Bob Aumann remembers John Nash

From Ynet..

.
John Nash, a teacher and a mentor

Nash was definitely one of the giants of game theory, writes Israeli Nobel laureate Yisrael Aumann, and the science world will miss him.

Prof. Yisrael Aumann

Published:  05.25.15, 19:15 / Israel Opinion

"I am so sorry to hear of John Nash's death. I have known John for more than 60 years.

•  

I met him in 1953, when he was a young lecturer who had just started teaching at the university and I was coming to the end of my doctorate. He was the one who first introduced me to game theory. He is my first mentor and teacher on the subject.

John Nash. A giant in his field. (Photo: Peter Badge / Typos 1)

The truth is that I didn't give the field much thought at the time because I was busy with pure mathematics. Later, however, when I moved to a performance studies consulting firm, I encountered a difficult problem and then I realized the importance of game theory – and I recalled my conversations with Nash.

John Nash is definitely one of the giants of game theory, which is an important tool in economics and numerous other areas. He invented it, the key concept known as "equilibrium strategy;" and not only did he found the field, but he was also a game-theory giant. And he was also one of the first to receive a Nobel Prize for game theory. It was in 1994, and he shared it with two others. I am shocked to hear of his death.

In recent years, we met at least once a year at international conferences. He knew a lot – not only about mathematics but about everything, and you could talk to him about what is happening in the world.

Nash came to Israel in 1995, on my 65th birthday, which took place at the Tower of David in the form of a celebration and conference. It was a year after he received the Nobel Prize in Economics. The science world and I will certainly miss him."

Claudia Goldin interview on the history of labor force participation by women, among other things

The interview is in Econ Focus, published by the Richmond Fed: Claudia Goldin

Here's one paragraph:
"EF: What changed in society that allowed this revolution to occur?

Goldin: One of the most important changes was the appearance of reliable, female-controlled birth control. The pill lowered the cost to women of making long-term career investments. Before reliable birth control, a woman faced a nontrivial probability of having her career derailed by an unplanned pregnancy — or she had to pay the penalty of abstinence. The lack of highly reliable birth control also meant a set of institutions developed around dating and sex to create commitment: Couples would "go steady," then they would get "pinned," then they would get engaged. If you're pinned or engaged when you're 19 or 20 years old, you're not going to wait until you're 28 to get married. So a lot of women got married within a year or two of graduating college. That meant women who pursued a career also paid a penalty in the marriage market. But the pill made it possible for women who were "on the pill" to delay marriage, and that, in turn, created a "thicker" marriage market for all women to marry later and further lowered the cost to women of investing in a career."

John Nash: 1928-2015. RIP

John and Alicia Nash have died in a car accident.

Here's the news story: Famed Princeton mathematician John Nash, wife killed in taxi crash

Here's the NY Times obituary: John F. Nash Jr., Mathematician Whose Life Story Inspired ‘A Beautiful Mind,’ Dies at 86

Same sex marriage becomes legal in Ireland, by popular vote

Ancient repugnances can be swept away in a matter of decades, and now it's Ireland's turn. The NY Times has the story: Ireland Votes to Approve Gay Marriage, Putting Country in Vanguard

 "Ireland has become the first nation to approve same-sex marriage by a popular vote, sweeping aside the opposition of the Roman Catholic Church in a resounding victory Saturday for the gay rights movement and placing the country at the vanguard of social change.

"With ballots from 34 out of the 43 voting areas counted, the vote was almost two to one in favor of legalizing same-sex marriage. All but one of the districts that were counted voted yes, and it appeared to be statistically impossible for opposition votes to overcome the ayes.

"Turnout was large — more than 60 percent of the 3.2 million people eligible to vote cast ballots. Government officials, advocates and even those who had argued against the measure said that the outcome was a resounding endorsement of the constitutional amendment.

"Not long ago, the vote would have been unthinkable. Ireland decriminalized homosexuality only in 1993, the church dominates the education system and abortion remains illegal except when a mother’s life is at risk. But the influence of the church has waned amid scandals in recent years, while attitudes, particularly among the young, have shifted.

Continue reading the main story

When Same-Sex Marriages Became Legal

About 20 countries have already legalized same-sex marriages. Here is a list of when each did.

• 2001 The Netherlands 
  2003 Belgium
  2005 Canada and Spain
  2006 South Africa 
  2009 Norway and Sweden
  2010 Argentina. Iceland and Portugal 
  2012 Denmark
  2013: Brazil, England and Wales, France, New Zealand and Uruguay
  2014 Luxembourg and Scotland
  2017 (Law becomes effective.) Finland 

The vote is also the latest chapter in a sharpening global cultural clash. Same-sex marriage is surging in the West, legal in 19 nations before the Irish vote and 37 American states, but almost always because of legislative or legal action. At the same time, gay rights are under renewed attack in Russia, in parts of Africa and from Islamic extremists, most notably the Islamic State.

