AEA Econ job market scramble is open

Good luck to those on the job market. If you are still looking (for jobs or for economists to hire) this is the week to enter the Scramble.

Economics Job Market "Scramble" for new Ph.D.s

2017 Job Market Scramble Timeline:

Registration for the 2017 Job Market Scramble will open on March 15, 2017. 

The deadline for registration is March 22, 2017 at 5:00 pm ET. 

The Scramble will open for viewing by registered participants only on March 24, 2017. Scramble viewing will close on April 10, 2017. 

Brief Description:

Occasionally prospective employers of new Ph.D. economists exhaust their candidates before hiring someone during the winter/spring "job market" period. Similarly, new economics Ph.D.s seeking a job sometimes find that all of the prospective employers with whom they have interviewed have hired someone else before they have secured an appointment.

To address these problems, the AEA has established a "Job Market Scramble" web site to facilitate communication between employers and job seekers in late spring. In March, employers that continue to have an open position previously listed in Job Openings for Economists (JOE) may post a short notice of its availability (with a link to theJOE listing). Similarly, new or recent economics Ph.D. job seekers still looking for a position may post a short announcement of their continued availability, with a link to their JOE candidate profile. The web site will open for viewing to those who have listed a position or availability soon after listings close. There is no charge to participate in the "Job Market Scramble."

See the Scramble Guide for more detailed information.

Signaling interest for college admissions

I've blogged before about Initial View, a service for overseas applicants to American colleges. It provides a video interview that can be part of their application, and also a signaling mechanism by which they can send a "star" to up to two colleges, to signal particular interest.

Some colleges make clear that they value such signals: here's a paragraph from the page for international applicants of Bates College.

"Does Bates accept interviews conducted through InitialView?

Yes. InitialView includes an interview and writing sample. Please list Bates as a recipient for your interview and designate a star if Bates is a top choice college for you."

In the market for new economists, some employers have adopted the same strategy and encourage applicants to send one of their AEA signals to them:

Signaling (by candidates) and advertising (by employers) on the Economics job market

Matchmaking. La scienza economica del dare a ciascuno il suo: Who Gets What and Why in Italian

Matchmaking. La scienza economica del dare a ciascuno il suo  
(Matchmaking. The economics of giving to each his own).

I guess that's a pretty good way to translate Who Gets What and Why.

Nico Lacetera writes: "I like the subtitle  "a ciascuno il suo", which refers to a latin way of saying (suum cuique  ~ to each, their own) -- in turn, this is the title of a famous novel by a major Italian contemporary writer, Leonardo Sciascia."

It's costly to interview for residency programs

Here's a debate about how to reduce the time and money cost of interviewing faced by many applicants for medical residencies and fellowships.

Medical physics has a fairly recent match, here's a debate in the Journal of Applied Clinical Medical Physics that focuses primarily on replacing on-site interviews with either electronic interviews (skype or equivalent), or with interviews at a conference, i.e. all in one place.

Maximizing the cost benefit of physics residency interview
Justus Adamson and/vs Sonja Dieterich

US Organ donation laws by state

Here's a handy map of U.S. organ donation laws by state.

Check out the tabs for legal consent, medical examiner/coroner, and support for living donors.

Who Gets What and Why in Polish

Matchmaking. Kto co dostaje i dlaczego

Ekonomia kojarzenia stron transakcji i projektowania rynku 

From the publisher MT Biznes

Matchmaking. Who gets what and why  Alvin E. Roth

Experimental macroeconomics

The annual experimental macro workshop and summer school that have in the past been in Barcelona will this year be at Stony Brook (the email address seems to be stonybrook in barcelona:):

Call for Papers: WORKSHOP ON THEORETICAL AND EXPERIMENTAL MACROECONOMICS
The Eighth International Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics will be held July 18-19, 2017 in Stony Brook, NY as part of the Stony Brook Summer Game Theory Festival.
The keynote speakers for the 2017 workshop are Xavier Gabaix (NYU) and Stephanie Schmitt-Grohé (Columbia University)
Researchers working on behavioral, experimental and theoretical approaches to addressing macroeconomic questions are invited to submit a paper for this two-day conference. The deadline for submissions is March 31, 2017. To submit a paper, please send your paper to stonybrook@upf.edu. 
For several decades, macroeconomic models have been built on explicit micro-foundations about the behavior of firms, consumers and government agencies, leading to closer ties between micro/game theorists and macro theorists.  On the applied side, the assumptions and predictions of macroeconomic models have historically been tested using non-experimental field data, collected mostly by government agencies. An alternative empirical approach attracting increased attention is to evaluate these models using controlled laboratory settings with human subjects, minimizing noisy, unknown, and confounding factors present in field data. Experimental findings can be informative about questions like equilibrium selection or the efficacy of various government policies as well as for the validation of various behavioral theories.
Further information about the Workshop is available at: http://gtcenter.org/Downloads/call_for_papers.pdf

