Kidney Exchange: Within and Across Borders (video lecture).

 Below is a video of my 40 minute talk at Berkeley on Monday, on Kidney Exchange: Within and Across Borders, at the final workshop on Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design,  at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath). (But we warned or reassured, this isn't a mathematical lecture...)

Here's another link to the video if you have trouble connecting:  https://www.slmath.org/workshops/1082/schedules/34227

The Robert Rosenthal Memorial Lecture for 2023 at BU, by Parag Pathak

 Parag Pathak gave this year's Robert Rosenthal Memorial Lecture at Boston University. The title of his talk is “Still Worth the Trip? The Evolution of School Busing in Boston” 

(The video below may undergo some further editing, but right now it starts with introductions at minute 3.) 

You can also find the Rosenthal lectures from previous years at the link.

(I had the honor of giving the 2007 lecture... Bob Rosenthal and I are academic siblings, we were both advised by Bob Wilson.)

Eric Budish on the economics of cryptocurrencies (video of his Harris Lecture at Harvard)

 If you haven't heard Eric Budish talk about crypto, this is your chance:  here's the video of his Harris Lecture at Harvard: The Economics of Cryptocurrencies by Eric Budish

(It was delivered before the recent collapse of the FTX exchange.)

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."

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.

**********

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

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."

***********

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 

***********

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:

Prices and Decentralization Without Convexity: Milgrom's Arrow Lecture at Columbia (video)

 Columbia University Press posts a "video of Paul Milgrom's 2014 Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture that inspired Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints. Paul Milgrom discusses how prices can guide decentralized resource allocations in environments with non-convexities. His work on auctions led the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to award him and Robert Wilson the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for improvement to auction theory and invention of new auction formats."

Prices and Decentralization Without Convexity

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

Related post:

Saturday, May 20, 2017

Discovering Prices, by Paul Milgrom

Some more Nobel links for Wilson and Milgrom

 This was a Nobel year unlike any in recent memory, since the Covid pandemic prevented the festivities from being held in Stockholm as they usually are.  The Nobel lectures by Milgrom and Wilson were recorded at Stanford, and they received their medals from the Swedish consul in a private ceremony.

Here's the text of the Award Ceremony Speech by Tommy Andersson

Here's Bob Wilson's Nobel lecture:

Here's Paul Milgrom's Nobel lecture: 

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

Paul Milgrom posted some reflections on his website:

2020 Nobel Prize Firsts and Lectures

1. "It was the first to be awarded outdoors and the first outside of Stockholm.
2. It was the first economics prize awarded to a student (Paul) with his disseration adviser (Bob).
3. It was the first awarded jointly to two people living across the street from one another.
4. Paul became the first to give TWO Nobel prize lectures, having already lectured on behalf of Vickrey in 1996.
5. The backyard ceremony was held behind a residence that had housed two economics laureates (Paul Milgrom & Joe Stiglitz), plus 3-time SuperBowl winning coach Bill Walsh!

"Also unusual is that, by focusing on Paul's auction contributions, the Nobel Committee had left unmentioned ten of Paul's twelve most highly cited publications."

*********

Here's an essay by Jacob Goeree:

How market design is transforming the role of economists into engineers

"there are many cases where the “invisible hand” does not work. Prof. Wilson’s analysis of the winner’s curse in common-value auctions is a prominent example. “Sometimes the invisible hand needs a bit of help, and that’s where market design comes in – for instance, making sure bidders can update their value estimates during the bidding process itself” 

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

Here (live streamed today on Dec. 16) is an event originating in Vienna, including a video interview in which I talk to Ben Greiner. (It starts at 6pm CET, i.e. 9am PST):

The Nobel Prize in layperson’s terms

"This event is being organized by the WU Department of Economics

"Nobel Prizes are awarded every year in December, on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. Nobel laureates are celebrated in the media, but hardly anyone knows anything about the research that goes on behind the scenes. We plan to change that. In cooperation with experts, we will be introducing the work of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in terms that even laypeople can understand. We will analyze the innovative power of the work and discuss its significance and potential applications in practice.

