The young Francesco Guala on experimental economics

Francesco Guala is a philosopher of science at U. of Milan, whose work deals with economics, and who has written about experimental economics (e.g. in his 2005 book The Methodology of Experimental Economics). Some of his early thoughts on the subject can be found in his 1999 Ph.D. thesis at LSE, which I recently ran across on the web: Economics and the Laboratory--Some Philosophical and Methodological Problems Facing Experimental Economics

The college admissions scramble

The National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) has posted its annual bulletin board of the more than 250 colleges that still have available positions.

NACAC College Openings Update: Space, Financial Aid and Housing Still Available For Fall 2014

​May 6, 2013 (Arlington, VA)  – More than 250 colleges and universities still have openings, aid and housing available to qualified freshman and/or transfer students for the Fall 2014 semester, according to the  National Association for College Admission Counseling’s (NACAC’s) annual College Openings Update (formerly the “Space Availability Survey”).

Now in its 27th year, the Update is a tool for counselors, parents and teachers as they assist students who have not yet completed the college application and admission process after the May 1 response deadline observed by many colleges.  In cases where well-qualified students may not have applied to a range of institutions, or may have been turned down by all schools to which they applied, the Update provides an opportunity to be identified and possibly accepted by competitive institutions, and to obtain financial aid and housing.

“This announcement is a ‘win-win’ for all parties, if students need to rethink their admission options,” said Joyce E. Smith, NACAC CEO.

“Part of demystifying college admission is understanding that, for many institutions, the application process is a year-round endeavor,” said Smith. “Some colleges accept applications throughout the year, while others may continue to have openings available even after the May 1 national response deadline. We hope students and families will benefit from knowing that these options are available to them each year.”

Both public and private colleges and universities are listed on the Update.

The Update can be viewed at:

http://www.nacacnet.org/research/research-data/College-Openings/Pages/College-Openings-Results.aspx

It will remain on NACAC’s Web site through June 30, and colleges have been asked to modify their listings as the number of openings at their institutions changes.

Media note: College Openings Update is not a survey, but instead, a bulletin board that allows students and colleges to find potential matches during the Spring prior to Fall enrollment. Some colleges accept applications well after May 1 as a matter of policy, while others have openings available due to fluctuations that occur each year in the college application process.

About NACAC: NACAC is an Arlington, VA-based education association of more than 14,000 secondary school counselors, independent counselors, college admission and financial aid officers, enrollment managers, and organizations that work with students as they make the transition from high school to postsecondary education. The association, founded in 1937, is committed to maintaining high standards that foster ethical and social responsibility among those involved in the transition process, as outlined in the NACAC Statement of Principles of Good Practice. More information about NACAC is available at www.nacacnet.org.

These secondary markets, sometimes called scrambles, have a big role to play in matching markets in which participants can only consider a relatively short list of the many participants on the other side of the market. (Fuhito Kojima and Parag Pathak and I showed in passing here that it is to be expected that such markets will have empty positions and unmatched applicants at the end of the initial matching phase...this observation is actually within a proof, see p12 of the online appendix)

Should there be a centralized clearinghouse for college admissions?

College admissions seems quite different than the markets for medical residents and fellows, because colleges have much more flexibility over precisely the number of new students they admit, compared to the rigid requirements of accredited residencies that lead to board certification.

But there are  similarities between some of the coordination failures that go on in college admissions, and the troubles that led to the resident and fellows matches.  Now, here is a blog from Fortune Magazine proposing a medical style match for colleges...(it makes a nice break from the blog post by a medical student wishing there was no match, but instead an ideal world with no market failures...see here, and yesterday's post on more sober evaluations from other medical students):

How to fix the crazy competitive world of college admissions: It has become increasingly tough to get into America's top colleges, so why not employ the same system medical schools use to match residents?

"FORTUNE -- Two recent articles in the New York Times are getting many parents pretty frazzled: This year, only 5% of those who applied to Stanford University were admitted -- the worst acceptance rate among top colleges. As colleges send acceptance letters out, reported acceptance rates elsewhere aren't much better: Harvard and Yale are at 6%; Columbia and Princeton at about 7%; and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago at about 8%.

