Freakonomics podcast on Who Gets What and Why

Stephen Dubner came to visit me in Palo Alto to talk about my new book. He also interviewed some other people, including Ruthann Leishman who now manages one of the active kidney exchanges, at UNOS, but who I met when she helped launch the New England Program for Kidney Exchange. You'll also hear from an incompatible patient-donor pair who quickly found a match, and the nondirected donor who started the chain that worked for them..  We end the conversation over dinner...

(I haven't figured out how to embed the podcast itself, but you can listen to it if you click on the title below which will take you to the Freakonomics page for this show.)

Make Me a Match: A New Freakonomics Radio Episode

STEPHEN J. DUBNER
06/17/2015 | 11:00 pmPRODUCED BY: GREG ROSALSKY

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(Photo, cropped: Newtown Grafitti)

Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called “Make Me a Match.” (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above. You can also read the transcript, which includes credits for the music you’ll hear in the episode.)

The gist of the episode: Sure, markets generally work well. But for some transactions — like school admissions and organ transplants — money alone can’t solve the problem. That’s when you need a market-design wizard like Al Roth.

Al Roth, an engineer by training, is a professor of economics at Stanford and won a Nobel in economics in 2012. (Roth shared the prize with Lloyd Shapley, whose research influenced Roth). What kind of work did Roth do to land the Nobel? It’s not the kind of thing that typically wins a Nobel. Roth has helped people who need a kidney transplant find a donor. He’s helped new doctors find their first jobs. He’s helped high-school students in New York City find the right high school – even though Roth himself, who grew up in New York City, dropped out of high school.

ROTH: I was, you know, a poor ungrateful student who didn’t appreciate what my teachers were trying to do for me. You should tell all your listeners they should complete high school.

Roth has also just published a very fine new book that is a great survey of his work — and his worldview, which is just as impressive. It’s called Who Gets What—and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design In the podcast, I visit Stanford to speak with Roth about market design, what’s it’s like to get that middle-of-the-night Nobel phone call, and why the world needs an economist-engineer like him in the first place:

ROTH: Matching markets are markets where money, prices don’t do all the work. And some of the markets I’ve studied, we don’t let prices do any of the work. And I like to think of matching markets as markets where you can’t just choose what you want even if you can afford it — you also have to be chosen. So job markets are like that; getting into college is like that. Those things cost money, but money doesn’t decide who gets into Stanford. Stanford doesn’t raise the tuition until supply equals demand and just enough freshmen want to come to fill the seats. Stanford is expensive but it’s cheap enough that a lot of people would like to come to Stanford, and so Stanford has this whole other set of market institutions. Applications and admissions and you can’t just come to Stanford, you have to be admitted.

You’ll hear how Roth and others have revolutionized the organ-donor market, and we hear the amazing story of how one particularly selfless woman kicked off a donor chain that gave life to many others. And you’ll also hear Ruthanne Leishman, from the United Network For Organ Sharing, talk about  the organ-donor algorithm developed by Roth and his colleagues:

LEISHMAN: It’s saving a lot of lives. We have about 600 kidney-paired donation transplants a year right now in the United States. In 2000, we had 2. … We would have stayed doing 2 or 4 or 6 a year without the algorithm.  

The next time you hear someone say that economists are a bunch of selfish good-for-nothings, feel free to counter by telling them about the fine work of Al Roth.

San Francisco is becoming a center for kidney exchange

UCSF Medical Center, CPMC Join Forces for 18-Patient Kidney Transplant Chain

"A unique collaboration between UCSF Medical Center and Sutter Health’s California Pacific Medical Center (CPMC) resulted in what is believed to be one of the nation’s first nine-way kidney transplant chains occurring in one city over a 36-hour period.

The chain started on Thursday morning (June 4), with an altruistic patient donating a kidney as a token of gratitude for his good health. It concluded with a recipient who has been on dialysis for several years.

The surgeries involved the above donor and recipient and an additional 16 patients – eight recipients, each paired by a friend or family member. These pairs were either blood type or immunologically incompatible with each other but were compatible with other pairs in the group.
...
"“This collaboration with CPMC enables us to broaden our pool of kidney transplant donors and recipients and treat them at two medical centers separated by only a few miles,” said John Roberts, MD, professor of surgery and chief of UCSF Medical Center Transplant Service. “The proximity of the hospitals means the donated kidney can be swiftly transplanted, minimizing risks to patients. This paired kidney exchange also benefits those on the transplant waiting list and moves up others who are still waiting.”

