reported by Rees et al., particularly because they permit more transplants to be accomplished.

But, another reason, as the following story makes clear, is just that they ease the logistics...
Second Patient Kidney Exchange Takes Place in NC

"The first of the surgeries, Dean’s laparoscopic nephrectomy, had been scheduled for 7:30 in the morning, but surgeon Deepak Vikraman didn’t start his work until nearly noon. “Things always start later than they’re supposed to,” Ellis said.

It was just logistical issues, he said. “And because that one was later, that pushed everything back,” Ellis said. “They just had to wait [to do the second set or surgeries] until they got all the logistics straightened out.”

Could the Church of England declare finance to be repugnant?

2011-12-17T05:31:00.000-05:00

It looks like they might try: Church leaders accuse bankers of losing their 'moral moorings'

"..."It is hard to imagine a more powerful way of telling someone that they are of little value than to pay them one-third of 1% of your salary," he said.

"Among the ill effects of very large income differences between rich and poor are that they weaken community life and make societies less cohesive."

"He said that "Queen's honours" – meaning peerages, knighthoods and other official honours – should not be given "to those who have already rewarded themselves handsomely".

Kidney transplants in the U.S. prison system

2011-12-16T05:11:00.000-05:00

The recent insider trading conviction of hedge fund manager Raj Rajaratnam sheds some light on the situation facing U.S. prisoners with kidney disease: Rajaratnam Said to Be Assigned to Massachusetts Medical Prison

"Raj Rajaratnam, the hedge fund manager sentenced to 11 years in prison for insider trading, was assigned to a federal prison medical center in Massachusetts, according to a person familiar with the matter.
...
"Rajaratnam, who says he has health problems including diabetes and will probably need dialysis and eventually a kidney transplant, was instead assigned by the Federal Bureau of Prisons to the Federal Medical Center Devens, according to the person, who declined to be identified because the matter isn’t public.
...
"Devens provides dialysis to about 85 inmates, with the capacity for as many as 125, Howard said.

Since 2004, 15 Devens inmates have received kidney transplants, performed at theUniversity of Massachusetts, she said.

Prisoners who receive permission from the Bureau of Prisons enter the national organ donor list on the same basis as patients outside prison, according to Howard. The prison has about 31 inmates who received transplants before they were in custody, she said.

“Mr. Rajaratnam has medical conditions that are managed routinely by the Federal Bureau of Prisons,” Howard said in her affidavit."

Organ donation in Wales

2011-12-15T05:22:00.000-05:00

Will Wales change from opt-in to opt-out on deceased organ donation? The discussion continues...

Presumed consent organ donation to be Welsh law by 2015
"The Welsh government says it plans to have a new law in place for presumed consent of organ donation by 2015.

"The legislation would require people to opt out of donating their organs when they die, rather than opting in by signing the donor register.
...
"Opponents say they do not believe it will work and it will hit trust in the system but supporters claim it will save more lives.

"The Welsh government has told the BBC Wales Politics Show that it is planning a system of "soft" presumed consent where family members would still be consulted after a person's death."
******************

Drop organ law says Archbishop of Wales Dr Barry Morgan
"The Archbishop of Wales is urging the Welsh Government to ditch plans for presumed consent for organ donation."
*****************

A call has been made for more research into presumed consent for organ donation as Wales is poised to become the first part of the UK to adopt it.
"A University of Ulster team has found Wales consistently supplies more donors and donations than other UK nations.

"But they say that laws on presumed consent across Europe show mixed results and need further research.

"Presumed consent campaigners say they have raised awareness of the issue, but opponents warn that it could backfire.

"The Ulster team analysed data from NHS Blood & Transplant for all four UK countries between 1990 to 2009, and compared data on registration and donation from other European countries.

The research found that Wales "consistently outperformed" its UK neighbours, both in terms of the percentage of people registered and its organ donation rate, which had been higher than the UK average for most of the past 20 years.

"The authors recommended more research on the issue of presumed consent, which would mean people would have to opt out of becoming donor, or their organs may be used.

The Welsh government is proposing to introduce the system with a proviso that family members should be consulted.

"The idea has the support of bodies like the Kidney Wales Foundation, but it has been criticised by some, such as the Archbishop of Wales, Barry Morgan, who said organs should be donated as a gift and not as an "asset of the state."

"Spain was found to have doubled organ donation rates with a such a system of "soft" presumed consent, but Sweden - which presumes consent - had a similar rate to Germany and Denmark where informed consent operates, as in the UK.

"Further exploration of underlying regional differences and temporal variations in organ donation, as well as organisational issues, practices and attitudes that may affect organ donation, needs to be undertaken before considering legislation to admit presumed consent," the report says.

"Comparison of EU nations, and particularly Spain, indicates that improvement of organ donation rates is unlikely to be achieved by introducing new legislation alone."

Papers on matching by job market candidates

2011-12-14T05:08:00.006-05:00

Matching is popular on the economics job market this year, including interesting papers from students other than mine. Here are a few that caught my attention (please let me know of those I've missed).

Azar Abizada at Rochester: Pairwise Stability for Assignment Problem with Budget Constraints
Abstract: We study assignment problem with fixed budget constraints. Examples include assigning students to graduate schools when colleges have fixed budget, a faculty member with a fixed research fund hiring research assistants, a manager assigning workers to different projects where each project has fixed total benefit, assigning post-doctoral candidates to universities with fixed budgets etc. In graduate college admissions, each college has a fixed amount of money to distribute as stipends. Each college has strict preferences overs individual students that can be extended to the group of students. On the other hand, each student is matched with at most one college and receives a stipend from it. Each student has quasi-linear preferences over college-stipend bundles.
Differently from earlier literature, in this paper, we specify a fixed budget for each college. One other different feature of our model is that colleges value money only to the extend that it allows them to enroll better students. We show that introducing budget constraint results in loosing some of the previous results in the literature. We define pairwise stability and show that a pairwise stable allocation always exists. We construct an algorithm. The rule defined through this algorithm always selects a pairwise stable allocation. This rule is also strategy-proof for students: no student can ever benefit from misrepresenting his preferences. Finally, we show that starting from an arbitrary allocation, there exist a sequence of allocations, each allocation being obtained from the previous one by "satisfying" a blocking pair, such that the final allocation is pairwise stable.

Gabriel Carroll at MIT: A General Equivalence Theorem for Allocation of Indivisible Objects
Abstract: We consider markets in which n indivisible objects are to be allocated to n agents. A number of recent papers studying such markets have shown various interesting equivalences between randomized mechanisms based on trading and randomized mechanisms based on serial dictatorship. We prove a very general equivalence theorem from which many previous equivalence results immediately follow, and we give several new applications. Our general result also sheds some light on why these equivalences hold by presenting the existing serial-dictatorship-based mechanisms as randomizations of a general mechanism which we call serial dictatorship in groups. The proof technique, a hybrid of explicit bijective and enumerative methods, is cleaner than previous bijective proofs.

Songzi Du at Stanford GSB: Unraveling and Chaos in Matching Markets, with Yair Livne. (Job Market Paper)

Abstract: We show that the timing of transactions is difficult to coordinate in large matching markets. In our model, some agents have the option of matching early before others arrive. Even with a market mechanism that implements a stable matching after all agents arrive, and without any discounting or risk aversion, some agents have incentives to match early. We show that as the market gets large, on average approximately one quarter of all agents have strict incentives to match early, independent of the underlying distributions of types and utility functions. Moreover, as the market gets large, with probability tending to 1 there is no dynamic matching scheme that is stable, even though the market would be stable if it was static.

SangMok Lee at Cal Tech: Incentive Compatibility of Large Centralized Matching Markets
Abstract: This paper discusses the strategic manipulation of stable matching mechanisms. We find that the expected proportion of agents who may obtain a significant utility gain from manipulation vanishes as a market becomes large. This result reconciles the success of stable matching mechanisms in practice with the theoretical concerns about strategic manipulation. We also introduce new techniques from the theory of random bipartite graphs for the analysis of large matching markets.

Taro Kumano at Washington U. Stability and Efficiency in the General-Priority-based Assignment (2011), [joint with Aytek Erdil], Preliminary draft

Abstract: A school choice problem is a priority-based assignment problem. A priority ranking of a school in practice inherently exhibits indifference relations among the subsets of the set of students. We introduce a general class of priority rankings over sets of students, which captures both indifferences and substitutability. Our notion of substitutability ensures the existence of stable assignments. The characterization of efficient priority structures implies that there is usually a conflict between efficiency and stability. Thus we turn to the problem of finding a constrained efficient assignment, and give an algorithm which solves the problem for any priority structure that falls in our class. In an important application, school priorities that care about affirmative action can be captured by our model, but not previous models in the literature.