Those are some pretty daunting numbers. The Times' David Leonhardt dug a little deeper to find that foreign students now take up double the number of slots compared with 20 years ago, constituting some 10% of admissions. Slots for Americans at Harvard have dropped 27% since 1994; 24% for Yale and Dartmouth.

Meanwhile, there is another story about a high school-er from Long Island, ranked 11th in his class, who applied to all eight Ivy League schools and was accepted to all of them.

As a parent, and a graduate of one of the top elite schools, and a volunteer admissions interviewer for my alma mater, I have been led to one conclusion: There has got to be a better, fairer, less stressful system for college admissions. It certainly is the "the opposite of a virtuous cycle at work" as Bruce Poch, a former admissions dean at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., is quoted in the Times. "Kids see that the admit rates are brutal and dropping, and it looks more like a crapshoot," he said. "So they send more apps, which forces the colleges to lower their admit rates, which spurs the kids next year to send even more apps."

...

"Setting those issues aside, there remains the riddle of the admissions process and how to improve what appears to be its somewhat random nature. How can one student get into all eight Ivys whereas another gets rejected from Stanford but admitted to Yale?

"How about a matching system for the elite schools, just as the University of California now uses where students rank which campus they prefer? Or better yet, what about using the same system as medical schools use to match residents? It is administered by an outside non-profit entity -- the National Resident Matching Program -- that has been matching residents and hospitals for over 60 years using a mathematical algorithm to pair the preferences of applicants with the best fit for the programs that need staff.

"Last year, the Match filled 99.4% of available residency positions, using an algorithm developed by Alvin Roth that helped garner him the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2012. The Match process begins much like the college applications process with an online application. It then culminates with medical students ranking programs they want to get into, as well as residencies independently ranking which students they want in their program through a match algorithm that errs on the side of benefiting the applicants. There is even a match process for couples who want to stay in the same geographic location.

"Having this type of a match program would reduce the stress of students (and parents). It would also reduce the number of applications to each school, and it would obviously increase the yield rate for every university. It might put the U.S. News & World Report rankings out of business, or it would force some changes in the inputs of those rankings to the better.

I"t's time to try to reduce the "crapshoot" nature of the college admissions process."

Maybe I didn't ruin the medical labor market after all

In a recent post I remarked on a Forbes blog post by a medical student at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School who proposed that it would be better if the medical Match, the NRMP, didn't exist, because then medical students would be able to freely choose the job they wanted. That's how free markets work, as she understands them.

Now, in the same blog, three of her classmates point out that things might not work that way...Why The Residency Matching System For Newly Minted M.D.'s Still Works

And (still in the same Forbes blog) another medical student, Jack DePaolo responds similarly: Sorry, Medical Students, But You're Not Entitled To Your Dream Job

All in all, this subsequent discussion is good news, it means that we economists aren't doing quite as bad a job explaining to the general public (and to medical students) how markets work and what they do, as it might have appeared from that first contribution.

Repugnant transactions in Nigeria: education, kidnapping and slavery

The news out of Nigeria has too many repugnant transactions to shake a stick at. The Islamic organization Boko Haram, whose name apparently means something like "education is forbidden" and which has kidnapped school girls, is threatening to sell them...

DAKAR, Senegal — In a video message apparently made by the leader of the Nigerian Islamist group Boko Haram, Abubakar Shekau claimed responsibility for the kidnapping of hundreds of schoolgirls nearly three weeks ago, called them slaves and threatened to “sell them in the market, by Allah.”

“Western education should end,” Mr. Shekau said in the 57-minute video, speaking in Hausa and Arabic. “Girls, you should go and get married.” The Islamist leader also warned that he would “give their hands in marriage because they are our slaves. We would marry them out at the age of 9. We would marry them out at the age of 12.”

...

The message from the Boko Haram leader once again highlighted the extent to which secular, Western-style schools are a principal target of the group, whose name roughly translates as “Western education is forbidden,” in an amalgam of pidgin English, Arabic and Hausa, one of the most commonly spoken languages in Africa. Mr. Shekau emphasized that the girls were taken because they were attending such a school.