The results in Ireland, announced on Saturday, showed wide and deep support for a measure that had dominated public discourse and dinner-table conversation, particularly in the months before the lead-up to the vote on Friday. Supporters celebrated in gatherings and on the streets, with the rainbow colors of the gay rights movement and Yes vote buttons conspicuously on display.

Ali Hortaçsu talks to the Turkish American Scientists & Scholars Association about market design

A Conversation with Ali Hortaçsu

"Our guest on this issue of The Bridge is Ali Hortacsu, Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Economics, University of Chicago.

The Bridge : Could you please give us a brief summary of your background?

Ali Hortaçsu : I was born in Istanbul in 1974 and grew up near Boğaziçi University where my parents are (emeritus) professors of chemical engineering. I went to Robert College for secondary school, and attended Stanford University, where I got my B.S. and M.S. in Electrical Engineering and my Ph.D. in Economics. I joined the University of Chicago Department of Economics as an assistant professor in 2001. I am currently the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Professor of Economics there.

T.B. :  Could you also summarize your studies/research?  

A. H. : Most of my research falls under the rubric of "market design." Most economists believe markets are a wonderful method of allocating scarce resources and facilitating exchange. However, we know of many conditions under which markets can fail miserably; especially when market participants have incentives to strategize around the stated rules of the marketplace. What is needed, then, is a well-thought out re-writing of the "rules of the game" that takes into account the fact that many market participants are highly rational, strategic actors who will understand and game the system. How should we go about designing such rules? There is now an elegant and extremely well established body of theoretical knowledge on this topic, starting e.g. with the work of my Nobel winning colleague Roger Myerson. What we have learned over time, however, is that theory does not always give sharp answers as to what to do; the specific parameters of the particular system we are analyzing matters a lot. What I have tried to advance in my research is a "data driven" approach to market design, in which we utilize very detailed data from existing markets, estimate the relevant parameters using econometric/statistical methods, and simulate the parametrized behavior under a slew of alternative market rules to arrive at improved market designs. My collaborators and I have utilized this framework to help guide the design of many real world markets, including electricity markets, financial markets, online auctions, and even Internet matchmaking sites. I am also happy to see the econometric and simulation methods I have developed being used in many exciting applications in this domain.

T.B. :   Where do you see studies of your area of specialty in Turkey? What are your suggestions to improve the research in Turkey in this area?

A. H. :  "Market design" has a long and distinguished history in Turkey, especially with the theoretical work of Murat Sertel, Ahmet Alkan, and Semih Koray. Tayfun Sönmez and Utku Ünver, who are also pioneers in this area, did much of their trailblazing research while they were colleagues at Koç University. Although the tradition of market design research is very strong in Turkey, I think improving collaborations between theoretical researchers and market operators would be very beneficial from both the applied and scientific point of views."

Mohammad Akbarpour defends his dissertation

We welcomed a new market designer into the profession today:

Dave Kreps, Paul Milgrom, MOHAMMAD AKBARPOUR, Al Roth, Matt Jackson, Amin Saberi

I can't help noticing that most of the facial hair in this picture is gray and belongs to faculty members, while most of the head hair belongs to Mohammad:)

Welcome to the club, Mohammad!

The market for early book reviews: commercial, crowd sourced, and bootleg

My book, Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design isn't due to be published until June 2.  But there are already some reviews, from commercial reviewers (Kirkus Reviews), from crowd sourced  reviews from Amazon, and at least one of what looks like a bootleg review from someone writing for Newsweek Europe, who may have ignored the label on the boxes of books warning folks to respect the June 2 "publication date" (the books will be in stores by then, so they are floating around).


The Amazon reviewing process is through what they call Vine Customer Review of Free Product, which they describe as follows:

"Amazon Vine invites the most trusted reviewers on Amazon to post opinions about new and pre-release items to help their fellow customers make informed purchase decisions. Amazon invites customers to become Vine Voices based on their reviewer rank, which is a reflection of the quality and helpfulness of their reviews as judged by other Amazon customers. Amazon provides Vine members with free products that have been submitted to the program by participating vendors. Vine reviews are the independent opinions of the Vine Voices. The vendor cannot influence, modify or edit the reviews. Amazon does not modify or edit Vine reviews, as long as they comply with our posting guidelines. A Vine review is identified with the green stripe Customer review from the Amazon Vine Program."