Ayse Yazici from Rochester: Random stable rules and Nash Equilibrium in two-sided matching problems
Abstract: We study many-to-one matching problems with firm preferences that satisfy no complementarity and respect the absolute desirability of workers. We allow for randomization to achieve procedural fairness in centralized matching markets. Randomization is also a useful device to explore decentralized markets for lotteries may be considered to represent the frictions in these markets. We analyze stochastic dominance (sd) Nash equilibrium in the game induced by a random stable matching rule. We prove that a unique match is obtained as the outcome of each sd-Nash equilibrium. Individual rationality is a necessary and sufficient condition for an equilibrium outcome while stability is achieved as the outcome of an equilibrium where firms behave truthfully. We also study sd-Nash equilibrium of the game induced by a stable matching rule in many-to-many matching problems under the same domain of preferences. We show that all results but the stability of the equilibrium outcome holds in these problems. Our results provide an implementation of the individually rational correspondence when all agents are strategic and of the stable correspondence when only workers are strategic.

Modern romance in China

2011-12-13T05:34:00.001-05:00

World's largest dating event sees 20,000 Chinese search for love

The headline speaks for itself, but the article reveals some local touches.

"At least a third of the attendees were parents, either chaperoning their children, acting as go-betweens for the more bashful, or brokering deals with other parents for arranged romances.
...
"The attendees, meanwhile, had some very rigid ideas about what they were looking for. Men said they wanted a "kind-hearted" wife, not too beautiful and flighty, but modest and homely. The "minimum requirement" for the women meanwhile was straight-forward: a man with his own house, and preferably also a car.
...
"Xue Xiaoyue, meanwhile, said she was already considered an old maid in her home village at the age of 27. "In my village in Anhui, all the girls marry at 20. Any unmarried woman older than 25 leaves town because of the shame. And these days, at 27, I dread going home for the holidays because of the badgering from my parents and relatives." She had travelled 300 miles to attend the event, but still had a strict set of requirements. "I used to be more unreasonable about what I expected, and I put my previous boyfriends under a lot of pressure to do better financially. These days I still would not marry a man without a house, but a joint mortgage might be acceptable," she said."

Friend or food? Horse meat for human consumption, Congress and PETA

2011-12-12T05:26:00.003-05:00

Regarding the ban on slaughtering horses to produce horse meat for human consumption, see these previous posts. There have been a rash of recent stories about the recent Congressional reversal on this, including this unlikely story (as reported by the Christian Science Monitor): Lifting horse slaughter ban: Why PETA says it's a good idea

""Congress has found what many may think of as an unexpected supporter in its decision to bring back horse slaughter facilities to the US after a 5-year-ban: People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), the often-controversial animal rights group known for campaigns like “fur is murder."

“It's quite an unpopular position we've taken,” Ms. Newkirk says. “There was a rush to pass a bill that said you can't slaughter them anymore in the United States. But the reason we didn't support it, which sets us almost alone, is the amount of suffering that it created exceeded the amount of suffering it was designed to stop.”

"While PETA says the optimal solution is to ban both consumption slaughter and export of horses, it supports reintroducing horse slaughterhouses in the US, especially if accompanied by a ban on exporting any horses at all to other countries.

"There are now plans in over half a dozen states in the South and West to begin horse slaughter processing, a business worth about $65 million a year before Congress defunded the inspection regime. While unpalatable to most Americans, horse meat is eaten in Mexico, Asia, and parts of Europe.

"As Newkirk predicted, the end to domestic slaughter didn't curtail the number of horses being slaughtered for consumption, but, according to a GAO report, may have led to more inhumane treatment of old, abandoned, or neglected equines as greater numbers were instead shipped to Mexico or Canada for slaughter where the USDA doesn't have the authority to monitor the horses' conditions.

"The number of horses exported from the U.S. to Mexico, for example, increased by 660 percent since the de facto ban, the Government Accounting Office reported in June. Almost 138,000 horses were shipped out of the country for slaughter in 2010, compared to the 104,899 horses that were slaughtered domestically in the year before the ban took effect.

“It's hard to call [the end of the horse slaughter ban] a victory, because it's all so unsavory,” Newkirk says. “The [funding] bill didn't mean any horses were spared, but it does mean the amount of suffering is now reduced again.”
******

Zhenyu Lai passes on the following related story, concerning the recent Congressional action (and which includes a video with the headline "Friend or Food?"): Horses could soon be slaughtered for meat in U.S.

""Congress has lifted a de facto ban on the slaughter of horses, a move hailed by Missouri farmers and state political leaders who say the prohibition had inadvertently caused more harm to the animals than good.

"But some animal-rights activists decried the little-noticed provision, which sailed to passage earlier this month and was signed into law by President Barack Obama on Nov. 18. And they vowed to keep the issue alive, pressing for an outright prohibition of horse slaughtering in the U.S."
********
And Divya Kirti points me to a story that ends with 5 Reasons Not to Eat Horse Meat
including 4. Most Americans oppose horse slaughter.
*******
And also this one (which seems to ignore most of the recent history that involved the just repealed ban): The Empathy Test: Why Nobody Cares About Horse Slaughter
*********

And in other horse related repugnance news, Push to Ban New York Carriage Horses Gains Steam
"After campaigning for decades, animal rights advocates are gaining support for legislation that would ban the hansom cabs..."

A heterodox economist looks (disapprovingly) at market design

2011-12-11T05:25:00.000-05:00

Ana Santos writes, not-entirely-unsympathetically, about choice architecture and market design, based on her reading of Thaler and Sunstein's book "Nudge...," and my survey article "The Economist as Engineer..." Her remarks include a novel (to me) objection to creating institutions in which individual goals don't conflict with social welfare: in the absence of such conflict, your "ethical muscles" would grow lax from not needing to be used. (Really; see the end of this post...)

Ana C. Santos, "Behavioural and experimental economics: are they really transforming economics?," CAMBRIDGE JOURNAL OF ECONOMICS 35, 4, 705-728, JUL 2011

"The purpose of choice architecture is to prepare contexts of choice to help individuals make better choices, as judged by individuals themselves, or by society as a whole (Thaler and Sunstein, 2003, 2008). Design economics is in turn devoted to the conception of speciﬁc allocation mechanisms that aim at coordinating individual actions for the accomplishment of the goals set by the designer (Roth, 2002). Rather than assuming that markets emerge spontaneously and automatically generate efﬁcient allocations of resources, design economics puts at the forefront the complex social engineering processes involved in the building of markets and market-like allocation mechanisms that determine individual outcomes and the aggregate results that are obtained by having people interacting under those mechanisms."
...
"Not only do these proposals retain the fundamental principles of neoclassical economics—rationality and efﬁciency—they also continue to promote their expansion to various domains of social life. Through the architecture of contexts of choice and the design of market mechanisms, economists are putting their expertise at the service of individual rationality and economic efﬁciency, within and beyond the traditional domain of economics.

"Choice architecture and design economics promote a particular version of economics imperialism that goes beyond the mere export of its concepts to territories traditionally occupied by disciplines other than economics. They actually aim at inculcating economic calculus in human deliberation and introducing market-like forms of social interaction where they have been absent. In other words, what is at stake here is the deliberate attempt to make society more like its description in neoclassical economic theories, i.e. the performativity of economics (Mackenzie, 2006; Callon, 2007; Mackenzie et al., 2007). Whether or not they have succeeded in this endeavour is an empirical question that cannot be addressed here. For now, it is sufﬁce to note that while taking into account predictable behavioural irrationalities and the opportunistic behaviour of economic agents in their policy proposals, both choice architecture and design economics retain and promote the expansion of the neoclassical concepts of rationality and efﬁciency in their market-based solutions."

The article includes a novel argument against aligning individual incentives with social welfare:
"In markets people are less compelled to follow non-market norms and values. By aligning self-interest with the interests of others, market mechanisms moreover obviates the need for ethical reasoning; as a result, individuals no longer have the opportunity, as Steve Turnbull puts it, to ‘ﬂex their ethical muscles’ (Frohlich and Oppenheimer, 2003, p. 290). Individuals’ ability to behave in accordance with non-market norms and values, then, will be seriously compromised. On the contrary, living with the tension between the best strategy from a rational, self-interested point of view and the ethically best strategy keeps the ethic imperative active."

Naked hiking is legally repugnant in at least one Swiss canton

2011-12-10T05:49:00.000-05:00

Switzerland seems to be a land of contradictions.
The BBC reports, Swiss can ban naked hiking, court rules

"Switzerland's highest court has ruled that local authorities can impose fines on people hiking nude in the Alps.

The federal court threw out an appeal by a man who was fined after hiking past a family picnic area with no clothes on.

"Judges said the eastern canton (region) of Appenzell had been entitled to uphold a law on public decency.

"They said the ban on naked hiking was only a marginal infringement on personal freedom.

