The design of markets, in Padua (video)

Yesterday I had the pleasure of speaking about market design in the Aula Magna of the University of Padua, where Galileo lectured.  Below is a video. I start to speak around minute 14:20.

Update: here's a post-talk photo:

Kidney exchange in Italy, Europe and the U.S.: video of my talk in Rome

 Here is a video recording of my talk in Rome yesterday at the  Istituto Superiore di Sanità. There are some introductions by people with vast accomplishments in Italian transplantation and kidney exchange, Giuseppe Feltrin (director of the National Transplant Center), Antonio Nicolò (professor of Economic Theory at the University of Padua) and Lucrezia Furian (Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Surgery Unit - Department of Surgical, Oncological and Gastroenterological Sciences of the University Hospital of Padua)*. 

My talk begins at 27:55.

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*Although her web page didn't yet reflect this, Dr. Furian was very recently promoted to the rank of Full Professor of Surgery.  Congratulations Lucrezia!

Kidney Markets--my debate with Debra Satz (video)

The video of my debate with Debra Satz on kidney markets is now available, see below.  

You can also find it here: https://humsci.stanford.edu/events/kidney-markets-alvin-roth-and-debra-satz

The question we debated was "Should we experiment with forms of regulated payments to individuals who provide a kidney for others?"  

The audience was asked to vote on that question before we began, and again after we concluded.

 

 To set the stage, in an early slide I spoke briefly about Debra's book  Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets, and my book Who Gets What — And Why. The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design.   

If you happen to have read those books, I think you can already have a good idea of what we said, and what a friendly discussion it was.

Kidney exchange as an innovation in organization

Here's a two minute video summary of an address I gave in 2014, just noticed now, which seems still pretty up to date. A lot of progress has been made through new ways of organizing  transplants, and there's plenty of organizational innovation still needed.

State-of-the-Art Address - World Transplant Congress 2014

   

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nJ9wXN03mpE

Simple Proofs of Important Results in Market Design-- (video of my talk at Berkeley's Simons Institute)

Here's a video of the talk I gave on Friday at the Simons Institute, on simple proofs of important theorems about matching, that have had impact on practical market design.

Ran Abramitzky interviews me on market design (followed by a good Q&A with Stanford freshmen)

Here's the video recording of our conversation

 

Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design: SLMath introductory workshop (videos)

Last week I gave the opening talk of the week long  Introductory Workshop at SLMath, on Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design.  Some of the video lectures are now online here (consisting mostly of slides and voice).

My talk introduces the general themes of market design by recounting the history and challenges facing the market for new doctors from 1900 through this year.

Berkeley's Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath), formerly known as the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) has a commanding view of the SF Bay.

Experiments and market design, video (I'm interviewed by Chiara Spina from INSEAD)

Professor Chiara Spina interviewed me about the use of experiments in market design (20 minute video). (We spoke about a number of experiments I collaborated on with Judd Kessler, among others.)

Public Lecture at Iowa State (video): "Who Gets What and Why? Economists as Engineers."

 Iowa State University in Ames Iowa has made available a video of a public lecture I gave there on September 22, called "Who Gets What and Why?  Economists as Engineers."

Economists as Engineers: Public lecture at Iowa State University tomorrow

 
I'll be travelling today to Ames Iowa, to give a public lecture tomorrow evening at Iowa State University (and to attend a market design conference there on Friday and Saturday)

"This event will be recorded and available for two weeks on the Lectures website at https://www.lectures.iastate.edu/recordings/available-recordings "

The Future of Living Donor Kidney Transplantation (videos)

On May 7, 2022 the University of Chicago hosted a Symposium on "The Future of Living Donor Kidney Transplantation: Evolving National Perspectives in Kidney Transplant "

Philip Held, one of the organizers, has provided the following guide, concluding with a link to an elegant Data Handbook that gives direct access to each talk.

 "A Symposium: The Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation

Earlier this year, we presented a virtual symposium on the Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation.  A primary focus was on the ethics of rewarding organ donors with an opening presentation by:

 ·       Janet Radcliffe Richards, a philosopher and ethicist from Oxford University.

 Other speakers and topics included:

 ·       Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth Ph.D. of Stanford University who laid out the case for paired kidney donation (aka kidney exchange), the only major technical improvement in transplantation in years.

 ·       Frank McCormick, Ph.D. presented recently published (Value in Health) research showing how the government can completely end the kidney shortage and save more than 40,000 kidney failure patients each year from premature death by rewarding living kidney donors. 

