23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’22)--call for papers (by Feb 10)

 The deadline is 11:59pm EDT on Feb 10, but I'm guessing that papers have a good chance of being received as late as midnight.

23rd ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’22): Call for Contributions

"TL;DR for Seasoned Authors:

Papers submitted to EC’22 must select one of four methodological tracks and up to two content areas. The list of tracks and content areas can be found below.

EC’22 is continuing the forward-to-journal option as in previous years.

EC’22 is currently planned as a primarily in-person event, with some components (e.g., poster sessions and tutorials) to be held either virtually or in a hybrid format. Presenters of accepted papers who cannot (or do not feel comfortable to) travel to EC’22 will have the option to present their paper virtually.

...

Timetable for Authors

February 10, 2022 (11:59 pm EST): Paper submission deadline

April 11, 2022 (11:59pm EDT): Reviews sent to authors for feedback

April 14, 2022 (11:59pm EDT): Author responses due

May 8, 2022: Paper accept/reject notifications

May 18, 2022 (11:59pm EDT): Camera-ready versions of accepted papers due

July 11-15, 2022: Conference technical program"

...

Program Chairs:

Sven Seuken (University of Zurich and ETH AI Center)

Ilya Segal (Stanford University)

Contact the PC chairs at ec22chairs@gmail.com 

Track Chairs:

Theory: Robert Kleinberg (Cornell University) and Aaron Roth (University of Pennsylvania)

Applied Modeling: Gabriel Weintraub (Stanford University)

Empirics: Georgios Zervas (Boston University)

AI: Kevin Leyton-Brown (University of British Columbia)

EC’22 will use the following areas:

• Mechanism design

• Auctions and pricing

• Market design and matching markets

• Contract design

• Online platforms and applications

• Econometrics, ML, and data science

• Equilibria, learning, and dynamics in games

• Social choice and voting theory

• Social networks and social learning

• Fair division

• Market equilibria

• Crowdsourcing and information elicitation

• Privacy, algorithmic fairness, social good, and ethics

• Blockchain and cryptocurrencies

• Behavioral economics and bounded rationality

Area Chairs: Nick Arnosti (University of Minnesota)  Haris Aziz (University of New South Wales)  Moshe Babaioff (Microsoft Research)  Yakov Babichenko (Technion)  Bruno Biais (Toulouse School of Economics)  Martin Bichler (Technical University of Munich)  Larry Blume (Cornell University)  Liad Blumrosen (Hebrew University)  Benjamin Brooks (University of Chicago) Yang Cai (Yale University)  Agostino Capponi (Columbia University)  Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia University)  Rachel Cummings (Columbia University)  Nikhil Devanur (Amazon)  John Dickerson (University of Maryland)  Laura Doval (Columbia University)  Paul Duetting (Google Research)  Michal Feldman (Tel Aviv University)  Ashish Goel (Stanford University)  Hanna Halaburda (New York University Stern School of Business)  Hoda Heidari (Carnegie Mellon University)  Martin Hoefer (Goethe University Frankfurt)  Ian Kash (University of Illinois at Chicago)  Fuhito Kojima (University of Tokyo)  Nicolas Lambert (MIT)  Jacob Leshno (The University of Chicago Booth School of Business)  Shengwu Li (Harvard University)  Annie Liang (University of Pennsylvania)  Brendan Lucier (Microsoft Research)  Mohammad Mahdian (Google Research)  Azarakhsh Malekian (University of Toronto)  R. Preston McAfee  Reshef Meir (Technion)  Jamie Morgenstern (University of Washington)  Thayer Morril (North Carolina State University)  Denis Nekipelov (University of Virginia)  Sigal Oren (Ben-Gurion University)  Michael Ostrovsky (Stanford University)  Rafael Pass (Cornell University)  Ariel Procaccia (Harvard University)  Marek Pycia (University of Zurich)  Marzena Rostek (University of Wisconsin-Madison)  Jay Sethuraman (Columbia University)  Nisarg Shah (University of Toronto)  Peng Shi (University of Southern California)  Alex Slivkins (Microsoft Research)  Eric Sodomka  Nicolas Stier-Moses (Facebook)  Siddharth Suri (Microsoft Research)  Steve Tadelis (Berkeley–Haas)  Inbal Talgam-Cohen (Technion)  Alexander Teytelboym (University of Oxford)  Utku Unver (Boston College)  Vijay Vazirani (University of California, Irvine)  Jens Witkowski (Frankfurt School of Finance & Management)  James Wright (University of Alberta)  Lirong Xia (Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute)  Bumin Yenmez (Boston College)  Yair Zick (University of Massachusetts, Amherst)  Aviv Zohar (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Natural experiments win a Nobel in Economics: Angrist, Card and Imbens