Alex Tabarrok reviews Who Gets What and Why in the WSJ

Who Gets What and Why is reviewed very generously by Alex Tabarrok in the Wall Street Journal :

Matchmaker, Make Me a Market--In some markets, price isn’t the determining factor. You can choose to go to Harvard, but Harvard has to choose to accept you first. (ungated link here if the one above doesn't work...)
By ALEX TABARROK, June 15, 2015 7:18 p.m. ET

Here's his first paragraph:
"The scientific pretensions of economics have been seriously questioned in recent years. Macroeconomists failed to predict the financial crisis and then failed to agree on either the causes or the solutions. It pained me when even my mother began to wonder whether economists were as useful as dentists. Alvin Roth’s “Who Gets What—and Why” is the book that I shall give to mom to redeem my profession."

And here's his final paragraph:
"“Who Gets What—and Why” is a pleasure to read. It’s also a pleasure to discover that rare species, a humble economist. Humble but useful."

(I enjoyed reading what he had to say in between, too--color me flattered:)

**************
And here are Tabarrok's comments on his review, in a blog post in MR:

The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design

by Alex Tabarrok on June 16, 2015 at 7:28 am

- See more at: http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/06/the-hidden-world-of-matchmaking-and-market-design.html#sthash.5ktW1SN4.dpuf

"One of the most interesting aspects of the book is that Roth has created a new typology of market failure but a very different way of addressing such market failures. Read the whole review for more"

Same sex marriages, south of the border

The revolution in reversing an ancient repugnance is quieter there:
With Little Fanfare, Mexican Supreme Court Effectively Legalizes Same-Sex Marriage

"In ruling after ruling, the court has said that state laws restricting marriage to heterosexuals are discriminatory. Though the decisions have been made to little public fanfare, they have had the effect of legalizing gay marriage in Mexico without enshrining it in law.

“When I heard the judge pronounce us legally married, I burst into tears,” said Mr. Gonzalez, 41, who, like nearly all gays marrying in Mexico, needed a court order enabling him to exchange vows.

As the United States awaits a landmark decision on gay marriage by the Supreme Court, the Mexican court’s rulings have added the country to a slowly growing list of Latin American nations permitting same-sex unions.

Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil already allow same-sex marriage. Chile plans to recognize same-sex civil unions this year; Ecuador approved civil unions in April; and Colombia grants same-sex couples many of the same rights extended to heterosexual married couples.

“It’s a huge change from where things were 10 years ago,” said Jason Pierceson, a professor at the University of Illinois at Springfield who studies gay marriage trends in Latin America.

The shift in Mexico, the second largest country in Latin America after Brazil, is the product of a legal strategy that advocates used to bypass state legislatures, which have shown little inclination, and often hostility, to legalizing gay marriage.

In 2009, Mexico City, a large liberal island in this socially conservative country, legalized gay marriage — a first in Latin America. There have been 5,297 same-sex weddings there since then, some of them couples coming to the city from other states."

College admissions, as seen by the Chronicle of Higher Ed

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a long roundup of thoughts on college admissions: College Admissions, Frozen in Time

They describe the admissions process this way:

"Like a machine Rube Goldberg might’ve built if he’d been really, really mean. For colleges aspiring to greater selectivity, the system’s undeniable inefficiency is by design. Each year, four-year institutions everywhere spend a fortune buying tens or hundreds of thousands of high-school students’ names from testing and other companies, and bombard those "suspects" with letters and emails. The hope is that, as they move through the recruitment funnel, enough of them become interested "prospects," then, ideally, applicants, at which point the bulk of colleges, tuition-dependent and not world-famous, scramble to admit and enroll a certain number (to meet their enrollment and revenue goals), while the wealthiest, choosiest institutions use elaborate criteria to whittle down vast numbers in an intensive exercise known as crafting a class. That’s an artful term for how colleges satisfy their many interests, for this much tuition revenue and that much diversity, this many legacies and that many goalies, and enough engineering majors to keep the program strong.