“Western education is sin, it is forbidden, women must go and marry,” he said in the video message. "

********
Update: the quote above is from this NY Times story: Nigerian Islamist Leader Threatens to Sell Kidnapped Girls

Kidney Exchange and Operations Research: Edelman award presentation (video)

Here are all the 2014 Edelman Award Presentations, including the one my colleagues and I gave on kidney exchange, on March 31. Ours is the second from the top (the winning entry is first), and to see the video you have to scroll to the bottom of the description or our lecture (reproduced below) and click on "View Presentation." (I couldn't figure out how to embed it here.)

The video of our presentation (35 minutes) is more elaborate than most of the lectures I've done, since it includes some video footage. I joined Josh Morrison of the Alliance for Paired Donation and Itai Ashlagi of MIT in making the presentation.  Mike Rees spoke in some of the videos. Ross Anderson and David Gamarnik joined us to answer questions, and Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver joined for the celebratory dinner later in the day. (For our efforts, we are all 2014 Edelman Laureates.)

Alliance for Paired Donation with Boston College, Stanford University and MIT: Kidney Exchange

Presented by: Josh Morrison, Alvin E. Roth, Itai Ashlagi Authors: Alliance for Paired Donation:  Michael A. Rees, Michael.Rees2@utoledo.edu; Josh Morrison,joshcmorrison@gmail.com; Boston College: Tayfun Sönmez,sonmezt@bc.edu; M. Utku Ünver, unver@bc.edu MIT: Itai Ashlagi, iashlagi@mit.edu; Ross Anderson, rma350@gmail.com; David Gamarnik,gamarnik@mit.edu Stanford University:  Alvin E. Roth, alroth@stanford.edu Abstract: Many end-stage renal disease sufferers who require a kidney transplant to prolong their lives have relatives or associates who have volunteered to donate a kidney to them, but whose kidney is incompatible with their intended recipient. This incompatibility can be sometimes overcome by exchanging kidneys with another incompatible donor pair. Such kidney exchanges have emerged as a standard mode of kidney transplantation in the United States. The Alliance for Paired Donation (APD) developed and implemented an innovative operations research based methodology of non-simultaneous extended altruistic donor (NEAD) chains, which, by allowing a previously binding constraint (of simultaneity) to be relaxed, allowed better optimized matching of potential donors to patients, which greatly increases the number of possible transplants. Since 2006, the APD has saved more than 220 lives through its kidney exchange program, with more than 75% of these achieved through long non-simultaneous chains. The technology and methods pioneered by APD have been adopted by other transplant exchanges, resulting in thousands of lives already saved, with the promise of increasing impact in coming years. The percentage of transplants from non-simultaneous chains has already reached more than 6% of the total number of transplants from live donors (including directed living donors) in the last year. We describe the long-term optimization and market design research that supports this innovation. We also describe how the team of physicians and operations researchers worked to overcome the skepticism and resistance of the medical community to the NEAD innovation.

Gary Becker 1930-2014

Speaking of kidneys, the sad news this morning is that Gary Becker has passed away. I heard it by phone, and a quick search turned up Greg Mankiw's announcement.

I had coffee with Gary at the Hoover Institute earlier this year, after his op ed on cash for kidneys appeared in the WSJ, and later saw him at Eddie Lazear's birthday conference.

I'll miss him, although I didn't know him well.

**********
Update: here's the U. Chicago obituary.

Sally Satel on Why People Don’t Donate Their Kidneys

Sally Satel, in Sunday's NY Times, argues for some forms of compensation for donors, even if short of cash payments: Why People Don’t Donate Their Kidneys.

"We can’t solve the issue merely by getting more people to sign organ donor cards — though everyone should — or even by moving to an opt-out system, under which we would harvest people’s organs at death unless they had earlier indicated they didn’t wish to donate them. These solutions can do only so much, because relatively few people die in ways that leave their organs suitable for transplantation.

"To make a real impact on kidney shortage, we have to find ways to persuade more healthy young and middle-aged people to give a kidney to a stranger.

