An economist goes to a surgery conference: American Transplant Congress, May 18-22

An unusual thing about giving a talk at a transplant conference is that it comes with a series of pre- (and perhaps post-) announcements...not that I'm feeling any pressure...

Don't Miss featured Keynote Speaker & Nobel laureate Alvin E. Roth, PhD, presenting

"Kidney Exchange: An Economist's Perspective" 
Sunday, May 19, 5:45 - 6:15 pm

With decades of experience and knowledge in experimental economics, game theory, and market design, Dr. Roth will provide insight into how he has applied economic theory to real-world problems at this year's ATC meeting.

Dr. Roth serves as the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. He contributed to the National Bureau of Economic Research paper on kidney exchange, which was published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics.

Dr. Roth was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley for his work on the theory of stable allocations.

View More Program Highlights

Here's an ATC press release:

Nobel Laureate to Describe How Economics Play Key Role in Kidney Exchange

Nobel laureate Alvin E. Roth, PhD, will discuss the economics of kidney exchange when he delivers the Keynote Lecture.

Nobel laureate Alvin E. Roth, PhD, has applied his economics expertise to strategies for organizing paired kidney donation exchange effectively, and he will share insights he has gained from this work when he presents the Keynote Lecture "Kidney Exchange: An Economist's Perspective" Sunday evening, May 19.

"This lecture will be an opportunity to offer an economist's perspective to a community of clinicians, surgeons and other health professionals, and explain what I see as some of the issues involved in implementing kidney exchange effectively," he said. "As an economist, I study how exchanges can be organized, and there is a great deal that has been, and can be, done to help organize kidney exchange."

The issues of organization emerge at different levels — within a transplant center, within a kidney exchange network, in collaboration among kidney exchange networks and in the development of national policy for kidney exchange. While much of the conversation focuses on what kinds of kidneys are suitable for the different patients needing transplantation, Dr. Roth said, attention also needs to be paid to how to make kidney exchange work well for transplant centers so that it can continue to grow.

Dr. Roth comes to the lecture with decades of contributions in game theory, market design and experimental economics, and in applying economic theory to solutions for real-world problems. He ventured into the real-world problem of kidney exchange when he and economist colleagues wrote a National Bureau of Economic Research paper "Kidney Exchange," which was ultimately published in the May 2, 2004, edition of the Quarterly Journal of Economics. They corresponded with transplant surgeon luminary Francis L. Delmonico, MD, and immunologist Susan L. Saidman, PhD, of Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston, and ultimately collaborated in forming the New England Program for Kidney Exchange (NEPKE) in 2005. Dr. Roth also worked with transplant surgeon E. Steve Woodle, MD, urologist Michael A. Rees, MD, and colleagues in developing the Paired Donation Consortium in Ohio and the Alliance for Paired Donation.

Currently, Dr. Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. He was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley for his work on the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.

and here's the ATC pre-talk post this morning (now I better finish preparing the talk...)

Transplant surgeons and economists are joining forces to implement efficient, effective paired kidney donation exchange systems. Learn how economics plays a role in this endeavor when Nobel laureate Alvin E. Roth, PhD, speaks about "Kidney Exchange: An Economist's Perspective" during the Keynote Lecture at 5:45 pm today in Room 6E. He won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley, PhD, in 2012 for his work on the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. 

"Organized kidney exchange clearinghouses arose out of collaborations between transplant professionals interested in improving patient care by expanding the number of transplants, and economists interested in market design. Transplant institutions have their different interests and ways of looking at patient care, and treating people with end-stage renal disease is a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States, so it's not surprising to find that sometimes complicated economic interests are also at play," said Dr. Roth, the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. 

Exploring how those economic and medical institution interests can interact will help all parties involved determine how to move forward, Dr. Roth said. Kidney exchange will require innovations in how to arrange, coordinate and conduct surgeries, and in how to assemble and organize efficient clearinghouses. Therefore, paired kidney exchange is a natural area of collaboration between surgeons and economists. 