They classify the reviews as positive or critical, so far there are 15 positive and 1 critical, here's the critical one:

Showing 1-1 of 1 reviews (critical)show all reviews

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3Marketing Design for Dummies Written by a Nobel Laureate in Economics With a Sense of Humor and Humanity

ByLita Perna "Clinical Professional Counselor/ Retired"VINE VOICEon April 14, 2015

Format: HardcoverVine Customer Review of Free Product( What's this? )

Note: Advance Reading Copy

Alvin E. Roth, Nobel Prize laureate in economics has written a comfortable and conversational book explaining complex concepts of market design for the lay person. A more apt title, I think would be Problems, Challenges and Solutions in Market Design or Marketing Design for Dummies. “Who Gets What and Why” makes this book sound simple. It is not. It is also not for every casual reader with a mild curiosity.

Dr. Roth defines and explains the new economics of market design which he says brings science to matchmaking. He shows how market design helps solve problems that existing market places haven’t been able to solve naturally.

The author discusses his design of clearing houses for markets that are not commodity markets like: the kidney exchange; the medical labor market; new labor markets for Ph.D.s in economics and school choice systems in New York and Boston.

He defines the challenges and solutions and explains that to achieve efficient outcomes, market places need to make markets:

Thick: Those with enough potential transitions available at one time.
Congested: Enough time for offers to be made and/or accepted or rejected.
(and) Safe to participate in.

He defines matching markets where one can’t just choose, but must also be chosen.
He gives concrete examples to explain his concepts like attributes of three different kinds of restaurants. He discusses design inventions to make markets smarter, thicker and faster.

This book is detailed. It reads like Dr. Roth has taken pains to be clear about those details.

For more in dept discussion of market design you can watch Dr. Roth’s lecture at Stanford University on the web.

Thos book is not for everyone, but is worth the effort to gain new insight and understanding of markets and “Who Gets What.”

Royal Economic Society-York Symposium and Mini-Courses on Game Theory, 21-23 May 2015

The 2015 RES-York Symposium and Mini-Courses on Game Theory, the 6th of the series of York Annual Symposium on Game Theory, will be held on 21-23 May 2015 at the Department of Economics and Related Studies, University of York, UK. 

The four keynote speakers of the Symposium (21-22 May 2015) are: 

Bhaskar Dutta (Warwick)

Stephen Morris (Princeton)

Michael Ostrovsky (Stanford)

Eyal Winter (HUJerusalem & Leicester)

The event is organised by the Micro Theory Research Cluster at the Department of Economics and Related Studies (DERS), University of York, and is jointly supported by the Royal Economic Society and the departmental Research Impact Support (RIS) Fund at DERS, University of York.

 Mini-Courses

Right after the Symposium, on Saturday 23 May 2015, we will run two mini-courses delivered by Professor Bhaskar Dutta (Warwick) and Professor Michael Ostrovsky (Stanford), respectively.

Professor Bhaskar Dutta will deliver a mini-course on "Games on Networks". 

Professor Michael Ostrovsky will deliver a mini-course on the topic "Matching in Trading Networks". The background reading can be downloaded below at this webpage.

The schedule on Saturday 23 May 2015 is as follows.

9:00-10:30 Course by Prof. Bhaskar Dutta

10:45-12:15 Course by Prof. Michael Ostrovsky

12:15-13:15 Lunch

13:15-14:45 Course by Prof. Bhaskar Dutta

15:00-16:30 Course by Prof. Michael Ostrovsky

IIPSC: the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

Over at the Dell Foundation (which funds a lot of work on public school choice), they have a Q&A on school choice and enrollment: Neil Dorosin and Gaby Fighetti from The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice

"The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC) is a nonprofit organization with a mission to support groups of people in cities in designing and implementing school choice and enrollment processes. They work with consortiums of people in cities to bring them through a process they call market design: creating a group of policies and operations that, when taken together as a whole, govern the way kids apply to and are accepted to schools.

IIPSC is hosting a conference on May 20, 2015 where education leaders from all over the country will gather to immerse themselves in unified enrollment theory and practice. Practitioners from cities that have already implemented or are implementing unified enrollment – Cleveland, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, Indianapolis, New Orleans, New York City, Newark, Oakland, and Washington DC – will be on hand to share their knowledge and experiences. The goal is for all participants to emerge from the conference with a concrete set of knowledge and tools to use in advancing this critical work in their own cities.

Neil Dorosin is the Executive Director and Gaby Fighetti is the Deputy Executive Director of IIPSC. Read more about their work below.

...

How has IIPSC effectively launched this current reform movement with unified enrollment?

