Cherry blossom season in Tokyo

The cherry blossoms are out in force in Tokyo

Who Gets What and Why in Japanese―マッチメイキングとマーケットデザインの新しい経済学 単行本 –

The Japanese translation has come out, and I will be travelling to Japan this week to talk about market design. (Professor Yosuke Yasuda has described the lectures and discussions I'm involved in on April 5 and 6 here; Google Translate works well enough to give you the idea.)

Here's the link to the book in Japanese:

Who Gets What(フー・ゲッツ・ホワット) ―マッチメイキングとマーケットデザインの新しい経済学 単行本 – 

Maiden names are repugnant in Japan

The NY Times has the story: Japan’s Top Court Upholds Law Requiring Spouses to Share Surname

"Japan’s highest court upheld a law dating back more than a century that requires married couples to share the same surname, rejecting a claim on Wednesday that it discriminates against women by effectively forcing them to give up their names in favor of their husbands’.

"The ruling was a blow to Japanese women seeking to keep their maiden names after marriage. Some couples have chosen not to register their marriages — opting instead to stay in common-law relationships with fewer legal protections — in order to keep separate surnames.
...
"The prohibition against separate surnames has survived decades of challenges in the courts and in Parliament, but it was the first time a suit seeking to overturn it had reached the Supreme Court. Ten of the court’s 15 justices ruled that the ban, first imposed in 1898, was consistent with constitutional protections for gender equality.

"Although the law does not specify which spouse’s surname must be used, wives adopt their husbands’ names in an estimated 95 percent of cases.

"The chief justice, Itsuro Terada, said the law did not impose an undue burden on women in part because they could continue using their maiden names in their professional lives, a practice that has become more widely accepted in recent years.

"The government began allowing married civil servants, for instance, to use their former surnames for official business in 2001.

“The issue of separate names for spouses should be debated in Parliament,” Justice Terada said, throwing the issue back to the legislature.

"The government of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe will have to calibrate its response carefully. Mr. Abe has positioned himself as an ally of working women, contending that Japan needs to keep more women in the labor force as its population shrinks and ages. But many members of his right-leaning Liberal Democratic Party support the surname law, and the party has quashed previous parliamentary initiatives aimed at changing it.

Newspaper surveys have shown that a slim majority of the public favors changing the law to allow couples to keep separate surnames."

Market design and repugnance interview, in Japanese

For readers of this blog who might like to read an interview in Japanese, here is one that includes discussion of both market design and repugnant transactions, by Ayako Hirono of Nikkei Business.

ノーベル賞経済学者が挑む「禁断の取引」

アルビン・ロス米スタンフォード大学教授に聞く

Fushimi Inari-taisha: a shrine to business and a pioneer in advertising

The Inari shrine in Kyoto is devoted to a patron of business. Unlike many other shrines and temples we visited in Japan it does not support itself by charging admission to visitors. Rather, many of its "thousand gates" are endowed by an advertiser.  There are still gates available.

Below are some of the ads on gates, and a price list for adding your ad, to gates of different sizes.

International trade in french fries

There's an imported potato drought in Japan, leading to rationing: The Japan News (English language news from The Yomiuri Shimbun) has the story.

 Sorry! Small fries only

"Japan’s food service industry is in the middle of a potato shortage, due to a port labor dispute on the U.S. West Coast.

"Most of the nation’s chain restaurants use processed spuds from the United States to make french fries, and the prolonged dispute is delaying shipments of the fast food ingredient. McDonald’s Holdings Co. (Japan) stopped selling large- and medium-size fries on Wednesday, and other restaurant chain operators are starting to consider such measures as the expensive process of flying in supplies and suspending french fry sales."

Roads and escalators in Japan: national versus regional equilibria

I presume that drivers drive on the left on roads throughout Japan, and so I wasn't surprised, in Tokyo, to find that pedestrians tend to keep to the left as well, and that on escalators, riders stay to the left to allow those in a hurry to pass on the right.

But in Osaka, the escalator equilibrium is reversed: on escalators one stays to the right to allow passing on the left. Roads and sidewalks seem to be as in Tokyo however.

