INFORMS Section on Auctions and Market Design (AMD)

 Itai Ashlagi and Vahideh Manshadi write:

"Dear colleagues:

 

We are writing to provide updates about the ongoing activities of the INFORMS Section on Auctions and Market Design (AMD)... 

 

1) AMD Membership without INFORMS Membership: As you may know, AMD aims to build an inclusive and diverse community interested in Market Design (broadly construed). Toward that goal, we have worked with INFORMS to create the option of joining AMD without INFORMS membership. If you are interested in joining the AMD section, please visit our website and check out the different options to join (as INFORMS member for an additional $10 on top of your INFORMS membership or non-member for only $20 in total per year). This way you will continue to be informed about our market design activities. 

 

2) Special Issue on Market Design (Deadline September 24): We are pleased to announce that we have co-sponsored a new Special Issue on Mathematics of Market Design at the INFORMS Journal Mathematics of Operations Research. (Special Issue Editors: Saša Pekeč, Martin Bichler, Nicole Immorlica, Scott Kominers, and Paul Milgrom) 

 

3) Journal Presence at Management Science: the INFORMS Journal  Management Science now has a department titled Market Design, Platform, and Demand Analytics. (Dept. Editors are Itai Ashlagi, Martin Bichler, and Srikanth Jagabathula; the list of AEs includes Paul Milgrom and Al Roth); Management Science is the flagship journal of INFORMS.  

 

4) AMD Workshop at the ACM EC in July 24: We are pleased to announce the INFORMS Market Design Workshop which will take place in conjunction with the ACM EC Conference at Yale University, July 8-11, 2024. Special thanks to Paul Dutting, John Horton, and Yash Kanoria for co-organizing the workshop. Check the workshop website for the program details.

 

5) AMD INFORMS Cluster at the Annual Meeting in October 24: We are excited to have organized  ~25 invited sessions on a wide range of topics as part of the AMD cluster at the upcoming INFORMS Annual Meeting (Seattle, Washington, October 20-23, 2024); special thanks to Thodoris Lykouris, Ali Makhdoumi, Pengyu Qian for serving as the cluster co-organizers.

 If you want to learn more about AMD, please check out the AMD website, people involved, and past activities. We'd be excited to have you as part of our growing community of market designers!"

Call for papers: special issue on Market Design at Mathematics of Operations Research

 Paul Milgrom and Martin Bichler write:

We are excited to announce that, as an initiative arising from discussions during the fall program, the journal Mathematics of Operations Research will be dedicating a special issue on market design (deadline: Sep 30, 2024). This special issue is co-organized by the INFORMS Section on Auctions and Market Design and aims to showcase cutting-edge research in the field, reflecting the depth and diversity of thought that our program sought to cultivate.

We are seeking contributions that not only push the boundaries of our current understanding but also highlight practical implications and potential applications of market design principles. We believe that your research and insights could greatly enrich this special issue, and we warmly invite you to submit your papers for consideration.

We are looking forward to submissions from program participants and to the opportunity to highlight the exceptional work emerging from our community.

Top Trading Cycles (TTC) and the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Mathematical Economics

 This year marks the 50th anniversary of the Journal of Mathematical Economics, and also of the Top Trading Cycles (TTC) algorithm that was introduced in Volume 1, number 1 of the journal, in the paper by

Shapley, Lloyd, and Herbert Scarf. "On cores and indivisibility." Journal of mathematical economics 1, no. 1 (1974): 23-37. 

TTC was further analyzed in 

Roth, Alvin E., and Andrew Postlewaite. "Weak versus strong domination in a market with indivisible goods." Journal of Mathematical Economics 4, no. 2 (1977): 131-137.

Now the JME is assembling a 50th anniversary collection of papers surveying some of the resulting literatures, with some papers posted online ahead of publication. Here's what they had as of yesterday, including an article on Top Trading Cycles, by Morrill and Roth, and one on Housing markets since Shapley and Scarf, by Afacan, Hu, and Li:

JME’s 50th Anniversary Literature  Edited by Andres Carvajal and Felix Kübler

1. Research articleFull text access

   Top trading cycles

   Thayer Morrill, Alvin E. Roth

   In Press, Journal Pre-proof, Available online 16 April 2024

   Article 102984

   View PDF

2. select article Bubble economics

   Research articleOpen access

   Bubble economics

   Tomohiro Hirano, Alexis Akira Toda

   April 2024

   Article 102944

   View PDF

3. select article Stable outcomes in simple cooperative games

   Research articleFull text access

   Stable outcomes in simple cooperative games

   Gabrielle Demange

   April 2024

   Article 102960

   View PDF

4. select article Fifty years of mathematical growth theory: Classical topics and new trends