 Congratulations to David Card, Josh Angrist, and Guido Imbens. Natural experiments and their statistical analysis join laboratory experiments and randomized control trials in the pantheon of modern empirical tools in economics celebrated in Stockholm:

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021

The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2021 was divided, one half awarded to David Card "for his empirical contributions to labour economics", the other half jointly to Joshua D. Angrist and Guido W. Imbens "for their methodological contributions to the analysis of causal relationships."

Data use agreements, and university research policies regarding restrictions on publication

 Since the beginning of the year, I've been sent several Data Use Agreements from organizations interested in the possibility of sharing some of their data for research purposes.  I've had to decline the opportunity more than once, because of publication restrictions that conflict with Stanford research policies (and those of most other universities, I think, out of concern for academic freedom, and to keep academic publications free from selection bias concerning the research findings).

The relevant Stanford policies are here:   https://doresearch.stanford.edu/policies/research-policy-handbook/conduct-research/openness-research

The most relevant paragraphs are these:

"C. Publication Delays

"In a program of sponsored research, provision may be made in the contractual agreement between Stanford and the sponsor for a delay in the publication of research results, in the following circumstances:

"For a short delay (the period of delay not to exceed 90 days), for patenting purposes or for sponsor review of and comment on manuscripts, providing that no basis exists at the beginning of the project to expect that the sponsor would attempt either to suppress publication or to impose substantive changes in the manuscripts.

"For a longer delay in the case of multi-site clinical research (the period of delay not to exceed 24 months from the completion of research at all sites), where a publication committee receives data from participating sites and makes decisions about joint publications. Such delays are permitted only if the Stanford investigator is assured the ability to publish without restrictions after the specified delay."

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

Alex Chan points me to this article in Science by some of our Stanford colleagues:

Waiting for data: Barriers to executing data use agreements  by Michelle M. Mello, George Triantis, Robyn Stanton, Erik Blumenkranz, David M. Studdert,   Science  10 Jan 2020: Vol. 367, Issue 6474, pp. 150-152 DOI: 10.1126/science.aaz7028

Here's a figure from the paper that makes clear that concerns about publication often are serious obstacles (and that concerns about indemnification clauses are frequent obstacles).

"The third set of issues relates to clashes between DUA negotiators over what is and is not acceptable in the contract. Negotiators reported that the most common and serious of these substantive issues related to provisions concerning information privacy and security, indemnification, and the definition of confidential information; provisions concerning publication rights and ownership of academic researchers' work product were less commonly in dispute but serious problems when they were. These are no mere matters of “legalese”; each implicates potentially important risks to the university and faculty member.

...

"Indemnification is another actionable area. At least where low-risk data are involved, university contract negotiators may be spending more time on these provisions than is warranted. If good privacy and security protections are in place, the risk of a data breach is low, and haggling over who pays in the unlikely event of a breach that causes harm should not obstruct timely data transfers for research. Yet, negotiators at 13 of 48 universities had walked away from a negotiation because of indemnification issues.

"When it comes to provisions safeguarding publication rights and ownership of faculty members' work product, on the other hand, universities must remain resolute. These provisions implicate core values of the university and of open science. A potential strategy for minimizing haggling over non-negotiable issues is for universities as a group to more clearly signal their unified position. Existing university policies setting forth institutional commitments to academic freedom and policies concerning IP are helpful in communicating norms, but even more helpful would be a universal DUA template."

PBS on Uber's economists

Paul Solman interviews Uber economists (John Hall and others) and other economists (Susan Athey and Paul Oyer) on what economists do at Uber:

NBER Market Design: 2016 Methods Lectures, Tuesday July 26 (Abdulkadiroglu, Agarwal, Ashlagi, Pathak, and Roth)

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Parag Pathak and I will be delivering a set of "Methods Lectures" on Market Design as part of the NBER Summer Institute sessions on Labor Economics, which will be held July 25-29, 2016 at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge MA.
The program for the whole week is here, and below is the Tuesday afternoon Market Design program.