Issues of organization entail the various levels of kidney exchange, he noted. Within a single transplant center, the question is how to organize surgeries to obtain the most suitable transplants for the most patients. At the next level, there is the question of how different transplant centers can coordinate with one another in a kidney exchange network. And then there are questions about how different kidney exchange networks function and interact with each other. Thus questions about organizing kidney exchange nationally are often at least partly about economics. 

A recent challenge is that many transplant centers now have enough experience with kidney exchange to conduct their own exchanges internally among their patient-donor pairs. The unintended result, Dr. Roth said, is that kidney exchange pools now consist increasingly of highly sensitized patients. One response to an over-representation of highly sensitized patients is the development of long non-simultaneous, non-directed donor chains to match compatible kidneys for these patients. 

"We have to figure out ways to get more of the easy-to-match pairs into pools where they can be matched with harder-to-match pairs," he said. "Suppose you have many highly sensitized patients, and when you find a compatible kidney from an incompatible pair that would work for another pair, it's unlikely the receiving pair can donate a kidney back. That's why chains are particularly important for highly sensitized patients. Long non-directed donor chains are beneficial to the most highly sensitized patients. Transplant centers can exchange paired kidney donations on a national level and still perform the surgeries in their own centers." 

What can transplant surgeons, clinicians and allied health professionals do? Attend Dr. Roth's lecture, understand the benefits of kidney exchange and contribute to growing it. Transplant professionals and economists alike are still working out how to make kidney exchange work well for patients, donors and transplant centers. 

"Working those things out will make it easier for transplant centers to enroll their patients and donors," Dr. Roth said. "There are gains to achieve through collaboration among transplant professionals with different kinds of expertise. It is a great privilege as an economist to be able to contribute to this endeavor. It is good that transplant professionals interested in kidney exchange have been able to look outside of what is known just in the surgical community to bring in other kinds of help. It is good for us as economists that we are able to obtain these insights from surgical experts so that we can assist them."

An Alliance for Paired Donation reception: "Business Attire"

I got the following invitation by email: I assume that the photograph is to illustrate what is meant by "Business Attire" (so surgeons won't come in scrubs...)

Join us in honoring our esteemed colleague,   Alvin Roth, PhD,   winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics During the ATC Meeting Saturday Evening, May 18th in the Willow Room At the Sheraton Seattle Hotel 1400 Sixth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101 Time: 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Business Attire Please RSVP By May 7th 2013 to reserve your seat l-r, Alvin Roth, PhD, with King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden at the Nobel Prize Ceremony

.Among Dr. Roth's achievements, the Nobel Prize Committee cited his work with the Alliance for Paired Donation (APD) in developing the algorithms that are used in the APD and other kidney paired exchange programs. After drinks and  hors d'hoeuvres, there will be a short presentation by Dr. Roth and  by Dr. Alan Leichtman, co-investigator of the Alliance for Paired Donation's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) sponsored study to propose a standard acquisition cost (SAC) for kidney donors who donate through the mechanism of kidney paired donation.

Art and Economics in Fresno

I received the following, unusual email:

I am writing to let you know about my exhibition "ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS?" at the Fresno Art Museum. 

It is roughly based on your research in matching theory.

Thank you for the inspiration,

Sonya Rapoport

ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS? is an interactive artwork that updates the Pattern and Design (P&D) art pieces that I created  from 1966 to 1968. I had painted iconic abstractions directly onto kitchy patterned linen from closeout sales. The results became my Funky P&D artwork.

Upon learning about the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Science for Marketing Design and Matching Theory, I was inspired to update the P&D work according to the research of its winners, Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley. 

ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS? pays tribute to Marketing as Andy Warhol's work pays tribute to Celebrity. The updated P&D work consists of ten stable images composed of a black and white, 8 x 10" glossy photograph of a 60's P&D painting placed on a New York Times Advertisement. I titled each of these ten stable art works with an unstable media headline, such as "Find Your Magic." The titles are "unstable" because I invite viewers to reassign the titles to a "stable" image of their choice. I track the results in a Matching Theory algorithm.

The work of Nobel laureates Roth and Shapley seeks to optimize how people, such as medical students and job applicants, and institutions, like residency programs and companies, find and select each other in order to create stable matches.

ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS? demonstrates both restricted and unrestricted mechanisms for matching. I organized data-gathering events in which groups of ten participants picked one "unstable" title and matched it with one "stable" composite image. I then removed this newly named work, leaving only nine titles for re-matching with the nine remaining composite images. This restricted mechanism of matching continued until all titles were assigned to a composite image. During the exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum, participants will engage in the unrestricted mechanism of matching any title to any composite image, previously selected or not.

In ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS? I try to merge art with economic science. By encouraging people to interact with my composite artworks, I created a simplistic model of the Marketing Design and Matching Theory to demonstrate the difference between the restricted and unrestricted selections.

Donate Life California solicits living kidney donors

Donate Life California Launches Living Donation California

"SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 14, 2013 – Living Donation California launched today as a first-of-its-kind, state-authorized information and referral service to inspire and inform people to be altruistic living kidney donors. Through its website, www.LivingDonationCalifornia.org, the free service provides information about living kidney donation and refers potentially eligible individuals for evaluation at a transplant center.

“There is a national shortage of kidneys available for transplant, and the need is especially acute in the State of California. By encouraging people to be altruistic kidney donors, Living Donation California gives hope to the thousands of transplant-eligible Californians who spend years on dialysis – years they could be spending more time with family, working and living healthy, active lives,” said Lisa Stocks, Board President of Donate Life California, administrators of the state’s organ and tissue donor registry who together with fifteen kidney transplant programs developed the Living Donation California initiative.

In California, kidney transplant candidates wait up to ten years, and for many patients twice as long as the national average, for a kidney transplant from a deceased donor. Circumstances allowing for organ recovery at the time of death are a rare (less than one percent) occurrence, so the state’s transplant community is focused on increasing living donation to help the large and growing number of Californians in need of kidney transplants.

The vast majority of living kidney donors are family or close friends of their recipients. A small but growing percentage are altruistic donors who offer the gift of a kidney without expectation of receiving anything in return. Federal law prohibits buying and selling organs for transplant, although in some cases living organ donors may be reimbursed for travel and other expenses incurred during the donation process. However, altruistic donors commonly feel greatly empowered by their choice to donate a kidney."

14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce June 16-20, The University of Pennsylvania

Here, from David Parkes is the call for participation in the EC conference at Penn in June. Note the deadlines of May 24 for hotels and May 28 for registration.  It looks like market design will be well represented, including two tutorials called just that by Utku Unver and Tayfun Sonmez.  I'll speak about developments in kidney exchange:

Kidney Exchange: where we’ve been and where we can go from here

Abstract: I’ll give an overview of the growth of kidney exchange and of the computational, economic, and behavioral issues that arise.  Kidney exchange has grown into an enterprise involving many hospitals and overlapping exchange networks, and in the process the set of strategic players has changed, and so has the patient pool. I’ll discuss how the market design has evolved to keep pace with these changes, and further challenges that remain, for the medical community, for economists, and for computer scientists.

MONDAY, MAY 6, 2013

from David Parkes: Final Call for Participation:: 14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce June 16-20, The University of Pennsylvania

FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13>
June 16-20, 2013 Philadelphia, PA

Early registration deadline: May 28
Hotel cut-off: May 24 

Since 1999 the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom)
has sponsored the leading scientific conference on advances in theory,
systems, and applications at the interface of economics and computation,
including applications to electronic commerce.

The Fourteenth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'13) will feature
invited speakers Jon Kleinberg and Alvin Roth, paper presentations,
workshops, and tutorials.

The conference will be held from Sunday, June 16, 2013 through Thursday,
June 20, 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Accepted technical papers and invited talks will be presented from June 18
through June 20; tutorials and workshops will be held on June 16 and June
17. Accepted papers will be available in the form in which they are
published in the ACM Digital Library one week before the conference.

Registration <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/registration.html> is now open
with early registration period ending May 28, and the reduced rate for the
conference hotel <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/conferencehotel.html> is
available until May 24, 2013.

Program outline:

14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce: June 18-20, 2013

Detailed program will be announced shortly. List of Accepted Papers is
announced.

Program will include a poster session on the evening of June 18th. See
http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/callforposters.html for the call for posters
due on May 10th.

Keynote speakers are

Alvin Roth (Stanford): Kidney Exchange: Where We've Been and Where We Can
Go From Here

Jon Kleinberg (Cornell): Cascading Behavior in Social and Economic
Networks

Workshops <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/schedule_workshops.html> and
Tutorials <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/schedule_tutorials.html> are held
Sunday June 16th and Monday June 17th.

Workshops
http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/schedule_workshops.html:

The 3rd Workshop on Social Computing and User Generated Content
Organizers: Yiling Chen (Harvard) and Arpita Ghosh (Cornell)

Workshop on "he Economics of Privacy"
Organizers : Aaron Roth (UPenn) and Katrina Ligett (Cal Tech)

The 9th Ad Auction Workshop
Organizers: Ashish Goel (Stanford), Michal Feldman (Hebrew University),
Ian Kash (Microsoft) and Neel Sundaresan (eBay)

Crowdsourcing and Online Behavioral Experiments
Organizers: Sid Suri (Microsoft Research), Winter Mason (Stevens Institute
of Technology) and Daniel Goldstein (Microsoft Research)

Tutorials
http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/schedule_tutorials.html:

Social Computing and User Generated Content
Presenters: Yiling Chen (Harvard) and Arpita Ghosh (Cornell)

Prior-Robust Optimization
Presenters : Nikhil Devanur (MSR) and Balasubramanian Sivan (U.
Wisconsin-Madison)

Econometrics
Presenter: Bo Cowgill (UC Berkeley)

Market Design I
Presenter: Utku Unver (Boston College)

Market Design II
Presenter: Tayfun Sonmez (Boston College)

Marginal Revolution: Manhattan meets Disney World

Tyler Cowen at MR writes today about this repugnant market, described in the NY Post: Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney World

And Minnesota makes 12 (states that have legalized same sex marriage)

As more states legalize same sex marriage, its status as a repugnant transaction isn't yet history. Minnesota's move was hardly bipartisan: Minnesota Senate Clears Way for Same-Sex Marriage

"Gay couples will be permitted to wed in Minnesota starting in August, making it the 12th state to permit same-sex marriage and the first in the Midwest to take such a step outside of a court ruling.

"The State Senate, controlled by Democrats, voted 37 to 30 on Monday to allow same-sex marriages, after approval by the State House last week. Gov. Mark Dayton, also a Democrat, had urged lawmakers to pass the measure and said he would sign the bill on Tuesday afternoon.
...
"Nationally, advocates of same-sex marriage lauded Minnesota’s move, saying it would add momentum to similar efforts elsewhere, including in at least one other Midwestern state, Illinois, which is considering a provision legalizing same-sex marriage. Critics of the Minnesota measure, meanwhile, predicted that the vote on Monday would carry a lasting political price for the state’s Democrats in coming elections. They also said that barring a sweeping ruling by the United States Supreme Court establishing same-sex marriage as a right, other states were not likely to follow Minnesota’s lead in a sudden wave of legislative changes.

"In a way, Monday’s vote was a startling shift in the conversation in this state. For much of 2012, Minnesotans had been debating an amendment to the state Constitution that would have done the opposite — define marriage as between a man and a woman. While 30 states have adopted such provisions, Minnesotans in November rejected the amendment and sent majorities of Democrats to both chambers of the State Legislature, setting off an intense new push to legalize same-sex marriage.
...
"The issue had pitted this state’s most urban area, around the Twin Cities, against rural sections of the state where lawmakers said support was more uncertain. In both chambers, voting fell along largely partisan lines.

In the end, four Republicans in the State House and one in the State Senate voted to allow same-sex marriage, while two House Democrats and three Senate Democrats voted no."

Choices of low achieving students in NYC high school choice

The Institute for Education and Social Policy has a report out on NYC high school choices, and how these differ for high and low achieving students. (I blogged about news reports of this and related studies here.)

