Conference in Honor of Paul Milgrom's 65th Birthday

Paul Milgrom is a giant, not just in market design, and at 65 he's still going full blast. Here's the program for his birthday party:

Program: Conference in Honor of Paul Milgrom's 65th Birthday

Location: Landau economics, first floor

Friday, April 19

Introduction to Conference

10:30-10:45                 Susan Athey, Yeon-Koo Che and Joshua Gans

Session 1: Market Design Methods in Matching and Auctions

10:45-10:55 a.m.         Al Roth: Introduction

10:55-11:25 a.m.         John Hatfield: “Matching with Contracts”

11:25-11:35 a.m.         coffee break

11:35-12:05 p.m.         Yeon-Koo Che: “Generalized Reduced Form Auctions: A Network-Flow Approach,” with Jinwoo Kim and Konrad Mierendorff

12:05-12:35 p.m.         Paul Klemperer: “Geometry, Auctions, and Matching”

Lunch

12:35-1:35 p.m.

Session 2: Auctions and Market Design

1:35-1:45 p.m.             Preston McAfee: Introduction

1:45-2:15 p.m.             Lixin Ye: "Efficient and Optimal Mechanisms with Private Information Acquisition Costs," with Jingfeng Lu

2:15-2:45 p.m.             Daniel Quint:  Indicative Bidding in Auctions with Costly Entry,” with Ken Hendricks

2:45-3:00 p.m.             Coffee Break

3:00-3:30 p.m.             David McAdams, "Secrecy in the First-Price Auction". 

3:30-4:00 p.m.             Ilya Segal, “U.S. Spectrum Reallocation and Heuristic Auctions,” with Paul Milgrom.

4:00-4:15 p.m.             Coffee Break

Panel Discussion: Market Design in Practice

4:15-5:00 p.m.             Panel Discussion

                                   

Dinner

Vidalakis Dining Room, Schwab Center

6:30 p.m.                     Appetizers

7:15 p.m.                     Seated dinner begins serving 

Saturday, April 20

Breakfast

9 a.m.                          at conference site

Session 3: Organizations and Complementarity

9:30-9:40 a.m.             John Roberts: Introduction

9:40-10:10 a.m.           Nick Bloom: Management and Organizations

10:10-10:40 a.m.         Bruno Strulovici: "The Supermodular Stochastic Ordering," with Margaret Meyer

10:40-11:00 a.m.         Coffee Break

Session 4: Incentives and Games

11:00-11:15 a.m.         Bengt Holmstrom: Introduction and Retrospective on Static and Multitask Incentive Theory

11:15-11:45 a.m.         Andy Skrzypacz: Repeated games and incentives 

11:45-12:15 p.m.         Michi Kandori: How to cooperate under private monitoring

12:15-1:15 p.m.           Lunch

Time/Location TBD    Afternoon Hike

6:30 p.m.                     Informal Dinner 

Someone was pretending to be me on Google+ (a story with a happy ending)

The internet is home to a variety of scams, and some of them involve trying to manipulate Google search results. So I was surprised and dismayed, but not entirely shocked, when I noticed that someone was pretending to be me, by establishing a Google+ page for a company called Market Design, whose web page was....this blog.

What could be in it for them?  Well, maybe they were really trying to pretend that by hiring them you were hiring me. But maybe they just were moving up in Google searches through the links that this blog gets.  Here's what you saw if you searched for "market design" on Google:

The first result, on the left, is my blog. But there's an item under it called "Google+ page" and an address, which both link to the spoofer, who is also on the right, with a phone number and a map, and a picture that if you click on it gets you to one of my blog posts.

If you clicked on the link that says Google+ page under the link to my blog, you got to this page, on which my blog URL was clearly displayed as the company web page:

On 4/7/13 I filled out a problem report on the Google+ profile page, and I wrote a review disclaiming any connection between their site and me or my blog...

Apparently Google pays attention to this kind of complaint. When I checked back on 4/9/13 the spoofer was already nowhere to be found.

