Süleyman Kerimov defends his dissertation

 Süleyman Kerimov defended his dissertation yesterday, in Stanford's MS&E department. He studies matching, and will teach at Rice next year.

His main advisors are both named Itai.

These are the papers he spoke about:

• Dynamic Matching: Characterizing and Achieving Constant Regret, with Itai Ashlagi and Itai Gurvich, . [pdf] [SSRN]


• Scrip Systems with Minimal Availability, with Itai Ashlagi, working paper.
  • Appeared as an extended abstract in the 15th Conference on Web and Internet Economics (WINE 2019).

Mazel tov and tebrikler, Suleyman.

Welcome to the club.

UAE as a natural hub for international/global kidney exchange

 There are excellent hospitals in the United Arab Emirates that can perform kidney transplants, and they are prepared to do kidney exchange, both domestically and internationally.  My post today is about why the UAE would be a natural international center for kidney exchange. 

International hubs for kidney exchange are needed because hard-to-match patient-donor pairs may need to find compatible exchanges outside the borders of their own countries. This is particularly true for citizens of countries with relatively small populations of potential compatible donors, and of countries that don't yet have widespread kidney exchange. But even a big country like the U.S., in which kidney exchange is a standard mode of transplantation, can sometimes be too small to find compatible kidneys for the hardest to match  patients. (The U.S. itself is a natural hub for global kidney exchange, about which I've written elsewhere. But so far, bureaucratic obstacles have prevented us from integrating kidney exchange even with Canada...)

The UAE itself is already quite international, as only about 10% of its approximately 10 million residents are Emirati citizens; the rest, largely foreign workers and their families, are citizens of other countries. The biggest of the Emirates, Abu Dhabi, provides medical care for its residents that includes dialysis and transplantation for kidney failure, which is prevalent there (perhaps due in part to the very hot weather and the perils of frequent dehydration in outdoor work). Most of those patients are on dialysis, although the national health insurance will pay for transplants for those who have willing donors either in the Emirates or in their home country. The UAE is wealthy, and many of the home countries are not, so my understanding is that the UAE is prepared to assume the costs of bringing family members to the UAE and providing the necessary medical care. This is cost effective as well as good for the patient, because in the UAE as elsewhere, transplantation is much cheaper than dialysis, as well as being the best treatment. So taking a UAE resident off dialysis via transplant saves a life and pays for itself.

Of course, sometimes the UAE resident's family member who is willing to donate a kidney isn't compatible with the UAE resident. So kidney exchange makes a lot of sense in this case. But with a resident population of only 10 million, there are severe limits on how much kidney exchange can do for hard-to-match patients. So international, global kidney exchange makes sense, in which patient-donor pairs from other countries could also be transplanted in the UAE through kidney exchange with UAE residents (or, eventually, with other international pairs).

It helps a lot that the UAE is also an air transit hub, with two international airlines. Emirates has a hub in the Emirate of Dubai, and Etihad has a hub in Abu Dhabi. So a big portion of the world's population is within a few hours of direct air travel to the UAE.  (When I went to the UAE this summer in connection with the UAE-Israel kidney exchange, I took a direct flight from San Francisco to Dubai, but that takes sixteen hours...)

My main goal in the UAE was to meet with various mostly government bodies engaged in an effort, in collaboration with the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation, to make domestic and international kidney exchange a regular part of medical care there. To that end, we met with the Ministries of Health in Dubai and in Abu Dhabi, with the national health insurance, with the Red Crescent (which is able to get involved in care of patients and donors after they return home), and others.

The key player in organizing this collaboration, and in transplantation generally in the UAE is  Dr Ali Abdulkareem Al Obaidli, transplant nephrologist and Chairman of the UAE National Transplant Committee. Two other key figures from the APKD are Mike Rees and Atul Agnihotri. Many of our meetings ended in photos, and I'm with those three in all pictures below. 

I expect to write some more about this. In the meantime, here are related posts.