Welcoming words: Tatjana Oppitz, Vice-​Rector for Infrastructure and Digitalization

Discussion: Maarten Janssen, Professor of Economics, University of Vienna

Maarten Janssen is Professor of Microeconomics at the University of Vienna. Among many others, his research interests are in the fields of game theory, industrial organization and competition policy, and in particular auctions. He is particularly interested in the implications of information asymmetries in markets and market design.

Stefan Felder, Rundfunk und Telekom Regulierungs-​GmbH: RTR

Stefan Felder studied at Technical University and University of Economics and Business in Vienna. He worked in the telecommunications industry and at the University of Vienna. As of 1998, he has been a member of the Austrian Regulatory Authority for Broadcasting and Telecommunications (RTR). He is an expert on spectrum auctions, competition analysis, and mobile communications. He is Head of Spectrum and Mobile Market at RTR.

Moderation: Maria Marchenko, WU

Maria Marchenko is an Assistant Professor at the WU Department of Economics. Her research lies in the fields of applied and theoretical econometrics using state-​of the art techniques and theoretical concepts with applications to networks and labor market.

Video interview: Alvin E. Roth, Winner of the Nobel Prize 2012; Professor of Economics, Stanford University

Alvin E. Roth is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. In 2012, he won the Nobel Prize in Economic jointly with Lloyd Shapley “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.’’

Update: here's the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oE2e6HynPvg&feature=youtu.be

 

Paul Milgrom's Marshall Lectures are now available on video

Auctions are ancient, but the linked auctions Paul talks about in his lectures are stunningly modern, and depend on high powered, thoughtfully deployed, state of the art computation.

"Market Design When Resource Allocation is NP-Hard," in two lectures.
Here they are:

Lecture 1

and Lecture 2:

Milgrom Marshall Lectures at University of Cambridge

Paul Milgrom will be giving the 2019-2020 Marshall Lectures at Cambridge today and tomorrow.  Here's a video abstract by Paul:

2019-20 Marshall Lecture by Professor Paul Milgrom

Paul Milgrom is best known for his contributions to the microeconomic theory, his pioneering innovations in the practical design of multi-item auctions, and the extraordinary successes of his students and academic advisees. According to his BBVA Award citation: “Paul Milgrom has made seminal contributions to an unusually wide range of fields of economics including auctions, market design, contracts and incentives, industrial economics, economics of organizations, finance, and game theory.” According to a count by Google Scholar, Milgrom’s books and articles have received more than 90,000 citations. - Professor Milgrom's Personal Site >>

 Professor Paul Milgrom
(Stanford Department of Economics)
will give two lectures on,
"Market Design When Resource Allocation is NP-Hard"

Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall

Tuesday 19th November 2019
5.00pm to 6.00pm
and
Wednesday 20th November 2019
5.00pm to 6.30pm
*********
I'll update when Paul's lectures are available.
(In the meantime, here are my 2013-2014 Marshall Lectures on "Matching Markets and Market Design"  )
************
Update: Both lectures are now available at the Marshall Lectures site.

Arrow Lecture at Columbia (video): Market design (with discussion by Parag Pathak and Joe Stiglitz)

Here's a video of the lecture I gave on Columbia on November 8, in honor and in memory of Ken Arrow. My title was "Market Design in Large Worlds: The Example of Kidney Exchange."
My discussants were Parag Pathak and Joe Stiglitz, and you can see them too.
I used slides (and so did Parag), but they don't seem to have made it fully onstage in the video.  But the audio is good, and you can see how good looking we all are...



The theme of my talk is that one big lesson of market design is that participants have big strategy sets, and this has implications for, among other things, how marketplaces need to be adaptively maintained.  One of Parag's examples in his discussion is how more NYC schools have begun to screen students since more effective choice was introduced, and how this may sometimes work against the goals that increased choice was intended to achieve (so that the NYCDOE is working to reduce screening by schools...).

