Computer assisted markets: infrastructure

Some time ago the NY Times ran a story on "smart infrastructure:" Bringing Efficiency to the Infrastructure

The story was mostly how better metering and communication can lead to increased efficiencies. Some of these efficiencies come from making new markets possible; e.g. if your electric meter were smarter, it could allow more complicated contracts, in which you could have interruptible service when demand was high (e.g. you could have an electricity contract that would turn off your washing machine when demand was high, but allow you to turn it on again and be billed at a higher rate if you needed it even so.)

The story touches on this when it discusses congestion pricing in Stockholm:
"In 2006, Stockholm experimented with congestion pricing, charging cars up to $4 to enter the downtown area, depending on the time of day. The cars were monitored with RFID cards and webcams that photographed license plate numbers. Drivers had to pay within two weeks or faced penalties, but I.B.M. linked the driver data to 400 convenience stores in the city to make payment easier.
Within a few weeks, the impact in Stockholm was evident, and it has proved permanent. Car traffic in downtown Stockholm has been reduced by 20 percent, carbon dioxide emissions have dropped 12 percent, and the city’s public transport system has added 40,000 daily riders, I.B.M. said. The webcams accurately read license plates, even on snowy days, more than 95 percent of the time. So the RFID tags are no longer in use. After expenses, the smart traffic system generates $80 million a year for the city.
Stockholm is a city in a Scandinavian country with a long environmental tradition, in a socially democratic nation. Yet even in Stockholm, there were complaints initially. The city also took the risk of installing the entire system, calling it a trial, and then having residents vote on it seven months later, after the benefits were apparent. "

Shill bidding in domain name auctions

SnapNames Employee Caught Bidding on Auctions

That's from Elliot's Blog: Domain Name Investing News and Tips. (And you wondered why it was hard to find a domain name...)

HT: Ben Edelman, who notes "Shill bidders sometimes win, and therefore need a plan for how to dispose of the resulting asset. Working at the auction house is helpful."

School assignment in New York City

The December issue of the American Economic Review has our paper on the redesign of the NYC high school assignment system:
Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match,'' American Economic Review, 99, 5, Dec. 2009, pp1954-1978. And here are the AER links at which you can access the Appendix and Download the Data Set

See my previous posts here and here.

Auction design by Paul Klemperer

Paul Klemperer alerts me to two new market design papers. He writes "here is the paper about the Product-Mix Auction, the new auction design for differentiated goods that I developed for the Bank of England from 2007,
forthcoming in the Journal of the European Economic Association. It is similar to Paul Milgrom's recent work on assignment auctions (we discovered this when we talked last year) -- No exciting theorems, but I paid a lot of attention to how to present simply, so bidders are comfortable participataing (and auctioneers are willing to use). I'm working on how to extend to some degree of complements, so maybe better theorems soon. The Product-Mix Auction: a New Auction Design for Differentiated Goods

"And here is a small enhancement of core-selecting package auctions (with Aytek who is taking up a lectureship (i.e. assistant professorship) at Cambridge University next year) -- we are working on the wider question of whether/when they are a good idea -- we currently take no position on that: A New Payment Rule for Core-Selecting Package Auctions by Aytek Erdil and Paul Klemperer

Course allocation at HBS

Some of the gems of the market design literature involve the careful analysis of existing institutions for allocating scarce goods, to understand the good and bad properties of those mechanisms, and the incentives they give to participants.

The latest example analyzes the way second year MBA courses at the Harvard Business School are assigned.

The Multi-unit Assignment Problem: Theory and Evidence from Course Allocation at Harvard by Eric Budish and Estelle Cantillon

Abstract: "This paper uses data consisting of agents. strategically reported preferences and their underlying true preferences to study strategic behavior in the course allocation mechanism used at Harvard Business School. We show that the mechanism is manipulable in theory, manipulated by students in practice, and that these manipulations cause meaningful welfare losses. However, we also find that ex-ante welfare is higher than under the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD), which is the only known mechanism that is anonymous, strategyproof and ex-post efficient. We trace the poor ex-ante performance of RSD to a phenomenon, "callousness", specific to multi-unit assignment and unrelated to risk attitudes. We draw lessons for the design of multi-unit assignment mechanisms and for market design more broadly."

A related paper is Budish's proposal for an alternative mechanism: The Combinatorial Assignment Problem: Approximate Competitive Equilibrium from Equal Incomes.
(And here's my earlier post on an early version of that paper.)

Law and market design

Law obviously plays an enormous role in market design.
Haifa University's Forum for Law and Markets is hosting a conference today on Behavioral Analysis of Law: Markets, Institutions, and Contracts

Compensation for donors of human eggs for medical research

Fox News carries the following press release: Pro-Life Feminist Group Sues NYS over Compensation for Women's Eggs .

"Feminists Choosing Life of New York (FCLNY) filed suit Friday in New York State Supreme Court (Albany) to block the use of taxpayer funds to pay women recruited to donate their eggs for embryonic stem cell research."...

"New York State is the first governmental entity anywhere in the U.S. to approve taxpayer money to pay women to undergo an invasive procedure to harvest eggs for embryonic stem cell research.The legal complaint was filed on October 9, 2009 in Feminists Choosing Life of New York v. Empire State Stem Cell Board. In part, the complaint states, "The Payment for Eggs Program provides significant monetary inducements to women to engage in this painful and risky procedure, which in part disproportionately appeals to economically vulnerable women...(it)...fails to satisfactorily provide for informed consent and other safeguards to ensure adequate disclosure to women of the risks of egg harvesting."In 2007, the New York State Legislature enacted a new Title V-A to Article 2 of the Public Health Act, committing $600 million for stem cell research. On June 11, 2009, the Empire State Stem Cell Board (ESSCB), which was given the responsibility for administering the funds, passed a resolution authorizing significant taxpayer monies of up to $10,000 per donation to be used to compensate young women who donate their eggs for research. "...

"The National Institutes of Health guidelines for Embryonic Stem Cell Research recommends against payments to egg donors.The National Academies of Sciences agrees: “No cash or in kind payments should be provided for donating oocytes (eggs) for research purposes." "

HT: Egg Donation & Surrogacy Law Blog via Kim Krawiec at The Faculty Lounge, whose post includes a link to her paper on pricing in the gamete market.

The market for blood plasma

Is Money Tainting the Plasma Supply?

"Hundreds, probably thousands, of Mexicans like Ms. Delgado come to the United States to trade their plasma for dollars. Eagle Pass, a town of 27,000 that bills itself as the place “where yee-hah meets olé,” has two such plasma collection centers. There are about 15 others in border cities from Brownsville, Tex., to Yuma, Ariz.
The centers are run by pharmaceutical companies that transform the plasma into life-saving but expensive medicines for diseases like immune deficiencies and hemophilia.
Some border centers are new while others have been around for many years. They account for only a small percentage of the plasma collected by the industry, with the rest coming from collection centers throughout the United States.
But they have stirred debate in recent years because they illustrate the workings of the $12 billion plasma products business, a fast-growing industry that has depended on the blood of people hard up for cash. Based on typical industry yields and prevailing prices, it appears that a single plasma donation, for which a donor might be paid $30, results in pharmaceutical products worth at least $300.