These days, students file more and more applications to hedge their bets on where they’ll get in and, unknown until very late in the process, how much it’ll cost them. Meanwhile, colleges only increase the suspense for all involved by chasing more applicants and placing great numbers of them on wait lists, drawing out a months-long process even more."

...

"In the fall-2013 cycle, the average institutional yield rate was 36 percent, down from 49 percent in 2002, according to the National Association for College Admission Counseling. "

...

"Some futurists want to automate college matches. Yet the recruitment process, tedious though it is, allows for personal interactions that help applicants form crucial opinions of colleges. When institutions make it easier and faster to apply, it can be hard for one party to know how seriously to take the other. "

...

"In 2011, for instance, Washington Monthly published an article proclaiming "the end of college admissions as we know it," about ConnectEdu, a website designed to match students and colleges. The platform, with its powerful algorithm, would transform the admissions process much like Match.com has changed dating. Such a shift would benefit less-savvy applicants in particular, the article said: "Everything you’ve heard about getting in is about to go out the window."

ConnectEdu filed for bankruptcy three years later. Though the reasons were complicated, one lesson was clear: Just because an entrepreneur has a big idea and a high-tech plan doesn’t mean the status quo is crumbling. Although other companies still provide similar matching services, the traditional process endures."

...

"To deal with the uncertainty of vast applicant pools, colleges might embrace anything that helped them identify candidates with genuine interest. A company called InitialView, which conducts brief interviews of foreign students and transmits the video to U.S. colleges, now allows those applicants to assign a virtual "star" to the two institutions they most want to attend. The company is considering a similar service for the domestic market."

...

"Right now, parents complete the Free Application for Federal Student Aid in the spring of their child’s senior year of high school, after typical application deadlines have passed, often estimating their tax information for the previous year.

But a proposed policy change would allow future applicants to use two-year-old tax data to complete the form, giving families an earlier, clearer picture of their college bills. That way cost could fold into students’ college search like never before, perhaps prompting them to apply to fewer places. Mr. Boeckenstedt says. And the change could shake up the traditional admissions calendar, in which applicants find out how much they’ll have to pay at each college shortly before the May 1 deadline for choosing where to go."

Review of living kidney donor outcomes, in The Lancet

In The Lancet
Volume 385, Issue 9981, 16–22 May 2015, Pages 2003–2013

Living kidney donation: outcomes, ethics, and uncertainty
Dr Peter P Reese, MD,  Prof Neil Boudville, MD, Prof Amit X Garg, MD

Here's the summary:
"Since the first living-donor kidney transplantation in 1954, more than half a million living kidney donations have occurred and research has advanced knowledge about long-term donor outcomes. Donors in developed countries have a similar life expectancy and quality of life as healthy non-donors. Living kidney donation is associated with an increased risk of end-stage renal disease, although this outcome is uncommon  (less than .5 percent increase in incidence at 15 years). Kidney donation seems to elevate the risks of gestational hypertension and pre-eclampsia. Many donors incur financial expenses due to factors such as lost wages, need for sick days, and travel expenses. Yet, most donors have no regrets about donation. Living kidney donation is practised ethically when informed consent incorporates information about risks, uncertainty about outcomes is acknowledged when it exists, and a donor's risks are proportional to benefits for the donor and recipient. Future research should determine whether outcomes are similar for donors from developing countries and donors with pre-existing conditions such as obesity."


And this...
"In many countries, living kidney donation is the only affordable treatment for kidney failure. This is evident across large regions of India and Pakistan, for example, where chronic dialysis is rationed in units supported by government or community donations, or is only available with payments that are prohibitive for most patients. In this respect, chronic dialysis is viewed as a bridge to a life-saving kidney transplant from a living donor. In many developing countries, the infrastructure to procure deceased-donor organs does not exist.

"Unrelated and incompatible donors
Living kidney donation in unrelated donors (eg, friends, spouses, or distant relatives of the recipient) are becoming more common. In the USA, the proportion of living kidney donations from unrelated donors increased from 30% to 57% between 1999 and 2013. Similar trends are evident in Europe, Australia, and New Zealand.