Thursday, September 30, 2021

Kidney Exchange between Israel and the UAE (in USA Today, yesterday)

Friday, October 1, 2021

Stanford celebrates Itai Ashlagi and the UAE-Israel kidney exchange

And this older one:

Friday, August 7, 2020

Global kidney exchange between Abu Dhabi and Kerala (India)

Here's a slide from a talk I'll be giving shortly at the annual conference of the Indian Society of Transplantation (ISOT) that provides some more information about this UAE-India exchange

Stanford welcomes students back to campus

Starting tomorrow, we'll have classes in person, indoors, masked.

Tom Payzant, Boston schools superintendent who reformed school choice, dies at 80

 Tom Payzant played a critical role in transforming Boston's school choice from an immediate acceptance algorithm that exposed students and families to complex strategic risk when navigating the system, to a deferred acceptance algorithm that simplified their participation. As Superintendent of Boston Public Schools, Tom came to understand those issues well, and acted on them.

Here's his obit in the Boston Globe.

Thomas Payzant, whose education vision lifted Boston’s schools, dies at 80, By Bryan Marquard

and here's the statement from Boston Public Schools:

SUPERINTENDENT'S STATEMENT ON THE PASSING OF TOM PAYZANT

Here's a pic I took of Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Tayfun Sonmez when we met with Payzant and his colleagues at Boston Public School headquarters, during the years we worked with BPS, starting around 2003.

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak and Tayfun Sonmez at Boston Public School headquarters

Here's a paper that came out of those meetings, describing the deliberations that ultimately led BPS to adopt a deferred acceptance algorithm design for it's school choice system.

• Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Tayfun Sonmez, The Boston Public School Match," American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 95,2, May, 2005, 368-371.

Over the course of those years, I was privileged to watch Parag evolve from a super smart young grad student to being a leader in the design of school choice.

I'll post tomorrow about some of Parag's latest efforts to bring the work associated with the design and evaluation of school choice, and market design more generally, into the world of startup companies and big university labs.

Hugo Sonnenschein (1940-2021)

 A chain of emails originating from U. Chicago brings the news that Hugo Sonnenschein has died.

Along with his many accomplishments as an economic theorist and then as a university administrator, he was a mentor to many, both formally and informally.  

Among the famous economists whose dissertations he supervised (taken from Wikipedia) are  John Roberts, Salvador Barbera, Dilip Abreu, Faruk Gul, Matt Jackson, Vijay Krishna, and Phil Reny.

Here's the list of Hugo's students from the Mathematics Genealogy Project: Abreu, Dilip; Barbera, Salvador; Cho, In-Koo; Dudey, Marc; Fang, Ryan; Fiaccadori, Marco; Gul, Faruk; Krishna, Vijay; Mailath, George; Mardones, Felipe; McLennan, Andrew; Nava, Francesco; Novshek, William; Pearce, David; Reny, Philip; Resende, Jose; Roberts, Donald; Santamaria, Martin; Simon, Leo; Sontheimer, Kevin; Spiegel, Matthew; Vincent, Daniel

The U. Chicago obit is at the link above. Here's Hugo's Wikipedia page that also focuses on his presidency at the University of Chicago. 

Here's Hugo's page at the History of Economic Thought project, which focuses on his contributions to general equilibrium theory and social choice.

Here's his cv.

Before becoming president of U. Chicago, Hugo was Princeton's provost. Some of the changes he instituted at Chicago were controversial among those who feared that they would make Chicago more like Princeton. Here's the Chicago Sun Times on that:

Hugh Sonnenschein, controversial former University of Chicago president, dead at 80.  He drew criticism from students and scholars including Saul Bellow for a university push to expand enrollment and cut the number of required courses to let students take more electives.

 

I first encountered Hugo in his capacity as Editor of Econometrica from 1977-1984.  He was the editor who brought game theory into Econometrica, and so he played a big role in making Economics the principle home of game theory since then.

Hugo Sonnenschein in 2017

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

Update: here's a longer, less hurried obit from U. Chicago

Hugo Sonnenschein, 11th president of the University of Chicago, 1940-2021

and here is one from the Barcelona School of Economics:

In memoriam: Hugo Sonnenschein (1940-2021)

Alejandro Martínez-Marquina defends his dissertation

 Alejandro Martínez-Marquina defended his dissertation this week.