   Research articleFull text access

   Fifty years of mathematical growth theory: Classical topics and new trends

   Emmanuelle Augeraud-Veron, Raouf Boucekkine, Fausto Gozzi, Alain Venditti, Benteng Zou

   April 2024

   Article 102966

   View PDF

5. select article Housing markets since Shapley and Scarf

   Research articleFull text access

   Housing markets since Shapley and Scarf

   Mustafa Oğuz Afacan, Gaoji Hu, Jiangtao Li

   April 2024

   Article 102967

   View PDF

##########

At least one of the papers in the (virtual) special issue is already published, I gather that some will be in the June issue:

Monday, March 4, 2024

50th anniversary of Shapley and Scarf (1974), and of the Journal of Mathematical Economics

Incentives and mis-incentives in science (Freakonomics part II)

 Freakonomics has a second post on fraud in science, and you can listen or read the transcript here:

Can Academic Fraud Be Stopped?

Two quotes stood out for me:

1. VAZIRE: Oh, I don’t mind being wrong. I think journals should publish things that turn out to be wrong. It would be a bad thing to approach journal editing by saying we’re only going to publish true things or things that we’re 100 percent sure are true. The important thing is that the things that are more likely to be wrong are presented in a more uncertain way. And sometimes we’ll make mistakes even there. Sometimes we’ll present things with certainty that we shouldn’t have. What I would like to be involved in and what I plan to do is to encourage more post-publication critique and correction, reward the whistleblowers who identify errors that are valid and that need to be acted upon, and create more incentives for people to do that, and do that well.

...

2. BAZERMAN: Undoubtedly, I was naive. You know, not only did I trust my colleagues on the signing-first paper, but I think I’ve trusted my colleagues for decades, and hopefully with a good basis for trusting them. I do want to highlight that there are so many benefits of trust. So, the world has done a lot better because we trust science. And the fact that there’s an occasional scientist who we shouldn’t trust should not keep us from gaining the benefit that science creates. And so one of the harms created by the fraudsters is that they give credibility to the science-deniers who are so often keeping us from making progress in society.

############

Earlier:

Sunday, January 14, 2024

"Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?" Freakonomics interviews Max Bazerman and others

AEA announces changes in how journals will be produced, financed and distributed

Yesterday's AEA Member Announcements include some substantial changes in how the AEA journals will be produced, distributed, and financed.

The AEA will phase out print journals over the next year by no longer offering print subscriptions for members and institutional subscribers as of February 1.  Existing print subscriptions for members and institutions will be honored through January 2025 but will be unable to be renewed.

In line with most other leading journals, the AEA will end payments to referees for reviews invited on or after February 1.

Collecting publication fees from those benefiting most from the AEA publications program distributes costs of the program more equitably than raising submission fees. With this in mind, the AEA will implement a page charge of $15 per typeset page for published articles submitted after February 1, to be paid by authors, and with provisions to waive the fee under certain circumstances. This page charge will not apply to formally solicited manuscripts (such as Presidential addresses) and will not include articles in the Journal of Economic Literature, Journal of Economic Perspectives, or AEA Papers and Proceedings.   

###########

I wasn't party to these discussions, but I wouldn't be surprised if someone mentioned that per-page charges will feel anachronistic once print journals are no longer produced.  But maybe they will be a mild incentive for brevity (as would per-word charges, which might however inadvertently incentivize sesquipedaleanism).

Mega-Journals and scientific publishing

 Academic publishing is getting more varied. A recent article in JAMA focuses on the rise of 'mega-journals,' which seek to publish papers that are correct, without filtering for (referees' opinions about) novelty or importance.

The Rapid Growth of Mega-Journals: Threats and Opportunities  by John P. A. Ioannidis, MD, DSc1,2; Angelo Maria Pezzullo, MD, MSc3; Stefania Boccia, MSc, DSc, PhD3,4, JAMA. Published online March 20, 2023. doi:10.1001/jama.2023.3212

"Mega-journals, those that publish large numbers of articles per year,1 are growing rapidly across science and especially in biomedicine. Although 11 Scopus-indexed journals published more than 2000 biomedical full papers (articles or reviews) in 2015 and accounted for 6% of that year’s literature, in 2022 there were 55 journals publishing more than 2000 full articles, totaling more than 300 000 articles (almost a quarter of the biomedical literature that year). In 2015, 2 biomedical research journals (PLoS One and Scientific Reports) published more than 3500 full articles. In 2022, there were 26 such prolific journals (Table). The accelerating growth of mega-journals creates both threats and opportunities for biomedical science.