"This rise in unrelated living kidney donation is largely associated with a declining emphasis on close HLA matches between donor–recipient pairs. With advances in immunosuppressive therapy, the longevity and function of the transplanted organ is now less dependent on the genetic donor–recipient relationship than in the past. The rise in unrelated donors has also been helped by so-called kidney paired donation, a strategy used to overcome donor–recipient incompatibility if the transplant candidate has antibodies to the donor's blood or HLA type. Such antibodies greatly increase the risk of donated-organ rejection and, in the case of anti-HLA antibodies, might develop because of previous pregnancies, blood transfusions, or transplants. As shown in figure 2, registries of incompatible donor–recipient pairs have enabled transplantation to proceed through paired exchanges, or donation chains in which each donor provides a kidney to an unrelated compatible recipient. Paired exchange has been helped by the transportation of living-donor kidneys between centres and by non-synchronous transplants, in which one or more donors wait to donate until new pairs enter the chain. In some cases, a transplantation chain begins when an individual with no relationship to any recipient donates a kidney (termed non-directed donation). In 2012, this type of altruistic donation enabled a 30-transplant chain to proceed."

video: “Who Gets What – and Why: The New Economics of Matching and Market Design"

For those of you who have little idea about what goes on at a book talk--which was my situation a week ago--here's a video of the first book talk I gave, last week, the day after Who Gets What and Why appeared, at the Roosevelt House of Hunter College  There's a kind introduction by Karna Basu, followed by a talk by me, and then a conversation with Michael Weinstein.
*************

Also available on C-Span: http://www.c-span.org/video/?326483-1/alvin-roth-gets-whatand 

Interview about WGWaW:

Here's the text of an interview about Who Gets What and Why, with Nancy Shute at NPR's Shots--Health News:
How An Economist Helped Patients Find The Right Kidney Donors
JUNE 11, 201512:35 PM ET

Here's a snippet:

"Market design is a very outward-facing form of economics. I'm talking with doctors. I'm talking with school administrators. ...I'm constantly talking with people who aren't economists. A big deal in market design is finding the inside champions who the economists can help. I kind of think of economists as being helpers here. We have some ideas, but we don't do any of the surgeries."

Who gets what and why interview

Here's an interview I gave last week in New York, at Quartz (qz.com):

The hidden economic rules behind Tinder, marriage, kidneys, and college admissions

"Roth swung by Quartz’s New York offices recently to chat about his new book, Who Gets What—and Why, which explains how matching markets work, why almost everyone makes it illegal to buy kidneys, and why it’s increasingly rare for people to marry their high-school sweethearts. Here are edited excerpts of our conversation."

Here's one snippet:

"You sound very excited in some parts of the book with some of the opportunities out there. [Editor’s note: Stanford University is in the heart of Silicon Valley.] For instance, some of the billion-dollar unicorn start-ups, such as Airbnb and Uber. We usually describe them as companies but you describe them as marketplaces.

Absolutely. Airbnb is a matching market between travelers and hosts. Uber is a matching market between travelers and drivers.

It seems like a boom time at least for these kinds of markets. Why now?

Well some of the reasons are technological. It’s hard to think of eBay before the internet. It’s hard to think of Uber before the smartphone. With smartphones you carry a marketplace in your pocket, so you have more access than ever to marketplaces. I think that’s a big part of the reason."

Is sniping bad for eBay? New paper by Bakus, Blak, Masterov and Tadelis

Is Sniping A Problem For Online Auction Markets? by Matt Backus, Tom Blak,  Dimitriy V. Masterov, and Steve Tadelis

Abstract: "A common complaint about online auctions for consumer goods is the presence of “snipers,” who place bids in the final seconds of sequential ascending auctions with predetermined ending times. Roth and Ockenfels (2002) and Bajari and Hortacsu (2003) conjecture that snipers are best-responding to the existence of “incremental” bidders that bid up to their valuation only as they are outbid. Snipers aim to catch these incremental bidders at a price below their reserve, with no time to respond.  As a consequence, these incremental bidders may experience regret when they are outbid at the last moment at a price below their reservation value. We measure the effect of this experience on a new buyer’s propensity to participate in future auctions. We also consider an alternative explanation, rooted in the behavioral literature on the endowment effect. Bidders may gradually develop an attachment to the object while they are the high bidder, implying that the regret should increase with time spent in the lead. We show that the two narratives are econometrically separable,
and estimate them using a carefully selected subset of auctions from eBay.com."

