Congratulations to Claudia Goldin: BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award

Here are the first two paragraphs of the announcement...

The BBVA Foundation recognizes Claudia Goldin for pioneering economic analysis of the gender gap
"The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management category has gone in this eleventh edition to the American economic historian Claudia Goldin “for her groundbreaking contributions to the historical analysis of the role of women in the economy, and for her analysis of the reasons behind gender inequality.”

"Goldin “is credited with founding the field of empirical analysis of the gender gap,” remarked the committee on announcing its decision, starting with her seminal 1990 publication Understanding the Gender Gap: An Economic History of American Women. This hugely influential book examined the roots of wage inequality between men and women, questioning the conventional explanations.

Congratulations to the 2019 Sloan Fellows

The full list, across all disciplines is here:

2019 Sloan Research Fellows

 Here are the 2019 economists:

Economics

Nikhil Agarwal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Denis Chetverikov, University of California, Los Angeles

Rebecca Diamond, Stanford University

Will Dobbie, Princeton University

Michal Kolesár, Princeton University

Melanie Morten, Stanford University

Philipp Strack, University of California, Berkeley

Gabriel Zucman, University of California, Berkeley

And the computer scientists:

Computer Science

Yang Cai, McGill University

Alvin Cheung, University of Washington

Reetuparna Das, University of Michigan

Rong Ge, Duke University

Bernhard Haeupler, Carnegie Mellon University

Moritz Hardt, University of California, Berkeley

Haitham Hassanieh, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Gillat Kol, Princeton University

Jason D. Lee, University of Southern California

Sergey Levine, University of California, Berkeley

Wyatt Lloyd, Princeton University

Shayan Oveis Gharan, University of Washington

Emily Whiting, Boston University

Christopher Wilson, Northeastern University

Keith Winstein, Stanford University

Mary Wootters, Stanford University

Congratulations to Eva Tardos, winner of the 2019 IEEE John von Neumann Medal

Congratulations to Eva Tardos.  The Communications of the ACM has the news:
Tardos to Receive von Neumann Medal

"Tardos was cited "For contributions to the field of algorithms, including foundational new methods in optimization, approximation algorithms, and algorithmic game theory."
...
"She will receive the Medal next May at the IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit and Awards Ceremony in San Diego, CA."

Congratulations to Fuhito Kojima, on the Enjoji Jiro Memorial Prize

My colleague Fuhito Kojima has a lot to be congratulated on lately, and today comes another cause for congratulations.  He shares the 5th Enjoji Jiro Memorial Prize by the Japan Center for Economic Research. The prize recognizes 'young and mid-level economists under 45 years of age who have made achievements in the field of economic theory, and have a promising future.'

Here's the story from today's Nikkei Shimbun Morning Paper:

第5回「円城寺次郎記念賞」 小島・渡辺両氏に

2018/11/18付

日本経済新聞　朝刊

"The 5th "Jiroji Jiro Memorial Award" To Mr. Kojima and Mr. Watanabe"

Congratulations, Fuhito!

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I used Google translate to translate the headline, but for the following paragraph it had trouble with a word that I gather in this context means "between junior and senior in age/career," which came out as saying that Fuhito is a "young and medium-sized economist ." (The description of the prize above comes from an English language report on the 2009 prize...)

2018 Exeter Prize to Shengwu Li (and a very strong shortlist)

On a day when it's likely that another prize in Economics will be announced (but before it has been), I'm happy to note the following announcement on the ESA googlegroup:

We are happy to announce the winner of the 2018 Exeter Prize for the best paper published in the previous calendar year in a peer-reviewed journal in the fields of Experimental Economics, Behavioural Economics and Decision Theory.

The winner is Shengwu Li (Harvard University) for his paper “Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms”, published in the American Economic Review.