SUMMER SCHOOL IN EXPERIMENTAL MACROECONOMICS: Call for applicants
The 10th Experimental Economics Summer School in Macroeconomics will be held in Stony Brook, NY, USA, from July 17-23, 2017.
The location of the 2017 summer school (and the related workshop) has been changed from Barcelona to Stony Brook, NY, USA.  This year’s summer school will be a part of the Stony Brook Summer Game Theory Festival.
For more details about the summer school including how to apply, visit the summer school webpage:
https://www.upf.edu/leex/events/bleess_2017/index.html
The deadline for applications is Friday, April 7, 2017.
We will provide (shared) accommodation for all invited summer school students in the dorms of the State University of New York (SUNY) at Stony Brook. Depending on our funding we will additionally provide some scholarships to a few students.
Summer school students are also invited to attend the 2-day, 8th International Workshop on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics from July 18-19, 2017 that will also take place in Stony Brook, USA.
Please forward this announcement to all interested parties.
Workshop and summer school organizers:
John Duffy (University of California, Irvine)
Frank Heinemann (Technische Universität Berlin)
Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, and Barcelona GSE)
Shyam Sunder (Yale University)

Thoughts on 'extreme altruism,' focusing on nondirected kidney donors

Here's an interesting article about altruism, non-directed kidney donors, and the difficulty of studying them (but maybe they are the opposite of psychopaths):
The Selfless Biology of the Extreme Altruist
What is the opposite of a psychopath? What is the limit of human goodness?
by Tanya Basu
(the url is as informative as the headline: https://www.inverse.com/article/28280-kidney-donation-extreme-altruism-can-people-be-selfless)

The article focuses on one particular non-directed donor, but also discusses some altruism researchers (and has a slightly confused view of economics).

Here are some sentences that particularly caught my eye:

"In 2015, Brooks and his wife were on a summer road trip. They were listening to Freakonomics, the NPR podcast spun off from the best-selling pop-economics book, when an episode called “Make Me a Match” came on. It was a profile of the Stanford economist Al Roth, whose Nobel Prize-winning work considered kidney donation matching as an economic market, maximizing its efficiency and potential. Roth’s work was unique because it looked at this unique market as an example of how non-monetary systems could run efficiently purely by matching, no system necessary. Brooks — otherwise a smooth talker — stammers when describing the power of that podcast, saying he felt he’d “been struck by lightning” when he first heard it. He shudders with emotion describing the realization that he, too, should donate his kidney."
...
"By September, he’d matched with a patient on the National Kidney Registry; by November, he’d given up his spare kidney to a total stranger (he later learned her name was Danielle). In February 2016, he founded Donor to Donor which matches non-direct donors with those looking for a kidney, citing his experience as an epiphany in shaping his life’s purpose. Before meeting me at the Yale Club, he’d convinced a potential donor to go through with the operation. He described the feeling of doing so as being something like getting a good grade."

Global kidney exchange (and pushback) in the American Journal of Transplantation

I've written earlier about the possibility of Global Kidney Exchange (GKE), in which foreign patient-donor pairs who cannot afford transplantation are invited to join American kidney exchange chains. The idea is that the cost of the foreign pair's surgeries and postoperative care can be paid for by the savings that result whenever an American is transplanted (because transplantation is so much cheaper than dialysis).

The March issue of the American Journal of Transplantation  contains a report of the first foreign pair, and the chain of exchanges that included them.

Curiously, the issue also contains an editorial that is profoundly ambivalent about GKE, in a way that makes clear that the issues of repugnance that surround organ donation, and incentives, and equity, and patients and donors from developing countries, are not vanishing in the face of the benefits that GKE provides to patient-donor pairs from developing countries.

Finally, for those in a hurry, here's a nice summary by Timothy Taylor on his blog the Conversable Economist: Global Kidney Exchange.

