Stanford celebrates Itai Ashlagi

Itai Ashlagi has joined the Management Science and Engineering Department at Stanford, and the Engineering School celebrates his arrival here: New Faculty Member: Professor Itai Ashlagi Plays Matchmaker for Patients, Schools, New Doctors

How Stanford Took On the Giants of Economics, in today's NY Times

The NY Times takes note of Stanford's economics department, and our recent hires of Matt Gentzkow and Raj Chetty:

How Stanford Took On the Giants of Economics, by Neil Irwin.

"The center of gravity for economic thought in the United States has long been found along the two miles in Cambridge, Mass., that run between Harvard University and M.I.T. But there is new competition for that title, and it is quite a bit farther west.

Stanford University has lured an all-star lineup of economists to Palo Alto, Calif., in the last few years — and fended off Harvard’s and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s attempts to woo Stanford economists.

The newest Stanford professors include a Nobel laureate — Alvin E. Roth, formerly of Harvard — but the shift is more noticeable among top young economists. Of the 11 people who have won the John Bates Clark Medal for best academic economist under age 40 since 2000, four are now at Stanford, more than at any other university. Two of them joined in the last few months: the inequality researcher Raj Chetty, who came from Harvard, and Matthew Gentzkow, who left the University of Chicago.

Stanford’s success with economists is part of a larger campaign to stake a claim as the country’s top university. Its draw combines a status as the nation’s “it” university — now with the lowest undergraduate acceptance rate and a narrow No. 2 for the biggest fund-raising haul — with its proximity to many of the world’s most dynamic companies. "
...
"“My sense is this is a good development for economics,” Mr. Chetty said. “I think Stanford is going to be another great department at the level of Harvard and M.I.T. doing this type of work, which is an example of economics becoming a deeper field. It’s a great thing for all the universities — I don’t think it’s a zero-sum game.”

Matthew Gentzkow, an economics professor at Stanford University in Palo Alto, Calif. He was hired away from the University of Chicago. Credit Jim Wilson/The New York Times

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Here's an earlier article on Stanford hiring Susan Athey and Guido Imbens and me, from the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2012:
Stanford Lures Alvin Roth and 2 Other Economists From Harvard

Stanford's endowment: I benefit directly from parts of it

An unusual thing about American universities is that they are largely financed by philanthropy. The oldest universities tend to have very big endowments. Some of those endowments yield income for general revenues, while others have very specific purposes.

Here's an article from the Stanford Benefactor about some of the endowments that have helped me personally settle in to my new job at Stanford: How to Bring a Nobel Laureate to Stanford

Gangnam Stanford Style

The Nobel sport of football at Stanford

The Nobel committee recognized two Stanford faculty members this year. And it's the football season.
So here I am, waving to the crowd from the field, with Brian Kobilka, who shared this year's Nobel prize in Chemistry. (The bottom pic is how we looked to my wife from the skydeck of Stanford's football stadium...)