...

"The BBC's Imogen Foulkes in Geneva says naked hiking is an increasingly popular pastime in Switzerland.

"However, Appenzell is a deeply devout and conservative canton - it only granted women the right to vote in 1990 - and the influx of naked hikers has offended many local people, she adds."

College admissions, exams, and "clearing" in Britain

2011-12-09T05:19:00.000-05:00

The Telegraph reports: Academic condemns 'tortuous' university admissions

"Mary Beard, the Cambridge University classics professor, said the admissions system employed in Britain was “more difficult and stressful than it should be”.

...

"The comments were made after the Universities and Colleges Admissions Service proposed a sweeping overhaul of the current system.

"They are planning to allow students to apply for places after receiving their results for the first time in a move that would lead to A-levels being brought forward and candidates choosing courses over the summer.

...

"Currently, students are supposed to apply to Oxbridge by October – around a year before courses start – and to other universities in January. Candidates are then given provisional offers based on the proviso that they gain predicted exam grades the following summer.

"Those who fail to score high enough in A-levels and other qualifications are eligible for “clearing” – the system that matches students to spare places.

"But writing on BBC online, Prof Beard said: “More than anything, it is the bizarre timetable that makes the application process so preoccupying.

“When we say in January or February that someone ‘got in’ to their chosen university, we don't actually mean that. We mean that they will have got in if they achieve the grades demanded by the university in their summer exam, which even if all goes well, drags out the nail biting for a good six months.”

"She added: “If it doesn't go well and they don't get the grades, they enter a whole new round of applications in August.

“This is a frenetic process, with applicants tracking down the remaining unfilled places by email and phone - then being given maybe a few hours to accept a place for a course they haven't really explored at a university they know little about.”

Buying and selling pensions

2011-12-08T05:03:00.000-05:00

Does buying future payoffs on someone else's pension become more or less repugnant if that person is in financial distress? (This is an aspect of repugnant transactions and markets that is one of the toughest to focus on, having to do on the one hand with the motivation for the transaction and on the other with ideas about coercion and exploitation...)

The WSJ reports on the mainstreaming of investment opportunities to buy the income stream from pensions: Investing in a Stranger's Retirement

"The burgeoning business of investing in someone else's pension has never been easier—or more controversial and risky.

"For pensioners who are eager to sell, websites beckon with names such as BuyYourPension.com and pension4cash.com. Financial middlemen then bundle the information from pensioners into spreadsheets that are supplied to financial advisers for their clients.
...
"No one keeps track of how many pensions are turned into instant cash, and the number for now is believed to be small. But in recent months, websites have proliferated, and obscure middlemen far from Wall Street have ramped up efforts to win over financial advisers to the concept. They are finding some acceptance among those who favor alternative investments as part of an overall diversified portfolio.

"It's becoming more of a staple part of our business," said Daniel Cordoba, founder of Asset Exchange Strategies LLC, a Leander, Texas, financial-advisory firm that has sold a handful of pension-payment deals to clients in recent weeks. "There's a starvation for yield" with most bonds paying little interest, and clients are scared of the volatile stock markets, he added.
...
"In general, pension deals thread the needle of federal law that discourages the assignment of pensions for public policy reasons, according to court rulings. In a preliminary ruling in August, a California state-court judge said that military-pension transactions by Structured Investments Co., which has been in business since the 1990s, are "prohibited and unenforceable."

Brett Rubin, a lawyer for Structured, said the firm believes its transactions are proper. Over the years, its agreements have been enforced by other courts, including a U.S. bankruptcy court, according to court filings.
...
"Several buyers of pension payments who were interviewed by The Wall Street Journal declined to be identified because they didn't want to be seen as profiting from anyone's financial desperation.

"I had misgivings at first," said an investor in Philadelphia who this summer bought seven years of pension payments from a retired sailor. She forwarded $50,000, to be repaid in monthly installments that includes 6% annual interest.

"As part of the deal, the woman got some information about the seller, including that he needed the money to escape foreclosure. The retired sailor's "distress" bothered her, she said, but she "concluded this would help him save the house."

Legacies in college admissions

2011-12-07T05:19:00.000-05:00

The NY Times writes about the burden of having a parent who went to an Ivy League college: Being a Legacy Has Its Burden

But, for all the angst and pressure, there are some compensations:

"...among legacy applicants for Princeton’s class of 2015, 33 percent of those offered a spot were the children of alumni. Harvard generally admits 30 percent, and Yale says it admits 20 percent to 25 percent. For all three, the overall rate is in the single digits.

"According to “The Impact of Legacy Status on Undergraduate Admissions at Elite Colleges and Universities,” a study of 30 colleges published in June in Economics of Education Review, the closer the relation, the greater the benefit: children of parents who attended a school as an undergraduate saw a 45 percentage point increase in the probability of admission; for children of graduate students — or those who had a relative other than a parent attend — the increase in probability was about 14 percentage points.

"Over the long haul, though, legacy enrollment has declined. In 1980, 24 percent of Yale’s freshman class had a parent who had attended, but in the class of 2014, 13 percent were legacy students. At most Ivy League schools, 10 percent to 15 percent of those who end up enrolling are the children of former students.

"And with college enrollment at an all-time high, admittance has become tougher for everyone; acceptance rates are far lower than a generation ago. An applicant from the Harvard class of 1985 would have faced an admission rate of 16 percent, compared with 6 percent for the class of 2015."

A kidney donor argues that selling kidneys should be legal

2011-12-06T11:32:00.000-05:00

An op-ed in today's NY Times, by Alexander Berger, scheduled to donate a kidney on Thursday: Why Selling Kidneys Should Be Legal

He'll start a non-directed donor chain, but donors are still in desperately short supply.

Here's his market design argument:

"It has been illegal to compensate kidney donors in any way since 1984. The fear behind the law — that a rich tycoon could take advantage of someone desperately poor and persuade that person to sell an organ for a pittance — is understandable. But the truth is that the victims of the current ban are disproportionately African-American and poor. When wealthy white people find their way onto the kidney waiting list, they are much more likely to get off it early by finding a donor among their friends and family (or, as Steve Jobs did for a liver transplant in 2009, by traveling to a region with a shorter list). Worst of all, the ban encourages an international black market, where desperate people do end up selling their organs, without protection, fair compensation or proper medical care.

"A well-regulated legal market for kidneys would not have any of these problems. It could ensure that donors were compensated fairly — most experts say somewhere in the ballpark of $50,000 would make sense. Only the government or a chosen nonprofit would be allowed to purchase the kidneys, and they would allocate them on the basis of need rather than wealth, the same way that posthumously donated organs are currently distributed. The kidneys would be paid for by whoever covers the patient, whether that is their insurance company or Medicare. Ideally, so many donors would come forward that no patient would be left on the waiting list.

In the end, paying for kidneys could actually save the government money; taxpayers already foot the bill for dialysis for many patients through Medicare, and research has shown that transplants save more than $100,000 per patient, relative to dialysis."

The role of recruiting in hiring and career choice

2011-12-06T05:44:00.000-05:00

Matching is the part of economics that studies who gets what, for things that are not allocated entirely by price. So, if there's an application or admission or recruitment or selection process, we're probably in the domain of matching.

A recent article by Marina Keegan, a Yale undergraduate, points out that the high percentage of Ivy undergrads who go into consulting and finance may have to do with how well those places recruit: Another View: The Science and Strategy of College Recruiting.

She writes:
"Sometime between freshman fall and senior spring, an insane number of students decide – one way or another – that entering the banking industry makes a whole lot of sense. A few weeks ago I interviewed over 20 Yalies to try to figure out why.

"What I found was somewhat surprising: the clichéd pull of high salaries is only part of the problem. Few college seniors have any idea how to “get a job,” let alone what that job would be. Representatives from the consulting and finance industries come to schools early and often – providing us with application timelines and inviting us to information sessions in individualized e-mails. We’re made to feel special and desired and important."
********

Vikram Rao, who brought the article to my attention, writes
"... I thought one of the interesting points of the article is that these companies do a very good job of getting to the best students quickly (seems like an unraveling market) by recruiting in the fall, spending lots of money on recruiting, and presenting students with a well-defined process. I know from personal experience having gone to Princeton that they also do a very good job of outlining the parameters of the job market (i.e. if you intern with us/apply for full time with us at this time, then you will receive an offer at time X for Y dollars with roughly Z probability). Their interview process is also extremely efficient. The article makes the point that most college students don't really know how to find a job. These companies eliminate a lot of this uncertainty by having such well-established recruiting timetables and processes.

