Matching Conference in Glasgow, April 16-17 2015: call for papers

MATCH-UP 2015 3rd International Workshop on Matching Under Preferences University of Glasgow, 16-17 April 2015 Home Committees Submissions Programme Registration Practical information MATCH-UP 2015 is the third workshop in the series of interdisciplinary and international workshops on matching under preferences. It is co-located, and is partially overlapped with, theCOST Action IC1205 meeting on Matching and Fair Division that takes place on 14-16 April 2015. Previous workshops The first MATCH-UP was held on 6 July 2008 at Reykjavík University as a satellite workshop ofICALP 2008. MATCH-UP 2012, second in this series, was held on 19-20 July 2012 at Corvinus University of Budapest. Background Matching problems with preferences occur in widespread applications such as the assignment of school-leavers to universities, junior doctors to hospitals, students to campus housing, children to schools, kidney transplant patients to donors and so on. The common thread is that individuals have preference lists over the possible outcomes and the task is to find a matching of the participants that is in some sense optimal with respect to these preferences. The remit of this workshop is to explore matching problems with preferences from the perspective of algorithms and complexity, discrete mathematics, combinatorial optimization, game theory, mechanism design and economics, and thus a key objective is to bring together the research communities of the related areas. List of topics The matching problems under consideration include, but are not limited to: two-sided matchings involving agents on both sides (e.g. college admissions, resident allocation, job markets, school choice, etc.) two-sided matchings involving agents and items (e.g. house allocation, course allocation, project allocation, assigning papers to reviewers, school choice, etc. one-sided matchings (roommates problem, kidney exchanges, etc.) matching with payments (assignment game, etc.) Invited speakers Katarína Cechlárová Pavol Jozef Šafárik University in Košice Christine Cheng University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Hervé Moulin University of Glasgow Submissions We call for two types of contributed papers. Format A original contribution at most 12 pages accepted papers will be published in proceedings Format B not necessarily original work no page limit only the abstract will be published in proceedings See Submissions for more information. Important dates Deadline for submission of contributed papers: 1 Dec 2014 Notification of acceptance: 16 Jan 2015 Final versions of papers and abstracts for the proceedings: 16 Feb 2015 Early registration deadline: 2 March 2015 Workshop: 16-17 April 2015 Funding There are a limited number of assisted places, funded by SICSA, that will be awarded to PhD students at SICSA universities. These assisted places will cover the cost of registration but will not cover travel or accommodation. Contact us If you require further information, please use the following email address for all enquiries regarding the workshop: matchup2015@dcs.gla.ac.uk. Sponsorship We gratefully acknowledge financial support from SICSA (The Scottish Informatics and Computer Science Alliance).

Fifth International Workshop on Computational Social Choice, Pittsburgh, June 23-25, 2014

Fifth International Workshop on Computational Social Choice, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, June 23-25, 2014

Invited Speakers Eric Budish (University of Chicago) Edward Felten (Princeton University) Jean-Francois Laslier (Paris School of Economics)

The program is here.

(And if you miss Eric B in Pittsburgh, you can catch him in Jerusalem on June 29).

25th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory :Matching and Market Design, June 23-July 2

I'm off to Jerusalem for the 25th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory. This year the topic is Matching and Market Design

Event date: Jun 23 - Jul 2 ,2014 

Organizers:

Scott Duke Kominers (Harvard University)
Eric Maskin, Director (Harvard University)
Alvin Roth (Stanford University)
Eyal Winter, Codirector (The Hebrew University)


Models of matching---in which agents are paired with one another to undertake transactions---have played an important role in contemporary economic theory. Matching algorithms have proven valuable in many real-life applications, including the assignment of students to schools, medical residents to hospitals, and organ donors to recipients. Matching theory has also helped illuminate thorny problems such as inequality and unemployment. The summer school will place greatest emphasis on design issues, but will touch on other aspects of matching as well.