The paper proposes and analyzes a desirable property for mechanisms implementing social outcomes. A mechanism is a game whose rules are designed by a social planner for the purpose of implementing a certain desirable social outcome (e.g., efficiency or fairness). Such mechanisms are always designed under the assumption that the parties involved will play an equilibrium outcome. Strategy Proof mechanisms received special attention in the literature, because they implement an outcome that is not only an equilibrium, but also one with dominant strategies, i.e., no player can do anything better than playing the strategy that leads to the socially desirable outcome, no matter what other people are doing. Yet as experimental and empirical results have shown, in real life, strategy proof mechanisms don’t always guarantee that players will do what they are expected to do. This is mainly because the reasoning behind the “right thing to do” is often complicated even in cases that admit a dominant-strategy equilibrium (one prominent mechanism of this sort is the second-price auction). Li’s paper proposes a concept of “obvious mechanisms.” This mechanism not only admits a dominant-strategy equilibrium, but also guarantees that it is cognitively simple to confirm that playing anything else is irrational. Li’s approach allows us to make mechanism design theory more applicable, and closer to reality. It warns us against choosing social mechanisms that we as game theorists hold to be secure, but when applied in the real-world will prove to be too complicated for people to do the right thing.

The winning paper was selected by the panel of Rosemarie Nagel (Pompeu Fabra University), Michel Regenwetter (University of Illinois) and Eyal Winter (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

Shengwu will be visiting the University of Exeter to receive the award and give a public lecture.

This year was again exceptionally competitive with a large number of excellent nominations. In addition to the winner, this year’s shortlist was:

Chew, Soo Hong, Bin Miao, and Songfa Zhong. "Partial ambiguity." Econometrica 85.4 (2017): 1239-1260.

Glover, Dylan, Amanda Pallais, and William Pariente. "Discrimination as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Evidence from French grocery stores." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 132.3 (2017): 1219-1260.

Kessler, Judd B. "Announcements of support and public good provision." American Economic Review 107.12 (2017): 3760-87.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce honors ideas

Country songwriters Lee Thomas Miller and Wendell Mobley share some of their ideas and IP at the Ideas in Bloom party sponsored by the Chamber of Commerce

Last Wednesday I flew to Washington DC to join a Chamber of Commerce celebration of  ideas and intellectual property, in various categories.

The innovation awards are both for lines of work that the National Science Foundation funded, and they were introduced by the NSF director, Dr. France Córdova. (I am happy to go to DC to help showcase the great work that the NSF does...see my remarks at the end of this post.)

Here's a link to the announcement:

The 2018 IP Champions Gala, September 12, 2018

IP Champion for Excellence in Enforcement
Peter O’Doherty, Head, Economic Crime Directorate, City of London Police
Nick Court, Chief Detective, Police Intellectual Property Crime Unit, City of London Police

IP Champion for Excellence in Innovation
Alvin Roth, Founder, Kidney Exchange
Inderjit Jutla, Founder, Aluna

IP Champion for Excellence in Advocacy
Bart Herbison, President, Nashville Songwriters Association
Steve Bogart, Chairman, Nashville Songwriters Association

IP Champion for Excellence in Creativity
Kristie Macosko Krieger, Academy Award-nominated producer
Kira Goldberg, Executive Vice President, Production, 21st Century Fox

IP Champion for Excellence in IP Policy
Professor Liu Chuntian, Renmin University of China

IP Champion for Excellence in Innovation
Uzi Hanuni, CEO, Maxtech Networks

Musical Performance
Lee Thomas Miller, Nashville Mega-hit Songwriter
Wendell Mobley, Nashville Mega-hit Songwriter

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And here's a link to a subsequent press release:
U.S. CHAMBER OF COMMERCE GLOBAL INNOVATION POLICY CENTER CELEBRATES IP LEADERS AT 2018 IP CHAMPIONS GALA

"IP Champion for Excellence in Innovation – Alvin Roth
...
"Since the first paired kidney exchange in 2000, thousands of people have received kidney transplants identified through paired exchanges."
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I scored a personal max for (travel time)/(speaking time).  Here are my prepared remarks:

"I flew here today to say thank you: to the Chamber of Commerce for recognizing not just my work but also the role that the NSF plays in fostering scientific innovation. 