They find that first-time bidders who are outbid in the final seconds of an auction are less likely to return to eBay: here's a graph of the probability of not returning, as a function of how close to the end of th auction the first time bidder was successfully sniped...

They conclude: "As a result, sniping has a negative impact on the growth rate of the auction platform."

Liver transplant waiting times and MELD scores around the country (and a calculator you can use)

Here's a story in the Wisconsin State Journal: Access to liver transplants unequal in Wisconsin, nation . (Link to a liver calculator at bottom, by transplant center, etc.)

"Access to liver transplants varies in Wisconsin and around the country, with relatively healthy patients getting organs in some places while sicker patients elsewhere deteriorate or die on the waiting list.

"The geographic disparities persist even after a policy two years ago required broader access to patients most in need.

"Policymakers are proposing a more radical change: Dividing the country into four or eight districts for liver sharing instead of the 11 regions and 58 local areas used today.

"Populous states welcome the idea. It would direct livers to “patients in most urgent need, drastically reduce existing geographic disparities in access and, most importantly, save lives,” members of Congress from California, New York and other states wrote to federal officials after the proposal was released last year.

"But congressional representatives mostly from the Midwest and South said the proposal would disadvantage more rural parts of the country. “Areas with high organ donation rates would be disproportionately affected,” they wrote.
...
 "Nationwide, more than 15,000 people await livers, nearly 13,000 of them in active status, meaning they could receive an organ today. About 6,700 people got liver transplants last year.

"Roughly 1,500 people die waiting for livers each year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing, or UNOS, which runs the transplant system.

"Patients are ranked by medical urgency scores called Model for End-Stage Liver Disease, or MELD. The scores, based on three lab tests, range from 6 for least ill to 40 for gravely ill.

"The sickest patients go to the top of their local waiting lists. But where they rank depends on where they live, as demand for and supply of livers varies around the country.

"Patients getting livers in much of Indiana, Iowa, South Carolina and Tennessee typically have MELD scores of 25 or lower. In parts of California, Massachusetts and New York, the median MELD score at the time of transplant is 33 or higher.

"In Madison’s local area, the median MELD is 28.5. In Milwaukee, it’s 34. In Chicago, it’s 30.

"When the late Apple founder Steve Jobs flew from California to Tennessee for a liver transplant in 2009, he brought attention to one way patients can circumvent the system — by going to places with lower MELD scores and shorter wait times.

"To assist the vast majority of patients who don’t have private jets, Sridhar Tayur launched OrganJet in 2011. The Weston, Massachusetts, company can help people waiting for kidneys or livers get to hospitals in other states in time for transplants, said Tayur, an operations management professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.

"The cost: $17,000 to $24,000 per flight. So far, about 35 people have signed up for the service but nobody has used it, Tayur said.

He’s trying to get insurance companies to cover the fee. “That would really increase demand,” he said.
...
"Opponents of broader sharing also say more time is needed to gauge the impact of a 2013 policy requiring partial sharing of livers.

The policy, called Share 35, gives livers to patients with MELD scores of 35 or higher throughout each region before local patients with lower scores get them.

A Milwaukee patient with a MELD of 36 gets priority for a Madison donor’s liver over a Madison patient with a MELD of 28, for example. Previously, the Madison patient would have received the liver.

What most irks Madison doctors is something called MELD exception points. Extra points can be given to patients with conditions such as liver cancer, who otherwise have low MELD scores.

Use of exception points varies, with some studies showing more liberal use on the coasts.

“People have gamed the system to have livers sent their way,” said Dr. Tony D’Alessandro, a transplant surgeon at UW Hospital.

Dr. Peter Stock, a transplant director at the University of California, San Francisco, said exception points “are only given if they’re truly, truly needed.”

