Experimental conference and summer school at Barcelona in June

There will be lots to learn...

2nd LeeX International Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics, June 10-11, 2011at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Keynote speakers are:Jean-Robert Tyran, University of Wiena, and Jordi Gali, CREI UPF. The conference organizers are: John Duffy, University of Pittsburgh Frank Heinemann, Technical University of Berlin, Rosemarie Nagel , Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Deadline Friday, April 1, 2011.

Summer school: Fourth Barcelona LeeX Experimental Summer School in Macroeconomics, June 6-9 2011 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The summer school  organizers are: John Duffy, University of Pittsburgh Frank Heinemann, Technical University of Berlin, Rosemarie Nagel , Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Deadline 18 April 2011. 

Wake Forest coach donates a kidney to player

The story is here, it was published yesterday, and I saw it only after yesterday's blog post of organ donation stories.

"When a coach says he would do anything for his players, it sounds like a cliché.

"Then there is Wake Forest baseball coach Tom Walter.

"On Monday, Walter donated one of his healthy kidneys to Kevin Jordan, a Wake Forest freshman outfielder talented enough to be drafted in the 19th round by the New York Yankees last year but sick enough to wonder if he would ever play again.

"Surviving became Jordan's challenge.

"Today, Walter and Jordan are recuperating together at Emory University in Atlanta, each with one healthy kidney and baseball in their futures.

"I wanted to help this young man," Walter, 42, said on a conference call last week. "When we recruit our guys, we talk about family and making sacrifices for one another. It's something we take very seriously."

"When no one in Jordan's family could give him what he needed, the baseball coach - for whom Jordan has never played a game - did."

Note that there's even an unraveling aspect to the story: the young man was drafted by the Yankees as a high school student.

HT: Thayer Morrill

Misc. organ donation stories

Here's a live donor kidney site run a bit in the style of a traditional matchmaker (שַׁדְּכָן‎) by an orthodox Jewish woman who donated a kidney: KidneyMatchmaker.com

But there remain religious objections to deceased donations in Israel, despite rulings in favor by senior rabbis, Haaretz reports: Despite donor card, soccer star Avi Cohen's family keeps hospital from taking organs after lobbying by rabbis
"The family of soccer star Avi Cohen has refused to donate his organs despite the fact that he signed a donor's card - something that has happened only once before in Israel's history.

"Cohen, 54, was declared brain dead Tuesday afternoon at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, where he had been in critical condition since suffering a motorcycle accident on December 20. The determination was made by a medical committee as required by law.

"Pursuant to Health Ministry regulations, Ichilov then asked his family for permission to use his organs. The family initially agreed, since he had signed the donor's card. But shortly before they were to sign the necessary forms, hospital staffers said, they were contacted by rabbis, some of whom even came to the hospital, and the rabbis dissuaded them.

"Though the Chief Rabbinate was involved in drafting the law on determining brain death that passed two years ago, some rabbis still do not recognize brain death, holding that death occurs only when the heart stops - at which point, most organs become useless.


"The hospital sources said that Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar personally called the family to urge them to approve the donation. But they ultimately sided instead with the rabbis who urged them to leave Cohen intact until his heart stopped, which happened yesterday morning.

"It was Amar - with approval from the Sephardi community's leading halakhic arbiter, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef - who issued the halakhic ruling that held brain death, rather than heart stoppage, to be the true moment of death, and enabled the brain death law to pass.

"Some 600,000 Israelis have signed donor's cards, but the cards have no legal force: When a signatory dies, family permission is still needed to donate organs. Still, the only previous case in which a signatory's family refused occurred over a decade ago."

A NY Times story deals with the question of why NY has relatively few organ donors

"For some, it’s a simple choice: when they die, they would like their organs to be used to save someone else’s life. But New York State doesn’t make it easy. People can sign up when they renew their drivers’ licenses, though that’s only once a decade, or they can go online and fill out an off-putting form, then print it out and walk it to a mailbox.

"A mailbox?

"The New York Organ Donor Network has decided it’s not even worth rolling out its new education campaign until the state makes it easier for people to sign up. People on the waiting list, meanwhile, keep dying. "

And it's not just in New York: Vatican Says Benedict No Longer an Organ Donor
"The Vatican says Pope Benedict XVI, who has long championed organ transplants, is no longer an organ donor.