Klein Lecture in Osaka, Dec 19 2014

I'll be speaking Friday in Osaka...

2014 Lawrence R. Klein Lecture

Prof. AlvinRoth

2012 Winner Nobel Prize in Economics	Title: The Economist as Engineer
	2014.12.19 (Fri.) Open15:30　Start16:00 Conference Room C01-02, 8th Floor, TOWER-C, Knowledge Capital, Grand Front Osaka   MAP *Lecture will be given in English Reception Time: 18:30 Venue: URGE (3rd Floor, Knowledge Capital, Grand Front Osaka)
		INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICREVIEW Osaka University　Institute of Social and Economic Research 6-1 Mihogaoka, Ibaraki, Osaka 567-0047 JAPAN E-mail: klein_lecture@iser.osaka-u.ac.jp URL: http://www.iser.osaka-u.ac.jp/~ier/lecture2014.html

High bids for tuna at Tsukiji fish market celebrate the new year

Bluefin tuna sells for record $1.76 million at Tokyo auction, 3 times previous record

"A bluefin tuna sold for a record $1.76 million at a Tokyo auction Saturday, nearly three times the previous high set last year
...
"In the year’s first auction at Tokyo’s sprawling Tsukiji fish market, the 222-kilogram (489-pound) tuna caught off northeastern Japan sold for 155.4 million yen
...
The winning bidder, Kiyoshi Kimura, president of Kiyomura Co., which operates the Sushi-Zanmai restaurant chain, said “the price was a bit high,” but that he wanted to “encourage Japan,” according to Kyodo News agency. He was planning to serve the fish to customers later Saturday.

"Kimura also set the old record of 56.4 million yen at last year’s New Year’s auction, which tends to attract high bids as a celebratory way to kick off the new year — or get some publicity.

Yuichiro Kamada defends his Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 2 (Offense 0)

Yuichiro (in suit:), with Tomasz Strzalecki and Al Roth (and Drew Fudenberg and Attila Ambrus via skype)

Yuichiro with the full defense team

Yuichiro had to choose three out of his many papers for his dissertation, which he called "Essays on Revision Games." Those papers all concern the difficult problem of analyzing incentives in non-stationary environments.

Multi-Agent Search with Deadline (joint with Nozomu Muto), December 31, 2011.(An earlier version of this paper referred to in the new version is here)

Revision Games (joint with Michihiro Kandori), December 31, 2011

Asynchronicity and Coordination in Common and Opposing Interest Games (joint with Riccardo Calcagno, Stefano Lovo, and Takuo Sugaya), March 2012, Revise and Resubmit, Theoretical Economics. (This paper is a result of a merger between two independent papers: Preopening and Equilibrium Selection by Calcagno and Lovo, and Asynchronous Revision Games with Deadline: Unique Equilibrium in Coordination Games by Kamada and Sugaya)

I earlier blogged about another of his papers, on the design of the market for new Japanese doctors:

Matching Japanese Doctors: problems with the current mechanisms, and suggestions for improvement by Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima

Yuichiro is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12)

 He will be going next year to a postdoc at Yale, after which he'll take up a position at Berkeley-Haas.

Two more defenses are coming up this week.

 Welcome to the club, Yuichiro.

Matching Japanese Doctors: problems with the current mechanisms, and suggestions for improvement by Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima

How to get more doctors into rural hospitals? That's a problem that confronts Japanese medical administrators, and American ones too. Apparently the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare has somewhat more control over the medical labor market than is available in the U.S., since they have instituted regional caps on how many new doctors--residents--can be assigned to urban regions.

But the way that they have implemented these caps, and integrated them with the job market for Japanese medical residents, isn't efficient. This is pointed out in a new paper which also proposes and analyzes an alternative design with more appealing properties. (A related paper also considers a simpler fix for the problem, and discusses why this wouldn't quite work...). Here's the new paper:
Improving Efficiency in Matching Markets with Regional Caps: The Case of the Japan Residency Matching Program by Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima), December 2010. (Revise and Resubmit, American Economic Review.

(A non-technical introduction to this paper (in Japanese) is here (written by Yuichiro Kamada, Fuhito Kojima and Jun Wako), and here's a short summary in English, which also discusses why a simple fix--an "iterated deferred acceptance algorithm"-- wouldn't be strategy proof for doctors): Stability and Strategy-Proofness for Matching with Constraints: A Problem in the Japanese Medical Matching and Its Solution by Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima, September 2011, Forthcoming, American Economic Review Papers and Proceedings.)

Here's the Abstract: "In an attempt to increase the placement of medical residents in rural hospitals, the Japanese government recently introduced "regional caps" which restrict the total number of residents matched within each region of the country. To accommodate regional caps, the government modified the deferred acceptance mechanism in a particular manner. Motivated by this policy change, we study the design of matching markets under constraints on doctor distribution. This paper shows that the Japanese mechanism may result in avoidable inefficiency and instability and proposes a better mechanism that improves upon it in terms of efficiency and stability while respecting the regional caps."

The inefficiency that they observe occurs arises because of the way the regional cap is translated into caps on the number of residents that can be hired by individual hospitals in the region. If the regional cap is to be, say, 75% of the total of the regional hospitals' original capacity to receive new residents in the Japanese Medical Resident Matching Program (JRMP), then each hospital's individual capacity is set to be .75 of its original capacity. The inefficiency arises when some hospitals fail to fill all of their capacity defined in this way, while other hospitals, which have filled their new, artificially low capacity, are prevented from hiring extra residents even though they could do so without violating the cap on the number of residents allowed in the region. These hospitals could even be part of blocking pairs that would not violate the regional caps, i.e.the outcome would be unstable even under an appropriately defined notion of stability with regional caps.

The JRMP uses a doctor-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm (like the U.S. NRMP, although apparently without the many match variations involved in the American match.) One way proposed to fix the problem described above would be to run the deferred acceptance algorithm once, and if some hospitals in a region had empty positions, allow these to revert back to other hospitals in the region and run the JRMP again. Yuichiro and Fuhito observe that this iterated deferred acceptance algorithm wouldn't be strategy-proof for doctors: it might give doctors incentives to truncate the preference lists they submit.

Instead, they observe that each proposed matching determines not only an assignment of residents to hospitals, but also, for each region, a vector of how many residents have been assigned to each of the region's hospitals. If this vector is evaluated according to some "regional preference relation" over vectors that obeys the substitutes property, then a notion of "stability under regional preferences" can be defined that allows many of the recent results from the literature on matching with contracts to be applied. (An example of a regional preference with the substitutes property would be to prefer vectors in which hospitals were closer to having proportional caps to those in which some hospitals received disproportionately more residents than others.)

They propose what they call a (doctor-proposing) Flexible Deferred Acceptance Algorithm, which allows hospitals to more flexibly determine how many residents to hire, while respecting the regional caps. The way it works is that, after a conventional doctor-proposing step of the deferred acceptance algorithm, each region selects its most preferred feasible vector of capacities, and hospitals in each region choose their choice sets with respect to this capacity, and reject only those applicants who aren't chosen under this capacity. It produces an outcome that is both stable under regional preferences and strategy proof for doctors.

It looks like it could be put to use in Japan in the years to come.

Yuichiro is an already-widely published game theorist with broad interests, mostly in more classical kinds of game theory. His papers are here. You could hire him this year.

Crisis response and organization

Companies that manage big facilities like power plants do a certain amount of planning for emergencies, as do local authorities. But when disasters rise beyond a certain level, national leaders become involved. They may of course not have relevant expertise, and may even lack access to relevant information.

The NY Times has a very interesting article about some of the organizational (and organization design) issues that impeded the Japanese response to the nuclear power plant failures that accompanied and amplified the recent earthquake/tsunami disaster: In Nuclear Crisis, Crippling Mistrust

"At this crucial moment, it became clear that a prime minister who had built his career on suspicion of the collusive ties between Japan’s industry and bureaucracy was acting nearly in the dark. He had received a confusing risk analysis from the chief nuclear regulator, a fervently pro-nuclear academic whom aides said Mr. Kan did not trust. He was also wary of the company that operated the plant, given its history of trying to cover up troubles."
...
"At the drama’s heart was an outsider prime minister who saw the need for quick action but whose well-founded mistrust of a system of alliances between powerful plant operators, compliant bureaucrats and sympathetic politicians deprived him of resources he could have used to make better-informed decisions.


"A onetime grass-roots activist, Mr. Kan struggled to manage the nuclear crisis because he felt he could not rely on the very mechanisms established by his predecessors to respond to such a crisis.


"Instead, he turned at the beginning only to a handful of close, overwhelmed advisers who knew little about nuclear plants and who barely exchanged information with the plant’s operator and nuclear regulators. 
...
"Critics and supporters alike said Mr. Kan’s decision to bypass this system, choosing instead to rely on a small circle of trusted advisers with little experience in handling a crisis of this scale, blocked him from grasping the severity of the disaster sooner. Sometimes those advisers did not even know all the resources available to them.


"This includes the existence of a nationwide system of radiation detectors known as the System for Prediction of Environmental Emergency Dose Information, or Speedi. Mr. Terada and other advisers said they did not learn of the system’s existence until March 16, five days into the crisis.


"If they had known earlier, they would have seen Speedi’s early projections that radiation from the Fukushima plant would be blown northwest, said one critic, Hiroshi Kawauchi, a lawmaker in Mr. Kan’s own party. Mr. Kawauchi said that many of the residents around the plant who evacuated went north, on the assumption that winds blew south during winter in that area. That took them directly into the radioactive plume, he said — exposing them to the very radiation that they were fleeing."

Are college places in the U.K. like Japanese medical internships?

That's the question raised in this Times Higher Education story by Simon Baker: Could Japanese hospital doctors offer a remedy to student place dilemma?

"Ministers still scratching their heads over how to release individual English universities from controls on student numbers while keeping a lid on the cost to the taxpayer have been urged to look at work by leading economists in the US.

"Research by academics at the universities of Stanford and Harvard on the placing of doctors in Japanese hospitals could contain the solution to a conundrum that is perplexing policymakers.

"The suggestion comes as David Willetts, the universities and science minister, reiterated in a speech last week that finding a solution to freeing up student places was the "big prize" that the government needed to drive competition in the sector.

"However, apart from putting forward short-term proposals to allow a proportion of overall places to be contested through a "core and margin model", all he said was that he would "welcome a debate" on a more permanent settlement.

"A radical solution could lie in the kind of research led in the US by Alvin Roth, George Gund professor of economics and business administration at Harvard University, an expert in how to design markets under public sector constraints.

"He said the problem faced by the English university system was "somewhat similar" in character to attempts by the Japanese government to allocate enough junior doctors to hospitals in rural areas by using regional "caps" that hold down numbers in cities.

"The issue was investigated by Fuhito Kojima, an assistant professor in economics at Stanford University, and Yuichiro Kamada, a graduate student at Harvard. They designed an algorithm to find the most efficient way to solve the problem.

"Dr Kojima said their analysis could be applied to the English university system - given that institutions were in effect operating under one large "regional cap" on numbers - by designing an algorithm to "transfer" places between institutions according to their popularity among students.

"Often, the problem is that these kinds of adjustments go through bureaucratic processes that firstly can take a lot of time and secondly do not result in the correct or efficient outcome. Once you use an algorithm, this kind of adjustment can be automatic," he said.

HT: Nick Feltovich

and here is the Kamada and Kojima paper: IMPROVING EFFICIENCY IN MATCHING MARKETS WITH REGIONAL CAPS: THE CASE OF THE JAPAN RESIDENCY

Job search in Japan

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports: In Bleak Economy, Japanese Students Grow Frustrated With Endless Job Hunt (subscription required)

"The recruiting system, which began in the early 1950s as a response to labor shortages, has caused years of tension between corporations and universities, which complain that it disrupts study."
...
"Japan is not unique in effectively forcing college students to look for jobs before graduation, but Mr. Slater says the system does demand that they start early. "They must begin figuring out what they want to do by second year," he says, "and it becomes really heavy-duty in third."
A voluntary code adopted by Japan's largest business lobbying group, the Keidanren, in 2007 does not allow companies to start recruiting graduates before October, but the code is widely flouted, say critics, with recruitment beginning as early as the summer before students' senior year."
...
"Recruitment is being pushed back earlier into the third and even the second year, says Mr. Hori, the Waseda student. "I'm as afraid as anyone of not being able to get work, but university just becomes a waste of time."
Those who miss out on recruitment the first time around are instantly relegated to the back of the pack, students agree. "You don't belong anywhere if you don't get a job straight after you graduate," says Yumi Nishikawa, also a fourth-year student at Sophia. "If you fail, you're stigmatized." "

For some background on this market, apparently not yet out of date, see

Roth, A.E. and X. Xing, "Jumping the Gun: Imperfections and Institutions Related to the Timing of Market Transactions," American Economic Review, 84, September, 1994, 992-1044.(the section on the Japanese market, focusing on the period 1970-1990 is also here.)

Gestation and the marriage market: second child still takes nine months

How long (after marriage) it takes for the first child to arrive is determined by many complex things, but the marriage market in Japan is evolving in a direction that shortens the time: Shotgun weddings on rise in Japan as attitudes to pregnancy shift.

"“From about five years ago the number of dekichatta-kon [weddings due to pregnancy] that we handle has not stopped rising,” she said. “Last year we worked out that about a quarter of the brides we worked with were pregnant, and some were about eight months along when they tied the knot.
“The couples used to be embarrassed, and our job was to try to hide the fact from the families. Now everyone is so relaxed about it we try to turn it into a double celebration and make life as easy as possible for the mother-to-be.”
...
"The shift reflects changing attitudes in Japan. The historic taboo of pregnancy outside marriage was largely abandoned during the 1990s but a strong tradition of being married by the time of the birth remained.
By 2004, however, the national average of ten months between marriage and the birth of a first child had fallen to six. "

Organ tranplants and law in Japan

Japanese transplant law and practice are in flux. Recent news stories convey different parts of the story.

Japan’s Parliament Eases Rules on Organ Transplants, Death Law
July 13 (Bloomberg) -- Japan’s parliament approved legislation to ease restrictions on organ transplants in a move that backers say will save thousands of lives.
The upper house today approved a bill passed in the lower chamber last month that eliminates the need for a written will for organ donations. The new rules also accept a lack of brain function as a legal definition of death.
Doctors performed 11 heart transplants in Japan last year, according to the Japanese Circulation Society, compared with more than 2,000 in the U.S. The 12-year-old limitations lawmakers voted to end today had forced Japanese to travel overseas for transplants “as a last resort to survive,” according to a joint statement from medical groups including the Japan Society for Transplantation.
Each year, about 400 Japanese die because they aren’t able to get a heart transplant, while 2,000 pass away without a new liver, according to statistics presented to lawmakers last year by the society.

Travelling overseas--to the U.S.--for a heart transplant isn't an easy thing to arrange:An organ in U.S. won't be cheap

" Japanese who traveled to the United States to get new hearts were charged as much as about $1.63 million for the operation in 2008, or five times higher than in previous years, medical sources well-versed in organ transplants said Thursday.
...The average fee charged to 42 Japanese who went to the U.S. for heart transplants between 1998 and 2008 rose to about ¥80 million last year, compared with between ¥30 million and ¥70 million in the past, they said.
One child patient was charged as much as ¥160 million for the operation last year, while another was required to put down a deposit of ¥400 million in March, the sources said.
In the U.S., the only country that accepts Japanese for heart transplants, nationals are charged $300,000 on average in hospital and physician fees for the operation, they said, adding that the figure does not include pre- and posttreatment fees."

Japan lifts ban on children donating organs
"Japan lifted a ban Monday on organ donations from children, reversing a restriction that created such a dearth of small organs in the country that young patients were forced to seek transplants abroad.
The law will allow children, defined as those under 15, who are brain dead to donate their organs — a sea change in this country, where organ donating is sensitive because of Buddhist beliefs consider the body sacred and reject its desecration."