UNOS is looking at creating a national board to review MELD exceptions, which would replace regional boards used today."
*************

You can get information about different transplant centers around the country, for patients of different ages, blood types and MELD scores using a calculator from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients (SRTR)
 Liver Transplant Waiting List Outcomes Tool Beta

12th International Naturalistic Decision Making Conference--June 9-12

12th International Naturalistic Decision Making Conference  (I'm scheduled to speak Wednesday morning...to human factors engineers)

Naturalistic Decision Making (NDM) research emerged in the 1980s and studies how people make decisions in "real-world settings." In particular, it focuses on peoples' level of expertise in diverse professional domains and analyzes how experience allows people to rapidly categorize situations to make effective decisions. And because situations can often include dynamic, uncertain, and rapidly-changing conditions, with the ultimate decision having significant consequences, NDM research seeks to help people understand how to make the best decisions possible.

NDM methods emphasize descriptive studies conducted in field and operational workplace settings. Research findings have been used to improve performance, revise doctrine and process, develop training that is focused on decision requirements, and design information technologies to support decision making and related cognitive functions.

Examples of topics include:

• Methods to study and support rapid decision making
• Designing visualizations and user interfaces to improve sense making
• Assessing cultural competence
• Designing more effective human-computer planning systems
• Bringing evidence-based decision making to bear in civilian and government agencies
• Decision making under stress
• Aiding police in the detection of imminent terrorist attacks

Applications to areas such as cyber space, intelligence, healthcare, aviation, and sports will be discussed at the conference.

Registration

Registration for the conference includes access to all of the presentation sessions at the conference (see Agenda Overview & Program Outline below). It also includes a continental breakfast and boxed lunch each day, along with two conference receptions on 9 & 11 June. Because of limited available seating, only the first 136 to register will receive the added bonus of a conference banquet and speakers. Spouses can attend the banquet for an additional separate fee.

There will be two optional events at this year's conference.

• 11 June: there will be a Social Recognition Prime Dinner at Seasons 52 restaurant in the Tysons Corner shopping mall attached to the conference hotel. The dinner will include 4-course dinner, wine, and beverages. An option to charge this separately is available on the registration site. Spouses are welcomed.
• 12 June: three half-day tutorial alternatives.

Agenda Overview

Distinguished invited speakers:

• Dr. Alvin Roth, winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012, applies economic theory to solutions for "real-world" problems.
• Dr. Gary A. Klein is a senior scientist at MacroCognition LLC, who pioneered the field of naturalistic decision making.
• Dr. Judith Orasanu, Principal Investigator/Team Lead for Distributed Team Decision Making, NASA, Systems Safety Research Branch, Ames Research Center, was a founder of the NDM community of interest.
• Mr. John Willison, Director, Command, Power, & Integration, U.S. Army RDECOM CERDEC. Mr. Willison is responsible for leading the technical program for all Army Battle Command Systems.
• Dr. David Woods a full professor in Integrated Systems Engineering at the Ohio State University, focuses on the foundations and practice of Cognitive Systems Engineering.
• Professor Tom Ormerod, Head of Psychology at the University of Sussex, is a cognitive psychologist who has studied naturalistic decision-making for over thirty years.
• Dr. Marvin Cohen is a principal investigator at Perceptronics Solutions on projects directed toward the understanding and training of critical thinking and leadership.
• Commander Joseph Cohn, PhD. is the Deputy Director, ASD/R&E Human Performance Training and BioSystems (HPT&B) Directorate.
• COL Matthew Hepburn, Marine Corps, USA, is the DARPA program manager for the Strategic Social Interaction Modules program (SSIM).

If you have questions or wish to submit a poster, please contact the NDM Committee.

Interview about Who Gets What and Why

Here is the link to a 30 minute audio podcast of an interview about my new book Who Gets What and Why:
https://soundcloud.com/chrisriback/alvin-roth-who-gets-what-and-why

Here's the webpage of the show:

 Conversation with Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth: Who Gets What — And Why

by Chris Riback on June 8, 2015 in Conversations, Economy

Working Capital Conversations: Leading thinkers, practitioners and experts discuss the ideas that drive global business.

Wouldn’t life be easier if only getting into college were determined solely by price – who could pay most? Or marriage – love to the highest bidder? Or a new kidney – How much you got to survive?

The ideas seem laughable. Yet we live in an era that celebrates free markets and seems to celebrate the role of pricing in markets. But thanks to a range of factors – some old, like tradition; some new, like smart phones – new markets are popping up everywhere. And they’re not always developed by the traditional free market rules or price dynamics.