"The pope's secretary Monsignor Georg Gaenswein addressed the issue in a letter to a German doctor who has been using the fact that Benedict possessed a donor card to recruit other donors.
"Vatican Radio, in a German language report this week, said Gaenswein wrote that while the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's organ card dates to the 1970s it was rendered void when he became pope."

Through the looking glass of medical ethics: compatible pairs in kidney exchange

Some time ago my colleagues and I observed that there would be really large gains in terms of increased numbers of transplants from inviting compatible pairs into kidney exchange, largely because it would increase the supply of O donors.

(see Roth, Alvin E., Tayfun Sonmezand M.Utku Unver A Kidney Exchange Clearinghouse in New England American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 95,2, May, 2005, 376-380.

As with many discussions of organ transplantation, discussions of efficiency are interspersed with discussions of ethics, and almost no good deed goes unquestioned (recall the story of the kidney doc who donated a kidney to a patient*). The current issue of Transplantation has a comment that takes issue with some of the prior discussion of ethics.

Compatible-Incompatible Live Donor Kidney Exchanges, by David Steinberg,Transplantation, 91(3):257-260, February 15, 2011.

Abstract: "The participation of an immunologically compatible donor-intended recipient pair in a kidney exchange that is unnecessary for them can significantly increase the number of kidneys available for transplantation. Despite their utilitarian value transplant ethicists have condemned this type of organ exchange as morally inappropriate. An opposing analysis concludes that these exchanges are examples of moral excellence that should be encouraged."


*Doctor's unique donation prompts ethical concerns: A Chicago-area nephrologist's gift of a kidney to her patient raises the question of whether doctors should be living organ donors.

Nonsimultaneous kidney exchange chains produce more transplants than simultaneous chains

That's the conclusion of a new paper,
Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, ''Nonsimultaneous Chains and Dominos in Kidney Paired Donation -- Revisited,'' American Journal of Transplantation, forthcoming, 2011.


The "revisited" in the title comes from the fact that the reverse conclusion was reached by an earlier paper in the same journal, due to a modeling error that unnecessarily constrained the length of non-simultaneous chains to be the same as simultaneous chains. (In practice, one of the main attractions of non-simultaneous chains is that they can be longer than chains in which all surgeries are performed simultaneously, since it is no longer necessary to have a different surgical team and operating room for each surgery.)


Here's the abstract of the paper:
"Since 2008 kidney exchange in America has grown in part from the incorporation of non-directed donors in transplant chains rather than simple exchanges.  It is controversial whether these chains should be performed simultaneously (“domino paired donation”, DPD) or nonsimultaneously (“nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donor chains”, NEAD). NEAD chains create “bridge donors” whose incompatible recipients receive kidneys before the bridge donor donates, and so risk reneging by bridge donors, but offer the opportunity to create more transplants by overcoming logistical barriers inherent in simultaneous chains. Gentry et al. simulated whether DPD or NEAD chains would produce more transplants when chain segment length was limited to three transplants, and reported that DPD performed at least as well as NEAD chains.  As this contrasts with the experience of several groups involved in kidney paired donation, we performed simulations that allowed for longer chain segments and used actual patient data from the Alliance for Paired Donation.  When chain segments of 4-6 are allowed in the simulations, NEAD chains produce more transplants than DPD. Our simulations showed not only more transplants as chain length increased, but also that NEAD chains produced more transplants for highly sensitized and blood type O recipients."


One of the most exciting recent events in kidney exchange has been the revolution in using chains of transplants, inaugurated by Mike Rees and the Alliance for Paired Donation, which has really taken off since the publication in 2009 of the account of his first non-simultaneous extended altruistic donor (NEAD) chain:
Rees, Michael A., Jonathan E. Kopke, Ronald P. Pelletier, Dorry L. Segev, Matthew E. Rutter, Alfredo J. Fabrega, Jeffrey Rogers, Oleh G. Pankewycz, Janet Hiller, Alvin E. Roth, Tuomas Sandholm, Utku Ünver, and Robert A. Montgomery, “A Non-Simultaneous Extended Altruistic Donor Chain,” New England Journal of Medicine, 360;11, March 12, 2009 


The new paper helps explain why this new kidney exchange technology has caught on so quickly.