Here's our paper reporting the first global kidney exchange chain:

Kidney Exchange to Overcome Financial Barriers to Kidney Transplantation
by M. A. Rees, T. B. Dunn, C. S. Kuhr, C. L. Marsh, J. Rogers, S. E. Rees, A. Cicero, L. J. Reece, A. E. Roth, O. Ekwenna, D. E. Fumo, K. D. Krawiec, J. E. Kopke, S. Jain, M. Tan, S. R. Paloyo
American Journal of Transplantation, Volume 17, Issue 3 March 2017, Pages 782–790

Abstract: Organ shortage is the major limitation to kidney transplantation in the developed world. Conversely, millions of patients in the developing world with end-stage renal disease die because they cannot afford renal replacement therapy—even when willing living kidney donors exist. This juxtaposition between countries with funds but no available kidneys and those with available kidneys but no funds prompts us to propose an exchange program using each nation's unique assets. Our proposal leverages the cost savings achieved through earlier transplantation over dialysis to fund the cost of kidney exchange between developed-world patient–donor pairs with immunological barriers and developing-world patient–donor pairs with financial barriers. By making developed-world health care available to impoverished patients in the developing world, we replace unethical transplant tourism with global kidney exchange—a modality equally benefitting rich and poor. We report the 1-year experience of an initial Filipino pair, whose recipient was transplanted in the United states with an American donor's kidney at no cost to him. The Filipino donor donated to an American in the United States through a kidney exchange chain. Follow-up care and medications in the Philippines were supported by funds from the United States. We show that the logistical obstacles in this approach, although considerable, are surmountable.

Here's an illustration of the idea:




And here's the first chain, to date: the Filipino pair is pair 1 (the chain was begun by an American nondirected donor who donated to the Filipino patient, whose donor in turn continued the chain...).

****************
And here's the accompanying editorial:
Walking a Tightrope or Blazing a Trail?
by A. C. Wiseman, J. S. Gill

Abstract: Engaging compatible kidney donor–recipient pairs from other countries for participation in a paired kidney exchange program in the United States poses a number of ethical challenges that deserve close scrutiny. Rees et al's article is on page 782.

Here's one sentence that illustrates the power of repugnance (it suggests that maybe the Filipino pair who joined the kidney exchange were really being exploited...):
"At a societal level, American patients received a disproportionate share of the societal benefit enabled by the participation of the compatible Filipino pair in KPE, which may not be adequately remedied by the payment for transplantation and posttransplant care."
*************

Update: and here's our coauthor Kim Krawiec at the Faculty Lounge: GKE Debate in Current Issue of The American Journal of Transplantation

Matching deceased organs to patients

Here's colorful story about the software that offers deceased donor organs to patients, via their surgeons:
Matching hearts — and kidneys and lungs. This website makes organ transplants in the US possible

Here's a UNOS page on How organs are matched.

Tom Starzl (1926-2017)

Dr. Thomas E. Starzl has passed away at 90. He pioneered the first liver transplants in the 1960's. He came to the University of Pittsburgh in 1981 (a year before I did) and was a towering figure there, a local hero as well as an international one,.  He made Pitt, and Pittsburgh a world center for transplantation, and for the education of transplant surgeons.

Here's the NY Times obituary: Dr. Thomas E. Starzl, Pioneering Liver Surgeon, Dies at 90

Here's the announcement from the University of Pittsburgh: Thomas E. Starzl, M.D., Ph.D., ‘Father of Transplantation,’ Dies at 90

Third Workshop on Marketplace Innovation, Stanford, June 1-2, 2017

Third Workshop on Marketplace Innovation

Stanford University, Stanford, California

June 1-2, 2017

Abstract submission deadline: March 15, 2017
Notification of acceptance: April 1, 2017
Workshop registration deadline: May 1, 2017

Organizers

Ramesh Johari, Management Science and Engineering, Stanford University
Ilan Lobel, Stern School of Business, New York University
Costis Maglaras, Columbia Business School, Columbia University
Gabriel Weintraub, Graduate School of Business, Stanford University

Description

Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the “right” partner. The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants. Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants. As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. Given these variables, market participants often face complex problems when optimizing their own decisions. In the supply side such decisions may include the assortment of products to offer and their price structure, while in the demand side they may include how much to bid for different goods and what feedback to offer about past purchasing experiences. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.

In this workshop we seek work that improves our understanding of these markets, both from the perspective of the market operator and the market participants. With respect to the former we are particularly interested in work that derives useful insights on how to design these markets, taking into account their operational details and engineering and technological constraints. With respect to the market participants, we seek work that introduces novel approaches to optimize their decisions and improves our understanding of their interactions within the market. We look for a mix of approaches including modeling, theory, and empirics, using a wide range of tools drawn from operations management, game theory, auctions and mechanism design, optimization, stochastic modeling, revenue management, econometrics, or statistics.