Away from the border as well, many plasma collection centers have historically been located in areas of extreme poverty, some with high drug abuse. That troubles some people, who say it might contaminate the plasma supply or the health of people who sell their plasma.
“Why in the United States do we have to depend on people who are down and out to donate?” says Dr. Roger Kobayashi, an immunologist in Omaha who uses plasma products to treat many patients. “You are taking advantage of economically disadvantaged individuals, and I don’t think you are that worried about their health.” "
...
"But the plasma companies and federal regulators say the practice is legal, ethical and safe. There have been no known cases of an infectious disease being transmitted through plasma products for more than a decade. And since the body quickly renews its plasma, the process is considered safe for donors if properly monitored.
“It’s not like giving up a kidney,” says Dr. Jay Epstein, director of blood research at the Food and Drug Administration, which regulates the collection centers and the plasma products."
...
"The United States is one of the few countries that allows plasma donors to be paid. (And even here the plasma industry says it pays donors for their time, not for the plasma itself.)
But many of the countries that prohibit compensation do not collect enough plasma. So they rely on plasma or plasma products made from the blood of people who donate in the United States, which supplies more than half the world’s plasma.
“The U.S. is the OPEC of plasma,” says Jim MacPherson, chief executive of America’s Blood Centers, a network of blood banks.
FOR the plasma industry, times have been good. Growth has averaged 8 percent a year over the last two decades. "
...
"To satisfy demand for plasma-based medicines, the industry has increased the number of collection centers to 408, from 299 in 2005, according to the Plasma Protein Therapeutics Association, the industry trade group. Paid donations in the United States rose to 18.8 million in 2008 from 10.4 million in 2005. "

"There are even a few signs that in areas hardest hit by the economic downturn, people who once donated blood without compensation to organizations like the Red Cross are selling plasma instead. “I know of five or six people who are multi-gallon donors who have switched to plasma,” said Doug Klynstra, recruitment manager for Michigan Blood, a nonprofit blood bank. He said the bank’s donations are down 10 percent this year. "

"The blood banks generally collect whole blood, which is separated into red cells, platelets and plasma and often used for transfusions. They almost never pay for donations because that might induce donors to cover up health problems that could make the blood unsafe.
The plasma companies, which collect only plasma, say that is less of a concern for them because their manufacturing process can kill many viruses and because they have more time to screen donors. "

Compensating blood donors

Robert Slonim, Mario Macis, and Nicola Lacetera report on the effect of (non-cash) incentives on whole blood donation: Will There Be Blood? Incentives and Substitution Effects in Pro-social Behavior

Abstract: " We examine how economic incentives affect pro-social behavior through the analysis of a unique dataset with information on more than 14,000 American Red Cross blood drives. Our findings are consistent with blood donors responding to incentives in a “standard” way; offering donors economic incentives significantly increases turnout and blood units collected, and more so the greater the incentive’s monetary value. In addition, there is no disproportionate increase in donors who come to a drive but are ineligible to donate when incentives are offered. Further evidence from a small-scale field experiment corroborates these findings and confirms that donors are motivated by the economic value of the items offered. We also find that a substantial fraction of the increase in donations due to incentives may be explained by donors substituting away from neighboring drives toward drives where rewards are offered, and the likelihood of this substitution is higher the higher the monetary value of the incentive offered and if neighboring drives do not offer incentives. Thus, extrinsic incentives motivate pro-social behavior, but unless substitution effects are also considered, the effect of incentives may be overestimated."

DARPA Red balloons at MIT

The DARPA network challenge has been won by the MIT team: MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest

"On MIT's Web site, a link was posted inviting people to sign up to help find the balloons and urging them to invite their friends. It said the MIT Red Balloon Challenge Team "is interested in studying information flow in social networks, so if we win, we're giving all the money away to the people who help us find the balloons!"
It detailed a chain for giving away the money, beginning with $2,000 given to each person who first sent in the coordinates of each balloon.
"We're giving $2,000 per balloon to the first person to send us the correct coordinates, but that's not all -- we're also giving $1,000 to the person who invited them. Then we're giving $500 whoever invited the inviter, and $250 to whoever invited them, and so on..." it said."

Here are some of the details from the MIT site linked to above...
The Challenge
This Saturday, December 5th, DARPA will be deploying 10 large, red weather balloons at 10 fixed locations in the United States. (more info) DARPA is giving $40,000 to the first team of people to find all 10 balloons. Join the MIT team, invite your friends and you can win money, help science, and help charity! (see how it works) .

New York State Senate Votes Down Gay Marriage Bill

Same sex marriage continues to teeter on the cusp of whether Americans regard it as a repugnant transaction, whether it should be legal or illegal. The NY Times story is here.

"The State Senate defeated a bill on Wednesday that would legalize same-sex marriage, after an emotional debate that touched on civil rights, family and history. The vote means that the bill, pushed by Gov. David A. Paterson, is effectively dead for the year and dashes the optimism of gay rights advocates, who have had setbacks recently in several key states.

The bill was defeated by a decisive margin of 38 to 24. The Democrats, who have a bare, one-seat majority, did not have enough votes to pass the bill without some Republican support, but not a single Republican senator voted for the measure. "
...
"Had the legislation passed, New York would have become the sixth state where marriage between same-sex couples is legal or will soon be permitted.
"...Last month Maine became the 31st state to block same-sex marriage through a referendum. The Maine State Legislature had voted to legalize same-sex unions earlier this year, but opponents of gay rights gathered enough signatures to put the measure on the ballot. Last year, California voters repealed same-sex marriage after the State Supreme Court said that gay couples had the right to marry."

Another story follows up the political calculations and miscalculations behind this latest vote: Amid Small Wins, Advocates Lose Marquee Battles
"Just a few months ago, gay marriage looked as if it was on an inexorable path to approval in the liberal redoubt of the Northeast.
Legislatures in Maine, New Hampshire and Vermont had voted to legalize same-sex marriage. Bills to do the same in New York and New Jersey had popular support and champions in the governors’ offices. And advocates of gay marriage were arguing that victories in these states would pressure others to “finish the job.”
But the bill to legalize same-sex marriage in New York failed by a surprisingly wide margin on Wednesday. In New Jersey, Democrats have declined to schedule the bill for a vote, believing that the support is no longer there. Voters in Maine last month repealed a state law allowing same-sex marriage despite advocates’ advantage in money and volunteers.
And on the other reliably liberal coast, California advocates of gay marriage announced this week that they would not try in the next elections to reverse the ban on gay marriage that voters approved in 2008; they did not believe they could succeed.
The losses obscure smaller victories: The District of Columbia Council, for example, voted on Tuesday to allow gay marriage. But in the marquee battles, advocates are losing.
Even supporters of gay marriage say that all the optimism got ahead of the reality."

Here are my previous posts on same sex marriage.

Market for kidnapping

The Hostage Business
"Few sectors have endured the economic downturn of recent years better than kidnapping. Confidence in big banks and stock markets might be shaky, but the crudest form of trade — abducting and bartering people — seems alive and well. Gregory Bangs, the kidnap-and-ransom manager for Chubb Group, an American insurance company, said that patterns of kidnapping around the world are “almost inverse” to that of the global economy. “In a recessionary environment, the kidnapping rate goes up,” he told me. More companies are requesting kidnapping and ransom insurance — Bangs reported a 15 to 20 percent jump at Chubb over the past three years — than ever before. But why? What makes kidnapping and ransom, or K.& R., such a growth industry?
In April, speaking at a security conference in the Nigerian capital Abuja, Mike Okiro, then the inspector general of the national police, shared a revealing fact. He estimated that the total amount of ransoms paid in Nigeria between 2006 and 2008 exceeded $100 million."...