Can we make school choice more efficient?

A new paper by Eduardo Azevedo and Jacob Leshno addresses a recent puzzle in school choice: Can we make school choice more efficient? An Example

Here's their abstract:
"The deferred acceptance mechanism, currently used in the New York City and in the Boston public school systems, can produce Pareto-dominated assignments. When students are non-strategic a Pareto-dominating and efficient mechanism can be achieved by allowing some students to trade schools (e.g. Stable improvement Cycles, Erdil and Ergin 2008). We find that when students are strategic the equilibrium assignments of these mechanisms can be unstable with respect to the true preferences and can be Pareto inferior to the deferred acceptance equilibrium assignment."

The paper follows up on the Erdil and Ergin 2008 AER paper, and also on the paper by Atila Abudlkadiroglu, Parag Pathak and me which discusses the NYC high school match and shows that about a thousand NYC high school students could in principle be made better off
Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match,'' American Economic Review, 99, 5, Dec. 2009, pp1954-1978.

That paper sets the stage for Azevedo and Leshno by observing that about 1,000 of the approximately 90,000 new high school students each year could have been given better matches if strategy-proofness were not a desiderata, and if their true preferences could be recovered without strategy proofness. So that raises the open question of what kind of preferences would be submitted to a system that tried to get these apparent welfare gains, and whether welfare gains could be achieved at equilibrium:
"Nothing is yet known about what kinds of preferences one could expect to be strategically submitted to such a mechanism, or what their welfare consequences would be. Consequently, there is room for more work to further illuminate the tradeoff between efficiency and strategy-proofness."

Azevedo and Leshno show that there's at least a possibility that attempting to improve welfare while sacrificing strategy-proofness could, in equilibrium, reduce welfare.

One of the exciting things about the modern school choice literature is how it has given rise to questions about matching that didn't arise in other applications (like to labor market clearinghouses). The special feature of school choice is the importance of how ties are broken, between between students who have equal priority for a given school that doesn't have capacity for all of them.

Azevedo and Leshno advance the discussion of how we should evaluate school choice algorithms, in the complex settings in which we're asked to design them. Their paper shows how strategy-proofness and welfare can be intertwined in subtle ways at equilibrium. There's a lot more to learn about this, so their short paper answers one question and raises many others.

Coalition Theory Workshop in Barcelona

Today and tomorrow: The 16th Coalition Theory Network Workshop Barcelona, February 4-5, 2011

Matching and market design are well represented.

Friday, Feb. 4

9:30 - 10:15 In-Uck Park "Internal Hierarchy and Stable Coalition Structures" (with Massimo Morelli)

10:15 - 11:00 Messan Agbaglah "Informal insurance: an approach by overlapping coalitions as merging of networks and groups"

11:30 - 12:15 Rémy Oddou "The effect of spillovers and congestion on the segregative properties of endogenous jurisdiction structure formation"

12:15 - 13:00 Francis Bloch "Endogenous formation of alliances in conflicts"

14:30 - 15:15 Emiliya Lazarova "Dynamic Multilateral Markets" (with Arnold Polanski)

15:15 - 16:00 Guillaume Haeringer "Learning to match" (with Hanna Halaburda)

16:30 - 17:15 Lars Ehlers "Strategy-proof Tie-breaking" (with Alexander Westkamp)

17:15 - 18:00 Florian Biermann "A Measure of Instability for Matchings in Marriage Markets"

Saturday, Feb. 5

9:00 - 9:45 Kalyan Chatterjee "Word of Mouth Advertising, Credibility and Learning in Networks" (with Bhaskar Dutta)

9:45 - 10:30 Agnieszka Rusinowska "Iterating influence between players in a social network" (with Michel Grabisch)

11:00 - 11:45 Sunghoon Hong "Strategic Network Interdiction" (with Myrna Wooders)

11:45 - 12:30 Andrea Galleotti "Network Trading Games" (with Daniele Condorelli)

14:00 - 14:45 Timo Hiller "The Friend of My Enemy is My Enemy: Alliance Formation and Coercion in Networks"