A recent email confirmed this:

From: Google Maps [mailto:noreply-local-issues@google.com]

Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 1:09 PM

To: Roth, Alvin

Subject: Google Maps Problem Report - Action taken

Bangladesh protesters demand blasphemy law with death penalty for bloggers

One repugnant transaction  isn't repugnant enough for protesters in Bangladesh:

Bangladesh protesters demand blasphemy law
"Hundreds of thousands of marchers call for law that would include death penalty for bloggers who they say insult Islam."

"The religious group, which has the backing of country's largest party Jamaat-e-Islami, organised the rally in support of its 13-point demand including enactment of a blasphemy law to prosecute and hang what they call atheist bloggers.
...
"Under the country's cyber laws, a blogger or Internet writer can face up to ten years in jail for defaming a religion."

Interview with the late Dr Joseph Murray, about the first kidney transplants and related matters

Great interview, conducted in 2000. Lots of detail. For example, he practiced on dogs, removing a dog's kidney and then transplanting it into the same dog, to practice the surgical techniques for kidney transplants without immunological complications...and discussion of repugnance... and of the generosity and courage of early transplant patients ...and the relationship between basic and applied science (18 minutes for the whole thing).

Here's the video from the Nobel site (I can't figure out how to upload it): http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=732 .

Here are my earlier posts on Dr. Murray who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "...discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease"

Clerkship hiring: early, and concentrated at top schools...

Above the Law reports on Which Law Schools Had the Most Clerkship Placements? and
Clerkship Hiring Is Getting Earlier and Earlier

Here's a quick look at which schools are doing well at placing students into clerkships...


 As for earlier and earlier hiring following the recent abandonment of the most recent timetable by the DC Circuit, here are two announcement over at OSCAR (the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review):

Latest OSCAR News

RSS

Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan Date Change

Apr 10, 2013 4:30 pm

The OSCAR system will release all online third-year law school student applications on June 28, 2013 at 12:00 pm Noon (EDT).

OSCAR Version 7: Limit of 100 Clerkship Applications

Apr 08, 2013 11:10 am

To address judge concerns, Version 7 introduces a 100-application limit per applicant for clerkship applications.

As it happens, a new model of unraveling of markets just came by email:
 STRATEGIC UNCERTAINTY AND UNRAVELING IN MATCHING
MARKETS, by FEDERICO ECHENIQUE AND JUAN SEBASTIAN PEREYRA

From their introduction:
"Strategic unraveling in our model proceeds as follows. There is a loss in efficiency when some agents go early: Information about the quality of the matches arrives late, so it is better for efficiency to wait until the information has arrived to make a match. If some agents go early anyway, this forces later matches to be less efficient. The result is a negative externality that makes it more tempting for all agents to go early. It may push some additional agents over the threshold by which they decide to go early. In turn, these additional agents going early makes it even more tempting to go early|and so on and so forth."

Internal exchanges in financial markets

The NY Times has a story on the increasing volume of trade going on in "dark pools," as opposed to in public exchanges. As Market Heats Up, Trading Slips Into Shadows. One point it makes is that some funds feel the exchanges aren't as safe as they used to be, e.g. because of high frequency traders.

The passage I found most interesting however, was about intercepting the trades of small investors before they get to exchanges:

"Other places besides the 30-plus dark pools are stealing the business of stock exchanges. A handful of firms including Citigroup and Knight Capital pay retail brokers like TD Ameritrade and Scottrade for the opportunity to trade with ordinary retail investors before the orders can reach an exchange, a phenomenon known as internalization. This type of off-exchange trading has also been growing, in part because of the recent revival of interest in the stock market among ordinary investors."

This is a little bit like what we are seeing in kidney exchange, in which big transplant centers withhold their easy to match pairs and transplant them internally.  See e.g.
Ashlagi, Itai and Alvin E. Roth, "New challenges in multi-hospital kidney exchange," American Economic Review papers and proceedings, May 2012, 102,3, 354-59

Buying a place in line to hear Supreme Court arguments

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy Dale Carpenter has the story, and the URL is more informative than the headline: http://www.volokh.com/2013/03/30/misbehavior-at-the-court/ 

"There are actually two lines to get into the chamber, which has very limited seating capacity.  One is for the general public, and in high-profile cases it’s quite long.  The other is for lawyers who become members of the Supreme Court bar.  Bar members enjoy a limited number of reserved seats at the front of the audience, right behind the lawyers for the parties in the case.  ...