"But as long as families and governments and companies continue to pay ransoms, Okiro told me, “there will be no end to it.”
The U.S. government concurs. Discussing the Somali pirates in April, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates said companies that paid ransoms to the pirates were “part of the problem.” “Clearly, if they didn’t pay the ransoms, we’d be in a stronger position,” Gates added. (When a terrorist organization is involved, paying a ransom can actually put individuals and companies in violation of U.S. laws, including the Patriot Act.) As Erik Rye, an adviser for hostage affairs at the State Department, puts it, “If you’re out there feeding the bears, the bears are going to keep coming into the camp.”
...
"The contemporary kidnapping-and-ransom industry emerged in the late 1970s in response to rampant kidnappings in Colombia and throughout Latin America. Globally, for the next 25 years, most cases occurred in Latin America. But political and economic developments have begun redrawing the map of kidnapping hot spots. Chase still considers Colombia “the most mature market” for kidnapping because Colombian perpetrators have been at it the longest — although incidents decreased after President Alvaro Uribe began to take on the country’s guerrilla movements in 2002. There were 465 reported cases in Colombia last year (down from almost 3,000 in 2002). Mexico now has the most kidnappings, with an estimated 7,000 in 2008, though this number has stayed steady in recent years. In fact, Latin America’s share of total reported kidnappings fell to 42 percent in 2008 from 65 percent in 2004.
Gregory Bangs, the K.& R. manager at Chubb, doesn’t foresee the global market flattening out anytime soon. He said new markets were flourishing outside Latin America. Two emerging markets are in Africa and the Middle East; together their share of reported cases nearly quadrupled between 2004 and 2008. During that time, Somali pirates seized dozens of ships off the Horn of Africa. The ships were usually insured, and the pirates made off with increasingly large sums. In postwar Iraq, criminals relied on kidnapping to raise money, and Al Qaeda used kidnappings and beheadings to spread terror. The Taliban have also turned to kidnapping to raise money. And in Nigeria, what began with MEND quickly expanded. Foreigners are still kidnapped in Nigeria, but because many international companies have pulled their employees out of the country, the majority of cases now involve Nigerian victims. The range of victims seems to keep expanding. Kidnappers have grabbed children on the way to school. This summer, two politicians from central Nigeria were abducted; when their relatives couldn’t pay the ransom, the captors freed the two men to go and find the money — but only after they left their wives as collateral. "
...
"Chase said the proof-of-life question — and the way it is handled — often defines the case. “It’s always comforting when they talk about the P.O.L.,” Chase said. “They’ve done this before. They know the form. They know how the game is played.”

Deferred acceptance in Ghanian school choice

Kehinde Ajayi, a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is studying school choice in Ghana. She recently sent me a 2005 document from Ghana's (then) Ministry of Education and Sport "that the government produced when the Computerised School Selection and Placement System (CSSPS) was initially introduced."

It describes a version of a deferred acceptance algorithm (a clearinghouse algorithm that has been discovered a number of times and places, but that game theorists associate with Gale and Shapley 1962), and describes an essential feature, which is that if student A would have displaced student B at school S had he ranked school S first, he will also displace student B at school S even if he ranks school S second (or lower). This is what makes it safe to list schools in your true order of preferences.

"4.2 Displacement
a. Selection on Merit
The computer places all qualified candidates into their first choice schools using the ranking order. The aggregate score of six subjects of each candidate is used to do the ranking.
b. Displacement of 1st choice candidates by 2nd choice candidates as a matter of merit or better performance
The ranking may displace 1st choice candidates with 2nd choice candidates; this will be on merit and not choice. The following table is an illustration:
"Kwasi and Kofi make the following choices of schools and programmes.
...[Table showing that Kwasi, with an aggregate 'score' of 400 ranks Anglican as his second choice, while Kofi, with a score of only 350 ranks Anglican as his first choice...]
"Suppose the cut-off for Science Programme for Opoku Ware is 420 and that for Anglican School is 350, Kwasi is sent to Anglican to compete with first choice candidates for science Programme because his aggregate score is just below the cut-off for Science Programme for Opoku Ware School. Kwasi is then sent to Anglican to compete with the first choice science candidates. Since Kwasi’s aggregate score is higher than that of Kofi’s, Kwasi will then displace Kofi."

School choice in San Francisco, Chicago, and Cambridge MA

Changes in school assignment procedures are being discussed in San Francisco, Chicago, and even Cambridge, MA.

In San Francisco, the redesign is well under way, and the school board has a link to the redesign process: What Have We Done So Far.

An impresssive parent-organized blog outlines the San Francisco Student Assignment system, and the current process intended to reform it, initiated by the San Francisco Unified School District. One of the early posts assembles some of the relevant materials, including the SFUSD page about the Student Assignment Redesign (including some history and legal context), and the
SFUSD technical description of the current Student Assignment Process (which can now be found here).

Chicago has begun to rethink its school choice system; see New Proposed Admission Policy Information


In Cambridge, Parag Pathak proposed that a strategy-proof mechanism replace the old Boston-style mechanism (no longer used in Boston); see School Assigning Process Criticized--MIT professor presents a possible solution to the problem

New York City High School choices are due Dec 4

These days I follow the NYC high schools from a distance, but it's gratifying to see some of the long lasting changes that Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak and I got to help put in place (described here, and for those really interested in technical detail, here).

Here's some advice on ranking schools, from a contemporary observer at InsideSchools.org: HS applications due Dec. 4: How to rank the schools

"Your favorite should come first. You don’t need to play guessing games or set up an elaborate strategy. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by ranking your top choice number one on your list because schools won’t see how you ranked them.
However if you are applying to a school for which you do not qualify — say you want to apply to a school that accepts only Manhattan residents and you live in Queens — you are wasting a spot on your list if you put it down. Likewise, if a school looks for students with an 85 average or above and your GPA is 70, your chances of getting accepted are slim to none.
What about the schools that tell you, you must put them first, or they won’t consider you? According to the Department of Education, that policy was done away with several years ago. Schools no longer see who lists them first, and they have to come up with their own ranking of students from first to last."

Kidney exchange in People Magazine

In the Nov 30 issue, with Johnny Depp on the cover.

"The chain's home base is the University of Toledo Medical Center, where transplant surgeon Mike Rees performs operations and coordinates the program through his nonprofit, the Alliance for Paired Donation. People enter the chain because they need a kidney and have a friend or family member who is willing to donate, but who isn't a match. Once they enter the chain, Rees's staff inputs their names, blood types and other information into a database of other patient-and-donor pairs; the computer then matches would-be donors and recipients."

The article is referring to a recent reunion of the 20 people involved in Rees' first pioneering non-simultaneous extended altruistic donor (NEAD) chain.

Another organization that has been successfully pursuing NEAD chains among other options is the National Kidney Registry founded by Garet Hil. Here's an article about a recent exchange of theirs: Two couples from Bronx, Jersey exchange kidneys through computer organ donation program.

See here for some more technical material on kidney exchange.

The signaling deadline for the economics job market is midnight tonight

A quarter of new Ph.D.s who failed to signal last year reported that it was because they missed the deadline. The deadline is midnight tonight.

You can register and select your signals here. If you're on the job market, send your signals now.

(You probably don't want to send them to a department ranked higher than the one you are graduating from, and you might want to send them to departments that you don't think will get too many signals. See the Coles et al. paper for the data.)

good luck to all.

The signaling deadline for the econ job market is tomorrow, Tuesday, at midnight

If you are an economist on the jobmarket, planning to be interviewed at the ASSA meetings in January, and if you haven't submitted your two signals yet, now is the time. You can register and select your signals here.

(For everyone else, here is a description of signaling, it's a process by which job candidates can have the American Economic Association send an indication of particular interest to two potential employers out of the many they have sent applications to. The idea is that a limit to two special signals helps employers sort through the many applications they receive when it is time to decide who to interview at the national meetings in January.)

The deadline is tomorrow, Tuesday, at midnight (2400 EST).

The December JOE is out, so there won't be any new job listings before tomorrow.

Now is the time to chat with your advisor, and send your two signals. (It can't hurt and might help, see the paper linked to in yesterday's post.)

The job market for new economists: preliminary report

I chair the AEA ad hoc committee on the job market, and a preliminary version of a report we're writing may be of interest to those on the job market this year (and in particular to those who should be signaling by the end of the day Tuesday). The bottom line for the moment? Don't forget to signal.

The paper is
Peter Coles, John Cawley, Phillip B. Levine, Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, and John J. Siegfried , " The Job Market for New Economists: A Market Design Perspective," preliminary draft, Nov. 25 2009.
A link to it (which will be updated as the paper proceeds towards completion) is on my market design page here.

Internet resources for the homeless

Being homeless does not necessarily mean being cut off from the internet. The Boston Globe reports Online sites offer a fertile venue for some in need

"On Homelessforums.org, thousands of people post questions and comments about everything from how to stay safe on the streets to where to camp for free. There are pleas for money on CyberBeg.com, which compares itself to a lottery, and Begslist.blogspot.com, which describes itself as a “source for free . . . e-panhandling, online donations, debt help, finding financial resources, and a great place to ask for financial help from the kindness of others.’’