And thank you to the NSF, and particularly to the Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences Directorate, which must be one of the most cost-effective investments the government makes.  Social science isn’t very expensive, but it can be incredibly valuable. It can save lives.

On a personal note, all of my work that was cited by the Nobel Prize committee was begun with funding from the NSF. Dan Newlon was the legendary director of the SBE Directorate, and he nurtured a generation of economists who made big changes in how economics is done. In the early 1990’s, when I was discouraged by the progress I was making on understanding matching, he encouraged me to stay the course. So for me, the NSF support was about much more than funding.

So:Thank you all for coming here tonight, thank you Dr. Córdova, thank you to the NSF for all your support, starting when I was very young, and thank you to the Chamber of Commerce."
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Here's a video link (that seems to start only after the first minute or so, and the NSF section begins with Dr. Córdova at minute 1:33 and goes to 1:45...) 

Nevanlinna Prize winner Constantinos Daskalakis, and the Fields medalists (and one of the Fields medals)

Here's a video that touches on his work on computational complexity of Nash equilibria, and auctioning multiple items.



Here's some more on that from AFT, focusing as well on the Fields medalist Alessio Figalli

THE 2018 FIELDS MEDAL AND ITS SURPRISING CONNECTION TO ECONOMICS!



And here's more still, from Quanta:

2018 Fields Medal And Nevanlinna Prize Winners


And in case less is more, here's a short announcement from Science:
Five superstars win ‘math’s Nobel Prize’

And then there's this, from the prize ceremony in Rio...
Winner of top mathematics prize has medal stolen from him minutes later

Design of fisheries--EURO Excellence in Practice Award to Bichler, Ferrell, Fux, and Goeree

Congratulations to the winners, and to the fishermen and the fish for this recent award for market design.

EURO Excellence in Practice Award 2018

The winners of the 2018 EURO Excellence in Practice Award are:

Martin Bichler, Technical University of Munich

Douglas Ferrell, Department of Primary Industries, Fisheries Analysis

Vladimir Fux, TUM

Jacob Goeree, Business School, University of New South Wales

A combinatorial exchange for fishery access rights

We present the design and implementation of a combinatorial exchange for trading catch shares in New South Wales (NSW). The market provided a market-based response to a substantial policy problem in fisheries worldwide: the reallocation of catch shares among fishers in a cap-and-trade system designed to prevent overfishing.
The design needed to address several key challenges to overcome a long struggle about the right way to reallocate shares.
Participants wanted to be able to submit all-or-nothing package bids. Also, prices were required to be anonymous and linear such that sellers of two identical packages would get the same payment. These features were crucial for the adoption of the market design but difficult to accommodate in a market design. The requirements led to a computationally challenging allocation and pricing problem that addressed the key concerns of the stakeholders.
The market was organized in summer 2017 by the government and successfully put the shares into the hands of those who needed them most. The design nicely illustrates how computational optimization can provide new policy tools, able to solve complex policy problems that were considered intractable only a few years ago.

The EEPA 2018 jury consisted of Ulrich Dorndorf (chair), Erik Demeulemeester, John Poppelaars, Adam Ouorou, and Karl Dörner.

The award was presented at the closing session of the EURO 2018 Conference in Valencia (Spain).

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Here's an earlier post on fisheries:

Monday, February 16, 2009

Sustainable fisheries

Frontiers of Knowledge Awards 2018, video of the presentation ceremony

Presentation ceremony of the 10th edition of the Frontiers of Knowledge Awards

18/06/2018

Bill Nordhaus at the BBVA Award ceremony

Rob Porter, Ariel Pakes, and Tim Bresnahan

 The celebration and speech of Bill Nordhaus runs from minutes 32:15-40:00 in the above video








The celebration of Tim Bresnahan, Ariel Pakes and Rob Porter, and the speech by Pakes on the behalf of all of them, run from 46:05-51:20 in the above video.








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See my earlier post,

Tuesday, February 20, 2018

Tim Bresnahan, Ariel Pakes and Rob Porter win BBVA Award, for their pioneering work in industrial organization, and Bill Nordhaus wins for his work in climate change

Best paper award to Mohammad Akbarpour and Shengwu Li for "Credible Mechanisms"

Good news from ec18 now going on at Cornell.