LIST OF SPEAKERS
NAME	AFFILIATION
Atila Abdulkadiroglu	Duke University
Itai Ashlagi	MIT
Eric Budish	Universty of Chicago
Scott Duke Kominers	Harvard University
Jacob D. Leshno	Columbia University
Eric S. Maskin	Harvard University
Paul R. Milgrom	Stanford University
Elliott Peranson	National Matching Services, Inc
Assaf Romm	Harvard University
Alvin E. Roth	Stanford University

PROGRAM 
Monday, June 23
8:30-9:30 REGISTRATION IN IIAS LOBBY
9:30-11:00 Eric Maskin (Harvard University)
 Introduction to Matching and Allocation Problems (I)
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Scott Duke Kominers (Harvard University)
 Introduction to Matching and Allocation Problems (II)
13:00-14:30 Lunch break
14:30-16:00 Alvin E. Roth (Stanford University)
 The Design of the National Resident Matching Program

16:00 Reception

Tuesday, June 24
9:30- 11:00 Itai Ashlagi (MIT)
 Unbalanced Random Matching Markets: Competition and Complementarities
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Elliott Peranson (National Matching Services, Inc.)
 Issues in Real-World Matching Market Design
13:00-14:30 Lunch break
14:30-16:00 Eric Maskin (Harvard University)
 Assortative Matching and Inequality

Wednesday, June 25
9:30-11:00 Paul R. Milgrom (Stanford University)
 Matching with Contracts
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Scott Duke Kominers (Harvard University)
 Substitutability in Generalized Matching
13:00-14:30 Lunch break
14:30 TOUR OF JERUSALEM

Thursday, June 26
9:30-11:00 Paul R. Milgrom (Stanford University)
 Deferred Acceptance Heuristic Auctions
11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-13:00 Paul R. Milgrom (Stanford University)
 Auctions for Internet Advertising
13:00-14:30 Lunch break
14:30 FIRST STUDENT POSTER SESSION

Friday, June 27
9:30-11:00 Alvin E. Roth (Stanford University)
 Kidney Exchange
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Itai Ashlagi (MIT)
 Current Challenges in Kidney Exchange

Saturday, June 28
TOUR OF MASADA

Sunday, June 29
9:30-11:00 Eric Budish (University of Chicago)
 Combinatorial Assignment
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Eric Budish (University of Chicago)
 Financial Market Design

Monday, June 30
9:30-11:00 Atila Abdulkadiroglu (Duke University)
Theory of School Choice
11:00-11:30 Coffee break

11:30-13:00 Atila Abdulkadiroglu (Duke University)
 Empirics of School Choice
13:00-14:30 Lunch break
17:00-18:30 ARROW LECTURE
19:00 Dinner (invited speakers only)

Tuesday, July 1
9:30-11:00 Jacob D. Leshno (Columbia University)
 Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Systems
11:00-11:30 Coffee break
11:30-13:00 Assaf Romm (Harvard University)
 Efficient Assignment and the Israeli Medical Match
13:00-14:30 Lunch break
18:30 Concert at the Jerusalem Music Center and dinner at the Terasa Restaurant

Wednesday, July 2
9:30-11:00 Jacob D. Leshno (Columbia University)
 Large-Market Matching

Here's the poster .
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Updates:

Eric Maskin giving the opening lecture

Social Choice in Boston and Pittsburgh, June 18-21

The 12^th Meeting of the Society for Social Choice
and Welfare

June 18-21, 2014 at Boston College

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View the Conference Program |  

 

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KEY NOTE SPEAKERS:

• Arrow Lecture: Daron Acemoglu (MIT)
• Condorcet Lecture:  Parag Pathak (MIT)
• Presidential Address: Bhaskar Dutta (U. Warwick)
• Social Choice and Welfare Prize: Vincent Conitzer (Duke U.), Tim Roughgarden (Stanford U.)
• Special SSCW Lecture: Amartya Sen (Harvard U., Nobel Laureate in
  economics 1998)

Local Organizers:

• Hideo Konishi (BC)
• Utku Ünver (BC)

NBER Market Design conference at Stanford, June 8-9, 2014

Here's the program:

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, INC. Market Design Working Group Meeting Susan Athey and Parag Pathak, Organizers June 8-9, 2014 Sheraton Palo Alto Sequoia/Oak Room 625 El Camino Real Palo Alto, CA PROGRAM Participant List Sunday, June 8: 8:30 am Continental Breakfast 9:00 am Haluk Ergin, Duke University Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College Utku Unver, Boston College Living-Donor Lobar Liver/Lung Exchange 9:45 am Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University Jinwoo Kim, Seoul National University Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University Stable Matching in Large Economies 10:30 am Break 11:00 am Nicolas Lambert, Stanford University Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University, Google, and NBER Mikhail Panov, Stanford University Strategic Trading in Informationally Complex Environments  11:45 am Nima Haghpanah, Northwestern University Jason Hartline, Northwestern University Reverse Mechanism Design 12:30 pm Lunch 2:00 pm Umut Dur, North Carolina State University Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard University Parag Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College The Demise of Walk Zones in Boston: Priorities vs. Precedence in School Choice 2:45 pm Nikhil Agarwal, Yale University and NBER Paulo Somaini, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Identification and Estimation in Manipulable Assignment Mechanisms 3:30 pm Break 4:00 pm Paul Milgrom, Stanford University Ilya Segal, Stanford University Deferred-Acceptance Auctions and Radio Spectrum Reallocation  4:45 pm Susan Athey, Stanford University and NBER Denis Nekipelov, University of Virginia Designing Large Advertising Markets When Agents Have Heterogeneous Objectives 5:30 pm Adjourn 7:00 pm Dinner at Il Fornaio 520 Cowper Street, Palo Alto Monday, June 9: 8:30 am Continental Breakfast 9:00 am Liran Einav, Stanford University and NBER Chiara Farronato, Stanford University Jonathan Levin, Stanford University and NBER Neel Sundaresan, eBay Research Labs Sales Mechanisms in Online Markets: What Happened to Internet Auctions? 9:45 am Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland Oleg Baranov, University of Colorado Boulder Revealed Preference in Bidding: Empirical Evidence from Recent Spectrum Auctions 10:30 am Break 11:00 am Bradley Larsen, Stanford University and NBER The Efficiency of Dynamic, Post-Auction Bargaining: Evidence from Wholesale Used-Auto Auctions  11:45 am Eric Budish, University of Chicago Judd Kessler, University of Pennsylvania Changing the Course Allocation Mechanism at Wharton 12:30 pm Joint ACM EC and NBER Lunch 2:00 pm A Joint Session for EC, NBER and Decentralization on CS and Economics Organized by the Events Chairs:  Susan Athey, Stanford University and NBER Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Vincent Conitzer, Duke University David Easley, Cornell University Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University Scott Page, University of Michigan Parag Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Invited Speakers, Titles and Links to Abstracts: Susan Athey, Stanford University and NBER The Economics of Crypto-Currencies  Joaquin Candela, Facebook Machine Learning and the Facebook Ads Auction Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University Computational Problems for Designed Social Systems Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University Approximately Optimal Mechanisms Motivation, Examples, and Lessons Learned 5:30 pm Adjourn The joint conference, with activities by EC and Decentralization, will continue from Tuesday to Thursday.  On Tuesday morning, EC will have a keynote talk by Matt Jackson, followed by a poster session and EC technical session.  Additional details on the EC Conference, including registration information are available at http://www.sigecom.org/ec14/index.html

International trade and customs unions, in Baku

To make a long story short, I'll be speaking at  the conference of the International Network of Customs Universities (INCU),  “Trade Facilitation Post-Bali: Putting Policy into Practice," in Baku.

The Inaugural INCU Global Conference 2014 "Trade Facilitation Post-Bali: Putting Policy into Practice" will take place from 21 to 23 May 2014 in Baku, Republic of Azerbaijan and will be hosted by the State Customs Committee of the Republic of Azerbaijan.

Here's a draft of the program. It will be a chance for me to meet Chris Pissarides, and to reconnect with Tom Sargent. 

Montreal conference on matching ( l’appariement), March 21-22

Here's the preliminary program...