14:45 - 15:30 Alexandru Nichifor "Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading Networks" (with John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Michael Ostrovsky and Alexander Westkamp)
16:00 - 16:45 Jaromir Kovarik "(Anti-) Coordination in Networks" (with Friederike Mengel and José Gabriel Romero)

16:45 - 17:30 Ana Mauleon "Myopic or Farsighted ? An Experiment on Network Formation" (with Marco Mantovani, Georg Kirchsteiger and Vincent Vannetelbosch)

Shift swapping in the Boston fire department

The Globe has an illuminating article on a system originally intended to allow Boston fire fighters to trade shifts with one another without money changing hands, that seems to have gotten out of control, possibly turning into a cash system.

Trading the call of duty for a call of convenience: A system that lets Boston firefighters swap shifts has turned into a costly free-for-all. Some barely work for years and never make up the time. The city does almost nothing about it.

"It is a familial courtesy as intrinsic to the culture of Boston firehouses as shared chicken dinners. When a firefighter can’t make his shift, a colleague steps in, on condition the favor will be returned.
"But there are scores of Boston firefighters whose shifts have been covered by others for weeks or months at a time, with no record they have ever reciprocated and worked off the debt.
"One firefighter, Gregory L. Burton, owes his firehouse comrades 554 shifts — nearly three years of work — for shifts he borrowed over five years while he was tending to a successful real estate business, according to department records.
...
"The lack of accounting — and the absence of limits that other fire departments routinely impose on shift swaps — has nurtured a subterranean culture in which some firefighters pay cash to others to work their shifts, or repay the obligation by doing outside work like home renovation projects for their firehouse creditors, according to interviews with several firefighters, who asked that they not be identified by name.
...
"One telltale sign that much of the debt has been settled privately: Fraser and Keating said not a single firefighter who is owed shifts has ever filed a complaint. Under-the-table cash payments would violate tax laws if the income is unreported.
...
"Shift-swapping is common in fire departments, but so are stringent controls on the practice, according to a Globe survey of big-city fire departments across the country. And the Boston Police Department, which permits its officers to swap shifts, turned over to the Globe records showing deficits to be virtually nonexistent."

College admissions in Texas: unintended consequences of the 10% rule

Under the headline Strategic Displacement, Inside Higher Ed covers the recent NBER paper
Jockeying for Position: Strategic High School Choice Under Texas' Top Ten Percent Plan, by  Julie Berry Cullen, Mark C. Long, and Randall Reback.

Here's the abstract of the paper:
"Beginning in 1998, all students in the state of Texas who graduated in the top ten percent of their high school classes were guaranteed admission to any in-state public higher education institution, including the flagships. While the goal of this policy is to improve college access for disadvantaged and minority students, the use of a school-specific standard to determine eligibility could have unintended consequences. Students may increase their chances of being in the top ten percent by choosing a high school with lower-achieving peers. Our analysis of students’ school transitions between 8th and 10th grade three years before and after the policy change reveals that this incentive influences enrollment choices in the anticipated direction. Among the subset of students with both motive and opportunity for strategic high school choice, as many as 25 percent enroll in a different high school to improve the chances of being in the top ten percent. Strategic students tend to choose the neighborhood high school in lieu of more competitive magnet schools and, regardless of own race, typically displace minority students from the top ten percent pool. The net effect of strategic behavior is to slightly decrease minority students’ representation in the pool."

HT: Victor Shnayder

Kidney exchange when hospitals are the players

Itai Ashlagi and I have a new paper, motivated by recent developments in kidney exchange. Now that exchange is often proceeding through multi-hospital clearinghouses, we are going to have to think about how to give hospitals the incentive to participate fully, and enroll all of their patient-donor pairs into the exchange, and not just the ones that are difficult to match.

Ashlagi, Itai and Alvin E. Roth, "Individual rationality and participation in large scale, multi-hospital kidney exchange," working paper, January 2011.


