Wednesday, January 6, 2021

von Neumann Award to Matt Gentzkow

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  Matt Gentzkow is the recipient of the 2021 John von Neumann Award . "We are excited to announce that the Assembly of the College ele...
Tuesday, January 5, 2021

New Israeli anti-prostitution law: the johns are now criminals

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With the new year, the Israeli law that makes it a crime to hire prostitutes goes into effect.  Haaretz has the story:  Israel's Anti-pr...
Monday, January 4, 2021

Randomized control trials plus preferences: a market design for experiments by Yusuke Narita in PNAS

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 Random assignment of patients to experimental treatments is intended to allow statisticians to cleanly measure the effect of the treatments...
Sunday, January 3, 2021

The Short-Side Advantage in Random Matching Markets by Linda Cai and Clayton Thomas (guest post by Itai Ashlagi)

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 Itai Ashlagi writes:  Linda Cai and Clayton Thomas, both graduate students, have a very short, elegant and straightforward proof for why th...
Saturday, January 2, 2021

Vaccine supply chain woes

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Supply chains are boring, until things are in short supply. And there are many steps in a supply chain that can cause supplies to be short. ...
Friday, January 1, 2021

A hopeful picture for 2021 (when vaccines will replace masks...)

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  Original at  https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EqayYuaXEAE7YCu.jpg HT: Mike Rees

Hypertension: the surgeon general calls for a New Year's resolution

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  The U.S. Public Health Service has issued the following call to action on high blood pressure, which affects many Americans, differentiall...
Thursday, December 31, 2020

The year in passings

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This year I noted the following deaths with particular significance to readers of this blog: Monday, December 21, 2020  Edward (Eddie) Lazea...
Wednesday, December 30, 2020

A hard (theoretical) look at school choice, in the AER by Chris Avery and Parag Pathak

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  What are some of the difficulties that might hamper school choice from achieving educational equality (or at least substantially reducing ...
Tuesday, December 29, 2020

College admissions in Australia, by Guillen, Kesten, Kiefer, and Melatos

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 Here's a working paper from the University of Sydney that looks at the New South Wales college admissions clearinghouse in which studen...
Monday, December 28, 2020

The cost of a horse's smile (and the supply chain of chess sets)

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 Among the pandemic shortages (along with toilet paper) are chess sets, whose sales have soared in response to the Netflix series "The ...
Sunday, December 27, 2020

Global chocolate production and consumption

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This map  of cocoa production and consumption from the  Cocoa Barometer 2020  would make it easy to guess which way is North (were it not fo...
Saturday, December 26, 2020

Global markets in antiquity: olive oil and wine

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Markets are ancient human artifacts, and a recent paper in the EJ suggests that markets of global scale, based on comparative advantage and ...
Friday, December 25, 2020

A chain of 900 strangers...

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 When I talk about chains on this blog, I'm almost always talking about kidney exchange .  But there are other kinds of gift giving chai...
Thursday, December 24, 2020

Fast Covid vaccine development --science and funding

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  Here's a news article from Nature: The lightning-fast quest for COVID vaccines — and what it means for other diseases. The speedy appr...
Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Celebrating Ramanujan's birthday (with some math quotes)

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 Yesterday,  22 December, is celebrated every year as  National Mathematics Day in India, in honor of the 1887 birthday of the great Indian ...
Tuesday, December 22, 2020

The market for music rights--all Bob Dylan's songs

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  The NY Times has the story: Bob Dylan Sells His Songwriting Catalog in Blockbuster Deal--Universal Music purchased his entire songwriting ...
Monday, December 21, 2020

Edward (Eddie) Lazear (1948-2020)

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  My Stanford colleague Eddie Lazear passed away last month, from pancreatic cancer. ( When he moved from the University of Chicago to Stanf...
Sunday, December 20, 2020

Jefferson University celebrates Dr. Ignazio Marino

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Ignazio Marino , transplant surgeon (and former Mayor of Rome) has received the Achievement Award in Medicine from Thomas Jefferson Univers...
Saturday, December 19, 2020

Should college admissions be organized like the medical residency match?

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 The Chronicle of Higher Ed asks why not organize college admissions the way we organize the match for residency positions in medicine. (It ...