Neil: IIPSC principals first worked together in New York City in the very early Joel Klein years, and in this environment there were almost no charter schools. This illustrates that the ideas within unified enrollment are not specific to any particular type of school- charter schools, district schools, non-public schools, etc. They are ideas that allow administrators to serve families better. To bring efficiency, equity, and transparency to enrollment and choice systems.

When we began working with Denver we realized that what we were doing requires district and charter sectors to work together in a whole new way, and these changes are fundamental to the way cities manage school choice and then hopefully implement portfolio reform strategy. We are committed to political neutrality and always make sure that people in cities know that our work is meant to advance healthy choice processes, not to advance any political position. We love the fact that people in cities all over the country now see the ideas and guiding principles of unified enrollment systems as things that they believe in and want to advance in their cities.

Tell us about the team who helped design the unified enrollment system.

Neil: Al Roth shared the Nobel Prize in economics for applying matching theory science to solve real world problems. Most famous examples include the Medical Residency match (matching residents and hospitals), kidney donor exchange programs (identifying compatible pairs of donors and recipients from VERY long waitlists, and saving many lives), and for unified enrollment work.Parag Pathak was his student, and is now a full professor at MIT. Atila Abdulkadiroglu co-wrote the seminal paper on the market design approach to school choice in 2003 and joined Al and Parag in the first schools project – in New York City in 2003. Al, Parag and Atila are all now members of our advisory board and active participants in our projects with cities.

It turns out that matching science can be adapted to solve these and other problems, and to make people’s live better in real and meaningful ways. We are motivated by this every day."

Everything for Sale? The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts (Video of the panel discussion)

Here's the video of the panel discussion I participated in at Johns Hopkins on May 7, Everything for Sale? The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts: the panelists were James Childress, Michele Goodwin, Alvin Roth and Debra Satz

The video, including introductions before and questions after, is an hour and 20 minutes. The introduction by Mario Macis starts around minute 6:40, and includes audience voting on questions of whether they would be in favor of regulated markets for kidneys, for hearts, for blood, for human eggs and sperm, and for breast milk. The panel discussion, moderated by Jeff Kahn, starts at minute 14, with each of the panelists, in alphabetical order, giving an 8 minute opening statement. (Mine begins at 33:20, and ends at 41:41, pretty close to the 8 minute guideline:) .)

School Choice: video of an interview I did in Israel

Here's an interview I did while in Israel in April, mostly about school choice (but also about some of my personal history, game theory, etc.) It starts at minute 4:00 of this news broadcast, and goes until minute 12:45...

Public schools and private philanthropy

Public school budgets are always stretched to their limits, and one of the ways those limits are sometimes surmounted is with an infusion of private funds, from big foundations with an interest in education, and also, apparently, from wealthy individuals. The NY Times has a story on how this part of school financing for New York City schools flourished more under the former mayor than it appears to be under the current one.
Public Schools Fund, Under de Blasio, Is Struggling to Lure Wealthy Donors

"The Fund for Public Schools, the nonprofit organization that former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellors built into a fund-raising juggernaut, has struggled to attract donations under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The fund, which raised an average of $29 million a year over the last decade, has raised just $18 million this fiscal year, which ends June 30, fund officials said. About half of that comes from two large multiyear grants that began under the Bloomberg administration."

9th workshop Matching in Practice June 8 - June 9 in Barcelona

9th workshop Matching in Practice, June 8 - June 9

The program for the 9th workshop of Matching in Practice is up:

Scientific Program

Day 1: June 8, 2015 

11:00 – 11:30     Welcome Coffee 

11:30 – 12:00     Registration

12:00 – 13:30    Keynote presentation – Christopher Avery (Harvard Kennedy School of Government)

The Common Application and the DA Algorithm in School Assignment (with Cara Nickolaus and Parag Pathak)

13:30 – 14:30     Lunch

14:30 – 16:30     Strategic Choice and Affirmative Action

Dynamic Reserves in Matching Markets with Contracts: Theory and Applications, by Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan

College Admission with Multidimensional Privileges: The Brazilian Affirmative Action Case, by Orhan Aygün and Inacio Bo

Self-selection in School Choice, by Li Chen and Juan Sebastián Pereyra

16:30 – 17:00     Coffee break

17:00 – 18:30     Empirical Estimation of Preferences in School Choice

Demand Analysis using Strategic Reports: An application to a school choice  mechanism, by Nikhil Agarwal and Paolo Somaini

Structural Estimation of a Model of School Choices: the Boston Mechanism vs. Its Alternatives, by Caterina Calsamiglia, Chou Fu and Maia Güell

20:00                  Dinner

Day 2: June 9, 2015 

9:30 – 11:00       Educational Choice, Incentives and Welfare

College Diversity and Investment Incentives, by Thomas Gall, Patrick Legros and Andrew F. Newman