NBER Market Design: 2016 Methods Lectures
1:15 pm	Welcome
1:20 pm	Al Roth: Game Theory and Market Design
2:05 pm	Parag Pathak and Atila Abdulkadiroglu: Design of Matching Markets
2:50 pm	Break
3:00 pm	Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak: Research Design meets Market Design
3:45 pm	Nikhil Agarwal: Revealed Preference Analysis in Matching Markets
4:30 pm	Break
4:40 pm	Itai Ashlagi: Matching Dynamics and Computation
5:30 pm	Adjourn

Microeconomic Insights: a new website for economists

I've just added this new website to my newsfeed:
Microeconomic Insights: distilling research for public debate

Ariel Pakes writes:
"We are starting a new website entitled Microeconomic Insights.  We intend it to be a home for accessible summaries of high quality microeconomic research which informs the public about microeconomic issues relevant to the public debate.  Its goal is to bridge the gap between academic research and the public’s knowledge, thereby informing the public’s conversation on microeconomic issues. Microeconomic Insights’ intellectual content will be determined by an editorial board whose sole goal is to disseminate the insights from the very best research in microeconomics, irrespective of its political or ideological viewpoint.  ... The editors will work with the authors of the selected papers – forthcoming or recently published peer-reviewed journal articles – to write short 1,500-2,000 non-technical summaries of the key insights for a public policy audience.  The preparation of the final text of these articles will be done by a team of independent editors with extensive experience of writing for the public."

Recap of the Sonnenschein celebration at Chicago (with a video)

Here's a recap from the Becker Friedman Institute: The Path Ahead for Economic Theory

Here's the video of a panel discussion on the future of economic theory, in which I get to talk about the work of Eric Budish, among other things, as an example of economic engineering. .(I speak for about 10 minutes after the introduction by Nancy Stokey, then Roger Myerson, Ariel Rubinstein and Lars Hansen speak)

Is freedom to do social science research like freedom of the press?

 A group of British social scientists (who appear to mostly be involved in survey research) think that the current system of institutional review of research in Britain is better suited to medical experiments than to social science.

Here's the story:

Social Science Ethics

March 14, 2013 - 3:00am

By

Paul Jump for Times Higher Education

British social scientists are drawing up a common set of ethical principles aimed at freeing research from what they see as excessive ethics oversight frameworks that hamper their ability to improve social understanding.

According to Robert Dingwall, professor of social science at Nottingham Trent University, a "free" social science research base is as important to a healthy democracy as a free press. But in the past decade, British and international funders have required universities to vet all research involving human subjects via institutional ethics committees.

"You can imagine how outraged journalists would feel if they had to pre-check with a committee that their questions would not upset someone," he said.

Dingwall, a member of an Academy of Social Sciences working group on the issue, said committee members often had no expertise in ethics or the research field in question, and were primarily concerned with the university's reputation. Their risk aversion fed back to academics, who were often disinclined to undertake research that could incur disapproval even if it was potentially important.

The situation was exacerbated, Dingwall said, by the application to social science of frameworks developed for biomedicine. He said the balance of individual risk and social benefit was different in the social sciences because most research posed a minimal risk to individuals and offered significant benefit to the community.

He said that although the U.S. and Canada have recognized that the regulatory system was in crisis, Britain has yet to join efforts to redress it.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/14/british-social-scientists-propose-new-approach-ethics-review#ixzz2NYEV2Xos
Inside Higher Ed 

Congressional briefing on the role of economic research in health policy: April 12

I will participate in this event remotely, but if you are in Washington you can come and enjoy it in person...

 Invitation: 4/12 Luncheon/Briefing on Health Economics Research
You are invited to a Congressional briefing on the role of economics research in health policy.
Economic Research: Saving Lives and Money

Friday, April 12, 2013
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Rayburn House Office Building Room B-338

This will be a widely attended event
(Complimentary box lunches will be provided)

Rising health costs make it increasingly difficult to fund other national priorities, such as defense, education, and public safety. Health economics research can provide the building blocks for responsible reforms that moderate health care spending, improve health system performance, and reduce the deficit. A panel of distinguished economists discusses the contributions of economics research to our health and well-being.

INFORMING HEALTH POLICY
Mark McClellan, MD, PhD (Brookings) CMS Administrator (2004-2006), FDA Commissioner (2002-2004), and CEA member (2001-2002) and Joseph Antos, PhD (American Enterprise Institute) explore the important role economics research plays in informing government decisions about health policy.