"Here is a plan to do just that. Donors would not get a lump sum of cash; instead, a governmental entity, or a designated charity, would offer them in-kind rewards, like a contribution to the donor’s retirement fund, an income tax credit or a tuition voucher.

"Meanwhile, imposing a waiting period of at least six months would ensure that donors didn’t act impulsively and that they were giving fully informed consent. Prospective compensated donors would be carefully screened for physical and emotional health, as is done for all donors now.

"These arrangements would screen out financially desperate individuals who might otherwise rush to donate for a large sum of instant cash and later regret it.

"The donors’ kidneys would be distributed to people on the waiting list, according to the rules now in place. (People who wanted to donate a kidney to a specific person — say, a father to a son — would still be able to, outside this system.) Finally, all rewarded donors would be guaranteed follow-up medical care for any complications, which is not ensured now.

"Plans like this have been in the air for decades, but physicians and policy makers have been wary of creating an ethically fraught organ market.
...
"Indeed, the event that led lawmakers to adopt the felony provision suggests that they had something else in mind. In the fall of 1983, while the bill was being drafted, Al Gore, then a representative from Tennessee and the bill’s lead sponsor, learned that H. Barry Jacobs, a Virginia physician, was planning to recruit people from poor countries, fly them to the United States and pay them for one of their kidneys while collecting a brokerage fee of $2,000 to $5,000 (Medicare accepted) from patients in need.

"Dr. Jacobs’s “business plan” — herding indigent people onto a plane to fly to a foreign operating room for a surgical procedure they barely understood — became the lightning rod for a general outcry against the idea of paying for and brokering organs.

 "Mr. Gore and his fellow sponsors wanted to prevent buyers from paying cash for kidneys, with wealthy purchasers’ taking advantage of poorer patients and enabling profiteering by intermediaries. They also, understandably, wanted to give altruism a chance — the main function of the act, after all, was to create a national network of voluntary organ procurement and distribution and maintain a federally overseen list.

"However, Mr. Gore was thinking ahead. He spoke of moving to “a voucher system or a tax credit to a donor’s estate” if “efforts to improve voluntary donation are unsuccessful.”

"On the 30th anniversary of the National Organ Transplant Act, in the shadow of the relentless waiting list, we must finally acknowledge that altruism isn’t enough. In-kind incentives provided by the government or a charity almost surely offer the best solution to the dire kidney shortfall. Let’s test compensation, rather than wait for another 100,000 people to join the queue."

**************
Update: here are the letters to the editor that the NY Times published in connection with this column.

Experiments in this life and second life

Here's an experiment done online, back when Second Life looked like it would be big...

Is avatar-to-avatar communication as effective as face-to-face communication? An Ultimatum Game experiment in First and Second Life, Ben Greiner, Mary Caravella, Alvin E. Roth
Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Available online 31 January 2014

Abstract: We report results from an Ultimatum Game experiment with and without pre-play communication, conducted both in a real-world experimental laboratory and in the virtual world Second Life. In the laboratory, we replicate previous results that communication increases offers and agreement rates significantly, and more so for face-to-face communication than for text-chat. In Second Life we detect a level shift to more cooperation when there is no communication, either driven by selection on unobservables or environmental effects. The higher cooperativeness in the virtual world lowers the need for additional communication between avatars in order to achieve efficient outcomes. Consistent with this we are not able to detect an effect of allowing avatar-to-avatar communication

Disgraced basketball team owners and kidney transplants--an unexpected connection

Virginia Postrel draws the connection: Latest Sterling Outrage Victim? Kidneys

"Earlier this month, Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling’s foundation pledged $3 million for kidney research at UCLA and made an initial payment of $425,000.
...
"Now, not surprisingly, UCLA has decided to return the money. “Mr. Sterling’s divisive and hurtful comments demonstrate that he does not share UCLA’s core values as a public university that fosters diversity, inclusion, and respect,” the university said in a press release.
...
"But it means that Sterling’s racist comments have now cost researchers precious funding in the fight against a racially biased disease. Blacks are more than three times as likely as whites to develop kidney disease and account for a third of U.S. kidney patients. Outrage won’t help their cause.

