1000 kidney exchange transplants by NKR

Here's the announcement: National Kidney Registry Facilitates 1000th Transplant


"BABYLON, NY--(Marketwired - Mar 12, 2014) -  The National Kidney Registry announced the successful completion of their 1,000th paired exchange transplant. The 1,000th transplant, completed today at the University of Cincinnati, is part of a chain of 10 transplants. These transplants are taking place at other centers across the country including, UCSF Medical Center, Cleveland Clinic, Barnes-Jewish Hospital, New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center, Lahey Clinic, Loyola University Medical Center, University of Minnesota Medical Center, Froedtert Hospital, and VCU Medical Center.

The NKR organized its first exchange transplants just over 6 years ago, in February of 2008, at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center. Commenting on the past six years, Dr. Sandi Kapur, Chief of Transplant Surgery and Director of the Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Program at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell Medical Center and the Surgical Director of NKR, said, "These 1,000 transplants would not have been possible without the hard work and dedication of the transplant professionals at the 70 NKR member centers and the many altruistic donors who have given the gift of life to those suffering from kidney failure. Our program at New York-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell has been able to transplant over 100 patients with incompatible donors during this time period including many highly sensitized patients."

Dr. Jeffrey Veale, the Director of the UCLA Exchange Program, remarked, "We have seen the widespread adoption of paired exchange over the past six years which has allowed many patients with incompatible donors to receive a lifesaving transplant. We are thrilled that UCLA has been able to transplant over 100 patients with incompatible donors over the past six years and we look forward to working with the other NKR Member Centers to quickly surpass the 2,000 transplant milestone."

Dr. E. Steve Woodle, Director of the Division of Transplantation, holder of the William Altemeier Chair in Surgery at the University of Cincinnati, and a founder of one of the first multi-center kidney exchange programs in the United States, said, "When we first published the ethical and scientific foundations for kidney exchange programs in 1997, we hoped that someday we would have kidney exchange programs like the NKR. This accomplishment by the NKR exemplifies what dedicated leadership and membership can accomplish with kidney exchange. Our hats are off to those who built the NKR."

The goal of the NKR is to facilitate 1,000 transplants annually by 2020. Above is the history of NKR transplants.

About the National Kidney Registry

National Kidney Registry (www.kidneyregistry.org) is a nonprofit organization with the mission to save and improve the lives of people facing kidney failure by increasing the quality, speed, and number of living donor transplants. "
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Other posts about NKR

Legal brothels in Germany

The Telegraph has the story: Welcome to Paradise (Paradise is the name of a brothel in Stuttgart.). It's an unusually good article, so here is an unusually long set of excerpts.  One of the reasons I follow this kind of debate is because of the similar, ongoing debate about whether the sale of kidneys should be legal.


"When Germany legalised prostitution in 2002 it triggered an apparently unstoppable growth in the country’s sex industry. It’s now worth 15 billion euros a year and embraces everything from 12-storey mega-brothels to outdoor sex boxes. Nisha Lilia Diu visits some of them to find out who won and who lost...
...
"Paradise is a chain, like Primark or Pizza Hut, with five branches and three more on the way.
...
"People think Amsterdam is the prostitution capital of Europe but Germany has more prostitutes per capita than any other country in the continent, more even than Thailand: 400,000 at the last count, serving 1.2 million men every day. Those figures were released a decade ago, soon after Germany made buying sex, selling sex, pimping and brothel-keeping legal in 2002. Two years later, prostitution in Germany was thought to be worth 6 billion euros – roughly the same as Porsche or Adidas that year. It’s now estimated to be 15 billion euros.
...
"The idea of the law, passed by Chancellor Gerhard Schröder’s Social Democrat-Green coalition, was to recognise prostitution as a job like any other. Sex workers could now enter into employment contracts, sue for payment and register for health insurance, pension plans and other benefits. Exploiting prostitutes was still criminal but everything else was now above board. Two female politicians and a Berlin madam were pictured clinking their champagne glasses in celebration.

"It didn’t work. “Nobody employs prostitutes in Germany,” says Beretin. None of the authorities I spoke to had ever heard of a prostitute suing for payment, either. And only 44 prostitutes have registered for benefits.