I joined the Supreme Court bar ($200 one-time fee) in order to get into the marriage arguments. I knew the lines would be long, so I arrived Tuesday morning at about 3:15 a.m., thinking that would be good enough to get me in.  I was about 57th in line at that point for about 100 seats in the bar section.  In front of me were mostly paid line-standers who had been waiting in the 30-degree temperatures all night.  I talked with quite a few of them.  None were members of the bar.  Almost all were impoverished and black.  Many of them slept on the ground, in cold and wet conditions, for several nights.

As daylight approached, a lot of equality advocates arrived to take their premium places in line.  These “clients,” as the line-standers called them, paid about $50 an hour to line-standing-service middlemen organized as businesses (I don’t know what the actual line-standers earn per hour).  For the Prop 8 case,  it cost as much as $6,000 to get to the front of the line and guarantee a seat in the courtroom.  Neither the Supreme Court nor any law-enforcement authorities prohibit this practice.

I don’t categorically object to line-placement capitalism, especially for private functions like buying tickets to a rock concert.  It’s an economic exchange in which the highest bidders get what they want and others sell their services and earn money they wouldn’t otherwise get.  It does seem odd to hold what’s effectively a private-market auction for seats at a public hearing of the country’s highest court.  Many of the buyers who participated in this particular market, given what I know of their other political preferences, would be hard put to defend this system in a public forum. 

They started letting us into the Court at about 7:30 for the Prop 8 argument on Tuesday.  I got into the main room, third row from the front, not more than 50 feet from the Justices.  Getting there early — and being able to stand in a separate bar-members line – had paid off.

But what happened the next day for the DOMA argument was appalling.  I arrived at 2:15 a.m. when the temperature was a balmy 40 degrees and was headed down.  I was 46th in line, again with a group consisting almost entirely of paid line-standers in front of me.  There were very few bar members personally waiting in line at that time.  The Court had space for fewer bar members that day in order to make room for an extra table for counsel arguing the jurisdictional issues.  But even with more limited seating, #46 was still sure to get in.

As 7 a.m. approached and the lawyers arrived to take their pre-paid places in line, something else happened.  They started inviting their friends to join them at the front of the line, pushing back people who had waited all night to get in.  The lawyer-clients of several of the line-standers near me never arrived to relieve their assigned line-standers, no doubt because they cut in line further up than what they had paid for.  Pretty soon, I was #55 and then #65 and then I lost count. "

Robert Edwards, R.I.P. Brought in vitro fertilization from repugnant transaction to Nobel prize

Robert G. Edwards Dies at 87; Changed Rules of Conception With First ‘Test Tube Baby’


"Working with Dr. Patrick Steptoe, Dr. Edwards essentially changed the rules for how people can come into the world. Conception was now possible outside the body — in a petri dish.

"The technique has resulted in the births of five million babies, many in multiple births, according to the International Committee Monitoring Assisted Reproductive Technologies, an independent nonprofit group.

"Yet, like so many pioneers of science, Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe achieved what they did in the face of a skeptical establishment and choruses of critics, some of whom found the idea of a “test tube baby” morally repugnant. Denied government support, the two men resorted to private financing. And they did their work in virtual seclusion, in a tiny, windowless laboratory at a small, out-of-the-way English hospital outside Manchester.

"It was there, after outwitting a crowd of reporters, that they delivered their — and the world’s — first IVF baby, Louise Brown, on July 25, 1978. Her parents, John and Lesley Brown, had tried for nine years to have a child — a period that virtually coincided with Dr. Edwards’s research."
*****************

Here's my earlier post on the occasion of his Nobel, including some dissenting voices at the time:

From repugnant transaction to Nobel Prize in Medicine

Law schools forming law firms to employ new graduates

The NY Times has the story. The quote is from the dean of the Arizona State U. Law School: To Place Graduates, Law Schools Are Opening Firms

"“I realized that was what we needed,” Mr. Sylvester recalled. “A teaching hospital for law school graduates.”

"The result is a nonprofit law firm that Arizona State is setting up this summer for some of its graduates. Over the next few years, 30 graduates will work under seasoned lawyers and be paid for a wide range of services provided at relatively low cost to the people of Phoenix."