Abstract: As multi-hospital kidney exchange clearinghouses have grown, the set of players has grown from patients and surgeons to include hospitals. Hospitals have the option of enrolling only their hard-to-match patient-donor pairs, while conducting easily arranged exchanges internally. This behavior has already started to be observed.
We show that the cost of making it individually rational for hospitals to participate fully is low in almost every large exchange pool (although the worst-case cost is very high), while the cost of failing to guarantee individually rational allocations could be large, in terms of lost transplants. We also identify an incentive compatible mechanism."

Carbon markets

The U.S. Dept. of Agriculture's Economic Research Service is running a conference today and tomorrow on the design of carbon markets: Carbon Market Design: Issues and Opportunities


Monday, January 31, 2011 Morning Session

9:00 a.m. Welcome remarks Kitty Smith, USDA, Economic Research Service, Administrator

9:10 a.m. Kickoff speaker Richard Sandor, Environmental Financial Products, Chairman and CEO; Chicago Climate Exchange, Founder

9:45 a.m. Carbon Markets Marketing, Jim Kharouf, Environmental Markets Newsletter, Editor

10:15 a.m. Lessons from Existing Environmental Markets for the Design of Climate Policy, Dallas Burtraw, Resources for the Future, Senior Fellow

10:45 a.m. Morning break (coffee and snacks)

11:00 a.m. Implementation of Regional Carbon Markets in the United States Jonathan Schrag, Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative, Inc., Executive Director

11:30 a.m. The Role of Exchanges in Global Environmental Markets: Confidence, Stability, Transparency,Tom Lewis,Green Exchange, CEO

Afternoon Session

1:15 p.m. Moderating Price Volatility, Andrew Stocking, Congressional Budget Office, Analyst and Market Design Economist

1:45 p.m. Participation in the Carbon Market Albert S. “Pete” Kyle, University of Maryland, Robert H. Smith School of Business, Charles E. Smith Chair Professor of Finance

2:15 p.m. Discussion of Moderating Price Volatility and Participation in the Carbon Market Matthew Harding, Stanford University Department of Economics

2:30 p.m. Alternatives to Quantity-based Climate Policy, Peter Cramton, University of Maryland, Professor of Economics

3:00 p.m. Discussion of Alternatives to Quantity-based Climate Policy Henrik Hasselknippe, Green Exchange

Tuesday, February 1, 2011, Morning Session

9:00 a.m. Oil Prices and the Carbon Market, Perry Sadorsky, York University, Schulich School of Business, Associate Professor of Economics

9:30 a.m. Discussion of Oil Prices and the Carbon Market Nela Richardson, Commodity Futures Trading Commission

9:45 a.m. Agricultural Carbon Credits: Lessons Learned from the AgraGate Experience, Dave Miller
Iowa Farm Bureau, Research and Commodity Services, Director

10:15 a.m. Tradeoff Between Permits and Offsets, Adele Morris, Brookings Institution, Fellow

10:45 a.m. Discussion of Agricultural Carbon Credits: Lessons Learned from the AgraGate Experience and Tradeoff Between Permits and Offsets John Horowitz, Economic Research Service

11:00 a.m. Regulatory Perspective on Carbon Markets Eric Juzenas, Commodity Futures Trading Commission, Senior Counsel to the Chairman

Fishing as an endangered but protected transaction

Here in New England, the plight of the fishing industry, and particularly of independent fishermen who operate small "day boats" from local harbors, is in the news. Three issues compete for attention: how to sustainably manage vulnerable fish populations, while keeping fishing profitable, particularly for the small independent fishermen who are seen as needing protection from larger, corporate fishing fleets.  Small fishermen are to New England what small family farms are in other areas of the country.

Here's a story from the Globe.

Change in fishing rules altering storied industry: Regulators to look at ways to protect fleet
"PLYMOUTH — Scores of fishermen have stopped going to sea in the past year as controversial new rules take hold that could fundamentally alter the storied fishing economy, culture, and communities of New England.

"The region’s scenic harbors already shelter hundreds fewer fishing boats than a decade ago, but some worry that smaller boats may vanish altogether: There are some signs the new rules, which assign groups of fishermen a quota on their catch of cod and other bottom-hugging fish, could accelerate a trend of consolidating those boats into far fewer, more efficient vessels. Some small-boat fishermen are selling or leasing their allotment to others under the new rules because they cannot turn a profit.