"What did happen was the opening of Europe’s biggest brothel – the 12-storey, neon-wrapped Pascha in Cologne. Not to mention a rash of FKK, or “naked”, clubs where men can spend the evening drifting between the sauna, the bar and the bedrooms. Bargain-hunters might try the “flat rate” brothels, where an entry fee of between 50-100 euros buys you unlimited sex with as many women as you want, or cruise the caravans at motorway truck stops, or the drive-through “sex boxes” in the street-walking zones. (They look like stables and are known as “verrichtungsboxen” - “getting things done boxes”.)

"The Netherlands legalised prostitution two years before Germany, just after Sweden had gone the other way and made the purchase of sex a criminal offence. Norway adopted the Swedish model - in which selling sex is permitted but anyone caught buying it is fined or imprisoned - in 2009. Iceland has followed suit, and France and Ireland look set to do the same.

"The Home Office insists Britain’s byzantine prostitution laws (in brief: you can buy and sell sex indoors under certain circumstances) are not up for review. But that might not be the case for long.

"Mary Honeyball, the Labour MEP, has been leading the charge to have the Swedish model adopted across Europe. Her bill was voted through by the European Parliament on 26 February, formally establishing the EU’s position on the issue. A few days later, on Monday, a cross-party report in Britain also recommended the model.

"Pressure to review prostitution laws is coming from an EU anti-trafficking directive that obliges member states to “reduce demand” for human trafficking. Given that at least 70 per cent of trafficking in Europe is into forced prostitution, a lot of people are arguing that the best way to reduce demand for trafficking is to reduce demand for prostitution. And one way to do that is to criminalise the buyer.
...
"More than 55,000 men come to Paradise every year. Everyone – punter and prostitute – pays a 79 euro entry fee. That includes food (there is a buffet right by the Jacuzzi into which a naked middle-aged man is lowering himself) but the sex is extra. That’s negotiated between the men and the women and all of the money from that activity is kept by her. The going rate at Paradise is about 50 euros for half an hour, slightly cheaper than the hammam – another extra – which is offered at 53 euros for 30 minutes.
...
"The law leaves [Saarbrücken’s mayor, Charlotte] Britz with her hands tied. “It’s easier to open a brothel in Germany than a chip shop,” she says. That’s actually true: while premises serving food need special licences there are no restrictions on brothels. That’s because all they do, technically, is rent rooms. The prostitutes are their customers just as much as the punters are. Sometimes, more so.
...
"Most [prostitutes] are in a similar situation to Suzi: her family has no idea what she’s doing and she has no desire to have an official record of her years in prostitution. “This work is not for a long time,” she says. “Very soon I will stop.” Once she’s saved up enough money, she plans to get a job in a hotel or a restaurant. Kristina Marlen, a tantric dominatrix in Berlin and a spokeswoman for Germany’s Trade Association for Erotic and Sexual Services, agrees. “A lot of people just do it for a short period in their lives. They don’t want to have in their CV, ‘I was a whore from 2007 to 2009’.”
...
"“People don’t employ prostitutes in Germany because it’s complicated,” says Beretin...
"Actually, says Knop, managing prostitutes is completely legal. The problem is making sure you don’t cross the line between “managing” them and “exploiting” them.
...
"Forced prostitution comes in many guises. Some women are kidnapped, others are tricked with the promise of jobs as nannies or waitresses. Others choose to work as prostitutes but have no idea of the conditions that await them. Often, a woman’s pimps or traffickers are people from her own town. They know where her family lives and aren’t afraid of harming them in order to control her. Sometimes it’s the families who pressure girls into prostitution in the first place - unable, or unwilling, to think of another way for a woman to earn a living.
...
"All the sex workers I spoke to, in Britain and in Germany, told me it’s “not for everyone.” Kristina Marlen, the Berlin dominatrix, sees her work in terms of “celebrating the sexual part of the person” (though “sometimes people come in and I am like ‘Ew’. But I can work with them.”) She’s bisexual and currently in an open relationship with a woman. She thinks of prostitution as its own kind of “sexual orientation”.