"The NBA could. The league is in a unique position to raise money for and awareness of kidney disease, which suffers from a low public profile and lack of celebrity representatives. It could start by donating Sterling’s $2.5 million fine to the UCLA nephrology program to replace the lost funds.
...
"This summer presents the perfect opportunity for the NBA to embrace kidney disease as a cause. On August 8, Alonzo Mourning will be inducted into the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. NBA fans know him as a defensive great and long-time center for the Miami Heat. He is also one of the country’s most famous kidney transplant recipients. His cousin Jason Cooper, who gave him the kidney, will be with him for the honors. "

School choice: fewer kids getting first choice may be a sign of success

Here's a report from Denver: Fewer top choice placements in Denver’s school selection process

Denver’s SchoolChoice process is a three-year old initiative billed as “one form, one timeline, all schools,” which aimed to make school enrollment fairer. Parents submit up to five choices for potential schools. Those who do not participate or do not get one of their five choices are automatically enrolled in their neighborhood school. This year is the first since the system’s launch in 2011 in which the number of participants who received a top choice declined.

"District officials are trying to figure out what caused that drop. One theory is that more people applied to the district’s most competitive programs.


“Even though there are fewer participants, more people may be pursuing high quality programs,” said Brian Eschbacher, who heads the district’s planning and choice department. That, he said, is the goal of the process: for parents to be able to choose the best program for their children."

Kim Krawiec's class on Taboo Trades

If you're interested in repugnant transactions, Kim Krawiec's webpage for her class at Duke on Taboo Trades is a great resource, as are her blog posts on the subject.

The market for affairs

Here's the latest on the growing 'infidelity economy', facilitated by the website Ashley Madison, about which I've blogged before.

Adultery is good for your marriage – if you don’t get caught, says infidelity website boss As global membership to the world’s biggest infidelity site soars to over 24 million, its founder explains the international appeal of adultery

"Famed for its catchy motto – “Life is short. Have an affair” – the dating service is free for women but paying for men.
...
"The website is currently in the throes of a rapid global expansion: since launching in Canada on Valentine’s Day in 2002, it has attracted more than 24 million members in 37 countries, with South Korea launched last week."

Repugnant transaction watch: New Hampshire Senate votes to repeal anti-adultery law

Here's the story, which comes with this map of states with anti-adultery laws:

"Adultery isn't just a crime in the eyes of your spouse. In 21 states, cheating in a marriage is against the law, punishable by a fine or even jail time.

The New Hampshire state Senate voted Thursday to repeal its anti-adultery law, sending the bill to Gov. Maggie Hassan, who says she's likely to sign it into law. Under the law the Legislature voted to repeal, adultery is a Class B misdemeanor and punishable by a fine of up to $1,200.

"I don't think there's any appetite in New Hampshire to use police powers to enforce a marriage," state Rep. Tim O'Flaherty, the bill's sponsor, said during a public hearing last month.

Last year, Colorado repealed its anti-adultery law.

States' anti-adultery laws are rarely enforced, a vestige of our country's Puritanical beginnings, says Naomi Cahn, a law professor at the George Washington University Law School."

Law clerk hiring

Over at Concurring Opinions a little while ago was this :The Law Clerk Hiring Process – An Interview with Federal Judge Thomas Ambro

Question: How far in advance do you select your clerks?  Some federal judges are now hiring two years in advance?  What is your current practice?

Answer:  Right now (March 2014) I have all positions filled for the 2014-’15 and the 2015-’16 terms.  I also have two clerks committed for the 2016-’17 term. My typical lead time for a clerk is two years. That may mean that a clerk will be at least a year removed from law school when she or he begins working in my chambers. That time is usually spent in another clerkship (almost always a District Court clerkship, though on two occasions it has been another Circuit Court clerkship), with a law firm, or sometimes both another clerkship and work in a law firm.

....

"In addition to letters of recommendation, I welcome calls from recommenders. That tells me that the recommender is willing to put her or his reputation on the line for the applicant, something I value highly. It is also a great shortcut to my becoming aware of good applicants.