Colloque CIREQ Montréal sur l’appariement

Programme préliminaire
 

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VENDREDI, le 21 mars 2014
9:00 – 10:30	SESSION I – Président : Umut DUR (North Carolina State University) Peter Coles (ebay Research Labs), Yannai Gonczarowski (Hebrew University),Ran SHORRER (Harvard University) Strategic Behavior in Unbalanced Matching Markets Timo MENNLE (University of Zurich), Sven Seuken (University of Zurich) An Axiomatic Approach to Characterizing and Relaxing Strategyproofness of One-sided Matching Mechanisms Umut DUR (North Carolina State University), Onur Kesten (Carnegie Mellon University) Sequential versus Simultaneous Assignment Problems and Two Applications
10:30 – 11:00	Pause
11:00 – 12:30	SESSION II - Président : Utku UNVER (Boston College) Lars Ehlers (Université de Montréal, CIREQ), Alexander WESTKAMP (Maastricht University) Strategy-Proof Tie-Breaking David Cantala (El Colegio de México), Szilvia PAPAI (Concordia University, CIREQ) Reasonably and Securely Stable Matching Marek Pycia (UCLA), Utku UNVER (Boston College) Incentive Compatible Allocation and Exchange of Indivisible Resources
12:30 – 14:00	Lunch
14:00 – 16:00	SESSION III - Présidente : Bettina KLAUS (University of Lausanne) Shuhei Morimoto (Kobe University), Shigehiro SERIZAWA (Osaka University) Strategy-proofness and Efficiency with Non-quasi-linear Preferences : A Characterization of Minimum Price Walrasian Rule Jens GUDMUNDSSON, Helga Habis (Lund University) Assignment Games with Externalities Tomoya KAZUMURA, Shigehiro Serizawa (Osaka University) An Impossibility of Allocating Objects among Agents with Non-Quasi-Linear Preferences Bettina KLAUS (University of Lausanne), Jonathan Newton (University of Sydney) Stochastic Stability in Assignment Problems
16:00 – 16:30	Pause
16:30 – 17:45	KEYNOTE LECTURE : Tayfun SÖNMEZ (Boston College) Kidney Exchange : Past, Present, and Potential Future
19:00	Dîner de conférence (sur invitation seulement)Restaurant Laloux, 250, Pine Avenue East

SAMEDI, le 22 mars 2014
9:00 – 10:30	SESSION IV – Président : Jan Christoph SCHLEGEL (Université de Lausanne) Madhav RAGHAVAN (Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi) Fair Assignment with Capacity Constraints Takashi AKAHOSHI (Waseda University) Singleton Core in Many-to-One Matching Problems Jan Christoph SCHLEGEL (Université de Lausanne) Contracts versus Salaries in Matching : A General Result
10:30 – 11:00	Pause
11:00 – 12:30	SESSION V – Président : Panos TOULIS (Harvard University) M. Bumin Yenmez (Carnegie Mellon University), Federico ECHENIQUE (California Institute of Technology) How to Control Controlled School Choice Péter Biró (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Elena IÑARRA (University of the Basque Country), Elena Molis (University of Granada) Solutions Concepts for Unsolvable Roommate Problems David C. Parkes (SEAS, Harvard University), Panos TOULIS (Harvard University) A Random Graph Model of Multi-Hospital Kidney Exchanges
12:30 – 14:00	Lunch
14:00 – 16:00	SESSION VI – Président : Vikram MANJUNATH (Université de Montréal, CIREQ) * Chaque présentation de cette session sera de 20 minutes.   Ville KORPELA (Turku School of Economics) Nash Implementation of Stable Solutions in Many-to-One Matching Problems : The Case with No Complementarities Samson ALVA (University of Texas at San Antonio) Pairwise Stability and Complementarity in Many-to-One Matching Mustafa Oğuz Afacan (Sabanci University), Bertan TURHAN (Boston College) Assignment Maximization Lars EHLERS (Université de Montréal, CIREQ) TBA Alexander TEYTELBOYM (MIT) Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Networks with Bilateral Contracts Vikram MANJUNATH (Université de Montréal, CIREQ), Bertan Turhan (Boston College) When Two Should Be One but Aren’t : Milwaukee Public Schools and the Voucher System
16:00 – 16:30	Pause
16:30 – 18:00	SESSION VII – Président : Nizar ALLOUCH (Queen Mary University of London) Claudia HERRESTHAL (Oxford University) Mobility, Learning and School Choice Albin Erlanson (Lund University), Karol SZWAGRZAK (University of Southern Denmark) Strategy-proof Package Assignment Nizar ALLOUCH (Queen Mary University of London) The Cost of Segregation in Social Networks
18:00	Réception de clôtureColloque CIREQ Montréal sur l’appariement

Decentralization conference at Stanford June 10-11: call for papers

Here's the call for papers:

Call for Papers 2014 Decentralization Conference

The 2014 Decentralization Conference will be hosted by the Department of Economics at Stanford University on June 10th and 11th at The Sheraton Palo Alto, in Palo Alto, California.  The Local organizer will be Fuhito Kojima.   