 The three papers he chose for his dissertation are these:

When a Town Wins the Lottery: Evidence from Spain

(with Christina Kent) [Slides] [Draft]

"How do local wealth shocks impact economic activity? For over two centuries, Spain has conducted a national lottery which often results in the random allocation of up to $800 million in cash to the citizens of one town. This is the only case in the world where individuals living in the same location randomly receive pure wealth shocks of this scale. Leveraging data on town-level lottery ticket expenditures, we compare winning towns to non-winning towns that had the same probability of winning. We find that although consumption increases, the lottery causes a slowdown in economic activity and deters new migration to towns that won in recent decades. However, an analysis of a century of lottery winners reveals large and persistent increases in population for towns that won in earlier periods."

The Burden of Household Debt

(with Mike Shi)

"We propose that holding debt causes worse financial decisions using a novel experimental design where we randomly assign debt. Our design isolates the consequences of holding debt while controlling for potential confounding factors such as initial wealth levels, selection, risk, and time preferences. Our findings show that debt causes behavioral biases detrimental to subjects' financial payoffs. However, subjects' strategies are not random but instead debt-biased, consistent with an additional penalty for holding negative balances. We refer to the financial losses caused by debt as the Burden of Debt and provide evidence that, under certain circumstances, these behavioral biases can compound and lead to substantial losses. Furthermore, we show in additional treatments how these debt-biased behaviors can also deter subjects from borrowing and forego profitable opportunities."

Ingraining Traditional Gender Roles in the Classroom: Evidence from the Spanish Social Service

[Slides]

"This study uses a regression discontinuity framework to examine the long- run effects of conservative education on women's' family and labor decisions. In 1939, the Spanish dictatorship created the Social service, a compulsory 6- month training program aimed at relegating women to the roles of mothers and housewives. We exploit the discontinuity induced by the sudden abolition of the Social Service, in addition to variation in the age of enrollment, to examine the consequences of attending the program. Using historical enrollment records and the universe of birth certificates, we find the Social Service was successful in instilling the regime's ideology. Women exposed to the class get married and have kids at younger ages, consistent with the desire to form a family sooner. In addition, they are more likely to declare being housewives when their first child is born. Future work will explore the underlying mechanisms and the effects on children by surveying women who enrolled around abolition."

Welcome to the club, Alejandro.

Aleandro ( top center) with Chenzi Xu, Muriel Niederle, Doug Bernheim, Al Roth, Ran Abramitzky

Akhil Vohra and Mike Shi defend their dissertations

 We're still locked out of the Economics building, but science progresses and dissertations are defended.  I've been remiss in celebrating them: here are two recent ones.

Akhil Vohra, whose job market paper I blogged about  here.

Akhil Vohra (top center) with Al Roth, Itai Ashlagi, Matt Jackson, Gabe Carroll and Fuhito Kojima

And Mike Shi, one of whose papers is this one:

The Burden of Household Debt  By ALEJANDRO MART´INEZ-MARQUINA and MIKE SHI *

Mike Shi (upper right) with Al Roth, Jeremy Bulow, Muriel Niederle, Luigi Pistaferri, and Nick Bloom

Welcome to the club, Akhil and Mike.

Edward (Eddie) Lazear (1948-2020)

 My Stanford colleague Eddie Lazear passed away last month, from pancreatic cancer. (When he moved from the University of Chicago to Stanford around 1995 he told me that he moved when he did because he was aware that the academic market for professors became thin after one's 50th birthday.) 

Prominent among his many accomplishments were his studies of labor markets from the inside out, i.e. from the perspectives of workers inside firms.

His papers include

Lazear, Edward P. "Why is there mandatory retirement?." Journal of political economy 87, 6 (1979): 1261-1284.

Lazear, Edward P., and Sherwin Rosen. "Rank-order tournaments as optimum labor contracts." Journal of political Economy 89, 5 (1981): 841-864.

Lazear, Edward P. "Performance pay and productivity." American Economic Review 90, 5 (2000): 1346-1361.

He founded the Journal of Labor Economics, and its current issue, Volume 39, Number 1, January 2021, published just now, contains his most recent paper:

Why Are Some Immigrant Groups More Successful Than Others?