The economics of designing markets, and the sociology of "civilizing" them

Jose Ossandon emailed me to alert me about his thoughtful blog post comparing some developments in market design and in the sociology of markets. In particular, he draws connections between market design and some of the work of Michel Callon.

Ossandon's blog post is called Are markets matching Callon and Roth?

He begins:
"The last meeting of our “Copenhagen market group”[i] was devoted to an increasingly influential stream within current economics, namely “market design”. The discussion left me with the somehow perplexing puzzle I am trying to unfold in this post: isn’t this type of economics almost too close to the ‘markets as calculative collective devices’[ii] approach developed by Michel Callon and colleagues so influential among us -non-economists market researchers- in the last years?

During the meeting we discussed two articles (here and here) written by the 2012 Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth. As Roth explains, see also his very clear Nobel Prize speech, his and his colleagues’ work has been dedicated to very practical problems."

And after come comments on my earlier posts on performativity, Ossandon concludes:

"Are the new² economic sociology and market design the same? Avoiding the obvious methodological splits that separate a highly formalized and a rather descriptive-reflexive ethnographic approach, there are still important conceptual differences. The ideal situation for Roth’s designers seems to be “give me some choosing things[iii] to match and I will rise a technologically equipped market”, while for Callon - especially in his work connecting his thoughts on technical democracy, hybrid forums and markets- the ideal situation is where what is traded, who can participate in the exchange, and who and what is equipping the market encounter are collectively and heterogeneously defined. Civilizing (Callon) and engineering (Roth) markets are therefore two different programs of market design. More practically, for instance, in school choice, for Roth et al. what a good school is or who can choose or what is chosen while matching school places is defined before the market. In Callon et al.’s view such an arrangement would not only match pre-calculating families and schools but it would include the consequence of making the involved agents calculative, changing accordingly the way they understand and deal with education. In other words, in Callon’s view markets are never only about matching, or matching would need to beunderstood also as a mode of per-formatting new agencies and things.

But, despite these differences, it seems like finally engineer economists and engineer sociologists are finding a common starting point. Isn’t that scary? I don’t think so. This is a much better place to start and try a dialogue that is not so limited by pre-existing disciplinary boundaries (see also Callon here). Let’s agree: markets are not pre-social metaphysical forces that need to be left alone, but they are practical arrangements that can be more or less, better or worse, designed[iv]. In those cases where there is an already functioning market or quasi-market mechanisms (for instance: school choice or carbon trade) let’s try to make them work the best we can. In other words, social researchers should not only criticize marketization but also spend time, energy and knowledge onengineering and/or civilizing these complex arrangements. This is, I think, a nice pragmatic starting point for market researchers at large.

But is this just good?  No it isn’t, there is also a serious flaw. These two streams of market research seem to share a somewhat excessive optimism about markets as devices that can solve social and environmental issues. As a product of neoliberal Chile, I would happily pay for not having to make choices in areas like health insurance, pension funds, schools or long distance phone carriers. And certainly many people have argued that these and other sectors (have you heard about trains in the UK?) are not necessarily working better years after features such as competition, choice and providers able to select or exclude their potential users have been introduced. Market design risks becoming the face of the latest round of social and environmental reforms (for instance: emissions trading or the announced Job Match interface in the UK). And the new reformers seem to believe something like: it is not that markets were necessarily a bad social policy but that they were not properly designed. But, shouldn’t we also be experimenting with other ways of doing things? I am not saying that markets are always bad, but that the same brilliant ideas currently oriented at designing better markets could also be spent devising other forms of solving our common problems. In my opinion market civilizers and engineers will become fully respectable technicians the day they are also able to advise something like: “thank you for contacting me, but here you don’t need a market”."

I haven't yet had a chance to do more than glance at the links he provides: it's clear that some translation will be needed between econ and soc, in order for me to try to understand all the connections that he sees.

Congressional briefing on the role of economic research in health policy: April 12

I will participate in this event remotely, but if you are in Washington you can come and enjoy it in person...