Experimental economics at Stanford SITE, Sept 14 and 15

Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics Summer 2012 Workshop
	Segment 5: Experimental Economics September 14 and 15, 2012 Organized by Judd Kesler, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Lise Vesterlund, University of Pittsburgh; and Muriel Niederle and Charles Sprenger, both Stanford University.
	The session will meet in Conference Room A in Landau Economics Building. Here is the map to the building. Friday, September 14 9.00 - 9.30 Breakfast 9.30 - 9.45 Welcome and Opening Remarks 9.45 - 10.45 Laboratory Results and Field Inference External Validity and Partner Selection Bias presented by Hunt Alcott, New York University and co-authored with Sendhil Mullainathan, Harvard University Free Riding in the Lab and in the Field presented by Florian Englmaier, University of Wurzburg and co-authored with Georg Gebhardt, Ulm University  10.45 - 11.00 Coffee 11.00 - 12.00 Experimental Methods Incentives in Experiments: A Theoretical Analysis presented by Paul J. Healy, The Ohio State University and co-authored with Yaron Azrieli, The Ohio State University and Christopher P. Chambers, University of California, San Diego Mistakes and Game Form Recognition: Challenges to Theories of Revealed. Preference and Framing presented by Charles R. Plott, California Institute of Technology and co-authored with Timothy N. Cason, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University 12.00 - 1.45 Lunchtime discussion 1.45 - 2.45 Risk and Ambiguity Learning to be Probabilistically Sophisticated presented by Yoram Halevy,University of British Columbia Estimating the Relationship Between Economic Preferences: A Testing Ground for Unifed Theories of Behavior presented by Pietro Ortoleva, California Institute of Technology and co-authored with Mark Dean, Brown University 2.45 - 3.00 Coffee 3.00 - 4.00 Dynamic Inconsistency? Hypobolic Discounting and Willingness to Wait presented by David Eil,  George Mason University Working Over Time: Dynamic Inconsistency in Real Effort Tasks presented by Ned Augenblick, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley and co-authored with Muriel Niederle and Charles Sprenger, both Stanford University 4.00 - 4.15 Coffee 4.15 - 5.15 Shorter Presentation Session Competitive Pricing and the Search for Quality, presented by Daniel Martin, New York University Probability List Elicitation for Lotteries, presented by David Freeman, University of British Columbia Unintended Media E ects in a Conflict Environment: Serbian Radio and Croatian Nationalism, presented by Vera Mironova, Department of Political Science, University of Maryland and co-authored with Stefano DellaVigna, University of California, Berkeley; Ruben Enikolopov and Maria Petrova, New Economic School, Moscow and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Paris School of Economics Local Leadership and the Provision of Public Goods: A Field-Lab Experiment in Bolivia, presented by Maria P. Recalde, University of Pittsburgh and co-authored with B. Kelsey Jack, Tufts University 5.30 Continued discussion and dissemination of technical knowledge during dinner Saturday, September 15 9.00 - 9.30 Breakfast 9.30 - 10.30 Bargaining and Voting Behavior The Effect of Negotiations on Bargaining in Legislatures presented by Marina Agranov, California Institute of Technology and co-authored with Chloe Terigman,University of British Columbia Hypothetical Thinking and Information Extraction: Strategic Voting in the Laboratory presented by Emanuel Vespa, Stern School of Business, New York University and co-authred with Ignacio Esponda, New York University 10.30 - 10.45 Coffee 11.00 - 12.30 Game Theory in the Lab Emergent Star Networks with Ex Ante Homogeneous Agents presented by Daniel Houser, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science Contact Information, George Mason University and co-authored with Rong Rong, also Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science Contact Information, George Mason University Infinitely Repeated Games with Private Monitoring: An Experimental Analysispresented by Guillaume Frechette, New York University and co-authored withMasaki Aoyagi, Osaka University and V. Bhaskar, University College London Finding the Hidden Cost of Control presented by Judd Kessler, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and co-authored with Stephen G Leider,Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 12.30 - 2.15 Lunchtime discussion 2.15 - 3.15 Field Experiments Do People Choose What They Think Will Make Them Happiest? Evidence from the National Resident Matching Program. presented by Ori Heffetz, Cornell University and co-authored with Daniel J. Benjamin and Alex Rees-Jones, Cornell University and Miles Kimball, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Death Probability Shocks and Consumption: Evidence from Denmark presented by Kasper Meisner Nielsen, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and co-authored with Steffen Andersen, Copenhagen Business School  and Charles Sprenger, Stanford University 3.15 - 3.30 Coffee 3.30 - 4.30 Gender and Economic Behavior Gender, Competition and Career Choices presented by Thomas Buser, University of Amsterdam and co-authored with Muriel Niederle, Stanford University andHessel Oosterbeek also University of Amsterdam Breaking the Glass Ceiling with `No': Gender Differences in Doing Favors. Presented by Lise Vesterlund, University of Pittsburgh and co-authored with Linda Babcock, Amanda Weirup, and Laurie Weingart all Carnegie Mellon University. 4.30 - 4.45 Coffee 4.45 - 5.45 Shorter Presentation Session One in a Million: A Field Experiment on Belief Formation and Pivotal Votingpresented by Mitchell Hoffman, University of California, Berkeley and co-authored with John Morgan, University of California, Berkeley An Experiment on Reference Points and Expectations presented by Changcheng Song, University of California, Berkeley Wallflowers Doing Good: Field and Lab Evidence of Heterogeneity in Reputation Concerns presented by Daniel Jones, University of Pittsburgh and co-authored with Sera Linardi, also University of Pittsburgh Costly Information Acquisition in a Speculative Attack: Theory and Experimentspresented by Isabel Trevino, New York University and co-authored with Michal Szkup, also New York University

The university (Stanford) as a marketplace of ideas and innovation

Writing in the New Yorker, Ken Auletta thinks about what makes Stanford the heart of silicon valley, and whether this is an entirely good thing... Get Rich U.: There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?

"Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy.
...

If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the élites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley. When looking for engineers, Schmidt said, Google starts at Stanford. Five per cent of Google employees are Stanford graduates. The president of Stanford, John L. Hennessy, is a director of Google; he is also a director of Cisco Systems and a successful former entrepreneur. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing has licensed eight thousand campus-inspired inventions, and has generated $1.3 billion in royalties for the university. Stanford’s public-relations arm proclaims that five thousand companies “trace their origins to Stanford ideas or to Stanford faculty and students.” They include Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, Agilent Technologies, Silicon Graphics, LinkedIn, and E*Trade.
...

"But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune. Corporate and government funding may warp research priorities. A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent. Some ask whether Stanford has struck the right balance between commerce and learning, between the acquisition of skills to make it and intellectual discovery for its own sake."