Question: Apart from typos or grammatical errors, what is the most common mistake that applicants make?

Answer: In addition to believing that a high-profile recommender is preferable to one who knows you better, the most common mistake I observe is when an applicant feigns interest in a particular judge. When the hiring plan was in place, you could discover that very quickly. If calls or emails by judges to an applicant were not to be made before a set time on a particular day and I got my calls or emails sent out timely, I could tell who was interested by how quickly they responded. If an applicant got back to me within half an hour, she or he was interested.  If that person got back to me hours later, I was “low on their totem pole.” Now that the hiring protocols are discontinued, it becomes harder to know who is interested. That is yet another reason why I try to get as much information as I can from persons who recommend applicants.

...

Question: I see that as of February 13, 2014, the Administrative Office of the Courts has discontinued the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan. How do you feel about that?

Answer: I wish that there would be a plan in place. The hiring plan that was in place had many flaws, including making hiring season a frenetic chase for information and significant gaming of the system. That said, there was at least some organization.  I wish judges would be willing to consider something akin to the match system that exists for those in the medical profession. There would be a period for interviewing applicants (preferably after the 2L grades are out), both the judges and the applicants would prioritize their preferences and submit them to a central place, and those preferences would be dealt with by an algorithm in a computer program. No doubt that system could be “gamed” as well—for example, by having a recommender or other school official gauge a judge’s interest in an applicant, and vice versa, before the preference picks are submitted. That is not bad, however, as it is a good way to determine which applicants are truly interested in clerking for me.

NAS Research Briefings, 2014

 I'm in Washington DC today and will give a short talk at the National Academy of Sciences, along with several other new members.

Saturday April 26 - Research Briefings
A Sampling of the Work of Members Elected in 2013: Gregory P. Asner, Terry A. Plank, Alvin E. Roth, Robert D. Schreiber, Kristi S. Anseth and Stephen R. Quake.

Later in the day will be the induction ceremony, which I gather will be webcast live at www.nasonline.org beginning at 8:00 pm (Eastern Daylight Time--5pm Pacific for you Californians...).

Sadly, Dale Mortensen, the other economist elected to the NAS in 2013, passed away on January 9, 2014.

Iranian blog with ads for selling kidneys

Here's a website (in Persian) in which prospective kidney sellers advertise.

Google translate worked well enough to give me an idea of what the ads say; here are some of them translated by Afshin Nikzad...

The first line of each ad is bold, and has the following format:

Name (gender), Age, Blood type, Price.

Manizhe (female), 22, AB, $14.5K
single, athlete, bachelors in psychology.
Due to financial needs, I'm selling my kidney.

Massoume (female), 45, A+, negotiable price
Hello. I am a 45 year old woman, bachelors in business administration,
fluent in English, can work with computers, experience of work in a
real estate agency. I migrated from Tehran to a village in Mazandaran
6 month ago. I can't find any job fitting my work experience, and have
spent all my savings in the past 6 month. I am willing to sell an organ
(to save my dignity).
contact: 09376606455, http://zh32329292.blogfa.com

Sarah (female), 30, A+, negotiable price
urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent, urgent
I need to sell my kidney because I am in a lot of debts, and I am
broke [bankrupt].
Contact: 09385786869

unknown, 23, B+
I am in serious need of money, I am getting homeless; soon please.
please text your offered price. I really need money. Can travel to any
where, the buyer is responsible for all the expenses.
Contact: 09306890335

vahid (male), 28, A+, $20K
from Tehran. completely healthy. doesn't smoke or drink.
want to sell my kidney for financial problems.

Shahin (male), 24
Hello. I am in charge of the family since my father is ill. It has been
very difficult to go at work and study at the same time, I have quit
university since a few months ago. I'm really tired of this situation.
Please offer a fair price, cause I am in need; I am doing this cause I
see no other way.

? (female), 22, A+, negotiable price
Hello, I am a 22 year old woman, and I need to sell my kidney for my
college expenses. athlete. Can travel to any where in Iran. Price is
negotiable.
Contact: 09308665458.

Maryam (female), 25, AB+, $26K
healthy. need the money to pay debts.
The buyer is responsible for all other expenses.
contact: 09189978478

Amin (male), unknown, unknown, $8K
Hello. express sale. My child had eye-surgery and is in hospital right
now. I need to pay the expenses before the surgery. The price is $8K.
Sorry that I am writing like the dealers.
With best wishes for kidney patients.

Ali (male), 22, A+, negotiable price
For serious financial problems, and for my father's surgery, I need to
sell my kidney.
Contact: 09359818234

Amir (male), 41, A+
in urgent need to sell my kidney. I have two families and 8 children, I
am in debt because of my housing rents.
Contact: 09335751908

Milad (male), 19, O+, $40K
I have been under a lot of pressure in life, and it made me do such a
thing [selling his kidney] in this age. I hope no one would ever
experience a similar situation.
Very healthy. If you are determined to buy, the price is negotiable.
contact: 09337339240, http://miladmadise@yahoo.com

mojtaba (male), 31, O+, $8K.
very healthy.
Blood type: o+
Price: $8K"

X-STEM symposium: Promoting STEM fields to K-12 Students, April 24

Getting more American kids interested in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) fields seems like a worthwhile endeavor.

X-STEM Extreme STEM Symposium - Top Scientists and Inspiring Engineers Speak to K-12 Students - Thursday, April 24, 2014 / Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington DC -
Here's an article that initially brought it to my attention, since it used market design as an example:
What This Life-Saving Innovation in Mathematics and Economics Can Teach Students About STEM

It's connected to the US Science and Engineering Festival held this weekend in the same venue.

"What have we learned from market design?" now freely available from the EJ

My 2008 paper What have we learned from market design? is now out from behind the subscription wall and freely available from the EJ. (It may have been available for some time, but I just noticed it...)  Here's the pdf version.

Abstract

This article discusses some things we have learned about markets, in the process of designing marketplaces to fix market failures. To work well, marketplaces have to provide thickness, i.e. they need to attract a large enough proportion of the potential participants in the market; they have to overcome the congestion that thickness can bring, by making it possible to consider enough alternative transactions to arrive at good ones; and they need to make it safe and sufficiently simple to participate in the market, as opposed to transacting outside of the market, or having to engage in costly and risky strategic behaviour. I will draw on recent examples of market design ranging from labour markets for doctors and new economists, to kidney exchange, and school choice in New York City and Boston.

The Economic Journal Volume 118, Issue 527, pages 285–310, March 2008

More on circumcision

Circumcision is a medical procedure that is also a traditional religious ritual for Jews and Muslims. There are also those who regard it as a repugnant transaction that should be banned, either because of questions about whether it serves a medical purpose, concern about elective procedures on children (an issue of consent, or in some readings, abuse), and antipathy to Jews and Muslims. (In California, a potential coalition to ban circumcision came apart when some of the organizers revealed strong anti-semitic inclinations, and in fact a 2011 law put a stop to the movement: New California law prohibits circumcision bans)
************
In Israel the anti-semitic component of proposed European bans is regarded as a political issue.

Knesset produces film defending circumcision
http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4485174,00.html 

"After Council of Europe uses Jewish director's documentary to specify risks of religious ritual, Israeli parliament creates film featuring Jewish and Arab hospital directors voicing their support for medical advantages of circumcision"
**************

Recently some new medical evidence suggests that circumcision should be regarded as akin to child vaccination: Circumcision Benefits Outweigh Risks, Study Reports

"The authors conclude that the benefits — among them reduced risks of urinary tract infection, prostate cancer, sexually transmitted diseases and, in female partners, cervical cancer — outweigh the risks of local infection or bleeding. Several studies, including two randomized clinical trials, found no long-term adverse effects of circumcision on sexual performance or pleasure.
...
“Male circumcision is in principle equivalent to childhood vaccination,” said the lead author, Brian J. Morris, emeritus professor of medical sciences at the University of Sydney. “Just as there are opponents of vaccination, there are opponents of circumcision. But their arguments are emotional and unscientific, and should be disregarded.” ******

Prior posts on efforts to ban circumcision here.