"But, she says, “there are some people working in the sex industry who shouldn’t be there.” Sex workers can find themselves in “very precarious positions and not all the women can articulate themselves as I can.” Even she has had “moments in which it wasn’t clear to me how to communicate boundaries.” You need to be thick-skinned and good at negotiating with strong boundaries and high self-esteem. There isn’t much of what’s been called “willing supply”.

Prostitution in America

Yesterday's NY Times writes about a report from the Urban Institute, funded by the Department of Justice, on prostitution in eight U.S. cities.

Here's the NY Times article: In-Depth Report Details Economics of Sex Trade

Here's the full (pdf) paper: Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major US Cities 

Here's an abstract of the paper on the Urban Institute web site:
Estimating the Size and Structure of the Underground Commercial Sex Economy in Eight Major US Cities
Meredith Dank, Bilal Khan, P. Mitchell Downey, Cybele Kotonias, Debbie Mayer, Colleen Owens, Laura Pacifici, Lilly Yu

"Abstract
The underground commercial sex economy (UCSE) generates millions of dollars annually, yet investigation and data collection remain under resourced. Our study aimed to unveil the scale of the UCSE in eight major US cities: Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Miami, Seattle, San Diego, and Washington, DC. Across cities, the UCSE's worth was estimated between $39.9 and $290 million in 2007, but decreased since 2003 in all but two cities. Interviews with pimps, traffickers, sex workers, child pornographers, and law enforcement revealed the dynamics central to the underground commercial sex trade?and shaped the policy suggestions to combat it.

Underground Commercial Sex Economy Key Findings

"Sex sells" does little to explain the multimillion-dollar profits generated by the underground commercial sex economy. From high-end escort services to high school "sneaker pimps," the sex trade leaves no demographic unrepresented and circuits almost every major US city. What we know about the underground commercial sex economy is likely just the tip of the iceberg, but our study attempts to unveil its size and structure while documenting the experiences of offenders and law enforcement.

Our study focused on eight US cities— Atlanta, Dallas, Denver, Kansas City, Miami, Seattle, San Diego, and Washington, DC. Across cities, the 2007 underground sex economy’s worth was estimated between $39.9 and $290 million. While almost all types of commercial sex venues—massage parlors, brothels, escort services, and street- and internet-based prostitution—existed in each city, regional and demographic differences influenced their markets.

Pimps and traffickers interviewed for the study took home between $5,000 and $32,833 a week. These actors form a notoriously difficult population to reach because of the criminal nature of their work. Our study presents data from interviews with 73 individuals charged and convicted for crimes including compelling prostitution, human trafficking and engaging in a business relationship with sex workers.

Pimps claimed inaccuracy in media portrayals. 
Most pimps believed that the media portrayals exaggerated violence. Some even saw the term "pimp" as derogatory, despite admitting to occasional use of physical abuse for punishment. Although pimps may have underreported the use of physical violence, they did cite frequent use of psychological coercion to maintain control over their employees.

Pimps manipulate women into sex work. 
From discouraging "having sex for free" to feigning romantic interest, pimps used a variety of tactics to recruit and retain employees. Some even credited their entry into pimping with a natural capacity for manipulation. Rarely, however, were pimps the sole influence for an individual’s entry into the sex trade.

Women, family, and friends facilitate entry into sex work. 
Female sex workers sometimes solicited protection from friends and acquaintances, eventually asking them to act as pimps. Some pimps and sex workers had family members or friends who exposed them to the sex trade at a young age, normalizing their decision to participate. Their involvement in the underground commercial sex economy, then extends the network of those co-engaged in the market even further.

Unexpected parties benefit from the commercial sex economy. 
Pimps, brothels, and escort services often employed drivers, secretaries, nannies, and other non-sex workers to keep operations running smoothly. Hotel managers and law enforcement agents sometimes helped offenders evade prosecution in exchange for money or services. Law enforcement in one city reported that erotic Asian massage parlors would purchase the names of licensed acupuncturists to fake legitimacy. Even feuding gang members occasionally joined forces in the sex trade, prioritizing profit over turf wars. The most valuable network in the underground sex economy, however, may be the Internet.

The Internet is changing the limitations of the trade.
Prostitution is decreasing on the street, but thriving online. Pimps and sex workers advertise on social media and sites like Craigslist.com and Backpage.com to attract customers and new employees, and to gauge business opportunities in other cities. An increasing online presence makes it both easier for law enforcement to track activity in the underground sex economy and for an offender to promote and provide access to the trade.

Child pornography is escalating.
Explicit content of younger victims is becoming increasingly available and graphic. Online child pornography communities frequently trade content for free and reinforce behavior. Offenders often consider their participation a "victimless crime."

The underground sex economy is perceived as low risk.
Pimps, traffickers, and child pornography offenders believed that their crimes were low-risk despite some fears of prosecution. Those who got caught for child pornography generally had low technological know-how, and multiple pimp offenders expressed that "no one actually gets locked up for pimping," despite their own incarcerations.

Policy and practice changes can help combat trafficking and prostitution.

• Cross-train drug, sex, and weapons trade investigators to better understand circuits and overlaps.
• Continue using federal and local partnerships to disrupt travel circuits and identify pimps.
• Offer law enforcement trainings for both victim and offender interview techniques, including identifying signs of psychological manipulation.
• Increase awareness among school officials and the general public about the realities of sex trafficking to deter victimization and entry.
• Consistently enforce the laws for offenders to diminish low-risk perception.
• Impose more fines for ad host websites."

Vocabulary in the fertility business

Over at Bill of Health, Dov Fox starts a post on some tax litigation with some linguistic notes from the field:
Can you be taxed for selling your eggs?

"Those who deal in alternative ways of making families use euphemisms that obscure the market mechanisms at work when individuals ‘‘donate’’ their eggs or sperm, couples ‘‘contribute’’ their embryos, surrogates ‘‘offer’’ their wombs, and orphans are ‘‘matched’’ to adoptive parents. Make no mistake, family formation is big business. "

Recommender dating site

As is the case with used cars, it may be desirable to buy from someone you know. http://www.jessmeetken.com/ is an internet dating site that works on that principle.

Here's the come-on: 

"Women are in control.

Men are posted by women. If a guy’s here, it’s only because a woman like you thinks he’s boyfriend material.

(Ask your girlfriends to post their best guys.)"

HT: Stephanie Hurder

Society for Mutual Autopsy: Nineteenth Century solution to the cadaver shortage for anatomy studies

Michael Webster directs my attention to this post about The Society of Mutual Autopsy, a society formed to supply cadavers for more, and more scientific, autopsies.(At different times and places, cadavers have been in short supply: see these previous posts.)

Here's what Wikipedia has to say:
"The Society of Mutual Autopsy (or French: la Société d'autopsie mutuelle) was established on 19 October 1876 by members of the Society of Anthropology of Paris in Paris, France.

"Its purpose was to facilitate research on any links between personality, ability and brain morphology by creating a system whereby members' bodies, upon death, would be donated to the organization for study.
Its primary tool to organize these donations was a sort of living will which accomplished two main tasks. The first was to make clear the intention of the donor to have his or her body delivered to the organization upon death. The second was to present to the organization a description of the donor: the donor's personality, skills, habits, faults, etc. to allow for more complete research by the organization on the connection between these and brain morphology."

Apparently it was active from 1876 until World War I, and conducted quite a few autopsies.

I guess that willing your body to a scientific society is logistically a lot easier for your next of kin to carry out than is willing your organs to be donated to members of a club. As of this writing, the similarly constituted Lifesharers organization (about which I have posted here) has yet to make a single donation:

Q. How many LifeSharers members have died and donated organs?
A. We have not yet had a member die in circumstances that would have permitted recovery of his or her organs.

Surrogacy law in Israel

Apparently it is legal for heterosexual couples to pay surrogate mothers in Israel, but not for same sex couples, and there is legislation being proposed to change this. As usual, it's complicated.
Ministers will vote on surrogacy for gay couples

"The new surrogacy bill is up for vote: The Knesset Ministerial Committee on Legislative Affairs will discuss Health Minister Yael German's (Yesh Atid) bill Monday, allowing gay couples to use surrogacy services in Israel.
...
It is still unclear whether there will be a majority to pass the bill..
...
"According to the existing "surrogacy law", only heterosexual couples can have access to paid surrogacy. Two years ago the Mor-Yosef committee was asked to decide on the matter and ruled that gay couples should be allowed to use surrogacy under the condition that the surrogate mother is not paid.

"According to the new bill, Health Minister German supplements what she considers a "revolution," allowing gay couples paid surrogacy – much like heterosexual couples.

"This move – which is expected to bring great demand for surrogacy – is not free of limitations. Couples will be allowed to undergoing only two surrogacy procedures, the couples' mothers and grandmothers will not be allowed to be surrogates; however the possibility of having a family member as surrogate does expand to sisters and cousins.

"In addition the bill limits the age of men turning to surrogacy to 54 and not without limitation of age as it has been until now. On the other hand, the allowed surrogacy age has gone up to 38, two years more than what the existing law permits.

Utku Unver and Tayfun Sonmez talk about kidney exchange--video

Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver have a video on Boston College's YouTube channel:

"Published on Feb 23, 2014
Groundbreaking research by Boston College economists Tayfun Sönmez and Utku Ünver sparks hope for patients with kidney disease while advancing the University's philosophy of "men and women for others."
 Video Produced by Sean Casey "

***********
Update, 8 June 2016: Here's a video from Turkish TV of Utku Ünver being interviewed about kidney exchange. It's all in Turkish, but clips from the video above are included, so I'm guessing it's in the same spirit...
Türkiye'nin Bilim Öncüleri Haber Dizisi. Prof. Utku Ünver Abd'li Alvin Roth 'Un Nobel Ödülü Almasında Önemli Rol Oynadı. Nobel Ödüllü John Nash'in Oyun Teorisinden, Böbrek Takası Projesini Hayata Geçirdi.  (Google Translate: Professor Utku Unver Americans Alvin Roth of Play Important Role in Getting the Nobel Prize. Nobel Laureate John Nash in Game Theory, Passes Kidney Swap Project to life. )

Good summary of 15 minute talk on market design and experimental economics at Pitt

At the University of Pittsburgh, where I'm now an alum, I gave a 15 minute talk without slides, and it was covered in this news story by Kimberly Barlow, which I thought did a pretty good job of summarizing it.

Computer-assisted smart markets, at UC Davis

I'll be speaking today at UC Davis:

Alvin Roth Lecture: Computer-Assisted Smart Markets

March 06, 2014
3:00 pm to 5:00 pm 

Department of Computer Science Distinguished Lecture Series
Alvin Roth (Nobel Prize in Economics)
Computer-Assisted Smart Markets: From Labor Markets to Kidney Exchange

Thursday March 6, 2014, 3:10 p.m.
Student Community Center Multi-Purpose Room

Reception and refreshments 2:30 p.m.

More and more modern marketplaces are mediated by computers, and this opens up some new possibilities for market design, and new areas of intersection between economics and computer science. I will give examples from the design of the labor market clearinghouses for American doctors (“the Match”) through which most doctors in the U.S. get their first jobs, and from the design of kidney exchange clearinghouses that help match patients with compatible living kidney donors.

Alvin Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University. He is also the Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. He works in the areas of game theory, experimental economics and market design. He shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics.

Host: Dan Gusfield, Department of Computer Science

Co-hosted by Department of Economics, UC Davis

Levine Family Series: Alvin Roth (Stanford University)

"Computer-Assisted Smart Markets: From Labor Markets to Kidney Exchange"

When	Mar 06, 2014 from 03:00 PM to 05:00 PM
Where	Student Community Center Multi-Purpose Room

More on industrial farming

Are some farming transactions repugnant? The NY Times runs a story under the headline Wishing They All Could Be California Hens

"Hens in California are living the good life. Many can now lay their eggs in oversize enclosures roomy enough to stand up, lie down — even extend their wings fully without touching another bird.

Hens in most other states don’t have it so good. Their conditions, as the head of California’s egg trade group explained, are “like you sitting in an airplane seat in the economy section all your life.”

So if you’re a hen, you want to live in California. Short of that, you want California-size leg room. And that’s precisely what lawmakers in California are demanding of out-of-state farmers who sell eggs in California — setting off a feud over interstate commerce that has spilled over into the farmyard at large.

The Missouri attorney general has filed a lawsuit to block the California egg rules, and at least three other states are considering doing the same. The beef and pork lobbies are also lining up against the California rules in an effort to prevent any new restrictions on raising livestock."
******************

Here are my previous posts on food, most of them also related to repugnance...

Insider trading 2.0

The WSJ reports on the increasingly repugnant practice of selling access to news earlier to some customers than others:
Firm Stops Giving High-Speed Traders Direct Access to Releases--Warren Buffett Involved in Berkshire Unit Business Wire's Decision to End Practice

"[New York Attorney General Eric]  Schneiderman has begun cracking down on practices that provide high-speed traders with opportunities to act first on market-moving information, referring to such access as "Insider Trading 2.0."
...
"Traders engaged in this so-called race to zero, a measure of the difference between the pace of order transmissions and the speed of light, are constantly pushing to get news and market data a fraction of a second before their competitors.

"We see the AG action and the Business Wire story highlighting a deeper problem" with the stock market, said Eric Budish, an economics professor at the University of Chicago who has studied high-speed markets.

"The problem, Mr. Budish said, is that markets in which the first trader to enter an order wins the race give too much of an advantage to traders with the fastest technology.

"Instead, he says, markets should favor investors who offer the best price, even if that order comes in a fraction of a second after a speedier trader."
*******

Mr Budish and his recent paper on high speed trading have been getting some other press lately as well, see
Declawing Speed Traders Is Goal of Stock Market Revamp Proposal

"In the paper written with Peter Cramton of the University of Maryland and John Shim at Booth School, Budish showed the opportunities that exist for speedy traders by looking at the trading patterns of the SPDR S&P 500 ETF Trust (SPY:US) and futures on the S&P 500. They found that the price of E-mini contracts often jumps before the ETF, creating the chance for fast traders to make money from buying the fund before the market reacts. While the time shrank from a median of 97 milliseconds in 2005 to 7 milliseconds in 2011, the arbitrage opportunity still exists, the authors said."

Paul Klemperer on the product mix auction, and market design (video)

How geometry came to the rescue during the banking crisis - video

"Economist Paul Klemperer of Oxford University describes how he invented an auction based on a new kind of geometry to help the Bank of England as the financial crisis took hold in 2007. The auction got money to the banks and building societies that needed it most urgently. The then governor Mervyn King later called it 'a marvelous application of theoretical economics to a practical problem of vital importance'. Klemperer describes how similar auctions can help other government departments allocate resources.  The video featured as the Editor's Choice on the Guardian on 12th July 2013."

Organize: to end the organ shortage

I don't know much about this (relatively new) organization, Organize.org,  but I like their slogan: It's hard enough to survive a transplant, people shouldn't have to survive the waiting list too.

And Judd Kessler is their resident economist, so they're off to a good start.

They say: "Organize and its partners are doing whatever we can to register more donors, and are trying to build a system that makes it as easy as possible to do so."

"Organize is committing to fix this.  Here’s how:

• Streamlining the registration process to make it easier to enroll as a donor.
• Creating more entry points to enroll as a donor.
• Building tech solutions for state-registries to share information more easily.
•  Supporting academic research around the registration process, and learning best practices for different audiences.
• Empowering patients and their families to take part of the registration process."

Abdulkadiroglu, Angrist and Pathak on exam schools

In Econometrica;

January 2014 - Volume 82 Issue 1 Page 137 - 196

p.137

The Elite Illusion: Achievement Effects at Boston and New York Exam Schools Atila Abdulkadiroğlu Joshua Angrist Parag Pathak Abstract Parents gauge school quality in part by the level of student achievement and a school's racial and socioeconomic mix. The importance of school characteristics in the housing market can be seen in the jump in house prices at school district boundaries where peer characteristics change. The question of whether schools with more attractive peers are really better in a value-added sense remains open, however. This paper uses a fuzzy regression-discontinuity design to evaluate the causal effects of peer characteristics. Our design exploits admissions cutoffs at Boston and New York City's heavily over-subscribed exam schools. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the least selective of these schools move from schools with scores near the bottom of the state SAT score distribution to schools with scores near the median. Successful applicants near admissions cutoffs for the most selective of these schools move from above-average schools to schools with students whose scores fall in the extreme upper tail. Exam school students can also expect to study with fewer nonwhite classmates than unsuccessful applicants. Our estimates suggest that the marked changes in peer characteristics at exam school admissions cutoffs have little causal effect on test scores or college quality.

Honors flow both ways at Pitt

I'm going to applaud and be applauded at one of my favorite universities, where I taught from 1982-1998.

Nobel Laureate Alvin E. Roth to Address Pitt’s Honors Convocation

Economist conducted much of his Nobel-lauded research on matching theory at Pitt

PITTSBURGH—Alvin E. Roth, co-winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics, will be the keynote speaker at the University of Pittsburgh’s 38th annual Honors Convocation, to be held at 3 p.m. Feb. 28 in Carnegie Music Hall, 4400 Forbes Ave., Oakland. All members of the University community are invited to attend.

Honors Convocation recognizes the accomplishments and contributions of Pitt alumni, faculty, staff, and students. Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg will preside over the celebratory event. He will bestow an honorary doctoral degree on Roth, who began and completed much of the economics research for which he won the Nobel Prize while serving as Pitt’s first Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics from 1982 to 1998. Roth is now the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University.

“The University’s Honors Convocation recognizes the significant achievements of Pitt people who are pursuing academic, scholarly, and professional excellence in their fields,” said Chancellor Mark A. Nordenberg. “Our friend and former colleague Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth is an exemplary representative of the legacy of excellence that the University of Pittsburgh has established and upon which it continues to build. It will be a special pleasure to welcome him back to Pitt.”

Roth won the Nobel Prize along with Lloyd S. Shapley, professor emeritus of economics and mathematics at UCLA, for solving a key economic problem—how to match players in a market in the best possible way.

Beginning in the 1960s, Shapley developed a body of theoretical work in which he used Cooperative Game Theory to study matching. He found that it is important to find a “stable match,” meaning a match in which there are no two agents who would prefer one another over their current counterparts.

When Roth was a Pitt faculty member in the 1980s, he began using Shapley’s theoretical results to explain how matching happens in practice. He studied the medical job market and eventually began to implement his findings in existing programs like the National Resident Matching Program that matches newly minted doctors with residency positions at hospitals. In another case, he worked with Pitt economics alumnus M. Utku Ünver (A&S ’97G, ’00G) on a study that led to improvements in the design of a program to match kidney donors with compatible kidney recipients. He also has assisted with developing a system for matching students with schools.

When announcing the prize in 2012, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences said of Roth and Shapley: “Even though these two researchers worked independently of one another, the combination of Shapley’s basic theory and Roth’s empirical investigations, experiments, and practical design has generated a flourishing field of research and improved the performance of many markets. This year’s prize is awarded for an outstanding example of economic engineering.”

While at Pitt, Roth was the recipient of the 1992 Chancellor’s Distinguished Research Award. He also served as a Fellow in the Center for Philosophy of Science and a professor of business administration in the Joseph M. Katz Graduate School of Business. His work was also influential in developing the field of experimental economics at the University.

“Central to Prof. Roth’s work on market design has been the use of theory and laboratory experiments. Under his leadership, the Department of Economics at Pitt became, and is still regarded as being, one of the leaders in experimental economics,” said Lise Vesterlund, Pitt’s current Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics.

McKay lecture at Pitt on Market Design

If you're in Pittsburgh, I'll be giving the McKay Lecture at my old home, the Department of Economics at Pitt.

Market Design: The Economist as Engineer

February 27, 2014 - 3:30pm to 5:00pm

The University of Pittsburgh Department of Economics proudly presents the 2014 McKay Lecture "Market Design: The Economist as Engineer" by Alvin Roth, Nobel Laureate in Economics.

Market design is an ancient human activity but a relatively new part of economics.  It seeks to understand how the design of markets and marketplaces influences their performance, to use this growing understanding to fix markets when they're broken, and to help to establish markets where they are missing. 

Mr. Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Standord University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University.  From 1982 to 1998, he was the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics at Pitt.  He shared the 2012 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel.