 The Symposium took place on May 7, 2022.  It was hosted by John Fung M.D. Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Transplantation and Transplant Institute and was funded by the National Kidney Donation Organization (NKDO) and WaitListZero.

 This Symposium presented a broad education on the subject of living kidney donation, and indeed was presented for Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits by the University of Chicago. 

 The audio-visual recording of the entire University of Chicago’s CME symposium is available, for free. Access is extremely easy and one can access any and all presentations with 3 simple clicks starting with 2 clicks here: Data Handbook."

 If you prefer you can binge on the sessions in order:

Session 1:  The Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation

Session 2:  The Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation

Session 3:  The Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation

My talk, called "Kidney Exchange (and Kidney Controversy)" is the first half hour of the video below of the second of three symposium sessions.

The first session of the symposium is below, starting with an intro by Philip Held, focusing on some of the inequalities that we see in dialysis and transplant, followed by the philosopher Janet Radcliffe-Richards (starting at minute 17:15), and then Sally Satel (at 59:30), and then a round table discussion starting at 1:12.

 

In the discussion I asked Dr. Radcliffe Richards (who has been a tireless advocate of thinking more clearly about the tradeoffs involved in preventing compensation of donors) what experience she could share about when and how she had been successful in convincing people to change their minds.  She replied "I don't regard myself as an expert in mind changing, except with people who are happy to follow arguments."

Session 3 is below, including talks by Martha Gerson, Thomas Peters, Arthur Matas, John Roberts,  and Josh Morrison.

These and other videos have been assembled by NKDO.

Scott Cunningham's Mixtape Podcast Interview with Alvin Roth

 Here's Scott Cunningham's Mixtape Podcast Interview with Alvin Roth... "We discuss Gale and Shapley, Roth and Sotomayor, game theory and more"

You can listen to our conversation at the link above.  He drew me out about some things I hadn't thought of in a while, such as my varied relationships with Gale, Shapley and Bob Wilson, and how my ideas about matching markets developed over the course of my career (which started in Operations Research and then morphed into Economics...)

He also reveals the manner in which he was the perfect reader of my 1990 book Two-Sided Matching with Marilda Sotomayor. 

His site is multi-media, if you scroll down you'll find a video (the one below in on YouTube), and if you keep scrolling down you'll find an essay he wrote called "Paying it Forward..." which recounts more about what our book meant to him and some of our subsequent interactions over the years. And below that is his Transcript of [our] podcast interview, for those who prefer to read rather than listen or watch.

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I've had occasion to blog about Scott:

Friday, February 16, 2018

Sex work, Craigslist, and the law; podcast with Scott Cunningham

Here's a link to an interview with Scott Cunningham, whose work on sex work I've blogged about before. There's a surprising amount of discussion about causal inference and differences in differences. (I always suspected that econometrics was sexy, but this is the first time I’ve heard a podcast about that.)

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The accidental experiment with legal prostitution in Rhode Island

A scholarly paper and an easy to read-or-listen-to NPR report recount the period in which indoor prostitution was legal in Rhode Island.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Craigslist market for erotic/adult services

#122 Game Theory and Market Design. "Unsiloed" podcast about Who Gets What and Why

I'm interviewed by Greg La Blanc, on market design generally, using my book Who Gets What and Why as a takeoff point.

  

Honoring Milgrom and Wilson at the ASSA meetings in January (video)

 The video is at the link, there are four ten minute discussions, followed by brief responses by Paul and Bob. 

My discussion of Bob Wilson begins at around 27:20, and my final words to him were "Bob: you saw and demonstrated the future of game theory in economics, earlier and more clearly than anyone else.  We’re all lucky to know you."

AEA Nobel Laureate Address Honoring the 2020 Nobel Laureates Paul R. Milgrom (Stanford University) and Robert B. Wilson (Stanford University)
January 8, 2022 at 2:30 PM ET
View Recording

Presiding: Christina D. Romer, University of California-Berkeley

Susan Athey

, 

Stanford University

Topic: Honoring Paul R. Milgrom

Bengt Holmstrom

, 

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Topic: Honoring Paul R. Milgrom

Alvin Roth

, 

Stanford University

Topic: Honoring Robert B. Wilson

Srihari Govindan

, 

University of Rochester

Topic: Honoring Robert B. Wilson

Experimental Economics in the Tradition of John Kagel (video)

 In October there was an in-person celebration of John Kagel, which I was delighted to participate in, in Tucson, Arizona. (It was my first in-person conference since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, during a brief window of optimism.) Now it's been posted on YouTube by the hosts, at the Economic Science Lab of the University of Arizona:

Keynote lecture of Professor Alvin Roth at the Workshop in Honor of John Kagel, Tucson, Arizona, October 2021

My talk was called Experimental Economics in the Tradition of John Kagel, and I began by explaining this photograph, which has John in the middle.