IMPROVING MEDICAL MARKETS
Alvin Roth, PhD (Stanford) Nobel Prize 2012, describes how fundamental research in theoretical and experimental economics supported by the National Science Foundation is being applied in medical markets in ways that save lives by increasing organ donations and improving the efficiency of medical residencies.

ENCOURAGING HEALTHY BEHAVIOR
Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD (Penn) presents his National Institutes of Health supported research on innovative ways of applying insights from behavioral economics to improve patient health behavior and affect provider performance.

We hope you will be able to attend this important briefing.

Positive RSVPs only by April 10th to lplavnik@cossa.org

Sponsored by: AcademyHealth, American Economic Association, Consortium of Social Science Associations, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, Population Association of America, Research!America

Michael Sandel on "The Perils of Thinking Like an Economist"

It seems to me his title  "The Perils of Thinking Like an Economist" may be missing a comma.

I enjoy trying to follow his train of thought, though as time goes on he seems to be digging himself in deeper and deeper. See my previous posts on Michael Sandel here.

HT: László Sándor

Bernanke on economic engineering

Speech by Chairman Ben S. Bernanke, At the Conference Co-sponsored by the Center for Economic Policy Studies and the Bendheim Center for Finance, Princeton University, Princeton, New Jersey, September 24, 2010

Implications of the Financial Crisis for Economics.

"Although economists have much to learn from this crisis, as I will discuss, I think that calls for a radical reworking of the field go too far. In particular, it seems to me that current critiques of economics sometimes conflate three overlapping yet separate enterprises, which, for the purposes of my remarks today, I will call economic science, economic engineering, and economic management. Economic science concerns itself primarily with theoretical and empirical generalizations about the behavior of individuals, institutions, markets, and national economies. Most academic research falls in this category. Economic engineering is about the design and analysis of frameworks for achieving specific economic objectives. Examples of such frameworks are the risk-management systems of financial institutions and the financial regulatory systems of the United States and other countries. Economic management involves the operation of economic frameworks in real time--for example, in the private sector, the management of complex financial institutions or, in the public sector, the day-to-day supervision of those institutions. "

Just for fun, here's a link to
Roth, Alvin E., "The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics," Fisher-Schultz Lecture, Econometrica, 70,4, July 2002, 1341-1378.
 

HT to Wirtschafts-Ingenieur Axel Ockenfels

Why study social science?

That was the question I was asked to help answer this afternoon, as part of a panel discussing the Social Sciences at Harvard, for incoming freshmen who will formally begin college when Harvard's fall semester starts this week. (We were right after a similar panel in the same room, on the Humanities. I listened to the end of that discussion from the back of the room, and, let me tell you, it sounds like it would be loads of fun to be a Humanities major.)

We were each asked to speak briefly about our own work, and what excites us about it, and about what students could expect to learn if they studied in our department.

Our panel consisted of Eric Beerbohm representing the interdisciplinary Social Studies concentration at Harvard, Dan Carpenter representing the Department of Government,
Theodore Bestor, chair of the Department of Anthropology, Maya Jasanoff representing History, Nicholas Christakis  representing Sociology (one among many hats he wears),
and me, Al Roth, representing Economics.

As always, I'm amazed and delighted at the interests of my colleagues (and struck by the fact that I too rarely have the time and opportunity to listen to colleagues from the other social science departments).

Eric began by talking briefly about some of his work on polling (including not just assessing what people think, but how strongly they hold their opinions, and how they come to hold them).

Dan spoke about his work on regulatory bureaucracies, which he'll be speaking about at the White House in the coming days.

Ted (I actually don't recall if he's called Ted, or Theodore) announced that he studies sushi (at which point I recalled that I still hadn't read his book on the famous Japanese Tsukiji fish market), and quickly illustrated something about social change by asking students "who eats sushi?" (many hands raised), "who thinks your parents ate sushi?" (most hands remained up), "at your age??" (most hands came down).

Maya spoke about her studies of Revolutionary War loyalists who left the country after their side lost the Revolution. I thought about vacations we've had in the Anglophone Eastern Townships of Quebec, and as it happens she quickly ratified this line of thought by asking "who likes to travel?" and saying "then history is your ticket," and described her own far flung travels "and also Canada".