Abstract: "The composition of immigrants depends not only on immigrant choice but also on immigration policy, because slots are rationed. Policy determines immigrant attainment, as evidenced by immigrants from Algeria having higher educational attainment than those from Israel or Japan. Theory predicts and evidence confirms that immigrant attainment is inversely related to the number admitted from a source country and positively related to population and education levels at home. A parsimonious specification has only two variables yet explains a majority of the variation in educational attainment of US immigrant groups. The theory and predictions are bolstered by Swedish data."

Here is the memorial statement from the JOLE (with a link to a special issue in honor of Eddie's 65th birthday: IN MEMORIAM: EDWARD LAZEAR

He was an an influential policy advisor as well as an institution builder.  Here's his Stanford obituary:

NOVEMBER 24, 2020: Trailblazing economist and presidential adviser Edward Lazear dies at 72

Here's a photo I took of him in December 2011 at a conference in honor of the 20th anniversary of the Rationality Center in Jerusalem.

Eddie Lazear (1948-2020)

Eduardo Laguna Müggenburg explores the repugnance of price gouging, and defends his dissertation

 Eduardo Laguna successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation last month. One of the papers he presented  (with Justin Holz and Rafael Jiménez-Duran) was an online experiment in which Amazon sellers of face masks and sanitizer at high prices were sampled, and subjects in the experiment were offered the opportunity to pay to have items be purchased from those sellers and donated to hospitals, and also to pay to have those sellers reported as price gougers to the  Department of Justice National Center for Disaster Fraud.  Some subjects were willing to buy, some were willing to pay to report, and some were willing to pay to avoid having sellers reported.

Here's the paper 

Quantifying repugnance to price gouging with an incentivized reporting experiment 

by Justin Holz, Rafael Jiménez-Duran and Eduardo Laguna-Müggenburg

Abstract: "Anti-price gouging laws are ubiquitous and people take costly actions to report violators to law-enforcement agencies, which suggests that they value punishing price increases during emergencies. We argue with a model that consumer reports contain information about repugnance to price gouging, or willingness to prevent third-party transactions (Roth, 2007). We conduct a field experiment during the first wave of COVID-19 to measure individuals’ willingness to pay to report sellers who increase prices of personal protective equipment. The willingness to pay to report is non-negligible, polarized, and responsive to the seller's price. We also find that repugnance is partly due to distaste for seller profits, depending on the product."

Remarkably, "Half of subjects who are willing to pay to report sellers are also willing to forgo the $5 gift card to have us donate PPE from a price-gouging seller."

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

That is, there are substantial numbers of participants who are willing to pay to report the seller, but are also willing to pay for the experimenters to purchase from the seller and donate the PPE to a hospital.  

We often think of repugnance as partitioning the population—there are people who want to transact, and others who think the transaction shouldn’t happen.  The fact that some individuals can simultaneously have both these feelings is, I think,  one of the most striking results of this experiment—it shows just how complex repugnance can be. These are people who recognize that buying goods at inflated prices (and donating them to hospitals) may be efficient, and worth doing given the shortage,  but would still like to see the sellers fined or jailed.  

I'm reminded of this (third hand) story about a N. Carolina hurricane, in which people waiting in line to buy ice at high prices nevertheless applauded when police arrived to arrest the sellers for price gouging... They Clapped: Can Price-Gouging Laws Prohibit Scarcity?

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

    Here's a picture from Eduardo's dissertation defense, conducted over Zoom:

Top: Matt Jackson, Eduardo Laguna, Al Roth

   Bottom: Larry Goulder, Chenzi Xu, Melanie Morten

Welcome to the club, Eduardo.

Finally! Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson win the 2020 Nobel Prize in Economics

 Could this be the best Nobel pairing ever?  (It's certainly a great one, and one of the best things to come out of 2020 so far...) Here's the announcement:

"The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats" https://www.nobelprize.org/

I've known Paul at least since 1978, when he attended a course I taught while on leave at Stanford, on Axiomatic Models of Bargaining. Bob advised both of our dissertations, although not at the same time.  

Bob is a legendary advisor of grad students.  Paul is now the third of Bob's  students to win a Nobel.  So Bob is well established as the patriarch of a Nobel dynasty.

Bob Wilson's Nobel dynasty (to date): Wilson (with Milgrom) 2020, and Bob's students Roth (with Shapley) 2012, Holmstrom (with Hart) 2016, and Milgrom (with Wilson) 2020

It looks like we should check back in 2024...

Here's another picture, from another celebration:

Bob Wilson being celebrated for the 2017 CME MSRI prize, by his students Al Roth, Paul Milgrom, and Bengt Holmstrom.

I've often blogged about  both Milgrom and Wilson, separately and together.

Here's a paragraph I wrote about Bob's work in our (only) joint paper, in which we interviewed each other:

 How Market Design Emerged from Game Theory: A Mutual Interview

Alvin E. Roth and Robert B. Wilson
Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 33, Number 3—Summer 2019—Pages 118–143

"Wilson (1977) introduced the model of common-value auctions (sometimes called the “mineral rights model”). The model and its equilibrium initiated a large body of theoretical, experimental, and applied work. One important insight from this model is that winning an auction contains “bad” news, since it implies in equilibrium that the winner’s estimate is the highest. In equilibrium, rational bidders fully account for this, but the paper raises the empirical question of the extent to which actual  bidders are able to fully discount for the fact that, if they win the auction, they likely overestimated the value of winning. Thus, Wilson’s work initiated a new research program on the winner’s curse, involving systematic overbidding compared to equilibrium, sometimes involving losses to the winning bidder. The private-value model of Vickrey (1961) and the common-value model of Wilson (1977) together form the basis of much of modern auction theory and practice, since most auctions have elements of both private and common value." 

Right after that, Bob and I talked about important influences on our work. Bob included this:

"I was deeply affected in the early 1990s by working with Paul Milgrom on design of the FCC spectrum auctions. I marveled at his insights and creativity in constructing rules for a “simultaneous ascending auction” that would have good prospects of yielding an approximately efficient outcome in an environment afflicted with strong complementarities, dispersed private information about market fundamentals, and substantial market power."  

To which I replied:

" I was also much influenced by Paul when we developed and co-taught what may have been the first courses in market design, in 2000 and again in 2001 when he was on leave at Harvard and MIT." 

*********

Here's an old snapshot:

Bob Wilson and Paul Milgrom in 2006

There's a rabbinical literature about the relationships between students and teachers. It often comes to mind when I think about how lucky I have been to have the students I've had. But today I'm reminded of my luck in having Bob Wilson as my teacher and friend, and Paul as my friend and colleague.

"Joshua ben Perahiah used to say: provide yourself a teacher and acquire yourself a friend. Judge everyone favorably." (Pirkei Avot, chapt 1 verse 6)

Here's how I recalled Bob as a teacher, in an autobiographical essay of a kind that they will each now be asked to write:

"Bob Wilson agreed to be my advisor and rescued me from having what looked to be a very short academic career after I failed one of my Ph.D. qualifying exams. He was on sabbatical that year, but met with me regularly once a week for an hour. In memory, our meetings followed a kind of script: I would spend a while explaining to him why I hadn’t made progress that week, and then he would spend a while telling me not to be discouraged. Then I would describe some roadblock to further progress, and he would, as we finished our meeting, recommend a paper for me to read. Because his recommendations had always been very much on target, I would go straight from his office to the library and start to read the paper. As I did, I would think, this time Bob made a mistake, this paper has nothing to do with my problem. But then, somewhere in the middle of the paper would be a lemma or remark that helped me get around that roadblock …"

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

And here's a final picture from Stockholm in 2012, of me and Emilie and Paul and Eva, with Parag Pathak (one of Bob's academic grandchildren) in the  background.

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

Read the press release

"The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences has decided to award the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2020 to

Paul R. Milgrom
Stanford University, USA

Robert B. Wilson
Stanford University, USA

“for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”

...

“This year’s Laureates in Economic Sciences started out with fundamental theory and later used their results in practical applications, which have spread globally. Their discoveries are of great benefit to society,” says Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Prize Committee."
Learn more in the popular information

"Every day, auctions distribute astronomical values between buyers and sellers. This year’s Laureates, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, have improved auction theory and invented new auction formats, benefitting sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world."
Read the scientific background