I eventually focused on how the following experiment helped shape a good deal of practical market design:

Kagel, John H. and A.E. Roth, "The dynamics of reorganization in matching markets: A laboratory experiment motivated by a natural experiment," Quarterly Journal of Economics, February, 2000, 201-235.

And I concluded by giving John some unnecessary advice as he embarks on his tenth decade.

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You can see more from the 2021 North-American Economic Science Association Conference (including the above video) here.

Mail order catalogs, downtown department stores, suburban malls, and modern home delivery

 Here's a 10 minute video in which I discuss how retail markets have changed over the last century and more, with the invention of mail order catalogs, and the growth of downtown department stores (in part as a result of urban public transportation), and then suburban shopping malls, before our current age of digital commerce and home delivery.

This was my discussion of talks by Rob Townsend and David Autor at the October zoom conference

Technology and Equality in the Digital Era--Luohan Academy

Market design (I talk to the entering Ph.D. class at Escola Nacional de Administração Pública)

 Yesterday I gave what I think was the first lecture to the entering class of Ph.D. students at the Escola Nacional de Administração Pública (ENAP) in Brasilia.  I spoke about market design, using as my main examples school choice and kidney exchange.  Afterwards there was Q&A on a variety of subjects, including black markets and repugnance.

Here's a video (I start to speak around minute 8):

Kidney exchange, in Microeconomic Insights

 The team at Microeconomic Insights has published an easy to read summary of my just published paper with Itai Ashlagi in the September issue of Management Science:

Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective

"No country is presently able to supply all the kidney transplants required by its population, and most people with kidney failure will die without receiving a transplant. Kidney exchange is a way to increase the number of transplants by allowing incompatible patient-donor pairs to exchange kidneys. For logistical reasons, early exchanges involved just two patient-donor pairs, but the rise in donors without a particular recipient in mind has enabled long chains of non-simultaneous transplants. However, barriers between kidney exchange programs, both within and across countries, continue to make it difficult to find matches for some patient-donor pairs. Breaking down these barriers will be challenging, but the potential rewards are large—both in terms of lives saved and reduced healthcare costs."

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Here's a link to the original paper:

1. Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth, “Kidney Exchange:  an Operations Perspective,” Management Science, September 2021, Volume 67, Issue 9, September 2021, Pages 5301-5967, iii-iv, https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3954 

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Here's a video of a lecture I gave about the paper in June to an INFORMS audience, starting at minute 2:55.

Controversial Markets: Public lecture at the Zurich Center for Market Design (video)

 A video of my April 13 lecture on Controversial Markets is now available at the Zurich Center for Market Design. (The talk proper is about an hour, and then includes some Q&A about compensation for donors, among other things, starting at around minute 56.)

Here's a direct link:

Rajk College interviews me and Matt Jackson (pre-pandemic)

 Here's an interview that reminds me of the before (Covid) days, when we could go into the office.

It was conducted January 30, 2020 by students from Rajk College in Budapest, who also interviewed Matt Jackson.  Along with some more familiar things (what are matching markets?) I got to talk about the relationship of market design to mechanism design, and what I like about being an academic.

Here's the interview with me (11 minutes):

 

And here's the one with Matt Jackson, recorded on the same day:

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Here's a link to other interviews by Rajk College, and here's an article in Hungarian.

Video interview series presented by Rajk College for Advanced Studies for its 50th birthday. The series covers interviews made by selected awardees of the John von Neumann and Herbert Simon Awards established by Rajk College, Budapest, Hungary. This interview was made with Alvin Roth at the Economics Department of Stanford University CA at January 30, 2020 before any COVID-19 restrictions. Directors: Kornél Hoffmann, Márton Simó, Ádám Vig, Judit Berei, Artúr Velkey, Mátyás Tompa, Dóra Kovács Interviewers: Márton Simó, Ádám Vig Cinematographer: Dániel Bálint Editing: Levente Klára Graphic design: Soma Sebesvári Sponsored by: G7.hu, Oriens, Centrál Média, MTA KRTK KTI About Rajk College for Advanced Studies: homepage: http://rajk.eu/​ facebook: https://www.facebook.com/rajkofficial