...

"we define mega-journals as open-access peer-reviewed journals that charge article processing fees and publish more than 2000 full articles in a calendar year. The 2 early-launched mega-journals, PLoS One and Scientific Reports, were also characterized by very broad publishing scope, covering scientific topics in general. 

...

"Mega-journals typically claim to publish articles based on whether they are scientifically sound rather than important and novel. Accordingly, their acceptance rates, when disclosed, are 20% to 70%

...

"It would be unfair, nevertheless, to dismiss mega-journals as simply a negative development. Several of their characteristics could be aligned also with desirable scientific practices. First, open access is a good starting point, and it can be coupled with greater transparency. If these journals routinely adopt transparent research practices, such as sharing of data, code, protocols, and statistical analysis plans, they can have a transformative effect, given their large output. Several older, broad-scope mega-journals (eg, PLoS One, Royal Society Open Science) have already championed such efforts. It is crucial that disciplinary-focused mega-journals do the same. Second, publishing technically sound scientific work regardless of the nature of the results is highly commendable. It offers opportunities to curb publication and selective reporting bias. Empirical studies are needed to investigate whether mega-journals do achieve this goal or still have selective reporting biases and variants thereof (eg, “spin”). Third, mega-journals may allow publication of results deemed undesirable in traditional specialty journals with entrenched, inbred publishing practices. Enhanced diversity of perspectives and opportunities to challenge orthodoxy are welcome, provided the journals publish rigorous data and safeguard against conflicts of interest. Securing editorial independence and maximizing transparency about conflicts for editors, reviewers, and authors will be key in reaping such benefits.

...

"At the publisher level, competition may have major indirect effects on medicine and science at large. Scientific publishing has an annual work cycle exceeding $30 billion and very large profit margins, which are possible in part because approximately 100 million hours of peer reviewers’ time is offered free yearly.8 The publishers behind the new generation of specialized mega-journals (Table) are taking this money-making recipe to new heights. Science and scientists may feel thwarted, if not entirely powerless, while big publishing corporations fight for field domination. However, it would be to the benefit of all if scientists, medical and research institutions, and funders gave credit to and rewarded journals (and publishers) that promote more transparent research and more rigorous research practices."

Journal of controversial ideas

  Some ideas are controversial not just because some people think they are bad ideas, but because they think that they are the kinds of ideas that only bad people have.  So writing about them, let alone advocating them, may have reputational costs.  Here's a new (open access) journal that offers authors the option of publishing under a pseudonym if they wish, to avoid the harassment, hate mail and death threats that would otherwise come their way.

Journal of controversial ideas

"The Journal of Controversial Ideas offers a forum for careful, rigorous, unpolemical discussion of issues that are widely considered controversial, in the sense that certain views about them might be regarded by many people as morally, socially, or ideologically objectionable or offensive. The journal offers authors the option to publish their articles under a pseudonym, in order to protect themselves from threats to their careers or physical safety.  We hope that this will also encourage readers to attend to the arguments and evidence in an essay rather than to who wrote it. Pseudonymous authors may choose to claim the authorship of their work at a later time, or to reveal it only to selected people (such as employers or prospective employers), or to keep their identity undisclosed indefinitely. Standard submissions using the authors’ actual names are also encouraged."

Editors: 

Jeff McMahan (White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy, University of Oxford, UK)

Francesca Minerva (Researcher, University of Milan)

Peter Singer (Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, Princeton University, USA)

And Here's the first issue, with several pseudonymous contributions.

Peter Singer discusses the journal at Project Syndicate:

Keeping Discussion Free

"A new academic journal permits authors to use a pseudonym to avoid running the risk of receiving personal abuse, including death threats, or of irrevocably harming their careers. That option has become necessary even in countries that we do not think of as repressive dictatorships."

Market design in Management Science (the journal)

The journal Management Science is open to market design papers in at least two of its departments. Gabriel Weintraub alerts me to the following announcement:

Revenue Management and Market Analytics Department in Management Science

It begins:

Dear MD colleagues:

We wrote the blog below about this new department in Management Science. Part of the mission of the department is related to “market analytics”, which has a significant market design component. We have been receiving several strong market design papers from economists and from other disciplines but would like to see more, so we are sharing this here. 

We look forward to receiving your work!

Best,

Gabriel Weintraub

Associate Professor

Stanford GSB

Changing of the guard at Management Science (but papers on market design are solicited)

Here's an email announcement from Yan Chen and Axel Ockenfels about the recent change of editors at Management Science:

"We would like to update you on some recent development regarding behavioral economics at Management Science. As you may have heard, the new Editor-in-Chief, David Simchi-Levi, has decided to merge behavioral economics, judgment and decision making, and decision analysis into the newly expanded Decision Analysis Department (DA). The two of us will be the Department Editors handling behavioral economics papers within DA.