The list of markets to be studied includes but it is not restricted to:

• Online marketplaces, such as eBay, Etsy, etc.
• Internet advertising, including sponsored search and display ad exchanges
• Sharing economy markets, such as Uber/Lyft, AirBnb, etc.
• Online labor markets, such as Amazon mTurk, Upwork, Thumbtack, etc.
• Procurement markets, such as technology-enabled government procurement
• Health care exchanges
• Financial exchanges

Plenary speakers

The workshop will have several invited distinguished plenary speakers from academia and industry, including:

• Susan Athey, Stanford GSB
• Omar Besbes, Columbia Business School
• Vivek Farias, MIT Sloan
• Ashish Goel, Stanford MS&E
• Garud Iyengar, Columbia IEOR
• Paul Milgrom, Stanford Economics
• Asu Ozdaglar, MIT EECS
• Bob Phillips, Uber
• Tuomas Sandholm, Carnegie Mellon Computer Science
• Hal Varian, Google

Abstract submission

To present in the workshop we invite abstract submissions of at most one page. Papers will be accepted either for a regular presentation, or as a poster. There are no proceedings for this workshop, so we welcome submissions of work-in-progress, or work that is submitted or accepted for publication elsewhere. 

Kdo dostává co – a proč : Who Gets What and Why in Czech

Kdo dostává co – a proč   (Who Gets What and Why--Czech translation)

Who Gets What and Why: Czech

The Retail Market for Illicit Drugs

Outlawing a market is often the first step in the design of the illegal black market that results. Here's a paper from the most recent AER on the market for crack cocaine:

A Structural Model of the Retail Market for Illicit Drugs
By Manolis Galenianos and Alessandro Gavazza

Abstract: We estimate a model of illicit drugs markets using data on purchases of  crack  cocaine.  Buyers  are  searching  for  high-quality  drugs,  but  they determine drugs’ quality (i.e., their purity) only after consuming  them.  Hence,  sellers  can  rip  off  first-time  buyers  or  can  offer  higher-quality drugs to induce buyers to purchase from them again. In  equilibrium,  a  distribution  of  qualities  persists.  The  estimated  model  implies  that  if  drugs  were  legalized,  in  which  case  purity  could be regulated and hence observable, the average purity of drugs would  increase  by  approximately  20  percent  and  the  dispersion  would decrease by approximately 80 percent. Moreover, increasing penalties may raise the purity and affordability of the drugs traded by increasing sellers’ relative profitability of targeting loyal buyers versus first-time buyers.

Who Gets What and Why in Spanish for Latin America

Here's the Spanish translation of my book Who Gets What and Why, for Latin America, published by Oceana.

Lo que sea de cada quien. La economía de las relaciones y el diseño de mercado

I gather from Manu Vespa that "Lo Que Sea De Cada Quien" is an idiom common in some parts of Latin America which means something like "To Each His Own." (More literally it seems to be "Whatever could be for each person..."

Google translate renders the title as "Whatever it is for each one. The economy of relationships and market design"
************

The Spanish translation for Spain was a much more literal "Who gets what and why":
Quién obtiene qué y por qué
LA NUEVA ECONOMÍA DEL DISEÑO DE MERCADOS

Surrogacy in China: available but illegal

The Global Times has this story:
Surrogacy to ‘remain illegal’ By Liu Caiyu  

"China will not legalize surrogacy and will crack down on the crime, China's top health authority said Wednesday, after the People's Daily published an article hinting at support for the practice for older mothers.

Surrogacy is a complex problem involving law and ethics, and most nations and regions in the world ban any form of surrogacy and punish participating institutes and personnel, said Mao Qunan, a spokesperson with China's National Health and Family Planning Commission (NHFPC), said Wednesday during a press conference in Beijing.

"The commission and the government will continue to crack down on surrogacy and ensure the public can get safe and effective assisted reproductive technology," Mao said.

Since China eased its one-child policy in 2014, allowing couples to have a second child if either parent is an only child, and further loosened it to allow all couples to have two children in January 2016, more older mothers are trying to conceive, but are finding it difficult, a People's Daily article on Friday said.

The article quoted a doctor as saying that nearly 90 percent of women cannot conceive naturally after the age of 45. The average age for a final pregnancy is around the age of 40, although the number of older women giving birth has seen a continuous increase.

Among the 90 million families in China eligible to have a second child, 60 percent of the women are above 35 years old and 50 percent are over  40, data released by the NHFPC in January 2016 shows. In 1996, only 0.4 percent of women above 45 gave birth, rising to 4 percent in 2005 and 10 percent in 2015, it said.

Although China has a huge demand for surrogacy services, from both an ethical and legal standpoint, it is not feasible to legalize it now, Xia Yinlan, a professor at the China University of Political Science and Law,  told the Global Times.

"Legalizing surrogacy could worsen the problem of trafficked women, which is not humane and would increase discrimination against women," said Xia."