 Invitation: 4/12 Luncheon/Briefing on Health Economics Research
You are invited to a Congressional briefing on the role of economics research in health policy.
Economic Research: Saving Lives and Money

Friday, April 12, 2013
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Rayburn House Office Building Room B-338

This will be a widely attended event
(Complimentary box lunches will be provided)

Rising health costs make it increasingly difficult to fund other national priorities, such as defense, education, and public safety. Health economics research can provide the building blocks for responsible reforms that moderate health care spending, improve health system performance, and reduce the deficit. A panel of distinguished economists discusses the contributions of economics research to our health and well-being.

INFORMING HEALTH POLICY
Mark McClellan, MD, PhD (Brookings) CMS Administrator (2004-2006), FDA Commissioner (2002-2004), and CEA member (2001-2002) and Joseph Antos, PhD (American Enterprise Institute) explore the important role economics research plays in informing government decisions about health policy.

IMPROVING MEDICAL MARKETS
Alvin Roth, PhD (Stanford) Nobel Prize 2012, describes how fundamental research in theoretical and experimental economics supported by the National Science Foundation is being applied in medical markets in ways that save lives by increasing organ donations and improving the efficiency of medical residencies.

ENCOURAGING HEALTHY BEHAVIOR
Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD (Penn) presents his National Institutes of Health supported research on innovative ways of applying insights from behavioral economics to improve patient health behavior and affect provider performance.

We hope you will be able to attend this important briefing.

Positive RSVPs only by April 10th to lplavnik@cossa.org

Sponsored by: AcademyHealth, American Economic Association, Consortium of Social Science Associations, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, Population Association of America, Research!America

Columbia Engineering (my alma mater) interview

Here's the interview, called The ultimate matchmaker.

High school matching in New York City

Two stories caught my eye about the results of the recent high school match in New York City.

The first reminded me of the recent paper on college applications by Chris Avery and Caroline Hoxby
which finds that students from rural areas are less likely to apply to highly selective colleges than are equally well qualified students from high schools that more traditionally send students to top colleges

Disparities Found in N.Y.C.'s System for Matching Students to Schools
"Low-achieving students were less likely to rank as first choice a school rated an A or B on New York City's school-quality system, and nearly twice as likely to choose one graded C, D, or F. The first-choice schools of students in the bottom 20 percent in math and language arts achievement also had 10-percentage-point lower average graduation rates than the first-choice schools of higher-achieving students, 68 percent versus 78 percent.
"The gaps between everybody's first-choice schools and the schools where they are matched are about the same, but the starting points for low-achieving students are much lower," said Lori Nathason, a research associate at the research alliance, who spoke about the study at the policy conference."

Another story caught my eye because it has to do with the high school that I attended:

"Parents refuse to send their kids to the only zoned high school in the area, the C-rated Martin Van Buren High School, until it shakes its poor reputation.
In a twist, Alvin Roth — a graduate of Van Buren — won the Nobel Prize in October for creating the algorithm on which the city’s public high school admissions process is based."

Marketing gurus: how would you advertise the need for organ donors?

You can see how the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services does it at http://organdonor.gov/index.html

How American transplant policy is made: some policies put out for public comment

A view of the OPTN policy-making process for organ transplants can be glimpsed by looking at some of the many recent proposals put out for public comment. Here are a few...

1

Proposal to Substantially Revise The National Kidney Allocation System (Kidney Transplantation Committee)

Proposal (1.81 MB)

9/21/2012 - 12/14/2012

7

Proposal to Clarify Priority Status for Prior Living Organ Donors Who Later Require a Kidney Transplant (Kidney Transplantation Committee)

Proposal (313 K)

3/16/2012 - 6/25/2012

8

Proposal to Establish Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) Policy (Kidney Transplantation Committee)

Proposal (669 K)

3/16/2012 - 6/25/2012

9

Proposal to Include Bridge Donors in the OPTN Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) Program (Kidney Transplantation Committee)

Proposal (646 K)

3/16/2012 - 6/25/2012

Job markets in Korea

I had an interesting discussion yesterday at the Korean Finance Ministry about the interconnectedness of job markets and child care...

Google translate caption: Was hyeonohseok Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Strategy and Finance to discuss the policy last year, won the Nobel Prize in economics, Professor Ross Elliot Alvin (Alvin Elliott Roth) and job creation.