We have a terrific group of Associate Editors (AEs), including Al Roth and Richard Thaler who serve as our honorary AEs, and Björn Bartling (University of Zurich), Gary Bolton (University of Texas at Dallas), Peter Cramton (University of Cologne), Dan Friedman (University of California at Santa Cruz), Tanjim Hossain (University of Toronto), Scott Kominers (Harvard University), Dorothea Kübler (Berlin Social Science Center WZB), Katherine Milkman (University of Pennsylvania), Tanya Rosenblat (University of Michigan), Dirk Sliwka (University of Cologne), Matthias Sutter (Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods, Bonn), and Stephanie W. Wang (University of Pittsburgh).

We hope that you will continue to submit your best papers to Management Science. Please

​​

do check the new Editorial Statement for Decision Analysis

​​

, and note the new emphasis on (1) mechanism and market design at DA; and (2) relevance to the science and/or practice of management at the journal level.

In closing, we would like to thank Uri Gneezy and John List for bringing behavioral economics into Management Science. We hope to continue their excellent work and publish the best papers in our field.

Sincerely,

Yan ​​and Axel

--

Yan Chen

http://yanchen.people.si.umich.edu/

Axel Ockenfels
ockenfels.uni-koeln.de/aoc-seb.de

New AEA Journal--American Economic Review: Insights

The American Economic Society announces a new journal today: American Economic Review: Insights

Here's the call for papers:

The newest journal of the American Economic Association, American Economic Review: Insights, invites submissions.

Editor

Amy Finkelstein, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Coeditors

Pete Klenow, Stanford University
Larry Samuelson, Yale University

Board of Editors

Alberto Abadie, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Andrew Atkeson, University of California, Los Angeles
Markus K. Brunnermeier, Princeton University
Eric Budish, University of Chicago
Pascaline Dupas, Stanford University
Paul J. Healy, Ohio State University
Nathaniel Hendren, Harvard University
Hilary Hoynes, University of California, Berkeley
Navin Kartik, Columbia University
Ted O'Donoghue, Cornell University
Andrés Rodríguez-Clare, University of California, Berkeley
Jesse Shapiro, Brown University
Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University
Jón Steinsson, Columbia University

AER: Insights is designed to be a top-tier, general-interest economics journal publishing papers of the same quality and importance as those in the AER, but devoted to publishing papers with important insights that can be conveyed succinctly.

Papers in economics have grown substantially in length over the last four decades, leaving little scope to publish the important paper whose central contribution can be concisely presented. Yet, sometimes the most important findings are those that require little room. Paul Samuelson's landmark paper on the efficient provision of public goods was only three pages in the 1954 Review of Economics and Statistics. Further afield from economics, Watson and Crick's discovery of the Double Helix was presented in less than two pages in the 1953 Nature.

AER: Insights will target the turnaround times of the most efficient journals in our profession––with an aim to get all first responses within three months at most. More novelly, first responses will be either a reject or a "conditional accept," with no lengthy responses to referees required nor a second round of comments from referees on the revision. The Editor's requests with a conditional accept will be limited to expositional changes only; to self-enforce this norm, editors will ask for revisions back from the authors within eight weeks. Short papers. Short revisions.

Submissions must be <=6,000 words and have a maximum of five exhibits (figures or tables). The word count is based on the main text, including footnotes but excluding references, title, author names, abstract, the acknowledgement footnote, exhibit notes, keywords, and JEL codes. For reference, in Microsoft Word, 6,000 words is about 15 double-spaced pages of text using 11 point Times New Roman font and 1 inch margins and with additional pages for exhibits and references. As another point of reference, 6,000 words of text is about one-third the length of a typical AER article in recent years. The abstract should be <= 100 words.

Length limits on submissions and revisions will be strictly enforced. Online appendix materials are allowed (of unlimited length); but if referees or the Editor do not feel able to evaluate the essential elements of the paper from the main text alone, that will be grounds for rejection.

The aim of AER: Insights is to provide a high quality outlet for important yet concise contributions to economics, both empirical and theoretical.

To view the full Submission Guidelines for AER: Insights, please visit https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/aeri/submissions. To submit your paper, please go to https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/aer-insights. Please contact Managing Editor, Kelly Markel (k.markel@aeapubs.org), with any questions.

Science publishing and (versus?) science

The Guardian has an interesting history of modern science publishing, focusing on the growth of Elsevier.