The study itself, by Lori Nathanson, Sean Corcoran and Christine Baker-Smith, all of NYU is here:
High School Choice in New York City: A Report on the School Choices and Placements of Low-Achieving Students

Here's the summary of the executive summary:


Key Findings
• Low-achieving students were matched to schools that were lower performing, on average, than
those of all other students.
• These differences in placements were:
- Driven by differences in students’ initial choices—low-achieving students’ first-choice
schools were less selective, lower-performing, and more disadvantaged;
- Not a consequence of low-achieving students being less likely to receive their first
choice—overall, lower-achieving and higher-achieving students were matched to their top
choices at the same rate.
• Both low- and higher-achieving students appear to prefer schools that are close to home. Thus,
differences in students’ choices likely reflect, at least in part, the fact that lower-achieving
students are highly concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where options may be more limited.

Looking back at the first year of New Orleans' One App school choice system

New Orleans families should get their choice list in by the deadline of May 24 (don't wait til the last minute).  In the meantime, the Times-Picayune recaps last year's experience: Ben Franklin Elementary, McMain top OneApp choices for 2013-14

"In their first year in the unified New Orleansschool enrollment system, the five Orleans Parish School Board direct-run schools punched above their weight. Going into the 2013-14 school year, Ben Franklin Elementary was the most popular choice for younger students and McMain was the most popular high school, according to new OneApp data provided to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. 

"OneApp, now in its second year, aims tostreamline the school enrollment process in New Orleans' decentralized, two-district system. Families fill out one application and a computer algorithm matches students to open seats, by random lottery plus a few priority factors such as having a sibling in a school or, for the elementary years, geographic catchment area.

"All the schools in the city participate except for OPSB's popular charters and a handful of state-authorized charters that can take students from outside Orleans Parish. TheRecovery School District started the program and continues to lead it."

Ökonomische Ingenieurskunst: interview with Axel Ockenfels and Al Roth

Johannes Pennekamp interviews me and Axel Ockenfels on "Economic Engineering" in the Frankfurter Allgemeine: Ökonomische Ingenieurskunst

It reveals, among other things, that Axel is taller than I am:

Al Roth, Axel Ockenfels

West Coast Experiments Conference, today

Here's the program, with links to some of the slides and papers:

Agenda:

[8:00 - 9:00 am] Continental Breakfast

[9:00 - 11:45] Morning Session

• [9:00 - 9:45] Alvin Roth (Stanford Economics): Market design experiments concerning deceased organ allocation (joint work with Judd Kessler). Paper 1. Paper 2.
• [9:45 - 10:30] Scott Desposato (UCSD Political Science): Ethics in comparative politics experiments
• [10:30 - 10:45] Coffee break
• [10:45 - 11:45] Luke Keele (Penn State Political Science): Main paper = Conditioning on Post-treatment Quantities with Structural Mean Models; Technical paper = Estimating Post-treatment Effect Modification with Generalized Structural Mean Models

[11:45 - 1:00] Lunch

[1:00 - 5:00] Afternoon Session

• [1:00 - 1:30] Ted Miguel (Berkeley Economics) will give a "Ted" talk on the Berkeley Initiative on Transparency in the Social Sciences (BITSS).
• [1:30 - 2:30] Guido Imbens (Stanford Graduate School of Business): Some comments on stratification and re-randomization in randomized experiments
• [2:30 - 2:45] Break

Panel on experimental design in political psychology applications:

• [2:45 - 3:30] 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)
• [3:30 - 4:15] Jennifer Merolla (CGU Political Science): Methodological issues surrounding the use of the Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE)
• [4:15 - 5:00] Gabriel Lenz (Berkeley Political Science): Identifying the effect of candidate appearance on vote choice (without assigning candidates to plastic surgery....)

[5:15 - 6:00] Reception

[6:00 - ] Dinner (including a discussion on the future of WCE)

---

Participants

This year's co-organizers are:

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

Click here for an Excel sheet with the registered participants.

---

Registration
The registration deadline was May 1, 2013. Registration for this conference is now closed. If you have not registered, you can email Kevin Esterling (kevin DOT esterling AT ucr DOT edu) to check if any spaces are available.
If you have any questions about your registration, please send an email to Jackie Sargent (hijack AT stanford DOT edu)
If you have registered for the conference but realize that you need to cancel, please send an email to Jackie and indicate that you wish to cancel your registration.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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).

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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