Incentives in Computer Science--Tim Roughgarden

There was a time when only economists worried about incentives, but as this great looking computer science course by Tim Roughgarden shows, that time is long past...

CS 269I: Incentives in Computer Science

Instructor:

• Tim Roughgarden (Office hours (note new time): Mondays 12:15-1:15 PM, Gates 474. Email: tim@cs.stanford.edu.)

Prerequisites: Mathematical maturity at the level of undergraduate algorithms (CS161). Programming maturity at the level of 106B/X.
Course Description: Many 21st-century computer science applications require the design of software or systems that interact with multiple self-interested participants. This course will provide students with the vocabulary and modeling tools to reason about such design problems. Emphasis will be on understanding basic economic and game theoretic concepts that are relevant across many application domains, and on case studies that demonstrate how to apply these concepts to real-world design problems. Topics include auction and contest design, equilibrium analysis, cryptocurrencies, design of networks and network protocols, matching markets, reputation systems, and social choice. Possible case studies include BGP routing, Bitcoin, eBay's reputation system, Facebook's advertising mechanism, Mechanical Turk, and dynamic pricing in Uber/Lyft.
General references: Twenty Lectures on Algorithmic Game Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2016. See also the Amazon page.

• This textbook is based on the course CS364A. The overlap with 269I will be roughly 20-25%. Though if you enjoy this course, you're likely to also enjoy many of the topics in this book.

The following collection is older and targeted more to researchers than to students, but is still useful for several topics.

• Algorithmic Game Theory, Cambridge University Press, 2007. Read the entire book online by clicking here (look under the "Resources" tab).

We will also draw on the following books for some of the lectures.

• Parkes and Seuken, Economics and Computation (draft), 2016. (Stanford access only.)
• Easley and Kleinberg, Networks, Crowds, and Markets, 2010.

Lecture notes

• Lecture 1 (The Draw/College Admissions) [beta version]
• Lecture 2 (Stable Matching) [beta version]
• Lecture 3 (Strategic Voting) [beta version]
• Lecture 4 (Voting Rules as MLE/Knapsack Voting) [beta version]
• Lecture 5 (Incentives in P2P Networks) [beta version]
• Lecture 6 (Incentivizing Participation) [beta version]
• Lecture 7 (Selfish Routing) [beta version]
• Lecture 8 (Incentives in BGP Routing) [beta version]
• Lecture 9 (Incentives in Bitcoin) [beta version]
• Lecture 10 (Incentives in Crowdsourcing) [beta version]
• Lecture 11 (slides) (Incentives in Societal Networks) [guest lecture by Balaji Prabhakar]
• Lecture 12 (Reputation Systems) [beta version]
• Lecture 13 (Auction Basics) [beta version]
• Lecture 14 (Sponsored Search) [beta version]
• Lecture 15 (VCG Mechanism) [beta version]
• Lecture 16 (Revenue-Optimal Auctions) [beta version]
• Lecture 17 (Incentiving Forecasts and Feedback) [beta version]
• Lecture 18 (Prediction Markets) [beta version]
• Lecture 19 (Time-Inconsistent Planning) [beta version]
• Lecture 20 (Fair Division) [beta version]

Coursework

• Exercise Sets (50%): Exercise sets will be handed out on Wednesdays and will be due one week later. You can work in pairs, if you wish.
  • Here's a LaTeX template that you can use to type up solutions. Here and here are good introductions to LaTeX.
  • Week 1 Exercises
  • Week 2 Exercises
  • Week 3 Exercises
  • Week 4 Exercises
  • No exercises for Week 5!
  • No exercises for Week 6!
  • Week 7 Exercises
  • Week 8 Exercises
  • Week 9 Exercises
• Final Project (50%): For details and some example topics, see here.

Tentative Syllabus (will likely change)

• Week 1: Introduction to incentives through killer examples.
• Week 2: Social choice (voting, Arrow's impossibility theorem, etc.).
• Week 3: Incentives in peer-to-peer and social networks (e.g., incentives in BitTorrent).
• Week 4: Incentives in communication networks (routing, flow control, etc.).
• Week 5: Incentives in cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin).
• Week 6: Reputation systems. Incentives in crowdsourcing.
• Week 7: Basic auction theory (eBay, sponsored search auctions).
• Week 8: Advanced auction theory and mechanism design (Facebook advertising auctions, contest design).
• Week 9: Scoring rules and prediction markets.
• Week 10: Lessons from behavioral economics (i.e., how do people make decisions, anyway?).