Rules of the road for cars and bikes

In many places where cars and bikes share a road, they customarily (if not legally) follow different rules. In England, a trial program will allow bikes to travel the wrong way down some one-way streets: Cyclists will be given green light to ignore one-way signs.

"Cyclists will be permitted to ride the wrong way along one-way streets under a change intended to encourage more people to give up their cars or use them less.
The Government will announce today that cyclists will be permitted to ignore no-entry signs: a practice already followed by many, including David Cameron, the Conservative leader.
The Department for Transport is authorising a trial in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, Mr Cameron’s home authority in West London, in which a small plate saying “Except cyclists” will be attached to poles carrying no-entry signs.
If the trial is successful, the department intends to extend the policy to the rest of Britain and permit thousands of one-way streets to become two-way for bikes. It believes that long diversions around one-way systems are a significant deterrent to new cyclists, who might be less confident about breaking the rules."

On this side of the pond, Brookline MA is trying something similar, although not on the roads that I ride to work: Right way or wrong way? Brookline tries out new bike lanes

Lynne Kiesling at KP has a nice post on whether cars and bikes should obey the same rules of the road: Roads and paths as common-pool resources, and the problem of governing them

The rules of the road are a relatively recent invention: 2009 marks the 100th anniversary of Boston’s first traffic regulations, as issued by the Board of Street Commissioners. Peter DeMarco of the Boston Globe reports A century ago, driving laws tamed Boston’s wild streets.

"Back then there were no street signs, no stop signs, no traffic lights, no double center lines, no traveling lanes, and no yield signs. Automobiles had to battle horse-drawn carriages and wagons, bicyclists, trolleys, and pedestrians for space on the road. And while we joke today about how infrequently we obey traffic laws in Massachusetts, a century ago, there were scarcely any laws to obey."

Of the new laws adopted in 1909 he says:"A number of the laws are still very much in use today. Boston got its first one-way streets, adopted a new rule requiring drivers to “signal if about to turn,’’ and began requiring drivers to pass on the left - all in 1909. Parking within 10 feet of a curb was prohibited, double parking was outlawed (well, at least on paper), and police, fire, and other emergency vehicles (including postal carriers and doctors) were given the right of way.
But the rules also show how little our state’s first motorists actually knew about driving, and how Boston streets were really a free-for-all. Drivers had to be told not to stop in the middle of the street, not to park on sidewalks, and not to drive in reverse. The regulations include basic diagrams, reprinted in newspapers for all to study, explaining how to properly make a right turn, a left turn, and a U-turn - revolutionary stuff in 1909, when license exams consisted of a paltry 12 questions."
...
"Most cars were rudimentary, lacking not only turn signals, brake lights, and treaded tires, but also speedometers, windshields (thus the need for driving goggles), roofs, shock absorbers, power steering, and heat (necessitating leather driving coats and gloves). Steam-engine cars could explode, while hand-crank starter rods could spin back and break your arm. To apply brakes, you pulled hard on a lever. Seat belts, alas, didn’t exist."

Update: a column in the London Times suggests that bike riders will have to become more law abiding if London is to become more like Amsterdam, with high volume bike traffic: Time’s up, bike bandits

The market for fresh turkeys

Frozen turkeys can be produced year round, but fresh turkeys for Thanksgiving all need to be brought to maturity at around the same time. This column from last year's Slate puts the picture into focus: The Turkey-Industrial Complex--How do farmers produce so many birds for Thanksgiving?

"Producing fresh turkeys takes more planning. Market leader Butterball, for example—which grows about one fresh bird for every nine frozen ones—has already begun the production cycle for next year's holiday season. Eggs for breeder birds have been purchased from one of the world's two major genetic suppliers, Hybrid and Nicholas. Those eggs will then be hatched and placed in turkey farms so that they can grow and become sexually mature during the winter. (Butterball needs roughly 28,000 laying hens and 1,700 "stud" toms each year to produce the right amount of fresh turkeys.) Come springtime, these birds will produce the eggs that are destined to become the turkeys we actually eat. Hens produce eggs in 25-weeklong cycles: The first five weeks' worth go toward fresh turkey production, the rest toward the frozen turkey market. Breeder hens are normally used for a single cycle before being slaughtered and processed themselves."

Two edited volumes

Two edited volumes recently arrived in the mail:
Better Living through Economics, edited by John Siegfried; and Studies of Labor Market Intermediation, edited by David Autor.

Here's a link to one chapter:
Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth,''The Effects of a Central Clearinghouse on Job placement, Wages, and Hiring Practice'', in Labor Market Intermediation, David Autor, Editor, The University of Chicago Press, 2009, 273-306.

Early and late matching to career choices

A recent NBER paper by Ofer Malamud finds that students (in Scotland) who get to choose their academic specialty later in their educational careers have fewer changes of career than students who must choose earlier (in England). So, it provides some evidence about why unraveled markets are sometimes inefficient, i.e. on how early matching can result in lower match quality.

Discovering One's Talent: Learning from Academic Specialization by Ofer Malamud

Abstract: In addition to providing useful skills, education may also yield valuable information about one's tastes and talents. This paper exploits an exogenous difference in the timing of academic specialization within the British system of higher education to test whether education provides such information. I develop a model in which individuals, by taking courses in different fields of study, accumulate field-specific skills and receive noisy signals of match quality to these fields. Distinguishing between educational regimes with early and late specialization, I derive comparative static predictions about the likelihood of switching to an occupation that is unrelated to one's field of study. If higher education serves mainly to provide specific skills, the model predicts more switching in a regime with late specialization because the cost of switching is lower in terms of foregone skills. Using survey and administrative data on university graduates, I find that individuals from Scotland, where specialization occurs relatively late, are less likely to switch to an unrelated occupation compared to their English counterparts who specialize early. This implies that the benefits to increased match quality are sufficiently large to outweigh the greater loss in skills from specializing early, and thus confirms the important role of higher education in helping students discover their own tastes and talents. http://papers.nber.org/papers/W15522


An ungated version is here.

Designing a course grading system

Noam Nisan at Algorithmic Game Theory tells a funny story about grades for a game theory class. (Don't try this for other subjects...)

Worldwide university rankings, compared to GNP

Rankings have lots of problems, but here is an ambitious attempt to look at universities all around the world.

"The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) was first published in June 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities and the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and then updated on an annual basis. ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution. More than 1000 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published on the web. "

Here are the 2009 rankings.
Two of the top ten are from England (#4 Cambridge and #10 Oxford), the rest are in the U.S. The difference in the "overall score" between #2 and #10 is smaller than the difference between #1 and #2, but this may just have to do with how the scales are normalized. The highest ranked university from a country other than the U.S. or England is University of Tokyo, at #20.

Here is a table of Percentage Distribution of Top Universities by Country with Their Share of Global Population and GDP
Only 15 countries have universities ranked in the top 100, and an additional 24 countries have at least one university ranked in the top 500. The top producers of universities are producing them disproportionately to their share of world GDP or population, for example the U.S. has 55.0% of the top 100 universities, and 30.3% of the top 500, but only 23.6% of GDP and 4.5% of population. (Israel is a big outlier, with 1.0% of the top 100 and 1.4% (i.e. 7 universities ) of the top 500, from an economy with 0.3% of world GDP and 0.1% of population.
I have taught at the universities ranked #1, 25, and 50, and studied at #2 and 7. Based on this limited and skewed sample, and on other universities I know well, I can see that both wealth and the quality of the students are big components of university quality, not always perfectly correlated. (What makes the #1 university so extraordinary is the extent to which it succeeds in assembling so much of both in the same place, and what makes the Israeli universities so remarkable is certainly not their wealth.)