Is the staggeringly profitable business of scientific publishing bad for science?
It is an industry like no other, with profit margins to rival Google – and it was created by one of Britain’s most notorious tycoons: Robert Maxwell. By Stephen Buranyi

hard to excerpt, but worth reading whole...

Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design, vol 1, number 1 2016

The first issue of the Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design is now online here: http://www.mechanism-design.org/arch/v001-1/jMID-vol1(1)-01.pdf

A new journal for market design

Peter Biro brings to my attention the announcement of a new journal that seems to be focused at least partly on market design.  The journal's website and some of the editors (although not the ones I know) are associated with the University of York's Centre for Mechanism and Institution Design, which lists among its interests many areas in which elegant theory has led to practical design. I don't know more about the journal yet, and not all of the links work, but the composition of the Editorial Board suggests that it may have a chance of becoming an important journal, particularly if they have a plan for attracting good papers...

Here's the announcement...

Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design An open-access journal in mechanism and institution design
Main page	Submit a paper	Society
Editorial Board Editor Zaifu Yang Managing editors Tommy Andersson Yuan Ju Paul Schweinzer Associate Editors Peter Biro Randall Calvert Kim-Sau Chung Michael Suk-Young Chwe Xiaotie Deng Lars Ehlers Aytek Erdil Alex Gershkov Sayantan Ghosal Claus-Jochen Haake John Hatfield Paul Healy Jean-Jacques Herings Sergei Izmalkov Fuhito Kojima Gleb Koshevoy Dinard van der Laan Jingfeng Lu Jinpeng Ma David Manlove Debasis Mishra Rudolf Müller Tymofiy Mylovanov Sérgio Parreiras David Pérez-Castrillo Frank Riedel József Sákovics Alejandro Saporiti Ella Segev Arunava Sen Akiyoshi Shioura Ning Sun Dolf Talman Akihisa Tamura Jacco Thijssen Walter Trockel Utku Ünver James Walker David Wettstein Charles Zheng Acknowledgments	The Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design is published by the Society for the Promotion of Mechanism and Institution Design.The first issue of the journal is planned for 2016. Aim and scopeThe Journal of Mechanism and Institution Design aims to publish original articles that deal with the issues of designing, improving, analysing and testing economic, financial, political, or social mechanisms and institutions. It welcomes theoretical, empirical, experimental, historical and practical studies. It promotes clarity of thought and constructive, rigorous and logical research. We particularly encourage less experienced researchers such as recent PhD graduates to submit their work to the Journal and are sympathetic towards those papers that are novel and innovative but which, being outside the main paradigms, have been unsuccessful elsewhere. We hope that the published articles will be interesting and valuable to a broad audience from the areas of economics, finance, politics, law, computer science, management, history, mathematics, government, and related disciplines. The journal is an open-access, independent, peer-reviewed, non-profit, English-language journal with the purpose of disseminating and sharing the latest knowledge and understanding of the subject widely. For further information, please contact Tommy Andersson, Yuan Ju, Paul Schweinzer, or Zaifu Yang.

Design Mechanisms and Institutions that Improve Efficiency, Equality, Prosperity, Stability and Sustainability in Society.

Call for papers: special issue on Matching in honor of Marilda Sotomayor, in Journal of Dynamics and Games

This call for papers arrived yesterday by email:

Call for Papers

Journal of Dynamics and Games is pleased to invite paper submissions for  

Matching : Theory and Applications,

a Special Issue dedicated to Marilda Sotomayor on the occasion of her 70th birthday.

Marilda Sotomayor is a foundational figure in the development of matching theory and applications in economics with seminal contributions on the structural, game theoretic and mechanism design aspects of the basic model and its extensions. Her volume, Two-Sided Matching (1992), co-authored with 2012 Nobel laureate Roth is the singular textbook in the area, which was awarded the prestigious Frederick W. Lanchester Prize. 

Papers are welcome on all aspects of matching games and markets, theoretical as well as applied, including the analysis and design of institutions or marketplaces, e.g. for jobs or school choice, for houses or organ exchange.  

Please submit your paper directly to one of the invited editors using their email.

Invited Editors:

Ahmet Alkan

Sabancı University, Turkey

Email: alkan@sabanciuniv.edu

Jesús David Pérez Castrillo

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain

Email: David.Perez@uab.cat

Myrna Wooders

Vanderbilt University, USA

Email: myrna.wooders@vanderbilt.edu
John Wooders

University of Technology, Australia

Email: John.Wooders@uts.edu.au

Submissions deadline: 28 of  February 2015.

JDG webpage: http://aimsciences.org/journals/home.jsp?journalID=26