"“This may not be the end of fishing, but it is the end of fishing as we know it,’’ said Steve Welch, as he tinkered on one of his two boats, the Holly & Abby, in Plymouth. Nearby, his dog Hudson ate mussels that seagulls dropped on an icy dock.

Welch leased the fishing privileges on both his boats and laid off three workers this year. “We are talking jobs, tradition, culture,’’ he said. “All that will be left are large boats owned by corporations with deep pockets.’’ 

...
"However, it is inevitable, Grant said, that some fishermen will be pushed out of business for good because there are still not enough fish for all the fishermen. And that is a hard thing to take.

“Fishing is not what [these fishermen] do; it is who they are,’’ Grant said. “It helps define the community. You can’t say that about selling tires. They are a cultural icon.’’
...
"Still, there are some bright spots with the new rules. Some $5 million in federal funds has been allotted to New England states to buy fishing permits and lease them back, often at a reduced price, to vulnerable fishermen. Some fishermen say the new rules are successful, allowing them to keep catching bottom-dwelling fish while others are diversifying to go after more abundant species.

But some fishermen, like Welch, wonder whether there will be small fishermen left when the fish finally come back.

“I’ve been fishing for 33 years,’’ Welch said, proudly pointing out how he overhauled the electrical and hydraulic system on the Holly & Abby. “I’m a small, independent business owner. That should have value.’’"

HT: Tim Gray

SBE 2020: Future Research in the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences

The NSF has made available all 244 papers received in response to its request SBE 2020: Future Research in the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences


I earlier blogged about the  subset of 48 Economics "Grand Challenge" white papers posted by the American Economic Association, which includes some related to market design.

The market for used books

There have always been markets for used books, and it's one of the markets that has been most changed by the internet. I recently received an email that seems to indicate another change, this one aimed at increasing the supply of used books. The email was from Amazon.com, and the subject line referred to a book I bought a few months ago: "Sell Back "36 Arguments for the Existence of God: A Work of Fiction"

The message went on to say

Dear Amazon.com Customer, Customers who purchased textbooks from Amazon.com may be interested in an easy way to get great prices for used titles through our Textbook Buyback Store.    Visit the Textbook Buyback Store

Unraveling of pathology fellowships

A forthcoming paper in the journal Human Pathology gives a detailed account of the unraveling of the market for Pathology subspecialty fellowships, including the now familiar path towards earlier offers more diffuse in time, and to the increased hiring of internal candidates. It's an unusually thorough report that details some of the special pathologies of the Pathology labor market, and also compares it to the experience of other subspecialties such as Gastroenterology.

"Unlike the application process for first-year Pathology Residency, which is run through the National Resident MatchingProgram, applications for Subspecialty Pathology Fellowships are not coordinated by any consistent schedule. Competition for Subspecialty Pathology Fellowships has consistently resulted in undesirable drift of the fellowship application process to dates that are unacceptably early for many fellowship applicants. Responding to widespread dissatisfaction voiced by national pathology resident organizations, in 2007, the Association of Pathology Chairs began evaluation and potential intervention in the fellowship application process. Three years of intermittently intense discussion, surveys, and market analysis, have led the Council of the Association of Pathology Chairs to recommend implementation of a Pathology Subspecialty Fellowship Matching program starting in the 2011 to 2012 recruiting year, for those Applicants matriculating in fellowship programs July 2013. We report on the data that informed this decision and discuss the pros and cons that are so keenly felt by the stakeholders in this as-yet-incomplete reform process."

That's from the abstract of

"Pathology subspecialty fellowship application reform 2007 to 2010" by James M. Crawford MD, PhD,  Robert D. Hoffman MD, PhD, W. Stephen Black-Schaffer MD, in Human Pathology (2010)

Sales by museums

The NY Times reports on a Philadelphia museum's sales of parts of its collection to finance renovations, and on the controversy this has caused: Museum Sells Pieces of Its Past, Reviving a Debate

"A galloping horse weather vane sold for about $20,000, and the cigar store Indians brought in more than $1 million. A Thomas Sully oil painting of Andrew Jackson netted $80,500, and a still life by Raphaelle Peale, part of the family that put portraiture in this city on the map, was auctioned at Christie’s for $842,500.