Video from the AEA meetings (including my presidential address)

If you missed the AEA/ASSA meetings that just finished in Philadelphia, you can still hear some of the talks.

Here's mine (it's about an hour, but afterwards you'll know everything I know):
AEA Presidential Address - Marketplaces, Markets and Market Design
Alvin E. Roth, introduced by Olivier Blanchard
View Webcast

Update: it turns out the AEA website included this picture...

And here are the other videos:

2018 AEA Annual Meeting Webcasts of Selected Sessions

View Webcasts of selected sessions from the Annual Meeting in Philadelphia on January 5-7, 2018! (compliments of the AEA):

January 5, 2018

Climate Policy and Trade
Presiding: Mar ReguantRegulating Mismeasured Pollution: Implications of Firm Heterogeneity for Environmental Policy Eva Lyubich, Joseph Shapiro, and Reed Walker
How Trade-sensitive are Energy-intensive Sectors? Carolyn Fischer and Alan Fox
Measuring Leakage Risk Meredith Fowlie and Mar Reguant
Discussants: Matilde Bombardini, Thibault Fally, and Teresa Fort
View Webcast

TrumpEconomics: a First Year Evaluation
Presiding: Dominick Salvatore
The Effects of Policy Uncertainty Olivier BlanchardThe Impact of the Trump Tax Reforms Martin FeldsteinWhat's Lacking in Trumpean Economic Policy Edmund PhelpsTrump and Globalization Joseph E. StiglitzContinuing Relevance of Secular Stagnation Lawrence H. SummersDiscussant: Dominick Salvatore
View Webcast

AEA/AFA Joint Luncheon - Liquidity and LeveragreRaghuram Rajan, introduced by David Scharfstein
View Webcast

New Measures of the EconomyPresiding: Betsey Stevenson
Estimating Changes in Well-being Using Massive Online Choice Experiments Erik Brynjolfsson, Felix Eggers, and Avinash Gannamaneni
Measuring Social Progress: Evidence from Advanced Economies Daniel Fehder, Scott Stern, and Michael E. Porter
Using Online Prices to Measure Standards of Living Across Countries Alberto Cavallo, W. Erwin Diewert, Robert Feenstra, Robert Inklaar, and Marcel Timmer
Internet Rising, Prices Falling: The Era of e-Commerce and its Macroeconomic Implications Austan Goolsbee and Pete Klenow
Discussants: Carol Corrado, Betsey Stevenson, Dennis Fixler, and Leonard Nakamura
View Webcast

AEA Richard T. Ely Lecture: Competition, Equilibrium, Freedom, and PaternalismDavid Laibson
View Webcast

January 6, 2017

Central Bank Communications
Presiding: Andrew HaldaneFuture of Monetary Policy Communications Alan Blinder
Central Bank Forward Guidance and the Signal Value of Market Prices Hyun Song Shin and Stephen MorrisCentral Bank Communications and the General Public Michael McMahon and Andrew HaldaneDiscussants: Ricardo Reis, Michael Ehrmann, and Refet Gurkaynak
View Webcast

Global Inequality and Policy
Presiding: Emmanuel SaezThe Elephant Curve of Global Inequality and Growth Facundo Alvaredo, Lucas Chancel, Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman
From Communism to Capitalism: Private Versus Public Property and Inequality in China and Russia Filip Novokmet, Thomas Piketty, Li Yang, and Gabriel Zucman
Applying Generalized Pareto Curves to Inequality Analysis Thomas Blanchet, Bertrand Garbinti, Jonathan Goupille-Lebret, and Clara Martinez-Toledano
Extreme Inequality: Evidence from Brazil, India, the Middle-East, and South Africa Facundo Alvaredo, Lydia Assouad, Lucas Chancel, and Marc Morgan
Discussants: Thomas Blanchet, Lucas Chancel, Emmanuel Saez, and Li Yang
View Webcast