Tub thumping about market design in Seoul

Soo Lee and I discuss market design in Seoul: this photo is from this newspaper account (in Korean).




Here's another photo,(apparently I gesticulate...Google translate renders the title as [Photo] tub-thumping Nobel Prize winning economist Elvin Ross)


In this final photo, the translated caption helpfully indicates which one of us is the Korean prime minister.

Nobel economists met the prime minister Prime Minister (left first) and songjaejo jeonghongwon economy TV representatives (third) won the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics, Professor Alvin Ross and talk. / Heomunchan reporter

Seoul is an impressive city, and it seems that there may be lots of opportunities for market design in Korea's thriving economy. Soo and I had an interesting set of meetings yesterday at the Ministry of Education. Today we'll visit the Finance ministry, and later I'll give a talk on kidney exchange at the Samsung Medical Center...

Stanford's endowment: I benefit directly from parts of it

An unusual thing about American universities is that they are largely financed by philanthropy. The oldest universities tend to have very big endowments. Some of those endowments yield income for general revenues, while others have very specific purposes.

Here's an article from the Stanford Benefactor about some of the endowments that have helped me personally settle in to my new job at Stanford: How to Bring a Nobel Laureate to Stanford

Global Financial Conference in Seoul

Soohyung Lee and I will discuss market design at the 2013 Seoul Global Financial Conference, April 2-3.

Organs and executed prisoners: Jay Lavee goes to Taiwan

Jay Lavee, the Israeli transplant surgeon behind some of Israel's new legislation (and who I met in person for the first time at Duke),  recently returned from Taiwan, and forwarded these links:

The first is to this story in the Tapei Times:

"Two issues surrounding organ transplants in Taiwan were spotlighted by foreign experts and Taiwanese legislators: using executed prisoners as organ donors and post-transplant medication insured by the NHI.
Jacob Lavee, director of the heart transplant unit at Israel’s Sheba Medical Center, said he used to hold up Taiwan on various occasions as a prominent example of a nation that had stopped taking organs from executed prisoners, who are considered unwilling donors, until he regretfully discovered Taiwan had resumed using such organs two years ago.

"The Department of Health’s Bureau of Planning head Shih Chung-yuan (石崇原) said in response that “although there is no law banning the use of organs taken from executed prisoners, the government does not encourage it and has stopped soliciting organ donations in the prison.”

"Concerning the current lawless state of organ transplants performed abroad, Shih said that in 2009, an amendment to the Organ Transplant Act (人體器官移植條例) was proposed that would require all organ recipients, in Taiwan or abroad, to register with local authorities, but it was not passed.
Tien also called for stricter regulation for organ transplants performed abroad, saying that since the majority (88.6 percent) of Taiwanese organ recipients went to China for organ transplants that are often from questionable and unethical organ sources, but continue to be insured by the NHI for post-transplant medication, “it almost seems like all Taiwanese who contribute to the NHI are complicit with the illegal and unethical organ-harvesting crimes perpetrated in China.”
***********

Here's a related story from NTD news: Taiwan's Health Department Wants to Criminalize Organ Trade


Taiwan’s health department said on Thursday it plans to modify its organ transplant laws to criminalize organ trade and brokerage.

The main concern is illegally obtained organs in China, where authorities have been accused of killing prisoners of conscience for their organs. China is the main destination for Taiwanese patients who obtain organs overseas.

[Hsu Ming-neng, Director, Bureau of Medical Affairs, Department of Health]:
“We want to minimize the occurrence of using organs with questionable sources. We plan to discuss the amendment of organ transplant laws [during the upcoming legislative period] and we want everyone’s support.”

Hsu Ming-neng spoke during a forum in Taipei on Thursday organized by the Department of Health. On the panel was a group of five doctors and investigators from around the world. They visited Taiwan this week to highlight transplant abuse in China.

Dr Jacob Lavee from Israel discovered his patients were going to China for rapid transplants. Some were promised an organ on a certain day—something that suggests China has an “on-demand” organ supply.

He has since worked to get Israel to stop transplant tourism to China.

[Jacob Lavee, MD, Advisor, Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting]:
“Those brokers who intermediate between local candidates and overseas [donors in China], that should be taken care of. That’s what we’ve done in Israel and that’s the way we’ve succeeded in Israel to stop completely the flow of Israeli patients to China.”