 Socio-economic status and enrollment in higher education: Do costs matter? by Koen Declercq and Frank Verboven

 11:00 – 11:30     Coffee break 

11:30 – 12:15       Re-matching

The Design of Teacher Assignment: Theory and Evidence, by Julien Combe, Olivier Tercieux and Camille Terrier

12:15 – 13:00      Panel discussion on matching practices (TBD)

13:30                     Lunch

Scientific Committee: Dorothea Kübler, Antonio Miralles and Joana Pais

Registrations If you plan to attend the meeting (and are not a speaker), please contact Antonio Miralles at amirallesasensio@gmail.com

Venue: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Edifici Balmes, Carrer Balmes 132, Barcelona

High Frequency Trading in Santa Cruz today

Featuring Stanford students Josh Mollner and Markus Baldauf, and open to the public:

Market Design: High Frequency Trading

Program, May 15, 2010

Welcome & Keynote, 10:00 - 10:45 am

• Sayee Srinivasan, Chief Economist, Commodity Futures Trading Commission

Session 1, 10:45 am - 12:15 pm

Market Integration and High Frequency Trading

• Jonathan Brogaard, UW Foster School of Business, Department of Finance

High-Frequency Trade and Market Performance

• Joshua Mollner,  Stanford University, Department of Economics

Lunch, 12:15 - 1:30 pm

Session 2, 1:30 - 3:00 pm

Knew the News: Infrastructure Dynamics of Trading Surrounding Prescheduled Economic Announcements

• Greg Laughlin, UC Santa Cruz, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

"Need for Speed? Exchange Latency and Market Quality"

• Albert Menkveld, VU University Amsterdam, Department of Finance

Break, 3:00 - 3:30 pm

Session 3, 3:30 - 5:45 pm

Performance Evaluation of Algorithmic Trading Strategies

• Iaryna Grynkiv, Barclays, Equities Algorithmic Trading

Competition Among Exchanges

• Markus Baldauf,  Stanford University, Department of Economics

The Random Walk of High Frequency Trading

• Eric Aldrich, UC Santa Cruz, Department of Economics

Dinner, 6:30 - 8:30 pm

The workshop will take place in Engineering 2, Room 499.

The Guardian on Iranian kidney sales

The Guardian reports on a bad outcome in Iran's market for kidneys--the recipient dies, and the donor isn't doing well: Kidneys for sale: Iran’s trade in organs

"Iran is the only country in the world where it is legal to sell a kidney. Donors get money from the buyer and from the state, a system which eradicated waiting lists but, detractors say, exploits the poor and vulnerable. Here, we follow one terrible story"

Recent travels...Nigeria

Nigeria's Daily Independent covers the talk I gave there on Monday:
Exchange Programme’ll Improve Kidney Transplant In Africa – Expert

By Oyeniran Apata, Lagos

A Nobel Prize winner for Economic Science, Professor Alvin Roth, has declared that the poor state of Nigerian patients with chronic renal disease can be improved through effective kidney exchange programme.

Roth identified high cost of management, poor infrastructure, low awareness and non-direct donors as some of the factors contributing to the prevalence of the pitiable conditions in the country and the continent of Africa as a whole.

Delivering a paper as the keynote speaker at the second Covenant University International Conference on African Development Issues tagged, “Biotechnology, ICT, Materials and Renewable Energy: Potential Catalyst for African Development,” Roth lamented that Nigeria with a poor renal registry was able to successfully carry out only 143 Kidney Transplants (KTs) in 10 years against 11,000 carried out successfully in the United States of America.

Professor Ruth in his paper entitled, “Kidney Disease in Nigeria and the U.S. and Possibilities of Co-operation and Mutual Aid,” lamented that despite the huge number of successes recorded in the U.S., America is still falling behind in the treatment of kidney failure.

“I want to talk to you today about how we have taken some initial steps to increase kidney transplant in the U.S. through kidney exchange, and how such a programme might be extended to Africa and be a catalyst to build medical infrastructure in Africa,” he said.

He added that the kidney transfer waiting list in the USA was getting longer year in year out as more people are dying while waiting to be treated.

"In his words he said, “In 2003, 83,000 Americans were in immediate need of a kidney transplant; in 2014, 100,000 Americans were in immediate need of a kidney transplant. More patients on the wait list are dying every year. In 2003, 4,000 Americans died waiting for a kidney transplant, in 2013, 4,500 Americans died waiting for a kidney.”



He lamented that as similar epidemiological data is hard to come by in Africa, the prevalence of chronic renal failure and End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) have remained high worldwide and the epidemiology has changed significantly in the last decade in industrialised countries, contending that patients’ outcome is still appalling in developing countries.

He added: “There is paucity of information on the magnitude of the burden of renal disease in our environment. Obtaining accurate data is hampered by the poor socio-economic status of most patients with lack of access to specialised care in tertiary institutions, where most of the data are generated.”

Chancellor of the university and General Overseer of the Living Faith Bible Church Worldwide, Dr. David Oyedepo, stated that the conference was aimed at enabling the country to benefit from the wealth of experience of the experts and particularly Roth’s application of economic theory in finding solutions for “real world” problems."

***********
Update: here's some more coverage: Faith-Based Organizations, Private Sector, Crucial to Successes in Kidney Transplantation – Professor Alvin Roth

The State of College Admissions--NACAC report

The Chronicle of Higher Ed summarizes the NACAC report on college admissions: 3 Key Findings About College Admissions
"Here are three sets of findings from NACAC’s annual "State of College Admission" report:

Yield Rates Are Sliding

Nationally, application surges continue for most colleges, with more than 70 percent reporting year-to-year increases in 10 of the last 15 years. For the fall 2013 admission cycle, 32 percent of freshmen submitted seven or more applications.

As applicant pools expand, uncertainty usually grows. Many colleges have seen their yield rate — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — decline sharply. In the fall 2013 admission cycle, the average institutional yield rate was 35.9 percent, down from an average of 39.5 percent in 2010, and 48.7 percent in 2002.

It’s long been said that enrollment goals are subject to the whims of teenagers. Yet Mr. Fuller, the association’s president, says many decisions about where to enroll now hinge on last-minute conversations students have with their parents about affordability. Sometimes that means students who had planned to attend four-year colleges end up enrolling at community colleges. "Those kinds of conversations," he says, "are definitely playing into yield numbers."

Transfer Students Are Crucial

Many colleges are located in regions where the number of high-school graduates has plateaued. That’s one reason some enrollment officials are deciding to make transfer students a bigger piece of their recruitment puzzle.

Forty-four percent of four-year institutions reported an increase in transfer applicants over the previous five years, and 37.6 percent reported an increase in transfer enrollments. At public institutions, two-thirds of transfer students were previously enrolled at community colleges.

"A lot of us are really seeing the value of these students and what they add to the campus," Mr. Fuller says. "They’ve got a proven history."

As for the future, 58 percent of four-year colleges anticipate that recruiting transfer students will become more important over the next three years. (Public institutions were more likely than private ones to rate the importance of such students highly.) And 80 percent of respondents said their college had admissions counselors who work exclusively with prospective transfer students.

Recruitment Has No Borders

College-bound students everywhere are on the move. Over the last 40 years, the report notes, the number of students enrolled in colleges outside their home countries increased to 4.5 million from 800,000. That number is projected to exceed seven million by 2025.

Meanwhile, more and more foreign-born students are earning diplomas at American high schools. "Recruiting international students," the report says, "is no longer reserved only for those professionals who travel internationally."

Rethinking school competition in Sweden

There are calls for reforming Sweden's system of competition and school choice among lightly-regulated private schools. The Guardian has the story: Sweden urged to rethink parents' choice over schools after education decline--OECD recommends comprehensive reform including revised school choice arrangements and more effective regulation

"Sweden has been urged to halt the steep decline in the international ranking of its schools by taking action to limit parents’ and pupils’ right to choose.

A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) recommends “a comprehensive education reform” to restore the Swedish system to its previous standards.

"Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s education directorate, was scathing about the country’s “disappointing” performance, saying he had once viewed Sweden as “the model for education”.

“It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul,” he said at a press conference in Stockholm. “Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing.”

"The call for “revised school choice arrangements” will have resonance in the UK, where the coalition government’s programme to launch free schools funded by public money was in part inspired by Sweden.

"Since the 1990s, Sweden has allowed privately run schools to compete with public schools for government funds. Critics on the left blame the voucher system for declining results, saying it has opened the door for schools more interested in making a profit than providing solid education. Conservatives say students have been given too much influence in the classroom, undermining the authority of teachers.

"The OECD report says: “Student performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) has declined dramatically, from near the OECD average in 2000 to significantly below average in 2012. No other country participating in Pisa saw a steeper decline than Sweden over that period.”

...

"The report blamed the system of school choice for the failure of almost half of children from immigrant backgrounds (48%) to make the grade in mathematics.

"Rather than recommending rolling back Sweden’s system of free choice and competition in schools, however, it suggests that the country “revise school choice arrangements to ensure quality with equity”.

"That would involve limiting the independence of free schools from local education authorities by bringing in new national guidelines to allow municipalities to “integrate independent schools in their planning, improvement and support strategies”.