Based on the quality of students from various countries who we see in the U.S., I would guess that, if student quality were the main thing being measured, both Turkey and Iran (each with one university in the #400-500 range) are not getting the credit they deserve. (Many of our students from those places had their undergraduate education at home, and apparently got it at pretty good places; even those who come to the U.S. for their undergraduate education are obviously being drawn from pools of students for whom education is a priority.)
Similarly, there may also be countries where wealth rather than student quality is doing most of the work in putting one of their universities into the top 500, and talented and committed students there might be better advised to study overseas if they can. I'm thinking of Saudia Arabia, with one university in the 400-500 range. A number of Gulf countries have been investing in universities, and it will be interesting to see how well they succeed, and how that changes them if they do.

(A very interesting paper by my colleague Eric Chaney looks at the history of scientific productivity in the Muslim world, and gives some food for thought about what aspects of the general culture might promote vibrant universities: "Tolerance, Religious Competition and the Rise and Fall of Muslim Science")

Final remarks in our market design class

Harvard's new academic calendar and Thanksgiving combined to produce an early end to the lecture part of our Market Design class. I ended with some concluding remarks (here are the accompanying slides: 12.3 concluding remarks ).

One remark is that market design is an eclectic field, drawing on game theory, experiments, computation, and field observation of all sorts (rules are data!).

Teaching the class over the last not-quite-a-decade has been an invigorating intellectual experience. When Paul Milgrom and I began the class (when he spent a year at Harvard in 2001), he had the FCC spectrum auction experience under his belt, and I had the redesign of the National Resident Matching Program under mine, and we had plenty of ideas.

I entertained a faint worry that, at the end of the decade, those might still be the only major applications we had to talk about. But, as things turned out, we can no longer fit all the newly implemented market designs into one course (and Susan Athey will again teach a second semester of Market Design, focused on many recent auction applications, in the Spring). Among the designs we talked about this semester are other health care labor markets, Kidney Exchange, School choice mechanisms, signaling for new economists, internet ad auctions, and more.

I've also been gratified by developments in market design as a field of study. Not only have there been successful applications, there's starting to be an academic literature focused on practical market design, and the theoretical and empirical questions it raises. While there are still some special obstacles that have to be overcome to publish market design papers in general economics journals, we've come a long way since I worried about that in my 2002 paper "The Economist as Engineer: Game Theory, Experimentation, and Computation as Tools for Design Economics.

As I remarked in two earlier posts (see Market design is coming of age, and Market design courses this Fall at Harvard and MIT) another sign that the field is healthy is that it is attracting some of the most creative young minds. Some alumni of Harvard and the course who are presently active in market design and/or matching are Estelle Cantillon (with whom I taught the course for two years), Muriel Niederle, John Asker, Nicole Immorlica, Mohammad Mahdian, Michael Ostrovsky, Parag Pathak, Fuhito Kojima, Robin Lee, Mihai Manea, Eric Budish, and Scott Kominers.

Who gets deceased-donor kidneys? Thinking about changes in the rules.

A lot of thought and politics goes into changing the rules for which patients get which kidneys, how long they wait, and how much that should play a role in the allocation decision, as opposed to other criteria having to do with how well each kidney fits each patient, what is the age difference between deceased donor and recipient, etc.

John Faherty at the Arizona Republic has written an informative account of the ongoing debate: New rules change who gets donated kidneys

"Dr. Kenneth Andreoni, chairman of the United Network for Organ Sharing Kidney Transplantation Committee, has been working to develop a better way to distribute kidneys since 2004.
"The current allocation system went in decades ago," Andreoni said. "It was based on good science, but it was a different time."
The system was built to balance utility with fairness.
For utility, doctors required that donated kidneys and recipients be a close biological match. It was the only way to ensure that the recipient's body wouldn't reject the organ, wasting a precious donation.
For fairness, they established a waiting list. The people on the list the longest were first in line for the next matching kidney.
But in the 1980s and 1990s, things began to change. Better anti-rejection drugs helped a recipient accept a kidney even if they weren't a perfect match. Before long, the allocation system that was supposed to balance utility - the likelihood of a successful transplant - with fairness - time on the waiting list - was out of whack.
All that mattered was the wait time.
Frustration grew among transplant doctors. Without the criteria of a tissue match, the system was no longer using science to make the best choices.
Doctors were sometimes putting healthy young kidneys into recipients with only a few years left to live."
...
"The committee is recommending at least two key elements that are almost certain to be part of the new system.
• The first is dialysis time. The current waiting-list system is less fair than it seems, Andreoni said, because some doctors list patients early, at the first sign of kidney failure, while other doctors wait until after other treatments to list their patients. This puts patients in the second group at a disadvantage.
A dialysis-time list would put all patients on equal footing. The longer you have had to endure the treatment, the sooner you can get a kidney.
• The second element is a complex grading system called the Donor Profile Index. Doctors would measure the quality of a donated kidney to determine how well it will work and how long it will last. Then, they would give that kidney to the patient who would most benefit from it.
That means factoring, to a still-undetermined degree, who would get the most use of a new kidney - who would live the longest.
"Right now, whoever is next in line gets the kidney," Andreoni said. "It does not make the best use of the organ." "


Of course, changes like this, when allocating a scarce resource, involve benefits from some people, but not for everyone.

"With the proposed changes to the allocation system, a patient like Ramirez will be more likely to receive a kidney from a younger person, and probably sooner.
"It's a conundrum. A change would be a really good thing for me," she said. "But if I was older, I might be angry. Maybe they have been waiting for a long time." "

That's what makes some changes politically hard. Sometimes phasing such changes in over time may ease the path.

Update: for those of you who don't click on comments, Michael Giberson said... Why not favor patients with an unmatched donor, and so use deceased donor kidneys to trigger a exchange chain. ?

Mixing the deceased donor kidneys with the kidney exchange pool also involves some complicated political issues, since deceased donor organs are regarded as a shared public resource, but live donor kidneys are of course private property.

But in New England we have permission to do something like what Giberson has in mind, called list exchange: see
Roth, Alvin E., Tayfun Sönmez, M. Utku Ünver, Francis L. Delmonico, and Susan L. Saidman, ''Utilizing List Exchange and Undirected Good Samaritan Donation through 'Chain' Paired Kidney Donations," American Journal of Transplantation, 6, 11, November 2006, 2694-2705.

Here's the first paragraph of the abstract of that paper:
"In a list exchange (LE), the intended recipient in an incompatible pair receives priority on the deceased donor waitlist (DD-waitlist) after the paired incompatible donor donates a kidney to a DD-waitlist candidate. A nondirected donor’s (ND-D) kidney is usually transplanted directly to a DD-waitlist candidate. These two established practices would help even more transplant candidates if they were integrated with kidney paired donation (KPD)."

The paper goes on to report an early NDD chain conducted at the New England Program for Kidney Exchange that passed through the exchange pool, i.e. that included patients with incompatible donors in the middle, with the final link being a donation to someone on the DD-waitlist. We have also done exchanges that may be closer to what Giberson suggests, in which a deceased donor kidney goes to someone in the kidney exchange pool, whose incompatible donor gives to someone else in the pool...whose donor gives to someone on the DD-waitlist.