Detailed Lecture Schedule

• Lecture 1 (Mon Sept 26): The incentives of the Draw, past and present. Pareto optimality and strategyproofness. College admissions. One-sided vs. two-sided markets. The National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). Supplementary reading:
  • Check out the changes made to the Draw in 1970, as reported by the Stanford Daily. The other articles make for a fascinating time capsule, as well.
  • The original Gale-Shapley paper (1962). It's very easy to read!
• Lecture 2 (Wed Sept 28): Stable matchings. Properties of the deferred acceptance (Gale-Shapley) mechanism. Could college admissions go through a centralized clearinghouse? Supplementary reading:
  • Biró, Student Admissions in Hungary as Gale and Shapley Envisaged, 2008.
  • Section 2 of Lecture 10 from CS364A (or from the optional textbook).
  • The paper that compares the evolution of different resident-hospital matching algorithms in the U.K. (Roth, 1991).
  • Citation for the 2012 Nobel Prize (Roth and Shapley).
• Lecture 3 (Mon Oct 3): Participatory democracy. Strategic voting. Spoilers and the 2000 US election. Majority, plurality, ranked-choice voting, Borda counts. Gibbard-Satterthwaite and the impossibility of reasonable strategyproof voting rules. Arrow's Impossibility Theorem. Compromises, single-peaked preferences, and the median voting rule. Supplementary reading and resources:
  • Participatory budgeting in general and at Stanford.
  • The rank aggregation problem.
  • Reasonably short proofs of the Gibbard-Satterthwaite and Arrow impossibility theorems are here (see Sections 1.2.3 and 1.2.4).
  • Chapter 23 of the Easley/Kleinberg book (see general references).
• Lecture 4 (Wed Oct 5): Subjective vs. objective interpretations of voting rules. Metaphor: linear regression as the maximum likelihood solution with normally distributed errors. Marquis de Condorcet and majority rule as a maximum likelihood estimator. The Kemeny-Young rule. Knapsack voting and its properties. Supplementary reading and resources:
  • The dramatic life of Marquis de Condorcet.
  • See Pnyx for an implementation of the Kemeny rule.
  • Knapsack voting, by Goel/Krishnaswamy/Sakshuwong (2014).
  • Section 15.2 of the Parkes/Suen book (see general references).
• Lecture 5 (Mon Oct 10): Incentives in peer-to-peer (P2P) networks. History lesson: Napster, Gnutella, etc. Free riding on Gnutella. Prisoner's Dilemma. Repeated Prisoner's Dilemma: the grim trigger and Tit-for-Tat stategies. Tit-for-tat in the BitTorrent reference client. Strategic clients (BitThief and BitTyrant). Supplementary reading:
  • Chapter 5 of the Parkes/Seuken book draft, above.
  • Free Riding on Gnutella (Adar/Huberman, 2000)
  • The Axelrod tournaments: The Evolution of Cooperation (Axelrod/Hamilton, 1981)
  • Incentives Build Robustness in BitTorrent (Cohen, 2003) describes the motivation for the original design.
  • BitThief (Locher/Moor/Schmid/Wattenhofer, 2006)
  • BitTyrant (Piatek/Isdal/Anderson/Krishnamurthy/Venkataramani, 2007)
• Lecture 6 (Wed Oct 12): Coordination games. Technology adoption and network cascades. Individual vs. collective preferences in public good problems. Case study: badge design in Stack Overflow, Coursera, etc. Supplementary reading:
  • See CS 224W for much more on network cascades.
  • Steering User Behavior with Badges (Anderson/Huttenlocher/Kleinberg/Leskovec, 2013)
  • Engaging with Massive Online Courses (same authors, 2014)
• Lecture 7 (Mon Oct 17): Selfish routing and network over-provisioning. Braess's paradox and Pigou's example. The price of anarchy. Modest over-provisioning guarantees near-optimal routing.
  • Demonstration of Braess's paradox.
  • How Bad Is Selfish Routing? (Roughgarden/Tardos, 2000)
  • The Price of Anarchy is Independent of the Network Topology (Roughgarden, 2002)
  • See also Lectures 11 (Sections 1-3) and 12 (Section 1) from CS364A (or from the optional textbook).
• Lecture 8 (Wed Oct 19): The Border Gateway Protocol for Internet routing. Stable routings: non-uniqueness and non-existence. Dispute wheels and the convergence of BGP to a unique solution. Incentive issues. Incentive-compatability with path verification. Supplementary reading:
  • The Stable Paths Problem and Interdomain Routing (Griffin/Shepherd/Wilfong, 2002)
  • Stable Internet Routing Without Global Coordination (Gao/Rexford, 2001)
  • Interdomain Routing and Games (Levin/Schapira/Zohar, 2008)
  • A Survey of Interdomain Routing Policies (Gill/Schapira/Goldberg, 2013)
  • Latest draft of the BGPsec protocol (2016)
• Lecture 9 (Mon Oct 24): Incentives in Bitcoin mining. Transactions and the Bitcoin blockchain protocol. Forks. Incentive issues: the 51% attack, the double-spend attack, and selfish mining. Supplementary reading:
  • General reference: the book Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies. (Narayanan/Bonneau/Felten/Miller/Goldfeder, 2016)
  • See also Section 22.3 of the Parkes/Suen book (see general references).
  • Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable (Eyal/Gün Sirer, 2014)
• Lecture 10 (Wed Oct 26): Incentives in crowdsourcing. Bitcoin in a regime with high transaction fees. The DARPA Network Challenge and incentivizing recruitment. Sybil attacks and possible solutions. The "Wisdom of the Crowd": fact or fiction? Herding behavior and information cascades. Supplementary reading:
  • On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward (Carlsten/Kalodner/Weinberg/Narayanan, 2016)
  • Time-Critical Social Mobilization (Pickard et al., 2011) describes the MIT group's winning strategy in the DARPA Network Challenge.
  • Less happy times in the 2011 DARPA Shredder Challenge.
  • On Bitcoin and Red Balloons (Babaioff/Dobzinski/Oren/Zohar, 2012)
  • Chapter 16 of the Easley/Kleinberg book (see general references).
• Lecture 11 (Mon Oct 31): Incentives in societal networks (guest lecture by Balaji Prabhakar). "Nudges" for changing behavior. Case studies in Bangalore, Singapore, and at Stanford.
  • Balaji's slides
  • An Incentive Mechanism for Decongesting the Roads: A Pilot Program in Bangalore (Merugu/Prabhakar/Rama, 2009)
  • INSINC: A Platform for Managing Peak Demand in Public Transit (Pluntke/Prabhakar, 2013)
• Lecture 12 (Wed Nov 2): Adverse selection, moral hazard, and reputation systems. The market for lemons. Analogs in health insurance, the labor market, and online platforms. Moral hazard. Reputational effects in the n-person Prisoner's Dilemma. Whitewashing and the pay-your-dues strategy. Sybil attacks. Case study: the evolution of eBay's reputation system. Supplementary reading:
  • Chapter 27 of the AGT book (see general references).
  • Chapter 20 of the Parkes/Suen book (see general references).
  • Sections 22.5-22.9 of the Easley/Kleinberg book (see general references).
  • The Social Cost of Cheap Pseudonyms (Friedman/Resnick, 2001)
  • The evolution of the eBay reputation system: The Limits of Reputation in Platform Markets: An Empirical Analysis and Field Experiment(Nosko/Tadelis, 2015)
• Lecture 13 (Mon Nov 7): Auction design basics. How would you bid in a first-price auction? The Vickrey auction and truthfulness. Welfare maximization. Introduction to sponsored search auctions.
  • This lecture is based on Lecture 2 from CS364A (or from the optional textbook).
  • Optional: The Economics of Internet Search (Varian, 2006)
• Lecture 14 (Wed Nov 9): The theory of first-price auctions. Externalities. VCG: a truthful sponsored search auction. GSP vs. VCG. Supplementary reading:
  • See Section 2.3 of Hartline's book for more about the Bayes-Nash equilibria of first-price auctions.
  • Sponsored search: see AGT book, Sections 28.1-28.3.1 (see general references).
  • Internet Advertising and the Generalized Second Price Auction: Selling Billions of Dollars Worth of Keywords (Edelman/Ostrovsky/Schwarz, 2007)
  • Position Auctions, (Varian, 2007)
  • See also this CS364B course for tons of subtopics and references on sponsored search auctions (circa late 2007).
• Lecture 15 (Mon Nov 14): Revenue equivalence of the GSP and VCG sponsored search auctions. VCG in AdSense and Facebook. The general VCG mechanism and its truthfulness. Practical issues with VCG. Supplementary materials:
  • The VCG Auction in Theory and Practice (Varian/Harris, 2014)
  • On How Machine Learning and Auction Theory Power Facebook Advertising, talk by Eric Sodomka (2015).
• Lecture 16 (Wed Nov 16): Revenue maximization. Bayesian optimal auctions. Monopoly prices. Optimality of Vickrey with a monopoly price reserve. Case study: reserve prices in Yahoo! keyword auctions. Prior-independent auctions and the Bulow-Klemperer theorem. Further reading:
  • For more details and proofs, see Lectures 5 and 6 from CS364A (or the optional textbook).
  • Ostrovsky/Schwarz, Reserve Prices in Internet Advertising Auctions: A Field Experiment, 2009.
• Lecture 17 (Mon Nov 28): Strictly proper scoring rules. Incentivizing honest opinions. Output agreement. Peer prediction. Further reading:
  • Section 27.4 of the AGT book (see general references).
  • Chapter 17 of the Parkes/Suen book (see general references).
• Lecture 18 (Wed Nov 30): Prediction markets. The Iowa Electronic Markets and continuous double auctions. The Policy Analysis Market and the Wisdom of Crowds. Market scoring rules and automated market-makers. Further reading:
  • Chapter 26 of the AGT book (see general references).
  • Chapter 18 of the Parkes/Suen book (see general references).
  • The Policy Analysis Market: A Thwarted Experiment in the Use of Prediction Markets for Public Policy (Hanson, 2007)
• Lecture 19 (Mon Dec 5): Behavioral economics. Time-inconsistent planning: procrastination, choice reduction, and undue obedience. Upper and lower bounds on cost ratios. Naive vs. sophisticated agents. Further reading:
  • Procrastination and Obedience (Akerlof, 1991)
  • Time-Inconsistent Planning (Kleinberg/Oren, 2014)
  • For tighter bounds, see Computational Issues in Time-Inconsistent Planning (Tang/Teng/Wang/Xiao/Xu, 2015)
  • Planning Problems for Sophisticated Agents with Present Bias (Kleinberg/Oren/Raghavan, 2016)
• Lecture 20 (Wed Dec 7): Fair division. The cut and choose protocol and envy-freeness. The Selfridge-Conway envy-free protocol for 3 players. Recent advances for 4 or more players. The rent division problem, and the maxmin envy-free solution. Further reading:
  • Quanta article about recent advances in envy-free cake-cutting (Klarreich, 2016)
  • A Discrete and Bounded Envy-free Cake Cutting Protocol for Any Number of Agents (Aziz/Mackenzie, 2016)
  • Which Is the Fairest (Rent Division) of Them All?, (Gal/Mash/Procaccia/Zick, 2016)
  • Fair division in practice: spliddit