"The report also recommends helping disadvantaged families make better school choices, so that their children, as well as those from middle-class families, apply to the country’s more popular, better performing schools.

"Finally, it suggests that municipalities restrict the ability of some parents to choose their children’s schools by introducing “controlled choice schemes that supplement parental choice to ensure a more diverse distribution of students in schools”.

2nd Covenant University – International Conference on African Development Issues – 2015

I'll speak tomorrow in Nigeria, about kidney exchange and the possibilities it might offer for mutual aid between Africa and the U.S. in battling kidney disease, at the 2nd Covenant University – International Conference on African Development Issues – 2015

"Covenant University, in her continued quest for significant local and global impact, established the International Conference of African Development Issues (ICADI) series. ICADI is aimed at creating a unique platform for making innovative contributions towards value enhancement and capacity development of the black man and indeed, the African continent from the Covenant University context.

"As a sequel to the success of the first International Conference on African Development Issues (ICADI) that was held in 2014, we are again motivated to organize the second edition of ICADI between 11 – 13 May 2015 at the African Leadership Development Centre, Covenant University, Ota. The University has secured the commitment of a Nobel Laureate, Prof. Alvin Roth as the Keynote Speaker. Al Roth is a Professor of Operations Research from Stanford University, USA, who has done a lot of groundbreaking research in the areas of game theory and market design with specific applications to healthcare. The conference has also enlisted other notable experts as guest speakers. The conference will feature keynote addresses, panel/roundtable discussions, research and industry track papers as well as presentations, workshops and exhibitions.

   Dates: May 11 – 13, 2015

     Theme: Biotechnology, ICT, Materials and Renewable Energy: Potential Catalyst for African Development

    Sub themes:
Biotechnology and sustainable development in Africa
ICT and developing the knowledge economy in Africa
Climate change and renewable energy solutions for African Development
Material science and engineering for African development
Policy frameworks for technology-oriented development paradigms in Africa
 
 Target Audience: Professionals and executives of agro-allied, pharmaceutical, health, chemical industries, ICT providers, engineering firms, research institutes, governmental agencies, policy makers, investors, researchers, academic institutions etc."

Harvard Magazine celebrates Sendhil Mullainathan

The Science of Scarcity

 “To put it bluntly,” says Mullainathan, “if I made you poor tomorrow, you’d probably start behaving in many of the same ways we associate with poor people.” And just like many poor people, he adds, you’d likely get stuck in the scarcity trap.

Kidneys in British Columbia: a recommendation for presumed consent, and against compensation for donors

Kidney Transplant Summit recommends presumed consent legislation to increase organ donation in BC.

"BURNABY, BC, May 6, 2015 /CNW/ - The Jury at the first-ever BC Kidney Transplant Consensus Summit hosted by The Kidney Foundation has recommended that British Columbia adopt presumed consent legislation, with the appropriate safeguards in place, to increase the number of kidney transplants in this province.

The Jury, chaired by the Hon. Wally Oppal QC, also considered but rejected the idea of offering financial incentives to organ donors. Living organ donors are currently reimbursed for expenses incurred in donating an organ, but not for the kidney itself. "As a society, we do not condone the sale of organs," said Oppal."


HT: Sangram Kadam

Everything for Sale? The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts, at Johns Hopkins, May 7

I'm in Baltimore for the next few days...

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School present
The 2015 Robert H. Levi Leadership Symposium
and Carey Symposium in Markets and Ethics

	Everything for Sale?The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts
	Thursday, May 7, 2015 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
	Reception to follow
	Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Alumni Auditorium 525 N. Wolfe Street Baltimore, MD 21205
	Welcome: Ruth Faden Andreas C. Dracopoulos, Director and Philip Franklin Wagley, Professor Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics Bernard T. Ferrari Professor and Dean Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Introduction: Mario Macis Assistant Professor of Economics and Management Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Panelists include: Professor James Childress Professor Michele Goodwin Professor Alvin Roth Professor Debra Satz Moderator: Jeffrey Kahn Robert Henry Levi and Ryda Hecht Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics

Data, big and small

Alex Peysakhovich and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz write in the NYT about  How Not to Drown in Numbers, about how you can't always interpret data in a dataset just by looking at the dataset in isolation...

"So what can big data do to help us make big decisions? One of us, Alex, is a data scientist at Facebook. The other, Seth, is a former data scientist at Google. There is a special sauce necessary to making big data work: surveys and the judgment of humans — two seemingly old-fashioned approaches that we will call small data."

Google buys Timeful from Yoav Shoham and Dan Ariely

Here's Timeful.  Here's Dan. Here's Yoav: This Stanford professor just sold his second startup to Google in less than 5 years.