So how do and should these new markets work?

That’s what the Nobel Laureate of Economic Sciences Alvin Roth set out to define. He explored the dynamics – rules, processes, expectations and more – of matching markets. Roth is Professor of Economics at Stanford, and one of the world’s leading experts in market design and game theory. His newest book describes that market design. It’s called “Who Gets What – and Why.”

Marketplace Innovation Workshop, Columbia U, June 10 2015

This looks like an exciting conference, I would go if I weren't already committed to be elsewhere...

"Marketplace Innovation" Workshop Conference Organized by Ramesh Johari, Costis Maglaras, and Gabriel Weintraub Wednesday, June 10, 2015 from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM (EDT) New York, NY

Workshop on “Marketplace Innovation”

June 10, 2015

Columbia University

In conjunction with the 2015 Informs Revenue Management Conference

Organized by Ramesh Johari, Costis Maglaras, and Gabriel Weintraub

Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the "right" partner.  The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea of change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants.  Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants. As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. On its part, given these variables, market participants often face complex problems when optimizing their own decisions. In the supply side such decisions may include the assortment of products to offer and their price structure, while in the demand side they may include how much to bid for different goods and what feedback to offer about past purchasing experiences. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.

In this workshop we seek work that improves our understanding of these markets, both from the perspective of the market operator and the market participants. With respect to the former we are particularly interested in work that derives useful insights on how to design these markets, taking into account their operational details and engineering and technological constraints. With respect to the market participants, we seek for work that introduces novel approaches to optimize their decisions and improves our understanding of their interactions within the market. We look for a mix of approaches including modeling, theoretical, and empirical, using a wide range of tools drawn from operations management, game theory, auctions and mechanism design, optimization stochastic modeling, revenue management, econometrics, or statistics.

The list of markets to be studied includes but it is not restricted to:

--Online marketplaces, such as eBay, Etsy, etc.

--Internet advertising, including sponsored search and display ad exchanges.

--Sharing economy markets, such as Uber/Lyft, AirBnb, etc.

--Online labor markets, such as Amazon mTurk, oDesk, Elance, etc.

--Procurement markets, such as technology-enabled government procurement

--Health care exchanges

--Financial exchanges

The talks are by invitation only and the list of confirmed speakers is:

• Gad Allon (Kellogg)
• Itai Ashlagi (MIT)
• Eric Budish (Chicago Booth)
• Gerard Cachon (Wharton)
• Anindya Ghose (NYU)
• Karan Girotra (INSEAD)
• Steve Graves (MIT)
• Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft)
• Hamid Nazerzadeh (USC)
• Christian Terwiesch (Wharton)
• Rakesh  Vohra (Penn)
• Assaf Zeevi (Columbia)

The program is here

More Money, More Problems? Can High Pay Be Coercive and Repugnant?

One of the places where medical ethicists' intuitions are most different from those of economists is whether certain monetary transactions can become repugnant when the amount of money involved becomes high enough to be "coercive." Here's a brief paper that tries to bridge that gap.

Ambuehl, Sandro, Muriel Niederle, and Alvin E. Roth. 2015. "More Money, More Problems? Can High Pay Be Coercive and Repugnant?" American Economic Review, 105(5): 357-60.

IRBs can disallow high incentives they deem coercive. A vignette study on MTurk concerning participation in medical trials shows that a substantial minority of subjects concurs. They think high incentives cause more regret, and that more people would be better off without the opportunity to participate. We model observers as judging the ethicality of incentives by partially using their own utility. The model predicts that payments are repugnant only to the extent that they affect the participation decision, and more so for larger transactions. Incentivizing poorer participants is more repugnant, and in-kind incentives are less repugnant than monetary incentives.

Sandro Ambuehl is at the forefront of exploring the nexus of high pay, repugnance and coercion. He'll be on the market next year...and is definitely worth keeping an eye on.

Indianapolis schools discuss universal enrollment

Market design first steps: Report: IPS, Indy Charter Schools Should Use Same Enrollment Application

"A report out this week is urging the Indianapolis Public Schools district and city charter schools to consider partnering on a one-stop-shop approach for enrollment.