Roth directed the redesign of the National Resident Matching Program, through which 23.000+ doctors a year find their first employment.  He also has helped to reorganize the market for more senior physicians as they pursue subspecialty training. He helped to design the matching systems for students in several large American cities.   He is among the founders and designers of kidney exchange in the United States (along with a number of colleagues with Pittsbugh connections), which helps incompatible patient-donor pairs to find lifesaving compatible kidneys for transplantation.

Location and Address

University of Pittsburgh

Frick Fine Arts Building

650 Schenley Drive

Pittsburgh, PA  15260

Directions and Parking Information

on street parking and Soldiers & Sailors Garage

Boston Globe on 2010 death of live liver donor

The Boston Globe had a story earlier this month recounting the events surrounding the 2010 death of a liver donor (about which they wrote and I blogged at the time: Live Liver donation tragedy).

Donor’s death shatters family, stuns surgeons: Pure generosity drove Paul Hawks to donate part of his liver to his desperately ill brother-in-law. Then disaster struck, and transplant medicine has had to rethink its rules.
By Liz Kowalczyk    FEBRUARY 02, 2014

Pros and cons of paying for kidneys, in the Journal of Medical Ethics

Some pros and cons on paying for kidneys in the Journal of Medical Ethics, March 2014, Volume 40, Issue 3

From the editors' summary in the first article ("The concise argument")"

"For over half a century the subject of organ transplantation has attracted ethical debate. One such ongoing debate, provoked by the severe scarcity of organs for transplantation and a concern to increase their supply, has been about why willing live donors should continue to be prohibited from offering their own organs for sale. Against allowing this, it has often been argued that prohibition protects people in poverty from being driven to, and then harmed by, this desperate last resort. But is that how such people in poverty themselves see it? From their point of view, it has been suggested, wouldn't it be reasonable to see prohibition as depriving them of their best option, leaving them worse off than if they had been able to exercise it? Isn't the claim to protect people in poverty therefore ‘misplaced paternalism’, providing no ethical justification for prohibition?

"In this month's feature article, Simon Rippon (see page 145, Editor's choice) mounts a serious and sustained challenge to that conclusion. He argues that while it would be reasonable for people in poverty to sell their organs if given the option, it would be equally reasonable, given the ‘significant and unavoidable’ harms of a live organ donor market, for them to prefer not to have this option at all. In her commentary on Rippon's paper, Janet Radcliffe-Richards (see page 152) acknowledges that ‘a plausible case for prohibition would probably take this form’, but goes on to argue that ‘although in principle prohibition need not be paternalistic, in practice it is’, since it ‘has been imposed on everyone irrespective of any consultation’. To this, and two further commentaries, by Gerald Dworkin (see page 151) and by Adrian Walsh (see page 153), Rippon responds (see page 155) in a significant contribution to a debate that nevertheless seems likely to continue unabated as long as the need for whole organs continues so greatly to exceed their supply."

The concise argument

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  Responding to complexity

  • Kenneth Boyd

  J Med Ethics 2014;40:143-144 doi:10.1136/medethics-2014-102070

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Feature article

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  Imposing options on people in poverty: the harm of a live donor organ market

  • Simon Rippon

  J Med Ethics 2014;40:145-150 Published Online First: 28 June 2012doi:10.1136/medethics-2011-100318
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Commentaries

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  Organ sales and paternalism

  • Gerald Dworkin

  J Med Ethics 2014;40:151-152 Published Online First: 19 June 2012doi:10.1136/medethics-2012-100647
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  Commentary by Janet Radcliffe-Richards on Simon Rippon's ‘Imposing options on people in poverty: the harm of a live donor organ market’

  • Janet Radcliffe-Richards

  J Med Ethics 2014;40:152-153 Published Online First: 19 October 2012doi:10.1136/medethics-2012-100645
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  Commentary on Simon Rippon, ‘Imposing options on people in poverty: the harm of a live donor organ market’

  • Adrian Walsh

  J Med Ethics 2014;40:153-154 Published Online First: 29 June 2012doi:10.1136/medethics-2012-100646
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  Organ markets and harms: a reply to Dworkin, Radcliffe Richards and Walsh

  • Simon Rippon

  J Med Ethics 2014;40:155-156 Published Online First: 5 November 2012doi:10.1136/medethics-2012-101083
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