Here's the Google announcement: Time is on your side—welcoming Timeful to Google
"Today we’re excited to announce that Timeful, Inc. is joining the Google family to help make getting things done in your life even easier. 

The Timeful team has built an impressive system that helps you organize your life by understanding your schedule, habits and needs. You can tell Timeful you want to exercise three times a week or that you need to call the bank by next Tuesday, and their system will make sure you get it done based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities. We’re excited about all the ways Timeful’s technology can be applied across products like Inbox, Calendar and beyond, so we can do more of the work for you and let you focus on being creative, having fun and spending time with the people you care about."

Ray Fisman to Boston University

Boston University celebrates their newest senior hire (but the sub-headline in the BU Today story makes you wonder what they think their other economists do:
Economist Raymond Fisman to Join BU Faculty--Known for connecting theory to the real world

"BU’s newest economics professor has garnered a lot of attention for parking tickets. Not tickets Raymond Fisman received himself, but those in his much-cited 2006 study showing that UN diplomats from countries with a reputation for corruption, as well as anti-American sentiment, get more parking tickets than diplomats from countries that are considered less corrupt, like Sweden."

Raymond Fisman will bring an eclectic approach as the first Slater Family Professor in Behavioral Economics. Photo by Leslye Smith

Kidney exchange in the NY Times Magazine

Kidney exchange and public relations sometimes go hand in hand, which isn't a bad thing at all, since the more people who know about kidney exchange, the more transplants will be possible. A modest 6-transplant non-directed donor chain in California has attracted a nice story in this week's NY Times Magazine: The Great American Kidney Swap by By Malia Wollan.

Here's some of what the NY Times article has to say:

"A law-abiding American in need of a kidney has two options. The first is to wait on the national list for an organ donor to die in (or near) a hospital. The second is to find a person willing to donate a kidney to you. More than half the time, such donor-and-recipient pairs are incompatible, because of differences in blood type or the presence, in the donor’s blood, of proteins that might trigger the recipient’s immune system to reject the new kidney. The genius of the computer algorithms driving the kidney chains is that they find the best medical matches — thus increasing the odds of a successful transplant — by decoupling donors from their intended recipients. In the United States, half a dozen of these software programs allow for a kind of barter market for kidneys. This summer, doctors will most likely complete the last two operations in a record-breaking 70-person chain that involved flying donated kidneys on commercial airlines to several hospitals across the country.
...
"Economists call an arrangement like this a matching market. “It is not fundamental to economic theory to assume people are selfish,” Alvin E. Roth, an economist who teaches at Stanford University, told me. Roth won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2012 for his work using game theory to design matching markets, which pair unmatched things in mutually beneficial ways — students with public schools and doctors with hospitals. In such markets, money does not decide who gets what. Instead, these transactions are more akin to elaborate courtships.

"The classic example of a matching market is the college-admissions process. Every year, tens of thousands of students apply to Harvard University. But just because a student wants a spot in the freshman class and can afford tuition does not mean he gets in. Harvard must also want him to attend. In the case of kidney exchange, this matchmaking happens at a microcellular level. White blood cells contain genetic markers, proteins that help our immune systems distinguish between our bodies and foreign invaders. The more closely a transplant recipient’s genetic markers match a donor’s, the more likely the body is to adopt that foreign kidney as its own rather than attacking it."
*********

The average chain length for nondirected donor chains in the U.S. has lately been around 5, The latest longest chain accomplished 34 transplants (so it involved 68 people, donors and recipients).It's possible that that the number of transplants in the chain in this story was limited by the particular, proprietary commercial software that was used. One of the interesting things about kidney exchange is that most of the software is provided for free by the researchers who develop it, and is described in the open scientific literature. The  software used by the UNOS kidney paired donation pilot program is designed by Tuomas Sandholm and his colleagues at CMU, and Itai Ashlagi (at MIT until next year, when he comes to Stanford) and his colleagues have software that is very widely used by kidney exchange networks and large transplant centers, and the latest version of this software was described in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

You can download kidney exchange software from Itai's web page: here I've copied his instructions:

Kidney exchange source code. Instructions for how to compile can be found here. An older version in c# can be found here (for both cycles and chains), which also generates patient-donor pairs as well as compatibility matrices. The software finds an allocation that maximizes the number of transplants using cycles and chains each of a different bounded length. CPLEX is needed to use.

Bay Area Behavioral & Experimental Economics Workshop today in Santa Cruz

Here's the program: 2015 Bay Area Behavioral and Experimental Economics Workshop (BABEEW5) Program  May 2nd 2015, UCSC LEEPS Lab, Baskin Plaza.