The Best Paper Award goes to "Credible Mechanisms" by Mohammad Akbarpour and Shengwu Li 

Here is the paper: Credible Mechanisms

Abstract: Consider an extensive-form mechanism, run by an auctioneer who communicates sequentially and privately with agents.  Suppose the auctioneer can deviate from the rules provided that no single agent detects the deviation.  A mechanism is credible if it is incentive-compatible for the auctioneer to follow the rules. We study the optimal auctions in which only winners pay, under symmetric independent private values.The  first-price  auction  is  the  unique  credible  static  mechanism.   The  ascending auction is the unique credible strategy-proof mechanism.

And here are their websites
Mohammad Akbarpour
Shengwu Li

The incentive auction (for radio spectrum) in three videos

These come from the Edelman competition:

Video 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GKWs5My86fw

Video 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMAfacbPZ7Q

Video 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IeijpJ_6u_U

Earlier post:

Saturday, April 21, 2018

FCC receives Edelman award for incentive spectrum auction

Advancing wireless communication: FCC awarded the 2018 INFORMS Edelman Award, the leading award in analytics and operations research

FCC receives Edelman award for incentive spectrum auction

Advancing wireless communication: FCC awarded the 2018 INFORMS Edelman Award, the leading award in analytics and operations research

"The FCC conducted the world’s first two-sided “Incentive Auction” to meet the exploding demand for wireless services by reclaiming valuable low-band electromagnetic spectrum from TV broadcasters. By purchasing spectrum from TV broadcasters and reselling it to wireless providers, the auction repurposed 84 MHz of TV spectrum for mobile broadband, next-generation “5-G,” and other wireless uses, raised nearly $20 billion in revenue, and contributed over $7 billion to reduce the federal deficit. In addition, operations research enabled many TV stations to remain on their original channels, saving an estimated $200 million in relocation costs.  "
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I have written quite a number of posts focusing on the incentive auction, and on the dream team led by Paul Milgrom; here's one of the first:

Monday, April 21, 2014

The FCC's upcoming incentive auction, and I propose a new adjective (Milgromesque)

Parag Pathak wins the American Economic Association's Clark Medal

Here's the announcement, which describes Parag's work well:
Parag Pathak, Clark Medalist 2018

Parag Pathak

See my earlier posts involving Pathak here.

Congratulations Parag, on a well deserved award!
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Update:
Here's MIT's celebration of Parag:
Parag Pathak wins John Bates Clark Medal
MIT economist lauded for work on education, market-design mechanisms.
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here's an interview with Parag in the WSJ
Q&A: How an Economist Unlocked Hidden Truths About School Choice
Parag Pathak of MIT, winner of the John Bates Clark Medal for the nation’s most impressive economist under 40, says he 'fell into the topic'

Here's the Economist's coverage:
A market-design economist wins the John Bates Clark medal
Parag Pathak’s market designs have influenced the lives of 1m schoolchildren

Here's the local angle:
Corning native wins John Bates Clark Medal
"The American Economic Association recently announced its decision to award the Clark Medal to Dr. Parag Pathak, a Corning native and graduate of Corning-Painted Post High School."

Appreciations of Paul Milgrom from the CME-MSRI prize ceremony

Here is a link if you can't activate the video above.

I blogged about the prize here.