US-based doctor, Jianchao Xu, says a combined effort is necessary to stop forced organ harvesting in China.

[Jianchao Xu, MD, Medical Director, Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting]:
“I think the public, medical community, the political field and the legal community all need to take action, because this isn’t something that doctors alone can accomplish.”

Independent investigators and human rights activists have accused the Chinese regime of profiting from forced organ harvesting. The largest groups of victims identified are persecuted Falun Gong practitioners. Detained House Christians and Uyghur minorities are also believed to be amongst those killed for their organs.

NTD News, Taiwan

Organs and Inducements at Duke

I was talked into going to what turned out to be a wonderful conference.  The modal participant was a law professor, but here's a photo of economists and a surgeon:

Judd Kessler, Jay Lavee, Al Roth, Avi Stoler

Kim Krawiec posts about the conference at the Faculty Lounge: I reproduce her post below...

"Organs & Inducements

I, of course, meant to post this in advance of the symposium, but underestimated the amount of time and attention last minute details would consume (what’s that phrase about older but not wiser?).  So I’m just getting to it now. 

Anyway, I think that the event was a big success and I will have more to say about it in the coming days.  For now, I’ll just post the symposium abstract, along with a thanks to all the many wonderful participants who made this event a success. 

More to follow . . .

Symposium Abstract:

The need for human organs for transplantation far outstrips supply. As a result, a large literature has developed debating possible means to address the gap. Suggestions range from procurement system improvements and changes in the consent regime, in the case of cadaveric organ donation, to inventive exchange systems (such as swaps and NEAD chains) and financial incentives of various sorts, in the case of live organ donation.

In Organs and Inducements, contributors build on existing debates on mechanisms designed to bridge the gap between organ demand and supply, to address deeper questions regarding inducements to donate.   Among the varied possible mechanisms of persuasion and incentives at society’s disposal, what are the relative advantages and disadvantages of each?  What are the larger ethical, economic, sociological, and psychological issues raised by these different types of inducements, including non-financial inducements?  Why are some accepted by the law and society at large, while others are not?  Do the lines we’ve drawn among permissible and impermissible inducements make sense, given the concerns those rules are meant to address?"

*************************************************

Update: here's a further post today by Kim K., on the origins of the conference (and why they chose the word "inducements" rather than "incentives": More Organs & Inducements 

Video of my recent talk at the SIEPR economic summit

Here I was: speaking on Friday March 15, 2013.

"Horse meat is the Tatar's Viagra"

While horse meat may be repugnant in some places, the controversy over horse meat in Russia is over how to prepare it: Appreciation of the Horse, Well-Cooked

"In parts of Russia and throughout Central Asia, horse is a central feature in traditional cuisine and is considered almost mandatory on special occasions.
...
"Mr. Nasyrov buys much of his horse meat from trusted local producers in Tatarstan, the heavily Muslim region east of Moscow where, he said, residents ascribe even greater attributes to eating horse.

“Horse meat,” he said, “is the Tatar’s Viagra.”
*******************

You can buy canned horse meat here.

Furniture in Foshan

When I spoke in Foshan China, I got an opportunity to see one of the big furniture markets in that city, this one run by the Louvre Group:

Beijing East Linden Co.

While in Beijing I visited the East Linden Company, which is making a market for intellectual property by producing a high-tech searchable database of traditional medicines. Visiting them felt a lot like visiting a Silicon Valley start up (e.g. they run their own automatic translation server, and you can search their database by starting with a molecule...)

The chairwoman, Madame Yanhuai Liu graciously agreed to let me take this photo of her, next to two pictures in her office of her mother and father, a general who went on the Long March.

My names in Chinese transliteration

Irwin Rose, Irvine Ross, and Elvin Ross all appear in the Google Translate version of this story  (2012诺奖得主：中国经济需要市场设计   2012 Nobel laureate: Chinese economy needs a market design) about a talk I gave in Beijing.