"These were just a few of more than 2,000 items quietly sold by the Philadelphia History Museum over the last several years, all part of an effort to cull its collection of 100,000 artifacts and raise money for a $5.8 million renovation of its 1826 building.

In doing so the museum stepped into the quicksand of murky rules, guidelines and ethical strictures meant to discourage museums everywhere from selling collections to pay bills. It is one of the hottest issues in the museum world today. With budgets shrinking in a bad economy, the pressure to generate revenue is growing along with fears that museums are squandering public trusts meant to preserve the artifacts of the past for future generations.

The National Academy Museum in New York, Fisk University and Brandeis have all recently drawn fire — and even sanctions — for selling or planning to sell artworks, and none of them sold as many works as the museum here.

"In general art and objects are supposed to be sold only to finance acquisitions, though different museums are governed by different standards. Art museums, regulated by a formal code of the Association of Art Museum Directors, may not sell work for any other reason.

"As a history museum, though, this institution — formally called the Philadelphia History Museum at the Atwater Kent — is subject to separate, less stringent guidelines put forward by other associations. So museum officials say the installation of new carpet, paint and lighting were all legitimate expenses to be paid from the proceeds under the guidelines of the  American Association of Museums, which say that sales can be used for the “direct care” of a collection. Adding to the confusion, there is a third set of standards maintained by theAmerican Association for State and Local History permitting proceeds to go toward the “preservation” of a collection, a similarly broad term.

"The New York State legislature, confronting this maze of precepts, recently considered passing a law that would make selling collections — the art world term is deaccessioning — to pay operating expenses illegal. It never made it to the Assembly floor because museums opposed it."

And here's another story about a librarian who submitted her resignation over deaccessioning: Small Town, Big Word, Major Issue
"Deaccessioning is the kind of word that makes eyes glaze over and can seem to be the preserve of dusty intellectuals and large museums. But it’s just a fancy name for the sale or giving away of art and artifacts by museums and other cultural organizations, and the dust-up here in this city of about 5,000 demonstrates that such debates occur in all kinds of places, big and small, where people feel protective about materials in their care.
With her personal gesture of protest in late September, Ms. Phillips stepped into a growing public controversy surrounding institutions that have sold or considered selling parts of their collections, which have been entrusted to them for the public’s benefit. Some say such sales can compromise collections, and others argue that museums, libraries and historical societies have to cull their collections periodically, particularly if there is pressure to pay their bills.
In Little Falls, library officials said they were selling things to raise money, not to cover operating costs, which institutions try to avoid, but to preserve other artifacts.
“We don’t have the space to take care of some of these items,” said Chester P. Szymanski III, the library’s president. “We’re not a museum. We’re a library.”

Call for papers: Game Theory in Trade and Development

Avinash Dixit writes: "  I am organizing a two-day (July 19-20) workshop on applications of game theory in the fields of international trade and economic development, as a part of the  Game Theory Society's summer festival this year. I would be grateful if you would publicize the attached call for papers among your colleagues and thesis-writing graduate students."

Call for papers

Game Theory Society’s 2011 Summer Festival

Two-day workshop (Tuesday-Wednesday July 19-20) on

Applications of Game Theory in Trade and Development

               The two-day workshop will consist of four sessions. Each session will have three papers: one invited overview paper, and two contributed new research papers. The themes of the sessions, and the invited presenters of the overview papers, are as follows:

1. International negotiations on international trade and related issues

(investment, intellectual property rights, environment etc)

     Kyle Bagwell, Stanford  University

2. Foundations of constitutions and their implications for development

     Roger Myerson, University of Chicago

3. Trade and investment in developing countries and transition economies

               with poor governance

     Avinash Dixit, Princeton University

4. Design of incentives and organizations for provision of public services

               in developing countries

    Timothy Besley, London School of Economics

               Submissions for contributed papers should be sent to me as PDF files attached to e-mail messages. Complete papers are preferred but detailed abstracts are acceptable. In the e-mail message please state for which of the four sessions you are submitting your paper.  Partial travel support for authors of accepted papers is available.

             The deadline for submissions is March 15, 2011 and decisions will be conveyed by April 15.