AEA Nobel Laureate Luncheon Honoring the 2016 Nobel Laureates in Economics: Oliver Hart (Harvard University) and Bengt R. Holmstrom (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)Presiding: Olivier Blanchard
Luigi Zingales 
Daron Acemoglu
View Webcast

Economic Consequences of Artificial Intelligence and Robotics
Presiding: Erik Brynjolfsson
Demographics and Robots Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo
What Can Machines Learn, and What Does It Mean for the Occupations and Industries? Erik Brynjolfsson, Tom Mitchell, and Daniel Rock
Linking Advances in Artificial Intelligence to Skills, Occupation, and Industries Rob Seamans and Edward W. Felten
Human Judgement and A.I. Pricing Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb, and Ajay AgrawalDiscussants: Benjamin Jones, Shane Greenstein, Susan Helper, and J. Miguel Villa-Boas
View Webcast

AEA Awards Ceremony
Presiding: Olivier Blanchard
View Webcast

Listen to my Morishima Lecture: Marketplaces and Market Design (audio only)

Below you can listen to a podcast of my lecture in honor of Michio Morishima at the LSE last Thursday. (Update: I've also added links to video below.)

I showed slides in my lecture, but I think you can actually follow the talk without them.  The introduction is by Professor Nava Ashraf.  My talk ends at minute 60, and then you can hear a half hour of questions and answers, many raised by my discussion of repugnant transactions.
******************

Update:
Here are two videos of the event; the first mostly follows me and not the slides, the second is audio plus slides.

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

Economists as artisans, doctors, entrepreneurs...dentists, engineers and plumbers

Is metaphor a verb? If so, a number of writers have taken Esther Duflo's recent Ely Lecture, "The Economist as Plumber,*" as an invitation to metaphor. The essays below add to the stock of metaphorical economists, in which you can find economists as artisans and craftspeople, weather forecasters, doctors and medical scientists, entrepreneurs, and of course as dentists, architects, engineers and now plumbers.

Here's Tim Harford (initially in the FT but now ungated on his blog The Undercover Economist):
Why economists should be more like plumbers

And here's Beatrice Cherrier, whose blog is called The Undercover Historian:
From physicists to engineers to meds to plumbers: Esther Duflo rediscovering the lost art of economics @ASSA2017


* and here's the video of Esther's Ely Lecture
AEA Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Economist as Plumber: Large Scale Experiments to Inform the Details of Policy Making Esther Duflo, introduced by Alvin E. Roth  View Webcast
***********

Update: here's the NBER working paper The Economist as Plumber
(And here's the interesting acknowledgements, which identifies some master plumbers...)

My Lucia Lecture at Villanova (video)

Aumann Lecture (video): Economists as Engineers: Game Theory and Market Design

Here's a video of my Aumann Lecture last week in Israel--I took as my starting point Bob's 1985 paper "What is Game Theory Trying to Accomplish?"

Who Gets What and Why? at Duke Law School (video: one hour including Q&A)

Here's a video of one of the talks I gave at Duke Law School last Wednesday, sponsored by The Duke Project on Law and Markets.



And here is a link to Kim Krawiec's blog post about this and my other talks at Duke on the same day: Our Day Of Market Design,

 It came with this picture:

And here is a link to some more pictures from Kim:
"Who Gets What And Why? Photos And Video

Our communications folk were out in full force for Al Roth’s lecture on Wednesday and have already posted some nice photos from the event and uploaded a video of the lecture to YouTube. "

Who Gets What and Why at the European School for Management and Technology in Berlin--video

Here's a video of a public lecture followed by a discussion (about half an hour each) about my book Who Gets What and Why, which just came out in German.   The location of the lecture was once an East German government building where the head of state had his office, and is now a business school, the European School for Management and Technology.  I was introduced by Gerhard Caspar, the head of the American Academy in Berlin and former president of Stanford. (My talk begins about minute 11:30 of the video, the discussion begins about minute 41, with Christoph von Marschall, Managing Editor of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, which touches on market designers in Germany, the legal barriers to kidney exchange there, and refugee resettlement.)