Donor sibling registry: matching donor-conceived sibs

The Donor sibling registry is a matching service to help identify half siblings of  "donor conceived people," i.e. people who were conceived from donor sperm or eggs, and who may know only an anonymized donor number.  If your numbers match, you might want to arrange a meeting...

Who can be a common law couple?

Being a couple is about a lot of things, including survivor rights and medical visitation and decision-making rights...

Inseparable Israeli Sisters Fighting to Be Recognized as a Common Law Couple
"A day in court with two nonagenarian sisters, refugees from the Holocaust and constant companions, who seek the unprecedented status so that the one who lives longer can inherit the other's old-age allowance."

"The claimants, it turned out, are asking the National Insurance Institute to recognize each of them as being eligible to receive a next-of-kin allowance upon the other’s death. Effectively, they want the NII to grant them common-law status recognition.
A disturbing thought ran through the judge’s head. “Are you telling me that …” she said to attorney Igra who, guessing her thought, dismissed it with an “Absolutely not,” and placed before the judge a court ruling stating that sexual relations are not a condition for common-law recognition.
Relieved, the judge went on to sum up the lives of the two sisters in a few sentences, as she began reading her judgment. The claimants have lived in the same unit of a protected housing project since 2007. The claimants never married, are single and have no children. The claimants have a joint back account, and their old-age allowances have always been deposited in that account. The claimants manage their income and their expenses from the same bank account. The claimants purchased adjoining burial plots. The claimants’ only journeys abroad took place between 1995 and 1998, and always together, according to the Interior Ministry’s border inspection records.
...
"The Labor Court, though acknowledging the innovation and feasibility of the claim, did not accept it"

This request was not accepted by the Israeli court, but it is food for thought.

Interview on Who Gets What and Why: American Monetary Association, Jason Hartman

This interview was conducted some time ago, but I just now saw the link...and listening to it just now, it seems to me that we had a pretty interesting discussion.
(the link at the title below will take you to the podcast...)

AMA 126 – Who Gets What and Why, The New Economics of Matchmaking & Market Design with Alvin Roth

Jason Hartman talks with Alvin Roth, Craig & Susan McGaw Professor of Economics at Stanford and author of “Who Gets What and Why”

Key Takeaways

[5:28] – what aspect of the real estate market surprises him the most

[11:45] – The market of organ donation

[16:24] Repugnant Transactions

[20:51] Government’s role in contracts

[24:56] Signals and two kinds of messages we send

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