Avinash Dixit, workshop organizer

dixitak@princeton.edu

Kidney transplantation in Canada

A new report, Treatment of End-Stage Organ Failure in Canada; 2000 to 2009 draws on data from CIHI's Canadian Organ Replacement Register (CORR). (The report can be accessed directly here.) A news report focusing on kidney transplantation is here: Kidney transplants can save millions in dialysis costs: organ transplant report.

From the news summary:
"The number of people living with kidney failure more than tripled in Canada in the last 20 years, new statistics show, but experts hope to save lives and millions of dollars in dialysis costs by expanding organ donor programs.


"A report released Thursday by the Canadian Institute for Health Information shows that at the end of 2009, there were 37,744 people being treated for end-stage renal disease, with 59 per cent of them on dialysis and 41 per cent living with a functioning kidney transplant.

"Kidney failure rates appear to be stabilizing, but the supply of organs available for transplant has not kept pace with growing demand.
About 3,000 people were on waiting lists for a transplant in 2009. If they all received a transplant, it could result in annual savings of $150 million, the institute estimated.
...
"As for transplants, Nickerson said deceased donation tends to be better than average in Quebec and Atlantic Canada, at between 16 and 19 donors per million population.


"If you look at the U.S., the average donation rate is around 26 to 28 donors per million; if you look at Spain, it's up in the 30 donors per million range," Nickerson said.
"Donation rates can be significantly higher than what they are currently in Canada. And we've been stuck at this sort of 14 to 15 national average for a number of years now."
...
"CIHI estimated the annual cost of hemodialysis treatment at $60,000 per patient, compared to a one-time cost of $23,000 for a transplant plus $6,000 per year for medication.

Nickerson said savings are about $250,000 over five years.

"Sixteen to 20 years is the average expectancy of a living donor kidney transplant," he said, adding that deceased donor transplants would probably last 10 to 12 years.
Between 2000 and 2009, there were 10,641 kidney transplant procedures registered in the Canadian Organ Replacement Registry. Of these, 11 per cent were re-transplants. Of the 9,430 kidney-only first transplants, 61 per cent used deceased donor kidneys.
Since 2006, the number of living donor kidney transplants has been stable, fluctuating between 440 and 461 transplants per year.
...
"Canadian Blood Services recently launched a paired kidney exchange registry, which allows pairs to receive and donate a kidney from among other registered pairs even if they're not matches for each other.

Nickerson said 185 pairs are registered, and 65 kidney transplants have been done that otherwise wouldn't have occurred.
"And we know that this is only the beginning," he said.

"We estimate that we should have on an annual basis another 200 to 250 pairs joining annually and that we can facilitate about half of them finding transplants on a yearly basis."

Swiss parliament proposes to decriminalize incest

Switzerland considers repealing incest laws
"The upper house of the Swiss parliament has drafted a law decriminalising sex between consenting family members which must now be considered by the government.

"There have been only three cases of incest since 1984.

"...children within families will continue to be protected by laws governing abuse and paedophilia.

"Daniel Vischer, a Green party MP, said he saw nothing wrong with two consenting adults having sex, even if they were related.
"Incest is a difficult moral question, but not one that is answered by penal law," he said.

"Barbara Schmid Federer of The Christian People's Party of Switzerland said the proposal from the upper house was "completely repugnant."
"I for one could not countenance painting out such a law from the statute books."
The Protestant People's Party is also opposed to decriminalising the offence which at present carries a maximum three year jail term.
A spokesman for the party said: "Murder is also quite rare in Switzerland but no one suggests that we remove that as an office from the statutes."

See also Wen schützt das Inzestverbot? ("Who is protected by the prohibition against incest?")

HT: Sven Seuken

My previous posts on incest as a repugnant transaction are here, including this one which concerned a similar repeal in Romania: ''Not everything that is immoral has to be illegal'
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Sniping on eBay, in Australia (radio interview)

Apparently eBay users in Australia are concerned about sniping (last minute bidding). I was interviewed for a radio report on the subject by Hagar Cohen, which you can hear here (in Australian): Snipe bidding: the dark side of online shopping.

My papers on the subject, with Axel Ockenfels and Dan Ariely are here.