"Having just gone through the post-collegiate job market, I can say that this alone is worth a lot. In addition to lower salaries, the majority of other professions do not present such a clean-cut "do this, then this, then this" approach to recruiting and instead require that you go through contacts or wait long periods of time without much certainty to get a job. The banks and consulting firms also do a good job of convincing applicants that "if you work here, you can do a, b, or c afterwards", whereas many other industries do not make such claims. This is an interesting market design perspective on I-banking and consulting recruiting - I don't think America's youth is suddenly much greedier than it once was and is drawn by large salaries. Certainly some people are, but not all. I think what the I-banking and consulting firms really offer is 1) they recruit early, 2) they offer a very well-understood process towards getting a job, and 3) a clear vision of your future (I make no claim as to whether or not this vision is accurate or not). Graduates of top schools are used to getting results when they put their minds to something and tend not to like uncertainty. "
******

A similar view, from the point of view of what career counseling offices do, is expressed by Peter Bozzo, writing in the Harvard Crimson: Profits and Bridges

"The more intriguing question is why students—many of whom, like me, were inspired to create during their years at Harvard—eschew careers in the more “creative” professions and pursue work in the financial world. Why are we creating profits instead of bridges?

I think that much of the answer has to do with the resources devoted to career counseling for students whose interests point them toward occupations outside the world of finance and consulting. Certainly some students enter this world because of the financial benefits, but for others it’s simply the most visible and defined career path after graduation. Students can meet with recruiters and interview on campus; the Office of Career Services provides extensive counseling for undergraduates pursuing finance or consulting careers. Many students work in internships during the summer after their junior year; by the end of the summer some have job offers in hand and can go through senior year with defined post-graduation plans while their friends frantically search for job listings and interview opportunities.

"Searching for a career outside finance or consulting often comes with more uncertainty than searching for a career within this profession. As a result, students often need to be counseled extensively when searching for opportunities in non-finance fields. Opportunities for such counseling currently exist at Harvard, but they often aren’t advertised extensively and can be overshadowed by the highly visible recruiters who descend on campus each year. The OCS could more effectively highlight its counseling opportunities for students interested in engineering, politics, or academia and could more aggressively reach out to students interested in these fields. Currently, OCS’s extensive finance career counseling services are not an example of a response to students’ demand for careers in these fields; instead, the supply of these services inflates demand for careers that might not otherwise be as attractive to students.

"As seniors near their thesis deadlines and eventually their graduation dates, thoughts of post-college plans inevitably hang over their heads. Right now, the ease of enter the consulting and finance fields means that students with diverse interests and creative impulses are streamlined into these professions, even if they’re more willing—and more suited—to entering other occupations. So why are we creating profits instead of bridges? It’s not because we’re uncreative; it’s because profits—and the careers associated with them—simply come easier."
***********
The Occupy Harvard movement seems to agree: Occupy Harvard Rally for Free Speech Targets Goldman Sachs Recruiting Event

*********
Of course, recruiting isn't something that can only be done by some kinds of employers.Teach for America is also known for the good job it does: see my recent post on that...

Teach for America's recruiting at Harvard

********

And here's a report by Bryan Caplan on a paper about what hiring looks like (in contrast) at firms whose recruiters look at applications while commuting on the train and in other stolen moments :
How Elite Firms Hire: The Inside Story

The blackest of kidney black markets

2011-12-05T05:55:00.000-05:00

Can some black markets be blacker than others? Two longtime observers of black markets for kidney transplants nominate some.

Ethan Gutmann writes chillingly of The Xinjiang Procedure: Beijing’s ‘New Frontier’ is ground zero for the organ harvesting of political prisoners.

"Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.

"With the acceleration of Chinese medical expertise over the last decade, organs once considered scraps no longer went to waste. It wasn’t public knowledge exactly, but Chinese medical schools taught that many otherwise wicked criminals volunteered their organs as a final penance.

"Right after the first shots the van door was thrust open and two men with white surgical coats thrown over their uniforms carried a body in, the head and feet still twitching slightly. The young doctor noted that the wound was on the right side of the chest as he had expected. When body #3 was laid down, he went to work. "

*****

And Nancy Scheper-Hughes writes of The Rosenbaum Kidney Trafficking Gang, and of kidney black markets more broadly (as well as of her difficulties in getting others to see these things as she sees them).

"Some of the victims of US organs trafficking are bonded servants from Syria and Jordan brought into the US to provide kidneys to their patron royal families from the Gulf States. The Cleveland Clinic has a transplant wing that for many years has catered to these so-called “transplant tourists.” UCLA had its heyday with wealthy Japanese Yakuza crime “family members” who were given priority for liver transplants from the UNOS waiting list, livers that technically belonged to US citizens.

"So, Rosenbaum’s network, though extensive, represents only one of many forms of transplant trafficking into and out of the United States. Transplant trafficking is a public secret within the transplant profession, something that everyone knows about but which within the corporatist culture of the transplant profession — as secretive as the Vatican — is never discussed.
...
"Caught in the dragnet Rosenbaum admitted that he charged a lot to set up these illegal transplants in some of the best hospitals on the east coast, including Mount Sinai in NYC , Albert Einstein in Philadelphia, and Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
...
"Nobody cared about, or even believed in, human trafficking for organs. I went to the media, to CBS, to 60 Minutes and then to 48 Hours which did send an investigative reporter, Avi Cohan, to meet me in Israel where we spoke to patients who had had “undercover” transplants at hospitals in NYC Philadelphia, the Bay Area, and Los Angeles. CBS decided not to do the exposé. I was stumped. No one wanted to accuse surgeons, or prevent a suffering patient from getting a transplant, even with an illegally procured kidney from a displaced person from abroad. The Israeli origins of the trafficking network did not help either. It smacked of bias, blood libel, or worse. “Don’t Indians and Pakistanis broker more kidneys than Israelis”, I was asked? Why pick on Israel?
...
"What I imagine is that the complicit surgeons loved the Rosenbaum option because they didn’t have to go through UNOS, the United Network for Organ Sharing, which until 2007, had nothing to do with living donors, related or unrelated. Hospital administrators loved it because foreign patients paid cash so there was no waiting for Medicare or insurance premiums. And there was minimal responsibility for the aftercare of the recipients or their kidney providers. Both were speedily returned to their respective communities and countries. Should they ever get caught red-handed, surgeons can cite patient confidentiality (their privacy oath), the hospitals could pretend they had been duped, the transplant coordinators could say that they followed the transplant protocols for living donors, but they are not, after all, detectives. Everybody wins. Lives were ‘saved’, transplant surgeons got to do what they do best, poor people got a ‘bonus’ for being charitable with their ‘spare’ kidneys, and everybody was happy.
...
"Meanwhile, complicit transplant doctors collude and protect each other, while the best ones tried to fix the problem from inside the profession without the help of the DOJ or the courts getting involved. Bioethicists argue endlessly about the “ethics” of what is in fact a crime and a medical human rights abuse. Economists and moral philosophers launch arguments based on rational choice theory for regulation rather than prosecution, as if prosecutions were going on every day. In fact, as the Rosenbaum history shows so well, human trafficking for organs is a protected crime. It is protected by the charisma and awe-inspiring ‘ miracle’ of transplant. The Rosenbaum guilty plea is the first prosecution in the United States for organs trafficking. On February 2nd Rosenbaum could be sentenced to five to 12 years in prison and a fine for illegally brokering organs in New Jersey. But the larger and deeper story of his international kidney dealings, his hired traffickers, kidney hunters, ‘enforcers’, money laundering operations, false charity organizations, Medicare fraud is yet to be told. And in the meantime, “life saving” for some at the cost of diminishing the lives of others ,the invisible kidney sellers of Chernobyl, Kiev, Nazareth, or the Negev desert, will continue undeterred.

Kidney sales and trafficking

2011-12-04T05:29:00.001-05:00

There have been a number of recent stories about criminal organ-trafficking rings around the world. Here's a long quote from the one that seems most credible, from Bloomberg (in which Frank Delmonico is among those quoted), followed by links to two related stories.

Organ Gangs Force Poor to Sell Kidneys for Desperate Israelis
"Aliaksei Yafimau shudders at the memory of the burly thug who threatened to kill his relatives. Yafimau, who installs satellite television systems in Babrujsk, Belarus, answered an advertisement in 2010 offering easy money to anyone willing to sell a kidney.

He saw it as a step toward getting out of poverty. Instead, Yafimau, 30, was thrust into a dark journey around the globe that had him, at one point, locked in a hotel room for a month in Quito, Ecuador, waiting for surgeons to cut out an organ, Bloomberg Markets magazine reports in its December issue.

...

"Organ trafficking is on the rise, as desperate people seek transplants in a world that doesn’t have enough donors. About 5,000 people sell organs on the black market each year, according to Francis Delmonico, an adviser on transplants to the World Health Organization.

It’s against the law to buy or sell an organ in every country except Iran, says Delmonico, who is president-elect of the Montreal-basedTransplantation Society, which lobbies governments to crack down on illicit procedures.