Tim Bresnahan, Ariel Pakes and Rob Porter win BBVA Award, for their pioneering work in industrial organization, and Bill Nordhaus wins for his work in climate change

Breaking news:
The BBVA Foundation recognizes Bresnahan, Pakes and Porter for opening up the field of empirical industrial organization

"The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Economics, Finance and Management category goes, in this tenth edition, to Timothy Bresnahan, Ariel Pakes and Robert Porter for founding and shaping the field of empirical industrial organization, a branch of economics that has developed fundamental techniques to measure market power (understood as the ability of a firm to control prices in a given industry). “Motivated by important and policy-relevant questions in applied economics,” remarks the jury in its citation, “they developed methodologies that had a significant and long-lasting impact on subsequent work in industrial organization as well as other applied fields.”
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William Nordhaus, the father of climate change economics, wins the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award

"The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in the Climate Change category goes, in this tenth edition, to economist William Nordhaus, of Yale University (USA) for founding the field of climate change economics, by “pioneering a framework that integrates climate science, technology and economics to address the critical question: What should the world do to limit climate change?”:

Israel celebrates Sergiu Hart

The Israel Prize goes to Sergiu Hart! Here's a picture of him I once took in Jerusalem:

Sergiu Hart

Here's the story from the Jerusalem Post:
PROF. SERGIU HART TO RECEIVE ISRAEL PRIZE IN ECONOMIC RESEARCH, STATISTICS

"Prof. Sergiu Hart of the Hebrew University will be awarded the Israel Prize for economic research and statistics, the Education Ministry announced on Thursday.
...
"In its decision, the prize committee called Prof. Hart – a former president of the World Association of Game Theory and member of the Academy of Sciences of Israel, Europe and the United States – one of the world’s leading economists.

“Prof. Hart specializes in the field of game theory and its comprehensive implications in various economic fields. Among other things, it has an important contribution to the understanding of the convergence to market equilibrium, the value of a player in the game, how cartels are created in the markets and the development of objective risk indices,” the committee wrote.

"In recent years, it added, Hart’s research has focused on “designing mechanisms such as tenders, which are important in online trade.”

"Hart was born in Bucharest, Romania, and immigrated to Israel at the age of 14 along with his family. After serving in the IDF, he received undergraduate and graduate degrees from Tel Aviv University in mathematics with honors before completing his post-Doctoral studies at Stanford University in California.

"In 1991, Hart founded the Center for the Study of Rationality at the Hebrew University, whose academic committee he now chairs.
“Under his leadership the center became a unique leader in the world in the study of game theory with its implications in a wide range of fields such as economics, statistics, psychology, law, biology, philosophy and more,” the prize committee wrote in its decision.

"The Israel Prize is largely regarded as the state’s highest honor. It is presented annually on Independence Day in a state ceremony in Jerusalem attended by the president, the prime minister, the Knesset speaker and the Supreme Court president."

Congratulations to Paul Milgrom: 2017 CME Group-MSRI Prize

The award ceremony is today:  2017 CME Group-MSRI Prize

The 12th annual CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications will be awarded to PAUL MILGROM, Shirley and Leonard Ely professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Economics and professor, by courtesy, at both the Department of Management Science and Engineering and the Graduate School of Business at Stanford University, at a luncheon in Chicago on February 12, 2018.

The CME Group-MSRI Prize is awarded to an individual or a group to recognize originality and innovation in the use of mathematical, statistical or computational methods for the study of the behavior of markets, and more broadly of economics.

About Paul Milgrom

Paul Milgrom's primary research is directed to designing auctions for multiple unique but related items. Along with Robert Wilson, he introduced the initial design for sales of radio spectrum licenses in the United States. He has designed new auctions for Internet advertising and for procuring complex services. Research on incentives and complexity are combined to create auctions that are simple and straightforward for bidders, yet which dramatically improve resource allocation compared to traditional auction designs.

After earning his PhD at the GSB, Milgrom taught at Northwestern University and Yale before returning to Stanford. He has made well-known contributions to many areas of economics, including auctions, incentive theory, industrial economics, economic history, economics of manufacturing, economics of organizations, and game theory. His book coauthored with John Roberts, Economics, Organization and Management, opened a new area to economic research.

He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and winner of the 2008 Nemmers Prize in Economics and the 2012 BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge award.