Here's one version of my name in Chinese, which I gather lends itself to the "Ross" pronunciation:

Stanford's student senate rejects an anti-Israel divestment resolution

The Stanford Daily has the story of the contentious and lengthy debate: Undergraduate Senate votes against divestmentbill

The resolution failed handily: the newspaper account also gives in passing a picture of Stanford's diverse student Senate:
"[the divestment] bill did not pass, with seven senators in opposition, five abstaining and one in support of the bill.
"Senator Janhavi Vartak ’15 voted in favor. Senators Anna Brezhneva ’15, Brandon Hightower ’15, Garima Sharma ’15, Bindra, Miller, Olivos and Pham voted against. Senators Fadavi, Bacon, Crouch, Haveles and Menjivar abstained."

A number of faculty members and well known personalities from the wider world sent messages both for and against divestment. The SD has that story too: two market designers were mentioned as being against the proposal. The full statements of many of those who went on record as opposing divestment can be found on the page of the Stanford Israel Alliance  Mine is here, and Yoav Shoham's is a short scroll down..

Matching and Market Design: Bob Wilson and Mary Kline

Matching is important, and I returned from a trip to China just in time to attend the wedding of the Dean of Design, my advisor Bob Wilson, and Mary Kline.

Mazel tov, Bob and Mary!

Call for papers: May 4 Bay Area Behavioral and Experimental Economics Workshop

Call for Papers

Bay Area Behavioral and Experimental Economics Workshop

Saturday May 4, 2013, University of San Francisco

The Bay Area Behavioral Economics and Experimental Workshop (BABEEW) will be hosted this year by the University of San Francisco on Saturday, May 4^th 2012, in Fromm Hall (http://www.usfca.edu/campusmap/).

The objective of the workshop is to provide an opportunity for Bay Area researchers in behavioral economics and related fields to share their latest research.

All interested researchers are invited to submit an abstract for presentation. We would also appreciate it if you could advertise this call for papers in your department and inform interested faculty members and students.

There will be breakfast, coffee breaks, lunch, and dinner paid for by the sponsors*. We reserved the Koret Rec Center parking lot free all day (!) (http://tinyurl.com/ParkingBABEEW2013). Participants will need to cover any other travel or accommodation expenses. Hotel at a walkable distance: Stanyan Park Hotel (let’s say it is full of old times charm).

Deadlines

The deadline for submitting an abstract (250 words or less) is Friday, April 5^th 2013. Acceptance decisions will be e-mailed to registered participants by Friday, April 19^th. The workshop program will be e-mailed to registered participant by April 25^th.

To submit and register: http://tinyurl.com/BABEEW2013

BABEEW Scientific Committee

Alessandra Cassar              Univ. of San Francisco

Dan Friedman                     UC, Santa Cruz

John Ifcher
                        Santa Clara University

Linda Kamas
                    Santa Clara University

John Morgan                       UC, Berkeley

Charles Sprenger                Stanford University

*We gratefully acknowledge funding from the International Association for Research in Economic Psychology (IAREP), the Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE), and the International Confederation for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics and Economic Psychology (ICABEEP).

Exchanges for digital goods

The NY Times has the story: Imagining a Swap Meet for E-Books and Music


"In late January, Amazon received a patent to set up an exchange for all sorts of digital material. The retailer would presumably earn a commission on each transaction, and consumers would surely see lower prices.

"But a shudder went through publishers and media companies. Those who produce content might see their work devalued, just as they did when Amazon began selling secondhand books 13 years ago. The price on the Internet for many used books these days is a penny.

"On Thursday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office published Apple’s application for its own patent for a digital marketplace. Apple’s application outlines a system for allowing users to sell or give e-books, music, movies and software to each other by transferring files rather than reproducing them. Such a system would permit only one user to have a copy at any one time.

"Meanwhile, a New York court is poised to rule on whether a start-up that created a way for people to buy and sell iTunes songs is breaking copyright law. A victory for the company would mean that consumers would not need either Apple’s or Amazon’s exchange to resell their digital items. Electronic bazaars would spring up instantly.

“The technology to allow the resale of digital goods is now in place, and it will cause a dramatic upheaval,” said Bill Rosenblatt, president of GiantSteps, a technology consulting firm. “In the short term, it’s great for consumers. Over the long term, however, it could seriously reduce creators’ incentive to create.”

Treadmill desk

Not for everyone, but I enjoy mine when I'm in my office at Stanford: