Stephanie Hurder defends her Ph.D. dissertation

Stephanie Hurder defended her dissertation at Harvard a few days ago. In the modern photoshop fashion, I got included in the post-defense photo even though I had skyped in from Stanford.

Al Roth, Larry Katz, Claudia Goldin, Stephanie Hurder, Chris Avery, and Pika

I blogged about her job market paper here, and her job market here.

Welcome to the club, Stephanie.

Tales from the Organ Trade: documentary on kidney black markets

Tales from the Organ Trade investigates the black market of organ trafficking
A documentary filmmaker investigates the organ trade and questions her beliefs.

Should people be allowed to sell their organs?

That question lingers in Tales from the Organ Trade , a documentary by Toronto’s multiple award-winning filmmaker Ric Bienstock, making its North American premiere at Hot Docs , April 28, 29 and May 2.

The film won Best Sign of the Times Doc Award from New Zealand's documentary festival, where it had its world premiere last week.

Narrated by David Cronenberg, it’s an unflinching look at international organ trafficking, capturing, for the first time, the point of view of all participants in one operation.

Kidney disease is skyrocketing and transplant is the only way to survive for hundreds of thousands of people. With the desperately poor willing, and opportunistic surgeons able, there’s little hope of containing the spread, Bienstock says.

...

Globally it’s illegal to buy organs, a position Bienstock agreed with at first.

“I expected it to be a very black and white story when I set out,” she says. “Then I realized there was a lot of moral ambiguity.”

The film focuses on a trafficking ring run out of a Kosovo clinic, involving a Turkish surgeon, an Israeli facilitator and a Canadian prosecutor — and a Toronto man who purchases a kidney from a woman in Moldova.

...

Most disquieting is the footage from the Philippines, where donating a kidney is almost a rite of passage for young men. Viewers may find themselves actually hoping one wannabe donor finds a buyer — a young man trying to lift his family out of poverty. Another young donor gets sick and discovers he has kidney disease, after it’s too late for him and the unknown recipient.

...

Bienstock confesses to feeling sadness, not relief, for the man whose kidney is rejected due to the film crew’s presence. “He really wanted to buy that house in the country and he’ll never be able to,” she says.

The Philippine men, primarily labourers, also have scars that take months to heal, and no follow-up health care.

“That is why (some) are arguing for regulation,” Bienstock says. “It should be done properly. People who donate should be at the peak of their health.”

...

"“People are finding their way to these illegal operations when they are desperate enough,” Bienstock says. “We need to find a solution and we need to be open to think uncomfortable thoughts.”

Nikhil Agarwal defends his Ph.D. dissertation

Nikhil Agarwal defended his Ph.D. dissertation earlier this week. Two members of his committee, me and Susan Athey, skyped in from Stanford. But in the age of photoshop, seeing isn't believing: here is a photo of the post-defense celebration as it happened, and as it would have happened if California were a suburb of Boston...

Parag Pathak, Nikhil Agarwal, Ariel Pakes

Al Roth, Parag Pathak, Nikhil Agarwal, Ariel Pakes and Susan Athey

I blogged about his job market paper here, and his job market here.

Welcome to the club, Nikhil.

Glenn Cohen on Transplant Tourism: purchasing organ transplants internationally

Transplant Tourism: The Ethics and Regulation of International Markets for Organs

I. Glenn Cohen 

Harvard Law School
April 20, 2013

Journal of Law, Medicine and Ethics, Vol. 41, No. 1, 2013 
Abstract:      
“Medical Tourism” is the travel of residents of one country to another country for treatment. In this article I focus on travel abroad to purchase organs for transplant, what I will call “Transplant Tourism.” With the exception of Iran, organ sale is illegal across the globe, but many destination countries have thriving black markets, either due to their willful failure to police the practice or more good faith lack of resources to detect it. I focus on the sale of kidneys, the most common subject of transplant tourism, though much of what I say could be applied to other organs as well. Part I reviews some data on sellers, recipients, and brokers in these markets. Part II discusses the bioethical issues posed by the trade - I skeptically evaluate some of the typical arguments for prohibiting the trade but suggest a different kind of argument that might work better. Part III focuses on potential regulation to deal with these issues. The definitive version of the article can be downloaded from the Journal's website as hosted by Wiley-Blackwell.


 And see his related blog post here: http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/2013/04/24/transplant-tourism-hard-questions-posed-by-the-international-and-illicit-market-for-kidneys-new-article-i-wrote/

UCLA honors Lloyd Shapley, but closes CASSEL

On Thursday I gave a department seminar at UCLA's department of Economics, and was glad to see this poster of Lloyd Shapley around campus, and a display in his honor in the library.

Lloyd Shapley

In the same visit, I was sorry to hear that UCLA's big experimental economics lab CASSEL, the California Social Science Experimental Laboratory, is scheduled to be closed down...:(

Market culture and salary discussions

My first academic job, in 1974, was at the University of Illinois, where professors were state employees whose names and salaries appeared (with some delay) in the state budget. So, if you wanted to, you could go to the library (those were pre-internet days), check out the state budget, and study the salaries of all your colleagues.

As a result, at least among the young assistant professors, salaries were discussed freely. We would each get annual letters telling us how much we were appreciated, and then telling us about our salary for the next year, and we all treated those numbers as public information, knowing that they would indeed be public in a few months for anyone curious enough to look.  That had some effect on salary policy: e.g. anomalies between new hires and previous hires had to be noted and explained (there was high inflation in those days, and the state budget often lagged behind the rate of increase in the new Ph.D. market, for example).

I subsequently moved to private universities (Pitt, then Harvard, and now Stanford), where salaries were not public and salary discussions were more guarded, and among closer circles of friends.

More generally, salary has long seemed to be one of the things that Americans are reluctant to talk about freely.  But that may be partly generational, according to this recent WSJ story:
Workers Share Their Salary Secrets: Office Taboo Fades as Younger Staffers Openly Compare Pay; Wanting to Know 'Have I Settled?'

"Comparing salaries among colleagues has long been a taboo of workplace chatter, but that is changing as Millennials—individuals born in the 1980s and 1990s—join the labor force. Accustomed to documenting their lives in real time on social-media forums like Facebook and Twitter, they are bringing their embrace of self-disclosure into the office with them. And they're using this information to negotiate raises at their current employer or higher salaries when moving to a new job.

"Not surprisingly, many firms want to keep salary information private. They hope to retain the upper hand on salary negotiation and hope to keep flawed or even discriminatory compensation systems under wraps.

"But for workers, information is power, and young people recognize this. "People are much more willing to talk about pay than they were even 10 years ago," says Kevin Hallock, director of the Institute for Compensation Studies at Cornell University and author of the 2012 book "Pay: Why People Earn What They Earn and What You Can Do Now to Make More."
...
"Companies may not like transparency, but they cannot outright bar rank-and-file employees from disclosing their pay internally or externally, under the federal National Labor Relations Act, says Fort Lauderdale employment lawyer Charles Caulkins of law firm Fisher & Phillips. That means that an employee handbook or social-media policy barring workers from disclosing their pay is generally a violation, he says. (The rules are different for managers and supervisors, who can legally be prevented from disclosing pay.)"
...
"Lucy Bayly, 43, a copywriter for an advertising agency in Oneonta, N.Y., compares discussions about income with conversations about sex: "You're dying to know, but it's too rude to ask."

Such conversations run the risk of inspiring a corrosive kind of jealousy, she says. "You think you're satisfied and then all of a sudden, you find out someone is paid a little more, and it ruins your day because you start wondering, 'Have I settled?' "

Nobel Museum display

Olof Somell writes to me from the Nobel Museum in Stockholm:

Dear Professor Roth, 

I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for your donation of artifacts to our collections. We at the Nobel Museum now showcase your "Mr. Matching t-shirt" in a display with artifacts donated by last years Nobel laureates. I attach a few photos from the display (apologies for the somewhat poor resolution). Also in the display you see for instance a piece of art from the European Union, a book collection from Mo Yen and pipettes from Shinya Yamanaka. 

Best regards

Olof Somell

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Olof Somell

Subject specialist, economics

The Nobel Museum
Box 2245
SE-103 16 Stockholm
Sweden

In earlier correspondence, soliciting an artifact, he wrote to me describing some previous contributions (email of Friday Nov 2 2012):

"To illustrate: two years ago Professor Diamond presented us with a baseball shirt custom made by his graduate students, citing his long-time devotion to the Red Sox and the link between calculating batting averages as a child and his later interest in statistics and economics. Last year Professor Sargent presented us with a Hard times token given to him by his grandfather: an object that sparked his interest in economics. "

If I recall correctly, I gave them two T-shirts given to me by my students and postdocs at a surprise 50th birthday party, the one shown (which is a picture of me over the caption "Mr Matching") and one showing pictures of all of them...

Lecture and live webcast on Market design at Stanford GSB, May 3

For my sins, I'll be speaking at the Stanford GSB Spring Reunions...both virtually and literally.

Upcoming Live Webcast

Who Gets What: The New Economics of Matchmaking
and Market Design, with Professor Al Roth,
2012 Nobel Laureate

Friday, May 3
5:00 - 6:15 pm (PDT)

Do economists have to be dull theoreticians? Not so for Nobel laureate Al Roth. Al Roth will present examples of his real world applications of market matching and his ground breaking successes with labor markets, school choice, and his life-saving favorite, kidney exchanges. The talk will include a welcome and introduction by Dean Saloner.

Cost/Registration

Although attending the webcast is complimentary, pre-registration is required.

The webcast will be available from this page at 5:00 pm (PDT), May 3.

Want to Attend the Event on Campus?
See Event Details and Registration

About Professor Al Roth
Alvin Roth, MA '73, PhD '74, joined the GSB faculty in 2012. Also in 2012, Professor Roth won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design". He is an Alfred P. Sloan fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Econometric Society. Professor Roth is well-known for his research in game theory, and its application to the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP.)

Event Details

• 

  Date/Time:	Fri, May 03, 2013 05:00PM - 06:15PM
  Venue:	CEMEX Auditorium, Zambrano Hall, Knight Management Center
  Location:	655 Knight Way, Stanford CA 94305 |Map address
  Registration Period:	04/02/2013-05/03/2013
  Price:	Free, RSVP required. See link below.
  Contact:	Ms. Alegria Salaices sbsaa@gsb.stanford.edu 6507236596

Register to Attend

Who Gets What: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market DesignThis is just one of three great events open to all GSB alumni during Spring Reunions. You can register for only this event, or the multiple events offered through one registration. These events are open to all GSB alumni, regardless of class year.

American Math Monthly reprints Gale and Shapley 1962

The journal is available on jstor and to members, but here is some of the front material. The paper itself is well worth reading, and I've posted a link to an un-gated version below.


THE AMERICAN MATHEMATICAL MONTHLY VOLUME 120, NO. 5 MAY 2013
A Letter from the Editor 383
Scott Chapman

"...This month, we honor the Nobel Prize-winning accomplishments of Lloyd Shapley. Shapley’s 1962 MONTHLY paper “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage,” co-authored with David Gale, is well-known to long-time MONTHLY readers. According to Google Scholar, the Gale/Shapley paper has been referenced over 2500 times (among MONTHLY articles, only Li and Yorke’s 1975 paper “Period three implies chaos” has been referenced more). Hence, when the announcement was made late last year that Shapley and Alvin E. Roth had been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design,” it
was not a surprise that the 1962 MONTHLY paper was cited by The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. I did find it surprising that many of the younger members of the MONTHLY Editorial Board were completely unaware of this paper. Vadim Ponomarenko wrote me the following: “The article is not only short and ground breaking, but really well-written and interesting. I think the MONTHLY should republish this article in its entirety.” Thus was born the idea to honor Shapley by reprinting his article.
I thank Ehud Kalai, a long-time colleague of Shapley’s and the James J. O’Connor Professor of Decision and Game Sciences at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, for offering to write a Foreword to Gale and Shapley’s work.
I believe that his Foreword speaks for itself, but add that the MONTHLY Editorial Board sees the reprinting of Gale and Shapley’s paper as a special opportunity to open this classic piece to a new generation of mathematicians."



Foreword: The High Priest of Game Theory 384
Ehud Kalai

"In “Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory” [1] Robert Leonard describes a 1948 public lecture presented by John von Neumann at the RAND Corporation in Santa Monica. The lecture was interrupted by a young voice from the back protesting “No! No!, that can be done much more simply!” According to Hans Speier, a director at RAND, you could have heard a pin drop as von Neumann said “come up here, young man. Show me.” The young man goes up, takes the piece of chalk, and writes down another derivation as von Neumann interrupts and says
“not so fast, young man. I can’t follow.” The young protestor was Lloyd Shapley, and following this incident he was awarded a stipend to study game theory at Princeton, a fortunate occurrence for the future of game theory.
More than a half a century later, the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics was awarded to Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth. Roth opened his Nobel Prize lecture with the following sentence: “Lloyd, when I began studying game theory your work touched every part of it and shaped it, and you were an inspiration not just for me but for the whole generation of game theorists that followed you. . . .” Robert Aumann, the 2005 Nobel Laureate game theorist who often introduced Shapley as the “High Priest of Game Theory,” stated in his Nobel Prize Lecture that Lloyd Shapley is the “greatest game theorist of all times.”...

College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage 386
D. Gale and L. S. Shapley

Read it or re-read it...it's a great paper. Here's an ungated version.

The culture of universities (and the importance of hyphens)

I've blogged before about universities and how university culture interacts with the larger culture.
I am reminded of this by a recent Times Higher Education article that I saw in Inside Higher Education, about changes being made in some of the new universities that are trying to get going in Dubai: Adjustments in Dubai

The following paragraph illustrates the clash of cultures, and also the importance of properly placing hyphens (think about what it would mean, for the paragraph and for Dubai, if each hyphen were moved a word earlier...)

"The buzz of activity at Heriot-Watt's campus is surely exactly what was planned when the Dubai Knowledge Village, the first "knowledge free-zone" opened in Dubai in 2003. Like the country's "media free-zone" and "business free-zone," it was set up to allow organizations to operate without the constrictions of Islamic-based Emirati laws."

 The article goes on to say that a large proportion of the students at the British universities in Dubai are Indian students who are unable to go to British universities for one reason or another. One reason for this, apparently, is that within Dubai there is some difficulty in emigrating from the free-zone back to the -free zone:

"International employers in Dubai may be happy to accept courses offered via the free zone's own independent accreditation system, which is overseen by international quality review, but the powerful Emirati government is believed to favor courses that follow its own accreditation model. It is clearly a factor in deciding which institution to attend, according to one student.
"I want to study at one of the UK or U.S. universities at DIAC, but it's very hard to get a civil servant job with these qualifications," she observes. "

How restaurants deal with no-shows

Here's an article from eater.com with interesting details on the different marketplace institutions being tried to limit no-shows at high end restaurants...from abolishing reservations, to overbooking, to credit card reservations with penalties, to a theater-ticket model.  How Restaurants Can Deal With No-Show Diners

HT: Neil Dorosin (who points out that somewhat similar issues arise in school choice, since schools also suffer from no-shows when the school year begins)

Experimental social science conference at Stanford

West Coast Experiments Conference, May 10, register by May 1....http://ps-experiments.ucr.edu/conference/western

WCE.2013, Stanford University: The sixth annual meeting of the West Coast Experiments Conference will be held at Stanford University on Friday, May 10.

We encourage anyone with an interest in experiments to attend; graduate students are especially welcome, as well as those who are new to experimental research. The WCE conference is organized more as a methods "workshop" than as a venue to engage in subfield debates. Presenters focus on one or two methodological take away points of their experimental work. The goal is to give the audience applied, practical advice on methods and design in a way that will help them improve their own experimental research.

The WCE conference is a single day meeting, starting at 9 and ending after dinner. Although we do not have the money to cover travel or lodging expenses, we will provide all meals on that day and we promise a good conversation.

---

The conference will be held in the Koret Taube Conference Center at the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research (SIEPR), located at 366 Galvez Street.

Presentations include (in no particular order):

Social experiments that really matter in the real world:

• Alvin Roth (Stanford Economics): Market design experiments concerning deceased organ allocation (joint work with Judd Kessler)
• Scott Desposato (UCSD Political Science): Ethics in comparative politics experiments

Advances in statistical methods for counterfactual inference:

• Guido Imbens (Stanford Graduate School of Business): Some comments on stratification and re-randomization in randomized experiments
• Luke Keele (Penn State Political Science): Conditioning on posttreatment quantities with structural mean models

Experimental design in political psychology applications:

• Jennifer Merolla (CGU Political Science): Methodological issues surrounding the use of theDynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE)
• Eric Dickson (NYU Political Science): "Legitimacy and Enforcement: An Experimental Investigation" (using experimental games to measure psychological quantities and parse psychological mechanisms, joint work with Sandy Gordon and Greg Huber)
• Gabriel Lenz (Berkeley Political Science): Identifying the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice (without assigning candidates to plastic surgery....)

Ted Miguel (Berkeley Economics) also will give an update on the Berkeley Initiative on Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS) at lunchtime.

---

Funding

The conference is made possible by generous funding from the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford, the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, and the Stanford Department of Political Science.

---

Registration

Registration is free, but you must register by May 1st to be assured of a space at the conference. To register, please click on this link and fill out the required fields.

If you have any questions about registration, please send an email to Jackie Sargent (hijack AT stanford DOT edu)

If you register for the conference but realize later that you need to cancel, please send an email to Jackie and indicate that you wish to cancel your registration.

---

Parking and Transportation

We have reserved a group of parking spaces near the meeting. We hope participants will carpool to campus. To ensure we have enough for all driving to campus, please contact Jackie Sargent (hijack AT stanford DOT edu) to reserve a space.

---

Hotel

Hotel: We have reserved a block of rooms at the Sheraton Palo Alto Hotel. Using this link, you may book your own hotel room. The cutoff date for the conference rate is April 19. You also may call the hotel directly and indicate you are with the "West Coast Experiment Conference." Shuttle service to the conference location is available, or it is about a one mile walk.

---

Participants

This year's co-organizers are:

• Mike Tomz (Stanford)
• Kevin Esterling (UC Riverside)

We will post a spreadsheet with registered participants after the registraion cut-off date.

---

Contact Information

For more information about the conference, please email Kevin Esterling (kevin DOT esterling AT ucr DOT edu). For information about local arrangements, please contact Jackie Sargent (hijack AT stanford DOT edu; 650.725.1333) or Eliana Vasquez (elianav AT stanford DOT edu; 650.723.8042).

---

---

---

Previous Conferences

May 11, 2012: West Coast Experimental Political Science Conference, UC Berkeley
Conference Program

May 9, 2011: West Coast Experimental Political Science Conference, Caltech
Conference Program

May 21, 2010: West Coast Experimental Political Science Conference, UCLA
Conference Program.

May 15, 2009: West Coast Experimental Political Science Conference, UCSD
Conference Program

May 2, 2008: Experiments in Political Science, UCR
Conference Program

Carbon emissions permits are cheap in Europe

The NY Times has the story: In Europe, Paid Permits for Pollution Are Fizzling

"More important, though, than lost jobs and diminished payouts for traders and bankers, the penny ante price of carbon credits means the market is not doing its job: pushing polluters to reduce carbon emissions, which most climate scientists believe contribute to global warming.

"The market for these credits, officially called European Union Allowances, or E.U.A.’s, has been both unstable and under sharp downward pressure this year because of a huge oversupply and a stream of bad political and economic news. On April 16, for instance, after the European Parliament voted down the proposed reduction in the number of credits, prices dropped about 50 percent, to 2.63 euros from nearly 5, in 10 minutes.

“No one was going to buy” on the way down, said Fred Payne, a trader with CF Partners.

"Europe’s troubled experience with carbon trading has also discouraged efforts to establish large-scale carbon trading systems in other countries, including the United States, although California and a group of Northeastern states have set up smaller regional markets.

"Traders do not mind big price swings in any market — in fact, they can make a lot of money if they play them right.

"But over time, the declining prices for the credits have sapped the European market of value, legitimacy and liquidity — the ease with which the allowances can be traded — making it less attractive for financial professionals."

The NY Times debates whether prisoners should be able to donate organs

Organ Donors Behind Bars

DEBATERS

• 

  The Incarcerated Are Too Vulnerable to Consent

  LAWRENCE O. GOSTIN, GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY
  Despite rules that organ donations should not affect prisoner conditions, inmates will believe otherwise. Free consent is not truly possible under coercive conditions.
• 

  Let Those of Us in Prison Give Life to Others

  SHANNON ROSS, INMATE, STANLEY CORRECTIONAL INSTITUTE
  The reasons that people cite for not allowing prisoners to donate organs are careless exaggerations that have become obsolete because of medical advancement.
• 

  We Must Draw the Line on Death-Row Inmates

  AMY L. FRIEDMAN, TRANSPLANT SURGEON
  As surgeons, we must avoid conflicts of interest and consistently say, “No, thank you” to organ donation from a prisoner who has been executed.
• 

  Let Prisoners Donate Their Organs

  SALLY SATEL, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
  If healthy inmates are sincerely motivated to donate, fully educated about the risks and receive no special treatment in return, how are they not acting voluntarily?
• 

  With the Right Safeguards, the Utah Law Is Fine

  RUTH FADEN, JOHNS HOPKINS BERMAN INSTITUTE OF BIOETHICS
  One huge concern: this new law appears to leave open the possibility that death-row inmates could request to be executed by removal of their vital organs.
• 

  It’s Better to Focus on Other Donor Initiatives

  BETH PIRAINO, NATIONAL KIDNEY FOUNDATION
  Numerous concerns are raised when prisoners wish to donate to strangers, including whether they have access to appropriate medical care after the surgery.

INTRODUCTION

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York TimesWould the recipient of this organ care whether it came from a prisoner?

Utah recently became the first state to explicitly permit general prisoners – not death-row inmates – to donate their organs if they die while incarcerated. Should more states have laws like this? Should prisoners be allowed to make live donations to people other than family members? And with nearly 118,000 people in the U.S. waiting for hearts, kidneys, livers and other life-saving transplants, why not include death-row inmates?

READ THE DISCUSSION »

Update on those Four Harvard students on the economics job market this year (2012-13)

Back in November I blogged about Nikhil Agarwal, Stephanie Hurder, Scott Kominers, and  Johanna Mollerstrom   who were on the market, as well as Alex Peysakhovich who decided early to take a postdoc at Yale.

Well, they all got jobs.

Nikhil Agarwal will go to the Economics department at MIT.

Stephanie Hurder will go to the Economics department at Michigan.

Scott Kominers will return to Harvard as a junior fellow.

Johanna Mollerstrom will go to the Economics department at George Mason.

Congratulations to all!

Fast company

Tickets For Apple’s WWDC 2013 Sell Out In Under 2 Minutes, Compared To 2 Hours In 2012

Tickets for Apple’s annual Worldwide Developer’s Conference went on sale today at 10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern, and as expected, sold out in record time, at just under 2 minutes. Tickets for the developer-focused event at San Francisco’s Moscone West, which features presentations and one-on-one time with Apple’s own in-house engineers, sold out in just two hours in 2012, in under 12 hours in 2011, and in eight days in 2010.

...

This year also marks the first time Apple has provided advance notice regarding when tickets would go on sale, which almost definitely contributed to the faster-than usual sell-out this time around. Imagine a crop of millions of developers around the world hovering over their computers, waiting for the buying process to go live.

The quick sell-out is made more impressive by the fact that sales of the $1,599 tickets were limited to just one per person, and five per organization, tracked by individual Apple ID. During a previous keynote, former CEO Steve Jobs said that there were over 5,000 attendees at the show, which means that Apple potentially just made as much as $8 million in roughly 90 seconds in gross revenue from the event.

Apple’s developer economy is now a massive industry, having paid out $9 billion in total to developers, at a rate now of around $1 billion per quarter. Both iPhone and iPad audiences continue to grow, and Apple’s tablet especially showed tremendous progress during Apple’s most recent fiscal quarter. While Mac sales seem to be either flat or on the decline, the global growth of the iOS user pool more than makes up for that, and iOS as a platform is still the primary revenue driver when it comes to mobile apps and advertising. Combined, those factors mean interest in tickets for WWDC isn’t likely to flag anytime soon.

 HT: Joshua Gans

The NRMP fills most positions this year

Here's the NRMP April 2013 post-match press release: Final NRMP® Residency Match 2013 Results Show 99.4 Percent of Positions Filled

Skepticism about presumed consent in organ donor registration

Donate Life California posts a skeptical account of proposals to switch from opt in to opt out: An Attractive Concept with Unattractive Results

"72% of Californians and 75% of Americans who can become organ donors actually donate and save lives at the time of their deaths. Second,  California’s actual donation rate of 32.3 nDPM (normalized Donors per Million population[iv])  leads the US ‘s 26.1 nDPM and every country in the world except for Spain’s 33.5 nDPM[1] Meanwhile all other countries trail donation in California and the US; whether they have Presumed Consent or Explicit Consent laws."
...

"Most significant in this assessment of PC vs EC is the fact that the European countries that developed and maintain presumed Consent in their laws do not rely on it to actually recover organs.  A 2012 survey of practices reports[vi] that donation professionals in all of these countries require family consent prior to recovery of organs. The fact that all countries that have PC laws do not actually rely on the right of the state to take organs speaks to the public trust and autonomy issues that arise when countries seek to claim any type of property, and makes it clear that the variance in donation rates is a function of cultural and operational aspects rather than legal characteristics of their donation programs."

Gay marriage in France

Here's the story from the Guardian about what appears to be the end to a contentious transition in France from an illegal, repugnant transaction (actually, not just marriage, but also adoption, so two repugnant transactions) to transactions fully sanctioned by law, although still with substantial numbers of opponents:

France approves same-sex marriage: Passing of law allowing gay couples to marry and adopt children comes after heated debate in parliament and weeks of protest

France has become the 14th country to legalise same-sex marriage , pushing through François Hollande's flagship social change after months of street protests, political slanging matches and a rise in homophobic attacks.

After 331 votes for and 225 votes against, there were chants of "Equality. Equality." in the French assembly, where the Socialists have an absolute majority. But thousands of riot police and water cannons were in place near the parliament building in Paris in advance of planned demonstrations against the law.

The right to marriage and adoption for everyone regardless of sexual orientation has proved bitterly divisive in France, triggering the biggest conservative and rightwing street protests in 30 years. Recent weeks have seen more than 200 arrests as police teargassed late-night demonstrators near parliament. More than 172 hours of heated debate in the assembly and the senate meant the bill was one of the most debated in recent history, with furious clashes and a near fist-fightbetween politicians.

One rightwing MP warned the government was "killing children" by allowing same-sex married couples to adopt and one senator warned gay marriage would open the way to people being able to marry animals or objects. MPs in favour of the bill received death threats, skinheads attacked a gay bar in Lille, and gay rights groups reported a rise in homophobic attacks.

Before the vote, the speaker of the assembly ordered the expulsion of noisy protesters from the public gallery, calling them "enemies of democracy".

The vote makes France the ninth country in Europe to legalise same-sex marriage and the first ceremonies could take place this summer.

Crick's Nobel medal, and letter to his son describing DNA

For those of you have been waiting for news since I posted about the auction of Francis Crick's Nobel medal, wait no longer: How Much is a Nobel Prize Worth? If It’s Francis Crick’s, the Answer is $2 Million

Even better, his letter to his 12 year old son describing DNA sold for six million: you can read the whole letter here

...
...

Recommender algorithms for labor market search

Aki Ito has written a nice story at Bloomberg News about ongoing efforts to design labor market search engines to deal with congestion: Algorithms Play Matchmaker to Fight 7.7% U.S. Unemployment: Jobs

She writes about sites like AfterCollege and CareerBuilder and Burning Glass, as well as the online IT marketplace ODesk.

There's a lot going on in labor market matching and matchmaking, and lots of good market design  problems in that space.

Is freedom to do social science research like freedom of the press?

 A group of British social scientists (who appear to mostly be involved in survey research) think that the current system of institutional review of research in Britain is better suited to medical experiments than to social science.

Here's the story:

Social Science Ethics

March 14, 2013 - 3:00am

By

Paul Jump for Times Higher Education

British social scientists are drawing up a common set of ethical principles aimed at freeing research from what they see as excessive ethics oversight frameworks that hamper their ability to improve social understanding.

According to Robert Dingwall, professor of social science at Nottingham Trent University, a "free" social science research base is as important to a healthy democracy as a free press. But in the past decade, British and international funders have required universities to vet all research involving human subjects via institutional ethics committees.

"You can imagine how outraged journalists would feel if they had to pre-check with a committee that their questions would not upset someone," he said.

Dingwall, a member of an Academy of Social Sciences working group on the issue, said committee members often had no expertise in ethics or the research field in question, and were primarily concerned with the university's reputation. Their risk aversion fed back to academics, who were often disinclined to undertake research that could incur disapproval even if it was potentially important.

The situation was exacerbated, Dingwall said, by the application to social science of frameworks developed for biomedicine. He said the balance of individual risk and social benefit was different in the social sciences because most research posed a minimal risk to individuals and offered significant benefit to the community.

He said that although the U.S. and Canada have recognized that the regulatory system was in crisis, Britain has yet to join efforts to redress it.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/14/british-social-scientists-propose-new-approach-ethics-review#ixzz2NYEV2Xos
Inside Higher Ed 

Paul Milgrom's Wikipedia page (and 65th birthday present)

Today is Paul Milgrom's 65th birthday, and is the second day of a conference in his honor that has brought his students and other admirers from all over the world. Joshua Gans led the creation of the birthday present, which involved bringing  Paul Milgrom's Wikipedia page up to snuff. As Joshua announced at the dinner last night, it is presently the longest Wikipedia page for any living economist (maybe for any economist, I didn't get that clear...). Here's a picture of it being presented to Paul in scroll form, held up by those of his students who were present:

Paul' Milgrom's Wikipedia page, printed out for his birthday

 It's a great celebration of Paul's remarkable career, at its midpoint.

Happy birthday, Paul.

Paul Milgrom, rebutting all the toasts in his honor