Conference on Economic Design: York, United Kingdom, June 14-16, 2017

2017 Conference on Economic Design: York, United Kingdom, June 14-16, 2017

The tenth bi-annual Conference on Economic Design will be held at the University of York, United Kingdom, on three full days June 14-16 (Wed--Fri), 2017. It will be organised by the Economics Department of the University of York and the Centre for Mechanism and Institution Design. The conference welcomes paper submissions from many different fields such as economics, business, finance, politics, computer science, operations research, law, history relevant to mechanism or institution design in a broad sense, regardless of whether contributions are theoretical, empirical, experimental, historical or practical. Subjects include but are not limited to auctions, matching, school choice, college admission, organ exchange, decentralised markets, random market mechanisms, voting, social choice, taxation, tax reform, coalition formation, price formation, ranking and scoring, measurements of power and influence, contest, fair division, contract, bargaining, negotiation, market design implementation, pricing on electricity, pricing on public utilities, pricing on cloud computing services, online allocation mechanisms, online auctions, market design experiments, public goods experiments, behavioural mechanism design, information and incentive, digital sport market for labour, market design in transportation sector, institution and organisation, health care, health policy, health insurance, pension scheme, fiscal policy, monetary policy, growth and development, performance evaluation, arbitration, patent design, governance, etc. York is a beautiful historical city with a rich heritage and a wealth of attractions being one of the most popular tourist destinations in the UK. We would like to advise you to make a hotel reservation as soon as possible if you wish to attend the conference, in order to avoid a shortage of affordable accommodation. The Keynote Speakers are: Sanjeev Goyal (Cambridge) Parag Pathak (MIT) Philip Reny (Chicago) Important Dates: Paper Submission Opens: 20-Nov-2016 Paper Submission Deadline: 16-Feb-2017 Notice of Accepted Papers : 1-Mar-2017 until 6-Apr-2017 Registration Opens: 10-Mar-2017 Early Registration Deadline: 20-Apr-2017 Registration Deadline: 20-May-2017 Conference Fees: Regular participants: Until 20-Apr-2017: £330 (GBP), after 20-Apr-2017: £380 (GBP) Student participants: Until 20-Apr-2017: £190 (GBP), after 20-Apr-2017: £230 (GBP) (Fees include a gala dinner, 3 lunches, drinks, a two-year membership of the Society for Economic Design and a subscription to the Review of Economic Design.) Paper Submission: We start to accept paper submissions from 20th Noverber 2016 until 16th February 2017. Each individual is allowed for only one paper submission. Papers should be submitted in PDF with a cover letter to CED2017york@gmail.com. If the author is a student, it is advised to declare it.

NBER Market Design meeting at Stanford: Oct 28-9

Market Design Working Group Meeting

Michael Ostrovsky and Parag Pathak, Organizers

October 28-29, 2016

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

Program

Participant List

 

Friday, October 28
8:30 am	Continental Breakfast
9:00 am	Darrell Duffie, Stanford University and NBER Haoxiang Zhu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Size Discovery
	Ahmad Peivandi, Georgia State University Participation and Unbiased Pricing in CDS Settlement Mechanisms
10:30 am	Break
11:00 am	Laura Doval, Yale University A Theory of Stability in Dynamic Matching Markets
	Hugo Hopenhayn, University of California at Los Angeles and NBER Maryam Saeedi, Carnegie Mellon University Bidding Dynamics in Auctions
12:30 pm	Lunch
2:00 pm	Christina Aperjis, Power Auctions LLC Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland Oleg Baranov, University of Colorado Boulder Thayer Morrill, North Carolina State University Efficient Procurement Auctions with Increasing Returns
	Tibor Heumann, Princeton University Ascending Auctions with Multidimensional Signals
3:30 pm	Break
4:00 pm	John Hatfield, University of Texas at Austin Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard University Hidden Substitutes
	Paul Milgrom, Stanford University Deferred Acceptance Auctions Without Substitutes
5:30 pm	Adjourn
6:30 pm	Dinner Il Fornaio Restaurant 520 Cowper Street Palo Alto, CA
Saturday, October 29
8:30 am	Continental Breakfast
9:00 am	Gabriel Carroll, Stanford University Ilya Segal, Stanford University Robustly Optimal Auctions with Unknown Resale Opportunities
	Songzi Du, Simon Fraser University Robust Mechanisms Under Common Valuation
10:30 am	Break
11:00 am	Shengwu Li, Stanford University Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms
	Marek Pycia, University of California at Los Angeles Peter Troyan, University of Virginia Obvious Dominance and Random Priority
12:30 pm	Lunch
2:00 pm	Benjamin Roth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Ran Shorrer, Pennsylvania State University Making it Safe to Use Centralized Markets: Epsilon-Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design
	Michal Feldman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem Nicole Immorlica, Northwestern University Brendan Lucier, Microsoft Research Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University Vasilis Syrgkanis, Microsoft Research Efficiency Guarantees in Large Markets
3:30 pm	Break
4:00 pm	David Delacretaz, University of Melbourne Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard University Alexander Teytelboym, University of Oxford Refugee Resettlement
	Tommy Andersson, Lund University Lars Ehlers, Université de Montréal Assigning Refugees to Landlords in Sweden: Stable Maximum Matchings
5:30 pm	Adjourn

The market for Ph.D.'s, in the survey of earned doctorates

A report on the survey of earned doctorates is out, with data from 2014:
DOCTORATE RECIPIENTS FROM U.S. UNIVERSITIES
NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING STATISTICS
DIRECTORATE FOR SOCIAL, BEHAVIORAL AND ECONOMIC SCIENCES

Ph.D. admissions committees: a look under the hood at the graduate school matching market

Inside Higher Ed reviews "Inside Graduate Admissions." Here are the first few paragraphs of their review (and a link to the whole thing).

'Inside Graduate Admissions'

What goes on behind closed doors when professors decide who should get chance to earn a Ph.D.? Author of new book was allowed to watch. She saw elitism, a heavy focus on the GRE and some troubling conversations.

January 6, 2016

By

Scott Jaschik

Ph.D. programs are one of the few parts of higher education where admissions decisions are made without admissions professionals. Small groups of faculty members meet, department by department, to decide whom to admit. And their decisions effectively determine the future makeup of the faculty in higher education. Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion.

That may change with the publication ofInside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity and Faculty Gatekeeping, out this month from Harvard University Press. Julie R. Posselt (right), the author and an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Michigan, obtained permission from 6 highly ranked departments at three research universities to watch their reviews of candidates, and she interviewed faculty members at four others. All the departments were ranked as among the top programs in their disciplines. To obtain this kind of access (not to mention institutional review board approval), Posselt had to offer complete anonymity. While her book identifies comments as coming from people in particularly disciplines, she reveals nothing about where the departments are, and she also hides most details about the applicants they reviewed.

To judge from the book, the faculty members she observed did not present her with a scripted and idealistic view of admissions. They were frank about things that they are unlikely to have shared in public.

For instance, those whose programs were not at the very top of the rankings frequently talked about not wanting to offer a spot to someone they believed would go to a higher-ranked program. They didn't want their department to be the graduate equivalent of what high school students applying to college term a safety school. In this sense many of these departments turned down superior candidates, some of whom might have enrolled.

******************
And here's a conversation with the author in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
Inside the Graduate-Admissions Process
A study finds the pervasive misuse of test scores and too much homophily

Ray Fisman to Boston University

Boston University celebrates their newest senior hire (but the sub-headline in the BU Today story makes you wonder what they think their other economists do:
Economist Raymond Fisman to Join BU Faculty--Known for connecting theory to the real world

"BU’s newest economics professor has garnered a lot of attention for parking tickets. Not tickets Raymond Fisman received himself, but those in his much-cited 2006 study showing that UN diplomats from countries with a reputation for corruption, as well as anti-American sentiment, get more parking tickets than diplomats from countries that are considered less corrupt, like Sweden."

Raymond Fisman will bring an eclectic approach as the first Slater Family Professor in Behavioral Economics. Photo by Leslye Smith

Commerce and peer review: pay for speed?

Science has the story (and science is the story):
Editor quits journal over pay-for-expedited peer-review offer

"With a tweet yesterday, an editor of Scientific Reports, one of Nature Publishing Group’s (NPG’s) open-access journals, has resigned in a very public protest of NPG’s recent decision to allow authors to pay money to expedite peer review of their submitted papers. “My objections are that it sets up a two-tiered system and instead of the best science being published in a timely fashion it will further shift the balance to well-funded labs and groups,”
...
"The flap shines a light on a fledgling industry where several companies are now making millions of dollars by privatizing peer review. This niche is being exploited because journal peer review is usually a slow process. After all, it is typically an anonymous, volunteer effort for which scientists receive nothing more than thanks from journal editors and the good feeling of contributing to the scientific community. But for a price at some journals, authors now have the option of fast-tracking their submitted papers through an accelerated peer-review process.

NPG announced earlier this week that it was trying out the peer-review service, called Rubriq, provided by Research Square, a company based in Durham, North Carolina. For a $750 payment to NPG, authors are guaranteed a review within 3 weeks or they get their money back. NPG declined to say how much of that money goes to Research Square.

How does the company perform such quick reviews? “We have about 100 employees with Ph.D.s,” says Research Square’s CEO, Shashi Mudunuri. That small army of editors recruits scientists around the world as reviewers, guiding the papers through the review process. The reviewers get paid $100 for each completed review. The review process itself is also streamlined, using an online “scorecard” instead of the traditional approach of comments, questions, and suggestions. The company also offers services directly to authors, saying it can help them improve papers and find placement with a journal. Business is bustling for Research Square. So far, Mudunuri says, the company has about 1400 active reviewers who have scored 920 papers. The company pulled in $20 million in revenue last year. Mudunuri declined to name the other publishers with which the company has cut deals"

Academic jobs in the humanities

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports on declines in jobs posted in the humanities:Danger Signs for the Academic Job Market in Humanities?

Sources: Information drawn from published data from the national scholarly society for each field. (See endnote below for complete list of sources.) Counts represent the total de-duplicated number of positions advertised in the previous year. Philosophy counts are for the previous calendar year, while counts for all other disciplines are for previous academic year.

You know game theory is becoming mainstream when...

...There's a company offering to do your game theory homework for you...(I'll leave out the URL to avoid steering traffic...)

MOOCS: massive online certifiers

There's an increasing move among companies that offer MOOCs, Massive Online Courses, to also offer certification.  This may be where the money is.

e.g. this from the WSJ: Job Market Embraces Massive Online Courses--Seeking Better-Trained Workers, AT&T, Google and Other Firms Help Design and Even Fund Web-Based College Classes

""The common denominator [among the new MOOC certification programs] is that there really is an interest in finding credentials that don't require a student to buy the entire degree," said Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford University computer-science professor who co-founded Udacity, a MOOC with 1.6 million enrolled students in 200 countries. "This is really democratizing education at its best."

HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Berkeley has a great new endowed chair, joint in Economics and the I-School, named for (and partly endowed by) the remarkable Google chief economist and former I-School Dean Hal Varian.

I SCHOOL'S FIRST ENDOWED CHAIR WILL BE THE HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Hal R. Varian

More information:

• Hal R. Varian
• The Hewlett Challenge

January 19, 2012

The School of Information is delighted to announce the creation of its first endowed chair, the Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics, thanks to a generous gift from Hal R. Varian and matching funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
“This is terrific for the school,” said I School Dean AnnaLee Saxenian, “and it’s fitting that the founding dean of the school is endowing its first chair. This will be a wonderful legacy for Hal.”
The Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics will fund the work of an eminent faculty member, with a joint appointment in the School of Information and the Department of Economics, whose work involves research and teaching in the area of Information Economics.
“I made this donation to support teaching and research in Information Economics,” explained Varian. “Information is the lifeblood of the economy. Everybody who works in the information field should know something about economics, and every economist should know something about information.”
Varian was the founding dean of the I School (then known as the School of Information Management & Systems) and is now the Chief Economist at Google, where he has been involved in auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy, and public policy. He is also a UC Berkeley professor emeritus in business, economics, and information management.
A world-renowned economist, Varian has published numerous papers in economic theory, industrial organization, financial economics, econometrics, and information economics. He is the author of two major economics textbooks and the co-author of a bestselling book on business strategy,Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Varian also wrote a monthly column for the New York Times from 2000 to 2007.
“No area of research could be more exigent than the economics of information,” said Carla Hesse, the university’s Dean of Social Sciences. “This is a pathbreaking gift from a pathbreaking scholar.”
Dean Saxenian agreed. “The field of Information Economics is very important for understanding information and information behavior,” she said. “We couldn’t be where we are without a strong foundation in economics.”
The School of Information and the Department of Economics plan to hire a new faculty member by Fall 2013 to fill the endowed chair.
Varian’s gift allows the school to take advantage of a matching gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, through the Hewlett Challenge. The Hewlett Challenge is a $110-million challenge grant — the largest gift in the university’s history — to endow a total of 100 new faculty chairs across the university.
“The Hewlett matching grant offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and provided me a strong incentive to make a donation now,” said Varian. With the creation of the Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics, the Hewlett Challenge has now funded more than 90 of the 100 professorships and is on target to reach the full 100 soon.
“I have written a couple of papers on the incentive effect of matching grants,” commented Varian, “so in this case, it seems that ‘life imitates art.’”

**************
And here's the ad: you could apply for the position...
HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Advice on interviewing at the job market meetings

Good luck to all those interviewing at the job market meetings in San Diego!

Here's some advice, written by an historian, that applies well to economics too (and probably any academic job market): Advice for the Job Season: Interviewing

"My primary advice for interviewing is to tell candidates that THE SEARCH COMMITTEE MEMBERS WANT YOU TO DO WELL!!!
...
"I promise you, we did not just slog through hundreds of pages of recommendation letters and your prose, pick you out of hundreds of applicants, fly to some god-forsaken icy city, and swill cheap coffee and bagels in a cold hotel room waiting for you because we are eager to humiliate you. While it is possible that there is someone in that room who doesn’t like your work, the majority of the committee has gone to the mat to get you onto the interview list, and those search committee members are secretly praying that you will hit a home run. They are on your side.

"You may well not know which members those are, though, so do not make any assumptions about who are your friends and who are potential enemies on a committee. Treat everyone as interested colleagues. Even the old jerk in the corner asking impossible questions might be on your side. And if not, the chances are good that everyone else in the room recognizes that s/he’s an old curmudgeon, and are hoping that you will handle her/him with aplomb.
The committee members want you to do well, so help them out. Almost certainly there will be faculty members from different fields in the room who only know your field generally. So explain immediately what you do, and why it is important to someone outside your specialty. Do not make them plead with you to articulate why what you do is significant. (Clearly, they think it is, or they would not have brought you in for an interview."

Dean Rachel Croson

Economist Rachel Croson Named Dean of the UT Arlington College of Business

"Much of Croson’s research has centered on experimental and behavioral economics, investigating how people make economic decisions and how to improve them, she said.

"Those subject areas draw on and contribute to many disciplines, including economics, management, marketing, operations, political science and sociology, and her work has been published in myriad journals. As director of UT Dallas’ Negotiations Center, she connected negotiation scholars with practitioners and business leaders to inform business practice through education and outreach.

"Croson also is the co-editor of a forthcoming book, Oxford Handbook of Economic Conflict Resolution, with Gary Bolton, and is currently researching motivations for charitable giving, among other subjects."
**********

A big mabruk to Dean Rachel Toni Algaze Croson.

Dual career academic couples--some thoughts on negotiations

A dean shares some thoughts on the negotiations and some of the obstacles that face dual career couples, and particularly the second member of the couple to be hired:

Dual-Career Academics: The Right Start

July 27, 2012 - 3:00am

By

Elizabeth H. Simmons

"A typical hire is something that a department has prepared for at length and according to a familiar rhythm: asking to search, reading folders and conducting multiple campus interviews.  By the time an offer is tendered, department members have had numerous opportunities to review the new hire’s credentials, hear the person give a talk, and even speak one-on-one.   In contrast, a partner’s hire is often conducted more rapidly and with fewer opportunities for interaction with department members. 

"In consequence, when the second partner starts his or her job, there may be fewer members of the department than usual who are aware that the hire has happened, let alone who are aware of academic interests they may have in common."

Moving on...new address

My new address:
Al Roth
Landau Economics Building
579 Serra Mall
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-6072

(Previous announcement here:)

Centralized application systems: more consolidation

One of the ways the internet is changing job markets has to do with making it easier to transmit job market materials. (This becomes even more important as the internet makes it easier for job candidates to apply to a larger number of jobs.) Competing services have sprung up to serve this need, and as the market matures we are starting to see some consolidation.

In the humanities, Interfolio seems to be consolidating its position, with a recent endorsement from the Modern Language Association, which will integrate the service with its Job Information List:
 Dossier and Search-Management Services Available through the JIL

"Job seekers will be able to apply for positions directly from advertisements in the JIL by creating a free Interfolio account
...
"All departments that place ads in the 2012–13 JIL will be able to use Interfolio’s suite of online search-management tools, called ByCommittee. ByCommittee provides a single secure Web interface for departments to manage search-committee memberships for multiple searches and to receive candidate applications, dossiers, and other materials."
...
"Letter writers receive requests for letters directly from a candidate’s Interfolio account and submit their letters to Interfolio’s centralized dossier service."
********

In Economics, some preliminary discussions have taken place about the possibility of a similar kind of integration between the job listing service Job Openings for Economists (JOE) and the application-materials aggregator Econjobmarket.org. but it remains for at least another year to see whether these discussions will be fruitful.
********
Previous related posts:
Academic letters of reference;

Consolidation and competition among economics jobs aggregators

David Warsh on Stanford Econ

David Warsh, in his role as economist-watcher, in The Providence Journal today (along with some observations about the market for newspapers):


"The Stanford University buildup in economics, financed by the riches of Silicon Valley, continues apace. Susan Athey and Guido Imbens, of Harvard, a married couple, last week accepted an offer. Previously announced was the decision of Alvin Roth, of Harvard Business School, to relocate to Palo Alto. Other offers are said to be in the works.


"Athey and Roth are market designers, at the forefront of especially exciting developments in present-day economics, in which the nexus with technology is especially germain. (Imbens is a highly rated econometrician.) Athey started a research laboratory for Microsoft in Cambridge that has since grown to considerable size. I don't suppose that the leadership of economics itself is in any danger of tipping out of Massachusetts. But it's clearly easier to make things happen on the Left Coast."

Economics job market scramble opens March 21, 2012

Here's the announcement:

Economics Job Market "Scramble" for new Ph.D.s

The 2012 Job Economics Job Market Scramble registration will open on March 21, 2012.
March 21-28: Registration Period.
March 30-April 10: Scramble Website will open for viewing by registered participants only.
April 11: Scramble Viewing will close.
See the Scramble Guide for more detailed information.
Verified registrants received an email on April 1st with instructions for viewing the prospective Employer and Candidate lists.

Brief Description:

Occasionally prospective employers of new Ph.D. economists exhaust their candidates before hiring someone during the winter/spring "job market" period. Similarly, new economics Ph.D.s seeking a job sometimes find that all of the prospective employers with whom they have interviewed have hired someone else before they have secured an appointment.
To address these problems, the AEA has established a "Job Market Scramble" web site to facilitate communication between employers and job seekers in late spring. In March, employers that continue to have an open position previously listed in Job Openings for Economists (JOE) may post a short notice of its availability (with a link to the JOE listing). Similarly, new or recent economics Ph.D. job seekers still looking for a position may post a short announcement of their continued availability, with a link to their application materials (C.V., papers, references). The web site will open for viewing to those who have listed a position or availability soon after listings close. There is no charge for the "Job Market Scramble."
See the Scramble Guide for more detailed information. 

A different shade of red

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1465

cardinal: Pantone 201

 
rgb(164, 16, 52) crimson

Is the market for professors of English becoming less thick?

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."

Philosophy job market

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."