Submissions will be accepted until March 15th, 2014. Full papers are preferred, but extended abstracts will also be considered. To submit a paper, please submit your paper to Megan Glatzel (mglatzel@stanford.edu) with the subject line Decentralization Submission.  We aim to announce the conference program by April 15th. All participants must confirm their attendance by May 1, 2014.

The theme of this year's conference will be market and institutional design.  As mentioned in an earlier email, the conference will co-locate with the ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (http://www.sigecom.org/ec14/) and the NBER Market Design working group, creating an interdisciplinary market design conference.  The combined conferences will run from the morning of Sunday June 8th to Thursday June 12th. Participants as well as their graduate students are encouraged to attend for the entire week.

There will be a joint session of all three conferences taking place on the morning of June 10th. Owing to this joint session, our exclusive portion of the conference will be slightly shorter than usual. We expect the program to consist of between ten and twelve papers.   In keeping with the traditional format of this conference, each presenter will be allocated an hour to allow for technical and detailed presentations.

We have reserved a block of rooms at the Sheraton Palo Alto. You can contact them by email at www.sheraton.com/paloalto or by phone at 650 462 2930

Please feel free to forward this to email to any scholars who might be interested in presenting at or attending the conference.

All the best

Scott E Page

University of Michigan

Approaches to alleviating the shortage of transplant organs: AAAS annual meeting

Weather permitting, I'll be on my way to Chicago today for a session at the AAAS meeting, on the shortage of organs for transplants.

Transplant Organ Shortage: Informing National Policies using Management Sciences

Friday, 14 February 2014: 10:00 AM-11:30 AM

Columbus IJ (Hyatt Regency Chicago)

Since the first successful kidney transplant in 1954, outcomes have improved dramatically.  As a result,  the wait list for organ transplants has grown significantly over time. With only about 17,000  kidneys available from combined living and deceased donors annually, there are currently 99,000 Americans waiting for a kidney transplant, and the wait-list mortality is now higher than ever before. National policies for organ allocation are largely dictated by legislative priorities, but the organ shortage results in a number of disparities and therefore,  there is a growing interest in optimizing organ allocation policies to develop a balance between fairness, utility and efficiency.

Organs are a limited, perishable resource and using them more effectively saves more lives. The speakers in this briefing have taken an inter-disciplinary approach to addressing the organ allocation in the U.S., suggesting compelling and provocative solutions. Michael Abecassis, a transplant surgeon and Chief of the Transplant Program at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, and Past President of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons will offer a brief overview of the current issues facing organ allocation. John Friedewald, a transplant nephrologist and  Past Chair of the United Network for Organ Sharing Kidney and Pancreas Committee, that oversaw the most recent proposed changes in kidney allocation, also from Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, will speak about the implications of these recent proposed changes to deceased donor kidney allocation policy. Nobel laureate (2012) and Stanford University economist Alvin Roth will discuss the evolution of innovative solutions to the organ shortage and how mathematical models are used to optimize Kidney Paired Donation and the impact of increasing living donor kidney transplants on the waiting list for deceased donor transplants. Sanjay Mehrotra from the McCormick School of Engineering at Northwestern University will discuss how simulation models can be used to optimize deceased donor kidney utilization to maximize utility.  Mark Siegler Director of the University of Chicago’s MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and executive director of the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence will  will challenge some long-held beliefs about living donors and will address the salient issues related to ethical considerations in potential solutions to the organ shortage..