Kids under 15 can give organs
"The bill, known as Plan A, which won Lower House approval last month, allows brain-dead children under age 15 to be an organ donor with the family's consent and recognizes brain death as legal death.
google_protectAndRun("render_ads.js::google_render_ad", google_handleError, google_render_ad);
...The current transplant law, enacted 12 years ago, forbids brain-dead people under age 15 from becoming an organ donor. Supporters of Plan A had aimed to revise the law to increase the self-sufficiency of domestic organ availability, but some lawmakers argued brain death is too sensitive an issue and thus should not be universally recognized as actual death. " (HT: Jun Wako)

Related recent post: Children can't get organ donations in Japan, because they can't be deceased donors

Organs for transplant in Japan

The London Times reports on the shortage of transplantable organs in Japan, where deceased donation is very limited due to the legal requirement of cardiac death. The article is about future possibilities of cloning human organs in sheep. Nearer at hand, the article describes how the organ shortage in Japan is made more serious by the decreasing availability of organ transplants overseas, through growing restrictions on "transplant tourism": Japanese scientist claims breakthrough with organ grown in sheep:

"The reason for Professor Hanazono’s sense of urgency — and for the entire organ harvest project being undertaken at the Jichi Medical University — lies many miles away in Tokyo and with a historical peculiarity of the Japanese legal system.
Japan defines death as the point when the heart permanently stops. The concept of brain death — the phase at which organs can most effectively be harvested from donors — does exist, but organs cannot be extracted at that point.
The long-term effect of the legal definition has been striking: organ donation in Japan is virtually nonexistent, forcing many people to travel abroad in search of transplants. In the United States, the rate of organ donors per million people is about 27; in Japan it is under 0.8.
The effect, say paediatricians, has been especially severe for children. The same law that discounts brain death as suitable circumstances for organ donation broadly prevents children under 15 from allowing their organs to be harvested.
To make matters worse, international restrictions on transplant tourism are becoming ever tougher, making Japan’s position even more untenable. To avert disaster, say doctors, Japan either needs the science of synthetic organ generation to advance faster than seems possible, or it needs a complete rethink on the Japanese definition of death. "

Market for major league baseball players: international trade

The NY Times reports: Japanese Irked at U.S. Interest in Pitching Phenom

"Many Japanese baseball officials are outraged that United States teams are courting Tazawa, a hard-throwing right-handed pitcher, because they insist it is long-established practice for amateurs like him to be strictly off limits to major league clubs..."
"“This was more than just a gentleman’s agreement, but rather an implicit understanding that the major leagues would do no such thing,” Nippon Professional Baseball said in a news release on signing Japanese baseball amateurs. “That a handful of clubs from the majors is trying to break this gentlemen’s agreement is truly regrettable.”
..."The protocol agreement between Major League Baseball and Nippon Professional Baseball does not address the signing of either nation’s amateur players. It does formalize how Japanese veterans may switch continents: on the open market after nine seasons in the Japan major leagues, or earlier if a player’s club chooses to auction off his rights through a procedure commonly known as posting. Established in 1998, posting established stars like Daisuke Matsuzaka has generated as much as $51 million for their Japanese clubs, and losing top amateurs could hurt that pipeline."
..."The Yomiuri official Hidetoshi Kiyotake has said he fears for the viability of the entire Japanese majors should the major leagues descend on his nation’s amateur talent. In a recent issue of the Japanese magazine Weekly Baseball, he wrote that South Korea’s major league has been seriously harmed by 38 amateur players signing directly with major league clubs since 1994.
..."Fearful that Tazawa’s signing such a contract would encourage more Japanese amateurs to follow him, Nippon Professional Baseball recently passed a rule that requires any amateur who jumps to a major league team to sit out two or three years before being able to return to play in Japan."

Organized crime in Japan

The market for crime is organized differently in Japan. The NY Times reports on a local lawsuit involving the headquarters of a yakuza headquarters: Neighborhood in Japan Sues in Bid to Oust Mafia

"The Dojinkai is one of the country’s 22 crime syndicates, employing some 85,000 members and recognized by the government.
Traditionally, the yakuza have run protection rackets, as well as gambling, sex and other businesses that the authorities believed were a necessary part of any society. By letting the yakuza operate relatively freely, the authorities were able to keep an extremely close watch on them."