About the event

Prior to the lunch and award presentation, a panel discussion on Frontiers of Research in Market Design will be held with the following panelists:

• Mohammad Akbarpour, Assistant Professor of Economics, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University
• Piotr Dworczak, Assistant Professor, Department of Economics, University of Chicago
• Shengwu Li, Junior Fellow of the Society of Fellows, Department of Economics, Harvard University
• Ellen Muir, Research Fellow, School of Mathematics & Statistics, The University of Melbourne

Luncheon remarks, an appreciation of the life and work of Paul Milgrom:

• Roger Myerson, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago

Paul Milgrom will present at talk on A Market Process to Reallocate Radio Spectrum.

2017 CME Group-MSRI Prize Selection Committee: David Eisenbud (chair), Director, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute Lars Peter Hansen, Homer J. Livingston Distinguished Service Professor in the Departments of Economics and Statistics at the University of Chicago. 2008 CME-MSRI Prize. 2013 Nobel Prize Winner Bengt Holmström, the Paul A. Samuelson Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and 2013 recipient of the CME-MSRI Prize. 2016 Nobel Prize Winner. R. Preston McAfee, Chief Economist & Corp VP, Microsoft Leo Melamed, Chairman Emeritus, CME Group Roger Myerson, Glen A. Lloyd Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago. 2007 Nobel Prize Winner Maureen O'Hara, Robert W. Purcell Professorship of Management; and Professor of Finance, SC Johnson College of Business, Cornell University Myron Scholes, Frank E. Buck Professor of Finance, Emeritus, Stanford Graduate School of Business Hugo Sonnenschein, Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus, University of Chicago Jean Tirole, Scientific Director of Industrial Economics Institute (IDEI) and Member of the Toulouse School of Economics and 2010 recipient of the CME-MSRI Prize

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Here's an earlier announcement, of this prize and some others. Paul is deservedly a prize magnet, and this year he won three notable prizes.
Paul wins CME-MSRI Prize

Update:  and here's today's story from the CME
WHY PAUL MILGROM IS AN ECONOMIST YOU SHOULD KNOW

Auction design wins a national high school science prize

Market design may be expanding out into high schools...

Maryland and New York Students Capture $100,000 Scholarship Prizes in 2017 SIEMENS Competition in Math, Science and Technology


WASHINGTON, DC, December 5, 2017 – Four high school students, one from Bethesda, MD, and a team from Dix Hills and Melville, NY, were awarded grand prizes of $100,000 scholarships for their significant accomplishments in scientific research in the 2017 Siemens Competition in Math, Science & Technology. The Competition is the nation's premier science research competition for high school students and seeks to promote excellence by encouraging students to undertake individual or team research projects. For more information go to: www.siemens-foundation.org​

Andrew Komo, a senior at Montgomery Blair High School in Silver Spring, MD, won the $100,000 grand prize in the Individual category for developing a coded system that protects online auctions from threats, such as cheating and fraud."

HT: Scott Kominers

John J. Carty Award: NAS prize in Economics for 2018

The National Academy of Sciences John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science is to be awarded for work in Economics.

Get you nominations in before October 2... (you don't have to be a member of the NAS to make a nomination).

Scheduled for presentation in 2018 in economics. Nominations now accepted online through Monday, October 2, 2017.

About the John J. Carty Award 

The John J. Carty Award for the Advancement of Science is awarded every two years, to recognize noteworthy and distinguished accomplishments in any field of science within the National Academy of Science’s charter. The award is presented with a medal and a $25,000 prize. The American Telephone and Telegraph Company established the award to honor the memory of their Chief Engineer, Vice President, and general telecommunications innovator, John J. Carty. The Carty Award will be presented in 2018 in the field of economics. 

Market design and kidney exchange at the Royal Academy of Economics and Finance in Barcelona

I'll speak at and become a foreign member of the Royal Academy of Economics and Finance (RACEF), in Barcelona this evening.

El Nobel de Economía Alvin Roth ingresa en la Real Academia de Ciencias Económicas y Financieras

Here's a recent article about RACEF, which is based in Barcelona, while the other Royal Spanish Academies are based in Madrid:
RACEF, la Academia con sede en Barcelona que ya cotiza en el Instituto de España
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And here's a photo (I'm the one in the blue shirt):

More photographs here.

Update: and here's a video, in English and Spanish.