Incentives for buying health insurance when healthy

My colleague Marty Feldstein worries in the Washington Post about potential incentive mis-alignments in new health care legislation: Obamacare's nasty surprise-Fewer insured, higher costs might be the result


"Here's why: A key feature of the House and Senate health bills would prevent insurance companies from denying coverage to anyone with preexisting conditions. The new coverage would start immediately, and the premium could not reflect the individual's health condition.
This well-intentioned feature would provide a strong incentive for someone who is healthy to drop his or her health insurance, saving the substantial premium costs. After all, if serious illness hit this person or a family member, he could immediately obtain coverage. As healthy individuals decline coverage in this way, insurance companies would come to have a sicker population. The higher cost of insuring that group would force insurers to raise their premiums. (Separate accident policies might develop to deal with the risk of high-cost care after accidents when there is insufficient time to buy insurance.) "


HT: Mankiw

Restaurant reservations

An interesting paper by Alexei Alexandrov and Martin A. Lariviere asks Are Reservations Recommended?
From the abstract:

"We examine the role of reservations in capacity-constrained services with a focus on restaurants. Although customers value reservations, restaurants typically neither charge for them nor impose penalties for failing to honor them. However, reservations impose costs on firms offering them. We highlight ways in which reservations can increase a firm’s sales by altering customer behavior. First, when demand is uncertain, reservations induce more customers to patronize the restaurant on slow nights. The firm must then trade off higher sales in a soft market with sales lost to no shows on busy nights. Competition makes reservations more attractive as long as enough customers will consider dining at either restaurant. When there are many firms in the market, it is rarely an equilibrium for none to offer reservations. Second, we show that reservations can increase sales by shifting demand from a popular peak period to a less desirable off-peak time. This is accomplished by informing diners when all peak reservations have been given out. "



And from the Introduction:

"Restaurant reservations are a curious phenomenon. Customers value them, but restaurants give them away. Indeed, firms such as Weekend Epicure have stepped in to profit from the resulting arbitrage opportunity. These “scalpers” reserve tables at popular spots under fictitious names that they share with the first paying party. (Fees are on the order of $35 to $40.) What makes offering reservations even more remarkable is that they are costly to provide. Fischer (2005) identifies three costs to offering reservations. These include additional staff needed to take reservations and added complexity from having to balance the needs of walk-in customers with commitments made to reservation holders. The final consideration is no shows.
Customers can generally fail to keep reservations without penalty, but restaurants suffer if they hold capacity for customers that never come. No shows represent a real problem. Bertsimas and Shioda (2003) report a no-show rate of 3% to 15% for the restaurant they studied. More generally, rates of 20% are not unusual (Webb Pressler, 2003) and special occasions such as New Year’s Eve can push rates to 40% (Martin, 2001).
Why then should restaurants offer reservations? One reason is the operational benefits they provide. Reservations regulate the flow of work. By staggering seatings, a restaurateur can assure that waiters are not overwhelmed by a rush of customers followed by the bartender and kitchen being swamped with orders. Reservations thus allow fast service without excessive capacity (Fischer, 2005). Reservations would then be appealing when either customers are delay sensitive or the firm’s costs increase with arrival variability. Further, reservations may allow a restaurant to estimate demand and improve staffing and sourcing decision."

Misc. repugnant transactions

Environmentalists seek to wipe out plush toilet paper (headline in Boston Globe)
They advocate products made of recycled fibers

"And, activists say, there’s just the foolish idea of the thing: old trees cut down for the briefest and most undignified of ends.
“It’s like the Hummer product for the paper industry,’’ said Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “We don’t need old-growth forests . . . to wipe our behinds.’’

"The reason for this fight lies in toilet paper engineering. Each sheet is a web of wood fibers, and fibers from old trees are longer, which produces a smoother and more supple web. Fibers made from recycled paper - in this case magazines, newspapers, or computer printouts - are shorter. The web often is rougher.
So, when toilet paper is made for the “away from home’’ market, the no-choice bathrooms in restaurants, offices, and schools, manufacturers use recycled fiber about 75 percent of the time.
But for the “at home’’ market, the paper customers buy for themselves, 5 percent at most is fully recycled. The rest is mostly or totally “virgin’’ fiber, taken from newly cut trees, according to the market analysis firm RISI Inc."

Egyptian Lawmakers Want to Ban Fake Hymen
"CAIRO (AP) -- Conservative Egyptian lawmakers have called for a ban on imports of a Chinese-made kit meant to help women fake their virginity and one scholar has even called for the ''exile'' of anyone who imports or uses it.
The Artificial Virginity Hymen kit, distributed by the Chinese company Gigimo, costs about $30. It is intended to help newly married women fool their husbands into believing they are virgins -- culturally important in a conservative Middle East where sex before marriage is considered by many to be illicit. The product leaks a blood-like substance when inserted and broken."...

"Kotb noted that a medical procedure that reattaches a broken hymen by stitching is illegal in Egypt and can cost hundreds of dollars -- prohibitively expensive for the poor. But many women still secretly seek it out in fear of punishment for pre-marital sex.
Such punishment could include slayings at the hands of relatives, a practice more commonly referred to as honor killings and common in the more conservative tribal areas of the Middle East."

Harvard housing

Harvard sophomores, juniors and seniors are assigned housing randomly, with some details that require strategic thinking. The objective seems to be to make the Harvard undergraduate houses fairly homogeneous (while allowing friends to form small groups). But it wasn't always so.

An unpublished paper that recounts some of the history, and the previous market designs for housing allocation, is THE HARVARD HOUSING LOTTERY: RATIONALITY AND REFORM, by Susan M. Collins and Kala Krishna

It's an interesting read, and an important kind of market design paper. Rules are data, and histories of rule changes, and how they succeed and fail, are often one of the clearest windows through which to view the obstacles that allocation processes have to overcome to work well.

Non-simultaneous kidney exchange chains

Quite a few kidney exchange chains, starting with a non-directed (altruistic) donor, have been done non-simultaneously, since the first non-simultaneous extended altruistic donor (NEAD) chain went through so successfully. The idea is that the need for simultaneity is reduced when a chain starts with a non-directed donor, since no incompatible patient-donor pair is left waiting for a kidney after giving one.

Here's an article about a recent non-simultaneous chain in Maryland: the article gives a good idea of the multiple reasons why non-simultaneity might be desirable. First, it relieves logistical constraints involved with scheduling multiple operating rooms (not to mention waiting rooms and recovery rooms), and second, it allows the chain to continue in the future.

""Four people who otherwise would not have had matching donors now have lifesaving kidneys - from people they've never met. And this transplant chain was set in motion by a man who simply wanted to donate a kidney to someone in need," says Matthew Cooper, MD, director of kidney transplantation at UMMC and associate professor of surgery at the School of Medicine, who oversaw the series of surgeries.
Only a handful of hospitals in the country have performed large kidney transplant exchanges such as this one. The procedures, which took place over two days in four operating suites at the medical center, required extensive coordination and planning not only in the operating rooms, but also in the waiting rooms.
Because the right to privacy for the donors and recipients is protected throughout the process, transplant coordinator Debbie Iacovino arranged separate waiting areas in different parts of the hospital for their families to ensure anonymity.
The kidney exchange started with a 59-year-old man from a suburb of Boston, Mass., who offered to donate a kidney to someone in need. His kidney was given to a Maryland man who was not a match with his intended donor, a woman who is also from Maryland. The woman was matched with a 10-year-boy from Catonsville whose kidneys were failing because of a congenital abnormality.
A friend of the boy's family, a 50-year-old lawyer from Catonsville, gave his kidney to a 64-year-old Florida man, whose wife was a donor for 74-year-old man from Virginia Beach, Va. The Virginia man's son-in-law will be a "bridge" donor, who will give his kidney to a yet-undetermined recipient at a later date, which will allow the chain of transplants to continue."

Here's a video interview:
Video FourWay Kidney Exchange An Interview with Dr Matthew Cooper
http://www.spokenword.org/program/865751 21 minutes

"UMMC's director of kidney transplantation Dr. Matthew Cooper provides an overview of the four-way kidney exchange that involved eight patients from four states on November 2 and 3. Dr. Cooper talks about paired kidney exchanges, how this four-way exchange came about, what happened during the two days of surgery, the significance of this procedure for the people involved and much more."

Gaming the Liver Transplant Market (by Jason Snyder)

When my colleagues and I began talking to transplant surgeons about the design of kidney exchanges, it was initially sometimes hard to convince them that incentives played a big role in organ allocation. (I sometimes heard a variation of "Professor, incentives may be important in economics, but not in medicine; no one chooses to become sick.") But explanations were made easier by a 2003 legal settlement in which some hospitals paid fines for pretending their patients were sicker than they were, to give them increased priority on the waiting list for deceased donor liver transplants: Illinois: Prosecutor's Diagnosis Is Fraud.