Michael Abecassis MD MBA, J. Roscoe Miller Distinguished Professor of Surgery and Microbiology/Immunology, Chief, Division of Transplantaiton, and Founding Director, Comprehensive Transplant Center Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Organizer

John Friedewald MD, Associate Professor of Medicine and Surgery, Comprehensive Transplant Center, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, and former chair, Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network/United Network for Organ Sharing Kidney Transplantation Committee

Discussant

Sanjay Mehrotra PhD, Professor, Department of Industrial Engineering and Management Sciences, Northwestern University McCormick School of Engineering, and Director, Center for Engineering and Health, Institute for Public Health and Medicine, Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine

Addressing Allocation Inefficiencies and Geographic Disparities

Alvin Roth PhD, Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics, Stanford University, and co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences

Allocating Donor Organs in Ways that Increase Their Availability

Mark Siegler MD, Lindy Bergman Distinguished Service Professor of Medicine and Surgery, University of Chicago Medicine, Founding Director of the MacLean Center for Clinical Medical Ethics and Executive Director of the Bucksbaum Institute for Clinical Excellence

Ethical Considerations for Innovative Strategies to Increase the Supply of Organs
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Update: here's a picture of the panel:

and here's a news story: Math saving lives: New models help address kidney organ donation shortages

Venture capital looks at the design of marketplaces

Not long ago I had a chance to listen to some interesting presentations at a conference sponsored by Greylock Partners, about businesses that aim to make marketplaces: As Marketplaces Evolve, Greylock Places Its Bets

 Leena Rao writes:
"The idea of marketplaces as a business model for technology startups isn’t new. We saw some marketplaces go belly up in the bubble, and saw a few, like eBay, grow into massive businesses. However, the marketplace model has experienced a renaissance of sorts lately, with companies like Airbnb, Uber and others gaining serious traction and becoming billion-dollar-plus businesses.

Greylock Partners held a conference in mid-November devoted to talking about design, product development, the economics and more around marketplaces, spearheaded in part by the firm’s newest partner and former eBay Motors creator, Simon Rothman.

As part of its new $100 million commitment to investing in marketplaces, Greylock assembled Reid Hoffman, Airbnb co-founder and CEO Brian Chesky, eBay CEOJohn Donahoe, Nobel Prize Laureate and marketplace expert Alvin Roth, and many others to discuss the rise of marketplaces and much more. I was able to sit down with some of the speakers to talk about their thoughts on why marketplaces are hot right now.

Hoffman, who founded LinkedIn and was an early investor in Facebook, sees many parallels between networks and marketplaces. On the similarities in both models, he says: “There’s a question of how do you identify people? What reputational systems underlie it? What kinds of information and signaling? What kind of transactions go public? There’s some differences, too, but it’s essentially a similar brain activity.”

As for why marketplaces are getting more attention now, Hoffman believes that it’s in part due to mobile and the progression in human behavior. “Now everyone is comfortable with the notion of, ‘Oh, I could actually find someone I don’t know and transact with them, either as travelers, hosts, sellers, buyer.’ Those that can actually work mean that I have some trust in these mechanisms,” he explains further.

Rothman agrees with Hoffman, and told me that trust is a huge element of why marketplaces have evolved, as well as the biggest challenge for these marketplaces. “They’re really selling trust. And until the web adds social identity, I think creating trust at scale is really hard. As we’ve heard, marketplace is about influence, and if you can’t control the experience, if you can’t control the product, you can’t control the fulfillment. All you can control is trust and you need to have that. And then mobile is an accelerant to that. If you are a local market, or a local business, you have to have mobile. There’s just no way Uber works without mobile,” he says.

...

So how do marketplaces add trust? Hoffman advises to look at mechanisms by which you can essentially borrow some trust and add it to the product, such as using social networks or identities. He recalled a product development from his PayPal days, where an engineer developed a better way to authenticate bank accounts.

For years, in order to authenticate a bank account you had to send in a voided check, and a copy of your drivers license. PayPal realized that if they wanted to get to scale, the company would have to make it easier to create accounts. “If we can’t solve this problem, we basically don’t have an interesting business model,” he said. One of the early engineers developed a way to send two sub-dollar transactions to the account, to create a PIN of sorts for instant verification.

While friction is something most marketplaces want to remove, Rothman argues that some should consider “the concept of strategic friction” when it comes to trust and safety. He thinks it’s one of the only places where friction is not only tolerable but kind of desirable.

...

"Hoffman says that Airbnb was creating liquidity out of space. Even if the hosts didn’t own their real estate, the liquidity involved is “hugely valuable and motivating to them.” So, they’ll adopt mobile products, and go through hoops to make that happen. “There was no question that this is going to work,” he says. 