Nicholas introduced his work on networks (e.g. his well known work on how your friends influence your body mass index, and whether you smoke) with an analogy from chemistry: he pointed out that you couldn't hope to learn about how graphite is different from diamond just by studying carbon atoms, the differences result from how those atoms are connected to each other.

I spoke last, about my work in market design, and how economists thought about a much broader collection of marketplaces than freshmen might realize, such as the college admissions process they had just experienced. I pointed out that Harvard abolished its early admissions program only a few years ago and asked "how many of you applied to at least one other college?" (virtually all hands raised); how many applied to another college early admission (many hands, maybe a majority still raised); and "how many of you applied to another college with binding early decision? (one brave young man kept his hand up, and I told him some other college's loss was Harvard's gain). Then I explained that Harvard's decision to abolish its early admission program had prompted Princeton to abolish its binding early decision program, precisely because of the kind of strategic behavior that students could be expected to exhibit, as they had, and that this was the vantage point through which game theory entered economics. (I then briefly described how my colleagues and I got to help design school choice systems, and kidney exchange, and when I got back to my seat, Nicholas leaned over and told me that when I spoke about kidney exchange in the future, I might want to tell people about the movie Strangers on a Train, whose plot revolves around a proposed exchange of murders, so neither murderer could be connected to the crime by a motive...)

I confessed that I like Economics for some of the same reasons I sometimes like to hear gossip, because it gives me a picture of how other people go about getting what they want, and what choices they face that I might also face, or might have faced if my life had taken a different path.

Economics is often the biggest academic concentration for Harvard undergrads, so I don't doubt that many of the freshmen will soon be enjoying Greg Mankiw's introductory class Ec. 10 (often the class with highest enrollment at Harvard), where they'll be introduced to many of the more usual things that economists study, not only in class, but also on his popular blog.

It's clear that any of the social science departments offer a fantastic intellectual experience, and a window through which to understand those (big) parts of the world that human beings make when we interact with each other. I actually don't wish I was a freshman again, but I feel at least a tinge of envy at the range of exciting choices that freshmen face.

Nothing human need be foreign to economics

Economists like to think of Economics as a broad church that welcomes investigation of a wide range of human activity from many viewpoints. Nothing human is foreign to us. Non-economists (and perhaps some economists as well) take a much narrower view of what economists can and should investigate, and how well we can do so.

An inadvertently hilarious juxtaposition of those two views comes in a column in The Guardian: Our speechless outrage demands a new language of the common good--Market theory closed down public discourse about injustice. But we urgently need to describe what we should value

The author opines: "But don't look to economists to get us out of this hollow mould of neoliberal economics and its bastard child, managerialism – the cost-benefit analysis and value-added gibberish that has made most people's working lives a mockery of everything they know to value."

She then goes on to suggest that the evils of economics may be remedied by philosophers, and praises Amartya Sen's new book The Idea of Justice.

The joke of course is that the author of the column is blissfully unaware that Amartya is an eminent economist, and the winner of the 1998 Nobel prize in economics.

Needless to say, justice is an excellent thing for economists to study, and strive to understand and achieve.

The market for economics: what should economists study?

The Boston Globe has a story in today's Ideas section about whether academic economists will and should redirect their energies to focus more on events like the current crisis (and less on the "luxury goods" of more academic or more microeconomic topics): Paradigm lost--Economists missed the brewing crisis. Now many are asking: How can we do better?

It's always good for individual economists to think about how they want to direct their efforts. A big crisis like the current one will surely cause some people to redirect their work to the new (and old) questions that it raises, and the new opportunities it presents for studying them.

But I am reminded, at times like these, that science is an incremental business with its own internal agenda. We don't always make the most progress by studying the most important problems directly. We often choose problems to study by some combination of their importance and their tractability. That is, sometimes we choose subjects to study because the tools (or the data) have gotten to the point where we can make progress on them, not because they have grown in importance.

I recall reading similar articles during previous crises. One that sticks with me was by an author who had looked at a recent issue of the American Economic Review, and complained that none of the articles were relevant to the stagflation we were then experiencing. Economists ignored important questions, he complained, and concentrated on small beer. I remember casually thinking of writing a reply along the lines of "I just looked at a recent issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association and noticed that all the articles are about relatively small scale problems, none of them directly addresses how to cure the major problem of medicine, which is Death."

My advice to young economic researchers is to keep your eye on the important questions you would like economics to be able to solve, but don't feel you have to take the steepest path up the mountain, feel free to look for ways to make the ascent step by step.