By the time of the settlement, the rules for determining priority on the waiting list for livers had already been changed to depend on more objectively verifiable criteria, to reduce the ability of hospitals to game the system on behalf of their patients. A recent paper by Jason Snyder of the UCLA Anderson School of Management looks at the effect of this change:

"Gaming the Liver Transplant Market" Forthcoming at The Journal of Law, Economics, & Organization
"Approximately 6,000 transplants are performed annually and, on average, 2,500 people die while waiting for a liver. There is substantial variation in the number of transplant centers across markets; some markets have only one firm while other markets have multiple participants. Prior to March 1, 2002, a major determinant of whether a patient would obtain a liver was whether they were in the intensive care unit (ICU). Patients in the ICU jumped to the top of the priority list regardless of how sick they actually were. There is considerable anecdotal evidence suggesting that in order to obtain livers for their patients the transplant centers created faux-ICUs where relatively healthy people were put in the ICU to strategically advance their positions on the waiting list. After March 1, 2002, the allocation of livers changed to a system where livers were allocated solely on clinical indicators of sickness. ICU status was no longer a factor in determining whether a patient obtained a liver or not. This policy resulted in, if anything, an increase in the sickness of the average patient at transplant and a dramatic discontinuous decrease in the number of patients who were in the ICU at the time of their transplant. This seemingly contradictory behavior is consistent with centers strategically misrepresenting the health of their patients prior to the policy reforms.

"Using the policy change to examine changes in ICU admission behavior, I find that after the policy changed the use of the ICU decreased more in markets with more firms. I also find that after the policy changed the percentage of relatively healthy people in the ICU decreased more in markets with more firms. Finally I show that these results are non-linear in the number of firms in the market. Moving from one firm to two firms in the marketplace is associated with dramatic changes gaming behavior, but there is little difference between two firms and three or more firms."

Louis Menand on the market for PhDs in English

Louis Menand, in Harvard Magazine, has many interesting things to say about the Ph.D. in English literature and the market for Ph.D.s in English and the humanities. The Ph.D. Problem: On the professionalization of faculty life, doctoral training, and the academy’s self-renewal

"English was one of the fields surveyed in the two studies of the Ph.D. It is useful to look at, in part because it is a large field where employment practices have a significance that goes beyond courses for English majors. What the surveys suggest is that if doctoral education in English were a cartoon character, then about 30 years ago, it zoomed straight off a cliff, went into a terrifying fall, grabbed a branch on the way down, and has been clinging to that branch ever since. Things went south very quickly, not gradually, and then they stabilized. Statistically, the state of the discipline has been fairly steady for about 25 years, and the result of this is a kind of normalization of what in any other context would seem to be a plainly inefficient and intolerable process. The profession has just gotten used to a serious imbalance between supply and demand."

"The Berkeley study, “Ph.D.s—Ten Years Later,” was based on lengthy questionnaires sent to just under 6,000 people, in six fields, who received Ph.D.s between 1982 and 1985. One of those fields was English. People who received their Ph.D.s in English between 1982 and 1985 had a median time to degree of 10 years. A third of them took more than 11 years to finish, and the median age at the time of completion was 35. By 1995, 53 percent of those with Ph.D.s that had been awarded from 10 to 15 years earlier had tenure; another 5 percent were in tenure-track positions. This means that about two-fifths of English Ph.D.s were effectively out of the profession as it is usually understood. (Some of these people were non-tenure-track faculty, and some were educational administrators. Most of the rest worked in what is called BGN—business, government, and NGOs.) Of those who had tenure, less than a fifth had positions in the kind of research universities in which they had been trained—that is, about 5 percent of all English Ph.D.s. "
...
"The placement rate for Ph.D.s has fluctuated. Between 1989 and 1996, the number of starting positions advertised in history dropped 11 percent; in art and art history, 26 percent; in foreign languages, 35 percent; and in political science, 37 percent. Yet every year during that period, universities gave out more Ph.D.s than they had the year before. It was plain that the supply curve had completely lost touch with the demand curve in American academic life. That meant if not quite a lost generation of scholars, a lost cohort. This was a period that coincided with attacks on the university for “political correctness,” and it is not a coincidence that many of the most prominent critics of academia were themselves graduate-school dropouts: Dinesh D’Souza, Roger Kimball, Richard Bernstein, David Lehman. Apart from their specific criticisms and their politics, they articulated a mood of disenchantment with the university as a congenial place to work.
There were efforts after 1996 to cut down the size of doctoral programs, with apparently some positive effect on the job market. But time-to-degree numbers did not improve. In the sixties, the time-to-degree as a registered student was about 4.5 years in the natural sciences and about six years in the humanities. The current median time to degree in the humanities is nine years. That does not include what is called stop-time, which is when students take a leave or drop out for a semester or longer. And it obviously does not take into account students who never finish. It is not nine years from the receipt of the bachelor’s degree, either; it is nine years as a registered student in a graduate program. The median total time it takes to achieve a degree in the humanities including stop-time is 11.3 years. In the social sciences, it is 10 years, or 7.8 as a registered student. In the natural sciences, time-to-degree as a registered student is just under seven years. If we put all these numbers together, we get the following composite: only about half of the people who enter doctoral programs in English finish them, and only about half of those who finish end up as tenured faculty, the majority of them at institutions that are not research universities. An estimate of the total elapsed time from college graduation to tenure would be somewhere between 15 and 20 years. It is a lengthy apprenticeship."

"... The system works well from the institutional point of view not when it is producing Ph.D.s, but when it is producing ABDs. It is mainly ABDs who run sections for lecture courses and often offer courses of their own. The longer students remain in graduate school, the more people are available to staff undergraduate classes. Of course, overproduction of Ph.D.s also creates a buyer’s advantage in the market for academic labor. These circumstances explain the graduate-student union movement that has been going on in higher education since the mid 1990s. "

"The key to reform of almost any kind in higher education lies not in the way that knowledge is produced. It lies in the way that the producers of knowledge are produced. Despite transformational changes in the scale, missions, and constituencies of American higher education, professional reproduction remains almost exactly as it was a hundred years ago. Doctoral education is the horse that the university is riding to the mall. People are taught—more accurately, people are socialized, since the process selects for other attributes in addition to scholarly ability—to become expert in a field of specialized study; and then, at the end of a long, expensive, and highly single-minded process of credentialization, they are asked to perform tasks for which they have had no training whatsoever: to teach their fields to non-specialists, to connect what they teach to issues that students are likely to confront in the world outside the university, to be interdisciplinary, to write for a general audience, to justify their work to people outside their discipline and outside the academy. If we want professors to be better at these things, then we ought to train them differently."

Humanities job market: priming the pump

The American Council of Learned Societies has decided to give the job market for humanities Ph.D.s a boost, in the face of the tough job market expected this year. It looks like their stimulus package is well designed:


"The American Council of Learned Societies announces a new initiative to address the serious employment challenges faced by many of today’s new Ph.D.s while also supporting teaching at universities and colleges. The ACLS New Faculty Fellows program will allow 50 recent Ph.D.s in the humanities and humanistic social sciences to take up two-year positions at universities and colleges, where their particular research and teaching expertise will benefit the receiving institution. Awardees will commit to teaching three semester-length courses each year and receive an annual stipend of $50,000, a $5,000 annual research and travel allowance, health insurance, and a $1,500 one-time moving allowance. The program is supported by a generous grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Applicants for this program must be nominated by the university that awarded their Ph.D. In this first iteration of the program, nominations are limited to the 60 U.S. members of the Association of American Universities, each of which has designated a liaison for the ACLS New Faculty Fellows program. Possible applicants at participating institutions are encouraged to contact their advisor or department or program chair for further information on the program.
Read more: Stimulus for Humanities Job Market "


The link gives the following additional information:
"All 60 U.S. members of the Association of American Universities have been invited to nominate candidates who do not have a tenure-track position and who will have received a Ph.D. between January 2008 and December of 2009 in the humanities or the "humanistic social sciences," defined as including history, anthropology and such areas as political theory, historical sociology and economic history. The AAU members may nominate between 5 and 40 individuals, based on the size of the Ph.D. classes they produce each year in the humanities.
From these nominees, 50 finalists will be selected based on statements about their teaching and research interests.
Then the AAU universities and a few dozen liberal arts colleges (the latter group is still being defined) will be able to offer positions to the finalists, provided that the universities agree to pay one-third of the costs and the colleges one-fourth of the costs. The AAU institutions will not be allowed to offer positions to their own Ph.D.'s. Any finalists who don't get a job offer will get a one-year stipend of $35,000."