What the report found, basically, is enrolling in an Indianapolis public school -- be it IPS or a charter -- can be bewildering process for parents to navigate.

Students applying to an IPS magnet school have a different steps of enrollment based on whether they are new or returning to the district.

Some charters require in-person applications while others allow online submissions. The deadlines for all public city schools are not the same.

“If you think about applying for college, trying to navigate different deadlines and applications -- that is what it looks like for parents now in Indy,” said Caitlin Hannon, executive director of Teach Plus in Indianapolis which commissioned the a study of enrollment processes for IPS, charter schools and their authorizers.

The report, written by the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, says the IPS enrollment system and efforts by the city and local nonprofits to promote school options still leave parents and others confused.

Nathan Ringham, an IPS parent quoted in the report, said there is no one source to review deadlines, requirements or other issues related to enrollment.

“I shouldn’t have had to go to the state department of education to figure out the birth date cutoff for kindergarten,” he said. “I shouldn’t have to go to one page to see how we enroll as a new student and then another to see how to enroll in a magnet.”

In addition, enrollment projections by schools have been below target in past years because schools are unsure where students will attend until the school year begins. When teachers are hired months earlier based on flawed enrollment projections projections, they wind up being transferred to other schools or seeking another job, according to the report.

The institute and recommends that the city to consider a so-called common enrollment process. So rather than apply for multiple schools, a parent could fill out one application and rank their preference.

Cities, including Denver and New Orleans, offer a variation of the one-application approach that also provides information about each school, such as academic performance, so parents can compare schools.

“If the first choice is an IPS school and second is a charter and third is another charter -- that is fine,” Hannon said about how a common application would be filled out. “Then all of those would go into a lottery process where an algorithm is built and people are given their preferences by the way they have listed them and based on the requirements of each school.”

Data that could be collected in an open enrollment, Hannon said, could be used to identify whether a charter school is "creaming" -- taking the best students who apply -- or if students from one part of the city are seeking schools outside their neighborhood boundries. 

IPS Superintendent Lewis Ferebee has recently said he is open to discussing the common application."

Collaborations that went sour: Art Garfunkel and Paul Simon

A recent interview in The Telegraph sheds light on how a wonderful collaboration can be remembered with bitterness if one collaborator feels overshadowed by the other. In this case, Art Garfunkel complains about the songwriter singer Paul Simon, with whom he became famous when they, and I, were young...

Art Garfunkel on Paul Simon: 'I created a monster' -- Forty-five years after Simon & Garfunkel split up, the singer is still consumed with bitterness

Every unhappy collaboration is different, but you see these things in academia too from time to time.

The Shi'a religious jurisprudence behind Iran's legal market for kidneys

An anthropology graduate student named Elham Mireshghi is studying the market for kidneys in Iran, and includes in her study some interesting observations about the Shi'a fatwas on donation, brain death, and donor compensation that give the market its religious justification.

I haven't seen her paper yet, but she is presenting a paper in Chicago at the U. Chicago Program on Medicine and Religion's
2nd Annual Islamic Bioethics Workshop--Dissecting the Ethics of Organ Donation (June 5-7). Her tantalizing slides are here.

She writes that concern whether transplantation itself was permissible loomed larger than the issue of sales, and that Ayatullah Khomeini initially prohibited transplantation, but that this ruling was changed after it became accepted that the transplanted organ became part of the body of the recipient once blood flowed through it.

Regarding compensation of the donors, she argues that the distinction between a gift and a sale was avoided by framing the question not as

“Can a kidney be bought and henceforth removed and transplanted into a new body,”

but rather as

 “now that a kidney has been removed for the legitimate purpose of being transplanted, can the owner of the kidney receive payment for it?”

I'm looking forward to reading the paper...


HT: Jim Childress, Mario Macis

Short interviews about marketplaces, on The Street (video), MSNBC, and the Brian Leher show

Here's a five minute interview from The Street


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Here's the URL of another interview, to MSNBC, that I can't see how to embed: Everyday market lessons for your everyday life: http://on.msnbc.com/1FuNQ4l
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And here's an audio recording of my interview yesterday on the Brian Lehrer show on NPR (about 17 minutes)