‘Exploit Shortages’

“There have been successes fighting organ trafficking around the world,” Delmonico says. “But organ trafficking continues to flourish because criminals exploit shortages of organ donors.”

Bloomberg Markets reported in June that U.S. citizens and others from the Americas suffering from kidney failure were going to Nicaragua and Peru to buy organs in a shadowy trade that injured and killed donors and recipients.

That U.S.-Latin American connection is dwarfed by a network of organ-trafficking organizations whose reach extends from former Soviet Republics such as Azerbaijan, Belarus and Moldova to Brazil, the Philippines, South Africa and beyond, a Bloomberg Markets investigation shows.

Many of the black-market kidneys harvested by these gangs are destined for people who live in Israel.

...

"Delmonico, a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School, has spent the past six years lobbying governments and doctors around the world to combat organ trafficking. He says Israel’s government is cracking down.

The Knesset, Israel’s legislative body, passed the Organ Transplant Law in 2008, setting penalties, including imprisonment of up to three years, for buying and selling organs and requiring hospitals to scrutinize transplants by nonrelatives and foreigners.

Breaking up Gangs

In an effort to draw more legal organ donors, the law also offers volunteers compensation for lost wages and travel expense and provides them with additional health insurance. Israeli police have been among the most aggressive in the world against organ traffickers, breaking up three international gangs since 2008.

The government has also banned insurers from funding most transplants outside Israel.

The dearth of available organs in Israel has spawned a new class of criminals, mainly immigrants from the former Soviet Union, says Jerusalem Police Superintendent Gilad Bahat.

Investigators on five continents say they have uncovered intertwining criminal rings run by Israelis and eastern Europeans that move people across borders -- sometimes against their will -- to sell a kidney.

“The criminal here is the middleman who profits from the sick and the poor,” says Bahat, who investigated an organ- trafficking ring in Jerusalem. “It touches my heart that people will sell part of their body because they need money to live.”

...

"The Brazilian case is still wending its way through international courts. In November 2010 in Durban, Netcare Ltd. (NTC) -- South Africa’s largest hospital company -- pleaded guilty to violating the Human Tissue Act, which prohibits buying and selling organs.

Netcare paid 7.8 million rand ($848,464) in fines and penalties. It admitted to allowing 92 transplants in which donors from Brazil, Israel and Romania sold kidneys to Israeli patients. Four doctors are awaiting trial on trafficking charges.

In Brazil, 12 people connected to the Netcare case were convicted and jailed, with sentences from 15 months to 11 years.

In Kosovo, Ratel, who has dual citizenship in Canada and Great Britain and was appointed by the European Union to help restore the country’s criminal justice system, is overseeing a pivotal organ-trafficking case. It includes participants and victims from Belarus, Moldova, Turkey and four other countries.

Center for Trafficking

The EU has administered the courts in Kosovo since 2008, the year the country the size ofConnecticut declared independence from Serbia after a civil war. Ratel, who arrived in March 2010 as part of the European Union Rule of Law Mission in Kosovo, says the country has become a center for organ trafficking.

Ratel built a case against nine doctors, hospital administrators and recruiters on charges of buying and selling kidneys for patients in Georgia, Germany, Israel, Poland and Ukraine, as well as Canada and the United States.

...

"“This is organized crime,” Ratel says. “There is significant coercion and threats of violence.”

Organ traffickers search the world for hospitals willing to perform illicit transplants. Sometimes, sellers are flown to cities just to wait for procedures, and then traffickers move them to other parts of the globe when they find a recipient and a hospital willing to cooperate.

While the illegal organ trade may be run by seasoned criminals, it depends on the complicity of doctors and hospitals, says Oleg Liashko, a member of Ukraine’s parliament.

“I doubt this could happen without the hospital and doctors knowing about it,” says Liashko, who has investigated organ trafficking and is calling for more-severe criminal penalties in organ transplant laws. “They either know or look the other way because of the money involved. This is corruption, pure and simple.”

********

Here's a story that follows up on the U.S. side: Kidney Broker Said to Use Johns Hopkins in Organ-Traffic Case
********

And here's a graphic (but probably less credible) story from Egypt: Refugees face organ theft in the Sinai

Lectures on market design by Clayton Featherstone, Eduardo Azevedo, and Jacob Leshno

2011-12-03T05:36:00.011-05:00

Good market designers aren't necessarily good teachers, but three recent lectures in our market design class (two of them yesterday) revealed that some of them are great. Here are three who you could get to teach your students next year:

Clayton Featherstone

Eduardo Azevedo

Jacob Leshno

Seattle backs away from transparent (strategy-proof) school choice

2011-12-02T05:53:00.001-05:00

It appears that, after a decade of using a school choice system based at least in part on a deferred acceptance algorithm, in the course of making some other changes, Seattle schools may have backed into using a non-strategy-proof immediate acceptance algorithm instead.

Here's a Q&A on How to Rank Schools for the Seattle Public Schools Choice Process for 2010-2011

"My true first choice option school is very popular and hard to get in to. If I list it first on my School Choice form, am I throwing away my chances of getting in?

"For the 2010-2011 school year, you would not be throwing away your chances.

"This year the district is using what it refers to it as the Barnhart/Waldman processing algorithm, named after the school board members who suggested it. It is more properly called the Gale/Shapley “Stable Marriage” algorithm. This algorithm is well studied and understood by computer scientists and mathematicians. It has been specially designed so that there is never an advantage to listing your school choices in any order other than your true preference. The Gale-Shapley paper referenced below is highly recommended. It is well written and does not require special software or mathematics skills to understand. In addition to being used for school assignments in many districts, a variation of this algorithm is used for the yearly matching of graduating medical students to residency programs.

"Note that this will change when the NSAP is complete. The final plan calls for using a simpler algorithm in which families who list a school as their first choice have priority over families who list the school second choice or later. This can result in cases where your best chance for getting into one of your choices is to “lie” and list your second choice first."
********

And here's an analysis by a concerned parent, Chris MacGregor, who happens to be a software engineer and took the trouble to examine the school district's school choice algorithm source code: Serious Problem With New Student Assignment Plan
********

It sounds like the plan may have been passed hastily, with the change in algorithm being a detail in a more politically charged discussion: Student-assignment plan passed behind closed doors.
********

Here's some background on school choice in Seattle, in the form of court documents from 2001, about the use of race as a tie-breaker in school assignment.
********

Here's a 1998 story about the adoption of the deferred acceptance algorithm, with some discussion touching on strategy-proofness and making it safe to submit true preferences: New Student-Assignment Plan Set
"The change, devised by board members Scott Barnhart and Nancy Waldman, will extend the district's "hold harmless" rule to all choices. Currently, when students apply to alternative schools, they don't lose their place in line for a regular school.

But, when students apply to popular regular schools and don't get in, the computer bumps them down the list until it finds a school with a vacancy - even though they may have siblings in their second-choice school or may live right across the street.

Barnhart and Waldman's system will ensure that more students get their real second choice and eliminate bumping down to lower and lower choices, which has discouraged parents and driven some to send their children to private schools, according to Waldman.

At last night's meeting, Waldman said that had happened to her.

Space wasn't available at her first-choice kindergarten, so her daughter was assigned to a school Waldman hadn't even listed. So, Waldman put her daughter in private school for three years."

******
Note that Scott Barnhart is a medical prof at U. of Washington, who was matched to a number of residency positions, and so would have been familiar with the medical match.
*********

And here's a 1996 story (short on detail, but gives some of the political atmosphere) about the run-up to the adoption of the deferred acceptance algorithm that is apparently on its way out: Vote On Reform Plan -- School Board To Tackle Student-Assignment System
*******
For those of you new to discussions of making school choice simple and safe for parents to reveal their preferences over schools, see the papers here about New York and Boston, and see the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice which has more recently been involved in the design of school choice programs in Washington D.C., Denver, and New Orleans.

HT: Parag Pathak

Paying bone marrow donors is now legal (depending on how it's done)

2011-12-01T16:51:00.001-05:00

Joshua Gans forwards me this, just in on the AP wire from the Washington Post: Court says some bone marrow donors can be paid, overturning law that made compensation a crime

But the ruling makes for some odd distinctions:

"A federal appeals court ruled Thursday that most bone marrow donors can be paid, overturning a decades-old law that made such compensation a crime.

"In its ruling Thursday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said a technological breakthrough makes donating bone marrow a nearly identical process as donating blood plasma. It’s legal — and common — to pay plasma donors. Therefore, the court ruled, bone marrow donors undergoing the new procedure can be paid as well and are exempt from a law making it a felony to sell human organs for transplants.

"The unanimous three-judge panel of the court did say it remains a felony to compensate donors for undergoing the older donation method, which extracts the marrow from the donors’ bones.