...

Now that Greylock is allocating some of its new $1 billion in funding toward the marketplace model, we’ll be looking to see where the firm will be placing its bets. Rothman thinks that in the next five years there will be more $1 billion dollar marketplaces than there were in the past 20 years, and we already have quite a few that are rising fast. Stay tuned."

Webcast of the luncheon talks on market design from the 2014 AEA Annual Meeting

The AEA has posted a collection of webcasts from the 2014 annual meeting in Philadelphia, including from the
Nobel Laureate Luncheon
William Nordhaus; Paul Milgrom; Roger Myerson 
View Webcast

The video is a little less than an hour: and consists of brief introductions by Nordhaus, and talks on market design and its history by Milgrom and Myerson, and a short talk by me with some thoughts on the future of market design as economic engineering and the science that supports it.  (spoiler: I think it will be important to study congestion...)
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Eleven 2014 Annual Meeting sessions are available online. (I enjoyed Claudia Goldin's magisterial address on gender and jobs, which reminded me of the work following up on this and the matching aspects of pursuing both careers and marriages, of our joint student Stephanie Hurder.):

•    AEA Presidential Address "A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter" (Claudia Goldin)
•    AEA Awards Ceremony (William Nordhaus)
•    Richard T. Ely Lecture "Retirement Security in an Aging Population" (James Poterba)
•    Nobel Laureate Luncheon (Paul Milgrom, Roger Myerson, and Alvin Roth)
•    AEA/AFA Joint Luncheon (Jeremy Stein)
•    Chairman Bernanke Presentation (Ben Bernanke, Kenneth Rogoff, and Anil Kashyap)
•    What's Natural? Key Macroeconomic Parameters after the Great Recession
•    Discounting for the Long Run
•    Financial Globalization
•    Climate Change Policy after Kyoto
•    Macroeconomics of Austerity

Barcelona experimental economics summer school

Experiments and macroeconomics at Barcelona, this just in:

Announcing the 2014 Barcelona LeeX Experimental Economics Summer School in Macroeconomics

Macroeconomic theories have traditionally been tested using non-experimental "field" data. However, modern, micro-founded macroeconomic models can also be tested in the laboratory, and researchers have begun to pursue such experimental testing and evaluation. This June, graduate students specializing in macroeconomics or experimental economics, as well as junior faculty members and researchers of macroeconomic are invited to attend the Barcelona LeeX summer school devoted to experimental macroeconomics research. This intensive 5 day summer school will be held from June 11 to 17, 2014 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra (UPF) in Barcelona, Spain.  Students will be taught experimental methods and exposed to a number of macroeconomic applications that have been tested experimentally. Students will be asked to participate in experiments and to develop their own experimental macroeconomic projects. Faculty will assist with and critique these projects.

Details about the summer school including how to apply are provided on the summer school website

http://www.upf.edu/leex/events/bleess_2014/index.html

This year we invite summer school students to present their ongoing research during the summer school. Such presentations may take the form of presentations during the summer school or a poster session during the associated conference workshop, depending on the number of students seeking to present their work. Such presentations will be at the discretion of the summer school organizers.

Students can submit research proposals as part of their summer school application, though this is not a requirement for participation in the summer school.  Indeed, one purpose of the summer school is to think of macroeconomic topics and models that can be implemented in the laboratory in a way that advances our knowledge of behavior.

Summer school students are also invited to attend the 2 day 5th LeeX International Workshop co-organized with Barcelona GSE Summer Forum on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics  from June 9-10, 2014 that will also take place at UPF immediately prior to the summer school.

The deadline for summer school applications is Monday, April 21 2014.  

Summer school in experimental macroeconomics faculty:

• Guest lectures
• Charles Noussair (Tilburg University)
• Cars Hommes (University of Amsterdam)
• Shyam Sunder (Yale University)
• John Duffy (University of Pittsburgh)
• Frank Heinemann (Technische Universität Berlin)
• Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and  Barcelona GSE )

Summer school organizers:

• John Duffy (University of Pittsburgh)
• Frank Heinemann (Technische Universität Berlin)
• Rosemarie Nagel (Universitat Pompeu Fabra)

Please forward this message to any interested parties.