HT: Itay Fainmesser who will be at the ASSA meetings in Atlanta

Market for lesson plans

College professors sell textbooks, business school professor can profit from case studies, and now there's a market for lesson plans for elementary and middle school classes: Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions .

The "cash" in the headline is clear enough, while the "questions" seem to be of two kinds. The first is about intellectual property, who owns what:
"While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms."

The other kinds of questions involve the repugnance we sometimes see raised by markets for things that used to be given away or handmade:
"Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.
“Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,” he said. “But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.” "

The internet is a big facilitator here:
"Just about every imaginable lesson for preschool through college is now up for sale — on individual teachers’ blogs as well as commercial sites where buyers can review and grade the material.
Teachers Pay Teachers, one of the largest such sites, with more than 200,000 registered users, has recorded $600,000 in sales since it was started in 2006 — $450,000 of that in the past year, said its founder, Paul Edelman, a former New York City teacher. The top seller, a high school English teacher in California, has made $36,000 in sales.
Another site, We Are Teachers, went online last year with a “knowledge marketplace” that includes lesson plans and online tutoring."

Signaling for interviews in the Economics Job Market: Registration opens tomorrow

Here is the American Economic Association's announcement of the 2009 mechanism for Signaling for Interviews in the Economics Job Market

"The AEA coordinates a mechanism through which applicants can signal their interest in receiving an interview at the January meetings. From November 16, until December 1, shortly after the December JOE comes out, each applicant on the economics job market can register and designate no more than two departments (or other employers) to whom to send a signal of particular interest. On December 3, the AEA will transmit these signals to the departments a candidate has chosen. (Signals will not be made public.)

Please see Signaling for Interviews in the Economics Job Market for a detailed description as well as the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. "

Those already registered may select or update signals until Midnight, EST on December 1, 2009. This is a firm deadline.

In each of the years when signaling has been available (2006-9), about 1,000 signalers have used the system (almost all choosing to send 2 signals). Around 25% of JOE listings have received at least one signal in each of those years. So signaling has been pretty widespread, with lots of senders and receivers.

So, that said, should you signal? Or perhaps there's some reason not to signal?

In a December 2008 survey of those appearing on departmental lists of job candidates, 66% of respondents reported signaling. Of the remaining 33% of respondents, 26% reported that they missed the deadline, 21% reported they didn’t know about the mechanism, 41% thought signaling wouldn’t help their chances of getting a job, and 5% thought signaling would hurt their chances of getting an interview.

On this last point I can offer some reassurance; in our surveys of department recruiting committees, there is no indication whatsoever that anyone regards a signal as a negative indicator in deciding whether to offer an interview.

There is also some indication that signals help, at least sometimes (again from survey data, since we don't have direct access to data on who gets interviews), particularly for signals sent to employers who don't receive an excessive number of signals. (The 21 employers receiving the most signals received about 1/6 of all signals: ten of these employers are in the Boston, NY, and D.C. metropolitan areas.) Overall, a signal seems to increase the likelihood of an interview by around 6 percentage points.

I think it is sensible for most candidates to send the two signals they are allotted. I think the most you can expect a signal to do is to cause someone at the signaled department to take one more look at your dossier, and consider whether it makes sense to include you on their already pretty full schedule of interviews, given your interest. So, choose your signals with that in mind, and they may work for you.

(I hope to have a paper ready for circulation reasonably soon, with my colleagues on the AEA job market committee...)

Nothing human need be foreign to economics

Economists like to think of Economics as a broad church that welcomes investigation of a wide range of human activity from many viewpoints. Nothing human is foreign to us. Non-economists (and perhaps some economists as well) take a much narrower view of what economists can and should investigate, and how well we can do so.

An inadvertently hilarious juxtaposition of those two views comes in a column in The Guardian: Our speechless outrage demands a new language of the common good--Market theory closed down public discourse about injustice. But we urgently need to describe what we should value

The author opines: "But don't look to economists to get us out of this hollow mould of neoliberal economics and its bastard child, managerialism – the cost-benefit analysis and value-added gibberish that has made most people's working lives a mockery of everything they know to value."

She then goes on to suggest that the evils of economics may be remedied by philosophers, and praises Amartya Sen's new book The Idea of Justice.

The joke of course is that the author of the column is blissfully unaware that Amartya is an eminent economist, and the winner of the 1998 Nobel prize in economics.

Needless to say, justice is an excellent thing for economists to study, and strive to understand and achieve.

A grave problem of supply and demand

Grave sites, once sold and occupied, are intended to be occupied for a very long time, and their sale can't easily be negotiated if more valuable uses turn up. So there is less turnouver than in other kinds of real estate, with predictable consequences, as this Globe article attests: Supply limited, demand eternal, graveyards fill up.


"Provincetown’s shortage, while unusually acute, underscores a broad and burgeoning problem in the crowded Northeast. With land expensive and limited acreage available in large swaths of Eastern Massachusetts, budget-crunched communities are struggling to buy sites for new burial grounds as their existing cemeteries fill up."
...
"In Provincetown, many who have reserved burial plots are relative newcomers to the town, and in response, town officials this week passed a rule restricting burial plots to those who have maintained a principal residence for at least two years. Still, that was a short sojourn, some said, for a chance to spend eternity in a slice of heaven.
Said Lemme, the cemetery supervisor: “We might have to make that a little stricter.’’ "

School choice, and separation of church and state

As a beneficiary of both a democratic and a religious tradition, I think that separation of church and state is good not just for states (if they happen to be liberal democracies), but also for religious communities (if they aspire to be self governing). In Britain, there are state funded religious schools, so school choice issues for religious schools get resolved by secular courts: Who Is a Jew? Court Ruling in Britain Raises Question .

"Britain has nearly 7,000 publicly financed religious schools, representing Judaism as well as the Church of England, Catholicism and Islam, among others. Under a 2006 law, the schools can in busy years give preference to applicants within their own faiths, using criteria laid down by a designated religious authority. "

The case in question is wending its way through the appeals court process. But it appears that, by accepting state funding, Britain's religious communities have let the state into the church, so to speak.

Update:Dec. 15. British High Court Says Jewish School’s Ethnic-Based Admissions Policy Is Illegal
Update: January 10: Faith schools facing admissions curb

Incentives in Chicago school choice

The Chicago Sun Times reports:
"Poring over data about eighth-graders who applied to the city's elite college preps, Chicago Public Schools officials discovered an alarming pattern.
High-scoring kids were being rejected simply because of the order in which they listed their college prep preferences.
"I couldn't believe it,'' schools CEO Ron Huberman said. "It's terrible.''
CPS officials said Wednesday they have decided to let any eighth-grader who applied to a college prep for fall 2010 admission re-rank their preferences to better conform with a new selection system.
Previously, some eighth-graders were listing the most competitive college preps as their top choice, forgoing their chances of getting into other schools that would have accepted them if they had ranked those schools higher, official said.
Under the new policy, Huberman said, a computer will assign applicants to the highest-ranked school they qualify for on their list.
"It's the fairest way to do it," Huberman told the Chicago Sun-Times editorial board Wednesday."

This is the same issue that led to the redesign of the Boston school choice system.

HT Parag Pathak

update: see earlier stories on the changes in the Chicago magnet school program here and here.