"The ruling overturns a lower court decision barring compensation for all bone marrow donations."
****

See my previous post on that lawsuit here.

What does the NSF do? What should it do? Reports from and about the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences, and Dec 1 Webinar

2011-12-01T05:56:00.001-05:00

What should the National Science Foundation division of Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences be doing? They asked and we answered, and now they're having a webinar to report the results: here's the email announcement.

Dear Colleague:

Just a year ago, we stopped accepting SBE 2020 white papers. The papers were released to the public in February and now we have completed a report, Rebuilding the Mosaic, which briefly describes the process, some of the themes we identified, and the programmatic implications of what we learned. The report is available at: http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/index.cfm, and we expect to host a webinar/town hall on December 1. The login details are below.

All of your papers contributed to our thinking about the future of research in the SBE sciences, and we continue to be amazed at and grateful for your participation. I hope that you will take a moment to read the report – all of the papers are listed in Appendix 5. For the foreseeable future, we also expect to maintain the website (http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/sbe_2020/index.cfm), where the papers can be individually found and downloaded, since the report cannot substitute for the many ideas that you have shared with us and with the American people.

Although I have written to you before to express my appreciation, one more time, let me say:

Thank you.

Myron Gutmann

Directorate for the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences

National Science Foundation

Details for participating in the webcast:

Date: December 1 at 11 a.m.

Webcast Title: Rebuilding the Mosaic: Listening to the Future in the SBE Sciences

Dial-in phone number: 888-469-1936

Verbal Passcode: Mosaic

Webcast URL: http://live.science360.gov/ (will be active on Dec. 1.)

Webcast username: webcast

Webcast password: mosaic (case sensitive)

*********
Earlier, in a statement to Congress, Dr. Gutmann highlighted some of the tangible benefits derived from market design work that the NSF has supported:

Statement of
Dr. Myron P. Gutmann,
Assistant Director, Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences
National Science Foundation

Before the Committee on Science, Space, and Technology Subcommittee on Research and Science EducationUnited States House of Representatives

"3.1 SBE research has resulted in measurable gains for the U.S. taxpayer

Matching markets and kidney transplants. Researchers in economics at Harvard University, the University of Pittsburgh, and Boston College have applied economic matching theory to develop a system that dramatically improves the ability of doctors to find compatible kidneys for patients on transplant lists. Organ donation is an example of an exchange that relies on mutual convergence of need. In this case, a donor and a recipient. This system allows matches to take place in a string of exchanges, shortening the waiting time and, in the case of organ transplants, potentially saving thousands of lives.¹⁰ Similar matching markets exist in other contexts, for example, for assigning doctors to residencies.

Spectrum auctions. Spectrum auctions have generated $54 billion for the U.S. Treasury between 1994 and 2007 and worldwide revenues in excess of $200 billion. Researchers at Stanford University and the California Institute of Technology, supported by grants from SBE, developed the simultaneous ascending auction mechanism as a technique for auctioning off multiple goods whose values are not fixed but depend on each other. The mechanism was then tested experimentally and further refined before being implemented by the Federal Communications Commission. In this auction, all of the goods are on the selling block at the same time, and open for bids by any bidder. By giving bidders real-time information on the tentative price at each bid stage, bidders can develop a sense for where prices are likely to head and adjust their bids to get the package of goods they want. This process enables "price discovery," helping bidders to determine the values of all possible packages of goods. These auctions not only raise money, but ensure efficient allocation of spectra so that the winners of the auction are indeed the individuals who value the spectra the most. Applied with great benefit for the U.S. taxpayer in the FCC spectrum auctions, this method has also been extended to the sale of divisible goods in electricity, gas, and environmental markets.^11"

*****************
Here's an earlier post on congressional testimony:

NSF Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences--attack and defense

School Choice and Education Reform at Brookings

2011-11-30T05:44:00.008-05:00

The Brookings Institute hosts a session on School Choice and Education Reform, featuring Joel Klein, who was chancellor of New York City schools when the high school choice plan there was revamped.

"Large numbers of parents choose where their children are educated by moving to a school district or neighborhood that gives them access to good public schools, but school selection through residential choice is not an option for parents who are poor or unable to relocate. These parents are forced to take whatever is available to them through their local school district, and the schools that serve them do not have to worry about competition. While some districts are satisfied with this status quo, others have embraced policies that make school choice widely available and expose schools to the consequences of their popularity.

"On November 30, the Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings will host a discussion exploring the critical role of school choice in the future of education reform. Senior Fellow and Brown Center Director Russ Whitehurst will preview the Education Choice and Competition Index – an interactive web application that will score large school districts based on thirteen categories of policy and practice – and announce the Index’s initial rankings of the 25 largest school districts in America.

"Following his remarks, Joel Klein, the executive vice president of News Corporation and the former New York City Schools chancellor, will deliver a keynote address offering his reflections on the successes and challenges surrounding the expansion of public school choice in New York City"
***********

The Brookings Institute has also published a companion website and report: The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011. The report contains a ranking of school choice plans around the country.

One of the criteria is the "Assignment Mechanism

Our framework places considerable emphasis on the processes by which students are assigned to schools, treating it as a major category for evaluating choice and competition. The antithesis of choice is an assignment mechanism based on residence, with little or no chance of parents being able to enroll their child in a school other than the one in their neighborhood. In contrast, the paragon of assignment systems is one in which students are assigned to schools through an application process in which parents express their preferences and those preferences are maximized. We score districts based on where they stand with respect to these two poles. "

The report is here: The Education Choice and Competition Index: Background and Results 2011.

And it's conclusion (drumroll....) is

"The high score overall goes to New York City, with Chicago in second place.
Both received letter grades of B. The low score goes to Orange County, Florida,
which received a grade of D. New York performed particularly well in its
assignment mechanism, its provision of relevant performance data, and its
policies and practices for restructuring or closing unpopular schools. Chicago, in
contrast to New York, has more alternative schools, a greater proportion of
school funding that is student-based, and superior web-based information and
displays to support school choice. If the best characteristics of Chicago were
transferred to New York and vice versa, both would receive letter grades of A."

Early admissions and early decision

2011-11-29T05:51:00.001-05:00

A number of stories follow this year's trends in early admissions (with Harvard back in the early game).

Early applications on rise at colleges
"High school seniors hoping for an advance nod from Harvard University have swamped it with an unusually large group of early applications that represent the most economically and ethnically diverse set of students in the school’s history.

"Harvard canceled its early action program in 2006 because of worries that privileged applicants were getting an edge and holding back attempts to recruit a more diverse student population, a fear backed up by studies showing that early deadlines tend to draw a whiter, richer applicant pool than conventional winter and spring cutoff dates do.

"But the school reinstated the program this year and announced yesterday that it drew 4,245 applicants, an increase from the 4,010 who applied in 2006. Almost 72 percent of this year’s applicants need financial aid, and numbers of African-American, Latino, and Native American students are all up."
*************
see also

The Flock of Early Birds Keeps Growing
"In the end, the story of early-action in 2011 is not really about what happens at the most-selective colleges (they will be just fine, by any measure). The story’s really about how, in the wild ecosystem of enrollment, one institution’s actions and policies will affect another—and what that will mean for individual students down the line.

"At Georgetown, Mr. Deacon suspects that Harvard and Princeton siphoned many early applicants out of his institution’s pool this year. So he expects that Georgetown’s yield for early-action applications, which dropped from 60 percent to 46 percent back in 2007, will go back up to where it used to be, which would be good news for the university."
**********

Harvard College Receives 4,245 Early Applications
"“Early admission programs tend to advantage the advantaged,” then-Interim University President Derek C. Bok said in a statement in 2006. “Students from more sophisticated backgrounds and affluent high schools often apply early to increase their chances of admission, while minority students and students from rural areas, other countries, and high schools with fewer resources miss out.”

Harvard and Princeton retreated from that stance earlier this year, with each announcing the return of early admissions within hours of each other. Though Harvard administrators had hoped other colleges and universities would follow suit in eliminating early admission, that trend never materialized.

In the February announcement of early admission's return, Fitzsimmons argued that the circumstances had changed and that a broader group of students sought to apply early."

********

This story in the NY Times Choice blog starts with a good table listing schools with binding early decision (including some universities with two rounds of binding early decision), non-binding early action, and restrictive/single-choice early action. (They even have a printer-friendly version of their chart.)

Quick links to economics job market candidates, from the NBER

2011-11-28T05:35:00.046-05:00

If you are hiring new Ph.D. economists this year, it's time to begin inviting them to interviews at the ASSA meetings in January. If you haven't started doing your homework yet, this big list of candidates from the NBER might help. It lists Ph.D. Candidates in Economics, in alphabetical order from Alabama (1) to Yale (18) (where the numbers in parenthesis are the number of candidates, by my count).

(Some of the NBER's links seem to be from last year, here's Penn State's list for this year (7).)

Sampling from the NBER's big list yields some big producers of new Ph.D.s (and I have surely missed some). But see the ones below, with ten or more new Ph.D.s on the market.
I wouldn't have guessed this order.

Harvard (31), of whom I'm particularly fond of these 5);
NYU (25);
Northwestern (25);
Cornell (24)
MIT (23);
UCLA (21);
UC Davis (20)
Maryland (20):
OSU (20)
Chicago (19);
Columbia (19);
Wisconsin (19);
LSE (18);
Michigan (18);
Yale (18);
Princeton (16);
Stanford (16);
UCSD (15):
BU (14);
Berkeley (13);
Brown (13)
Duke (12);
Penn (12);
Illinois (10);
Minnesota (10);
Rochester (10):
Cal Tech (9) [I know, 9 isn't double digits...]

Matching in Practice conference: 28 November, Budapest

2011-11-27T05:36:00.002-05:00

Peter Biro writes:
Hi Al,
the European research network on Matching in Practice will have its third workshop on 28 November, this time in Budapest. You can find the program and other details at
Third Workshop on Matching in Practice

Third Workshop on Matching in Practice

Following the first two workshops in Berlin and Brussels, the Matching in Practice network will meet in our institute on 28 November 2011.

Organisers Péter Biró (IEHAS), Estelle Cantillon (ULB, Brussels) and Dorothea Kübler (WZB, Berlin)

Program

10:00-10:15 welcome and presentation

10:15-11:00 Tamás Fleiner and Naoyuki Kamiyama: A Matroid Approach to Stable Matchings with Lower Quotas

11:00-11:30 coffee break

11:30-12:15 Sebastian Braun, Nadja Dwenger, Dorothea Kübler and Alexander Westkamp : Implementing quotas in university admissions: An experimental analysis

12:15-13:00 lunch

13:00-13:30 discussion on the network
13:30-13:50 László Kóczy and Zsolt Szelíd: Resident matching in Hungary
13:50-14:35 Caterina Calsamiglia and Antonio Miralles: All about priorities: No school choice under the presence of bad schools

14:35-15:00 coffee break

15:00-15:45 John Kennes, Daniel Monte and Norovsambuu Tumennasan: The Daycare Assignment Problem

15:45-16:15 coffee break

16:15-17:00 Heinrich Nax and Peyton Young: The Evolution of Core Stability in Decentralised Matching Markets

Gift registries for everything

2011-11-26T05:01:00.001-05:00

Are people starting to think what gifts to buy you?

US Airways sends me the following email:

Don’t just wish for the miles you want…Ask for them!
Create your Dividend Miles Gift Registry today.

Dreaming of a trip but don't have enough miles? Create your Dividend Miles Gift Registry so your friends and family can help you. Whether it’s a special event like your honeymoon or birthday, or just the vacation you’ve wanted to take – ask and you shall receive.

Here’s how:

Create your Gift Registry
Invite friends and family to gift or share miles
Track your progress
Book your award trip!
Miles Gift Registry

Liver transplants for alcoholics?

2011-11-25T05:20:00.000-05:00

Here's hoping you didn't drink too much yesterday: Study stirs debate over transplants for alcoholics

"Some gravely ill alcoholics who need a liver transplant shouldn't have to prove they can stay sober for six months to get one, doctors say in a study that could intensify the debate over whether those who destroy their organs by drinking deserve new ones.

"In the small French study, the vast majority of the patients who got a liver without the wait stopped drinking after their surgery and were sober years later. The study involved patients who were suffering from alcohol-related hepatitis so severe that they were unlikely to survive a six-month delay.

"The findings, reported in Thursday's New England Journal of Medicine, could boost demand for livers, already in scarce supply, and reopen a bitter dispute over whether alcoholics should even get transplants.

"The controversy peaked in the 1990s when celebrities with drinking problems Larry Hagman, David Crosby and Mickey Mantle got liver transplants. More recently, British soccer star George Best received a new liver in 2002, started drinking again and died three years later.

"Alcohol can cause lethal, liver-destroying diseases such as cirrhosis and hepatitis. Nearly one in five liver transplants in the U.S. go to current or former heavy drinkers. Transplant hospitals commonly require patients waiting for a new liver to give up drinking for six months as a way of assuring doctors they are serious about staying sober after the operation.

"Drinkers severely ill with hepatitis account for a very small share of patients needing transplants. The French study suggests that dropping the six-month rule for these patients would increase demand for livers by only about 3 percent.

"The study's lead author, Dr. Philippe Mathurin of Huriez Hospital in Lille, France, said a strict application of the six-month rule may be unfair to such patients. He said they are just as deserving as other liver patients, many of whom have diseases caused by poor lifestyle choices such as drug use or obesity.

"Mathurin said he favors keeping the rule for other alcoholics with liver disease, noting that some can recover liver function simply by staying sober.

"Dr. Robert S. Brown Jr., transplant director of New York-Presbyterian Hospital/Columbia University Medical Center, agreed it is time to rethink the six-month rule. "The challenge of this paper is to come up with better ways, both to treat alcoholism as a disease and to predict who will succeed with transplantation," he said.

"Mathurin acknowledged that such a change could put more patients on the waiting list for organs, and said: "It means we have to increase the number of donors."

Raising turkeys for Thanksgiving

2011-11-24T05:19:00.002-05:00

Happy Thanksgiving y'all:)

Here's timely advice from North Carolina Cooperative Extension if you're thinking of starting a small turkey operation for next year: Raising Standard Turkeys for the Holiday Market.

The first two points sound like the voice of experience:

"a. Identify processing plant before obtaining poults
...
"b. Identify feed source before obtaining poults"
***********

And here's a report about a somewhat larger operation: In This Town, Turkey Picks Up Bill for Dinner, concluding with this:
"“You look at it every day, and you get to where you don’t really care for turkey,” Mrs. Farmer said. “That’s why I get a ham.”"

College admissions and searchable data

2011-11-23T05:43:00.003-05:00

A slightly breathless but interesting story in The Washington Monthly about college admissions, and how it may be transformed by data mining (and focused on the company Connectedu): "The End of College Admissions As We Know It: Everything you’ve heard about getting in is about to go out the window."

"Because the information that might help them is entombed in file folders, colleges resort to an expensive, inefficient, scattershot strategy. A typical midrange private college looking to enroll 1,200 freshmen might buy a list of 350,000 names from the College Board. An expensive but poorly targeted direct-mail campaign leads to 11,000 applications. They accept 5,000, of whom only 1,200 choose to enroll. Of those, more than half drop out or transfer, leaving the college struggling to bring in enough tuition revenue to pay their bills and left with no option other than buying another 350,000 names.

"Students have a similar problem. It’s hard to choose the right college. Higher education is what economists call an “experiential good,” something you can’t fully understand until after you purchase and experience it. As parents of college age children know, students often assemble a list of prospective schools through a frighteningly arbitrary process of hearsay, peer misinformation, and fleeting impressions gained during slickly produced college tours. Or, worse, they don’t assemble a prospective list at all and default to inexpensive, nearby institutions. Some of those local colleges are terrible places to go to school. (See “College Dropout Factories,” September/October 2010.) Too many students don’t find out until it’s too late.
...
"There are other players in this market, including the Common Application and a company called Naviance, which offers electronic college planning tools for high school students. The virtue of ConnectEDU, though, is that it spans the entire process, from late middle school into college and beyond. The company’s first foray into the market came in 2006, when it signed up three colleges and fifteen high schools. In 2007, it was up to thirty-five high schools and 300 colleges. It began signing up school districts instead of individual schools, then moved to contracts with entire states, starting with Michigan. The number of high schools increased to 700 in 2008, 1,700 in 2009, and 2,500 in 2010. That amounts to about 2.5 million students. The Miami-Dade County school system joined the network last year. The state of Hawaii signed up in May 2011.

"The number of colleges using the service has also increased, to 450, representing a decent—though not quite commanding—subset of the schools that receive large numbers of applications. Yale signed up in 2008."

HT: Stephanie Hurder

Surrogacy as a business

2011-11-22T05:38:00.000-05:00

Excerpts from The Red Market: Cash on Delivery

"India legalized surrogacy in 2002 as part of a larger effort to promote medical tourism. Since 1991, when the country’s new procapitalist policies took effect, private money has flowed in and fueled construction of world-class hospitals that cater to foreigners. Surrogacy tourism has grown steadily here as word has gotten out that babies can be incubated at a low price and without government red tape. Patel’s clinic charges between $15,000 and $20,000 for the entire process, from in vitro fertilization to delivery, whereas in the handful of American states that allow paid surrogacy, bringing a child to term can cost between $50,000 and $100,000, and is rarely covered by insurance.
...
"Dependable numbers are hard to come by, but at minimum, Indian surrogacy services now attract hundreds of Western clients each year. Since 2004 Akanksha alone has ushered at least 232 babies into the world through surrogates. By 2008 it had forty-five surrogates on the payroll, and Patel reports that at least three women approach her clinic every day hoping to become one. There are at least another 350 fertility clinics around India, although it’s difficult to say how many offer surrogacy services, since the government doesn’t track the industry. Mumbai’s Hiranandani Hospi- tal, which boasts a sizable surrogacy program of its own, trains outside fertility doctors on how to identify and recruit promising candidates. A page on its website advertises franchising opportunities to entrepreneurial fertility specialists around India who might want to set up surrogacy operations with an endorsement from Mumbai. India’s Council on Medical Research (which plays an FDA-like role—except that it has far less power to actually enforce its edicts) predicts that medical tourism, including surrogacy, could generate $2.3 billion in annual revenue by 2012. “Surrogacy is the new adoption,” says Delhi fertility doctor Anoop Gupta.

"Despite the growth projections, surrogacy is not officially regulated in India. There are no binding legal standards for treatment of surrogates, nor does state or national authority have the power to police the industry. While clinics like Akan- ksha have a financial incentive to ensure the health of the fetus, there is nothing to prevent them from cutting costs by scrimping on surrogate pay and follow-up care, or to ensure they behave responsibly when something goes wrong.

Matching and market design session at SAET in Australia in July

2011-11-21T05:44:00.003-05:00

Fuhito Kojima writes:
Call for submissions: I am organizing a session on matching and market design in SAET 2012: http://www.saet.illinois.edu/event-07.html

which will be held in Queensland, Australia, from June 30th to July 3rd.

Al is scheduled to give a plenary talk (Sir John Hicks Lecture) and Tayfun already offered to come to the session, and it will be an interesting conference for us!

So I would like to encourage your submission:

If you are interested, you please send a message directly to me by December 25th this year with the paper draft (if not yet available, please send me the abstract and/or slide if available).

I will get back to you about the decision by January 15th.

Hope that I can pique your interest!

Thanks for reading this. A happy thanksgiving.

Best,

Fuhito

--
Fuhito Kojima
fuhitokojima1979@gmail.com

Schools' choices and school choice in England

2011-11-20T05:39:00.000-05:00

In the U.S., charter schools are typically not allowed to be choosy: they often have to offer admission strictly by lottery. In England, there's controversy over religious schools, and the following story illustrates some of the issues.

Catholic school in new row over school admissions

"Coloma Convent Girls' School in Croydon was reported to the official admissions watchdog by the local diocese amid claims its entry rules are “discriminatory”.

The over-subscribed school – which is rated outstanding by Ofsted and regularly appears towards the top of league tables – gives more “points” to families who take part in parish activities.

But the Catholic Archdiocese of Southwark complained that the system discriminated against single parents who were unable to find the time to take part in parish work.

It also said it was unfair on immigrants who did not share the same “tradition of community service” and struggled to provide written evidence of volunteering because English was not their first language.

The move comes after Diocese of Westminster shopped the hugely popular Cardinal Vaughan Memorial School to the admissions watchdog, complaining that its entry rules were too elitist and effectively penalised the less devout.

School choice in New Orleans

2011-11-19T05:54:00.000-05:00

New Orleans has some ambitious plans for a unified school choice plan in a city whose schools will include many independent charter schools. Here's a ten minute video of an interview with Recovery School District Superintendent John White. Starting at minute 3 it is about school choice.

This is work in which IIPSC, the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, is lending support in market design and technology.

Here's an earlier story: Recovery School District chief plans central enrollment system, technical training, more

"The head of the state-run Recovery School District, which governs most of the city's public schools, issued a wide-ranging strategic plan Tuesday aimed at tackling the district's most chronic shortcomings.

...

"He is promising a central enrollment system by next year, so parents and guardians -- especially those looking to place children midyear -- will be able to ask the district to find them an open spot, rather than having to contact one school after another.
...
"Most, if not all, of the district's schools will eventually be charters...

"On the central enrollment system ... White provided new details, explaining that parents will be asked to list their top school choices on a common application. The district will be able to weigh factors like a school's distance from a child's home, and assign each student to a building by looking at available seats in both charters and direct-run campuses."

School Choice in Chicago

2011-11-18T05:56:00.001-05:00

CPS Application Plan Moves Ahead

"The Chicago Board of Education approved a resolution Wednesday that would require all incoming 9th grade students to apply for entrance into the public school system next year and opens the door to an application process for all grades.

The resolution authorizes Chicago Public Schools officials to create a single application for the high school admissions process that could be introduced as early as the 2012-2013 school year and to develop a similar application for elementary school admissions.

Currently, students can enroll in their neighborhood school without applying. If they choose to go to a magnet, selective, charter or other school outside the neighborhood they live in, they must fill out separate applications.

It is not known if charter schools would be included on the application. District spokeswoman Marielle Sainvilus said the resolution is the first step in creating a common application and none of the specifics have been decided.

The resolution also calls for the district to contract with the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, a non-profit school choice consultancy, to develop a “school choice matching system.” District officials did not elaborate on what the system would entail.

The current school application process can be dizzying and has spurred the creation of small consulting businesses to help parents navigate the system.

Jackson Potter, staff coordinator for the Chicago Teachers Union, said Tuesday that the resolution raises questions about how the district will ensure that all students, especially those that are homeless or have unstable situations, are able to enroll in school.

The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice has worked with other urban districts, such as New York and Boston, to overhaul their admissions processes. In New York, all 8th grade students are required to fill out an application and rank up to 12 schools they would like to attend. The district then sorts them based on their preferences. In Boston, all students submit an application, listing the schools they would like to attend. The district then assigns students based on their choice and a number of other considerations, such as how close they live to a school and if a sibling is already enrolled."

School Choice in Denver

2011-11-17T05:21:00.010-05:00

Denver is implementing a new school choice system. IIPSC, the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, is helping. Denver Public Schools will be the first large district to unite charter schools and district managed schools under one umbrella of centralized choice.

New, Unified DPS Enrollment Process Backed by Coalition of Education Advocates

DENVER – A coalition of 10 local education advocacy groups announced their support today for Denver Public Schools’ (DPS) new, unified enrollment process, SchoolChoice.

The coalition worked closely with DPS and national enrollment experts to develop SchoolChoice, a unified enrollment process for the 2012-13 school year that is designed to simplify how families enroll students in schools. The group will continue to assist the district with the campaign to notify parents and community leaders as well as the implementation and review of the new process.

“Years ago, families identified significant drawbacks and hurdles to the way DPS enrolled students in schools across the district. Many families were spending days or weeks trying to navigate multiple deadlines and driving across the city to find different forms. And many other families didn’t participate at all. We all came together to find ways that the current process could be simplified and streamlined,” said Amy Slothower, Executive Director, Get Smart Schools.

“We believe the new process will increase access to the district’s highest-performing schools and make enrollment much easier for students, their families and their schools,” Amy continued.

Prior to the introduction of SchoolChoice, charter and magnet schools each conducted their own enrollment. When combined with the district’s own choice process for its traditional neighborhood schools, there were more than 60 different enrollment processes with different forms and due dates for public schools across Denver. The range of due dates, methods and applications made enrollment overwhelming for many parents and made planning for the school year challenging for schools.

SchoolChoice is designed to simplify school enrollment because every transitioning student (incoming K, 6^th and 9^th grades and any student who wants to choice into a different school) will prioritize their schools of interest on a single form with a single deadline. All transitioning students will then receive a school assignment, based on their preferences, during a single week in March.

Putting into place one process for all district schools and one form per grade will simplify what has been a confusing and often overwhelming system for students and families to navigate.

“We’re excited because SchoolChoice will ensure a fair and equitable enrollment process for all DPS families,” Slothower continued. “With the help of our partners, the district and the Walton Foundation, we’re making it easy to connect students with the schools that best fit their needs.”

SchoolChoice is being funded by a combination of public and private funding in the form of grants and bonds, including a substantial grant from the Walton Foundation.

The full list of coalition members includes:

· Get Smart Schools

· The Walton Family Foundation

· Denver Public Schools

· A Plus Denver

· Colorado League of Charter Schools

· Colorado Succeeds

· Donnell-Kay Foundation

· Metro Organizations for People

· Stand for Children Colorado

· University of Colorado Denver

Congratulations to Muriel Niederle

2011-11-16T05:03:00.003-05:00

If that's white smoke coming out of the faculty meeting at the College of Cardinal, it must mean that Muriel Niederle has just been promoted to full professor. An excellent day for market design, experimental economics, and Stanford. (Congratulations to L.E. and N.B. too:)