There is a port in Oakland

In Pittsburgh it was sometimes said that Gertrude Stein's famous line about Oakland: "there's no there there," is about the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh, where Andy Warhol grew up. (But there seems to be good evidence the quote is about Oakland CA: Gertrude Stein’s Oakland.)  These days there's plenty of there in Oakland California, and the port there is active lately in, of all things, empty containers.

The WSJ has the story: Port of Oakland Reports Record Container Volumes in July--Movement of empty TEUs sparks upsurge

"The Port of Oakland, Calif., reported record container volumes in July, driven by a surge in empty containers on both the export and import side.

Dockworkers handled nearly 30% more empty containers—48,521 20-foot equivalent units for export and 17,017 import TEUs—in July. Empty containers are usually moved, in anticipation of trade growth, to places where they’re expected to be filled with goods before shipping back.

“With holiday shipments set to commence, this could be the start of something good,” said the port’s maritime director, John Driscoll.
...
Oakland is a major hub for U.S. agricultural exports other shipments destined for Asian markets.
...
Officials said July was the port’s busiest month in 10 years. During the month of July, the port received 153 visits from container ships, up from 136 during the same period in 2015."

Conversations about Who Gets What and Why (now in paperback)

After my book Who Gets What and Why came out in paperback, I did several radio interviews about it. Three of them have shown up on the web:

6/16/16: Alvin E. Roth – Economist – “Who Gets What – and Why” (14 minutes)
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This youtube is another audio conversation, on June 20 (about 20 minutes)

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Monday, June 27, station WISR in Pittsburgh (starts right before minute 1:02, and with a brief break for ads around 1:13, continues until 1:22)

http://wisr680.com/turn-guests-mon-627/

Gaming the waiting list for a heart transplant

The heart transplant waiting list is game-able, since your place on the list depends on what treatment you are getting. So your doctor can "treat your priority" as well as treat your medical condition.  Here's the story from NPR:
Should Doctors Game The Transplant Wait List To Help Their Patients?
 July 24, MATTHEW MOVSESIAN

And here's an old (2013) editorial on the subject in The Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation:
The urgent priority for transplantation is to trim the waiting list by Lynne Warner Stevenson:

"Current definitions of priority levels have been based both on medical rationale and the attempt to protect the system from being “gamed.” When the requirements for inotropic therapy for Status IB and pulmonary artery catheters for Status IA were adopted in the USA, it was with optimism that they would be used only when absolutely necessary to prevent imminent death, because continuous inotropic infusions and indwelling pulmonary artery catheters are inconvenient and costly and have been associated with serious complications. Although individual cases trigger heated controversy in regional committees, it is generally agreed that these therapies are being overused in patients awaiting transplantation.

If high priorities defined by therapies are the only route to access donor hearts, we face conflicted incentives as advocates for our patients. This is serious enough with incentives to inflate the description of severity of illness, but even more serious with incentive to impose interventions with complications, such as indwelling pulmonary artery catheters. One of the major conditions currently cited as justification for Status IA exceptions is vascular complications of indwelling catheters that preclude further catheterization. This complication on the list was virtually never seen before pulmonary artery catheters became an index of priority (although arrhythmia device leads have also added to the vascular complication rate).

The strength of inverse incentives in care of our waiting patients is indexed to the concern that they will die before a transplant, or will develop unnecessary risk such as from cachexia before they finally enter into transplant. The priority status will more truly reflect patient illness when the listing physicians have reasonable confidence that patients will receive a heart in a timely manner, a confidence eroded by the lengthening waiting times, which in turn reflect the anasarca of the waiting list."

HT: Marc Melcher

Market Design, and NSF support of economics

Market design plays a role in the arguments both pro and con, in the recent symposium in the Journal of Economic Perspectives:

Symposium: NSF Funding for Economists

In Defense of the NSF Economics Program (#11) Robert A. Moffitt

Full-Text Access (Complimentary) | Supplementary Materials

A Skeptical View of the National Science Foundation's Role in Economic Research (#12) Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok

Full-Text Access (Complimentary) | Supplementary Materials

 Moffitt mentions auction design, kidney exchange and school choice (with a more general reference to deferred acceptance clearinghouses) as beneficiaries of NSF funding. Cowen and Tabarrok single out auction design as something whose private benefits might argue against government funding: "Indeed, few areas in economics have been as privately remunerative as auction theory."

Matt Jackson, profiled in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

Matt Jackson in the PNAS: Profile of Matthew O. Jackson

Here's the 'Extract' (the full article seems to be gated but this gives you the idea):

During a lunchtime chat in 1993, Matthew Jackson first became interested in social and economic networks. Jackson and a colleague were discussing how power depends on networks of relationships. As an economist, Jackson had always been interested in modeling and analyzing social interactions and human decision-making. Soon, he and his colleague followed up on their lunchtime discussion by building game theoretic models of how people choose to form relationships (1). “Once I started getting interested in the subject, there were lots of different angles on it that became interesting, and I just started working on it more and more,” he says.

Jackson, the William D. Eberle Professor of Economics at Stanford University, has spent most of his distinguished career studying networks and game theory. He has studied how networks form in varied settings, including research on the root of racial biases in high school friendships and how microfinance spreads in rural Indian villages (2, 3). Jackson’s research has illuminated the role of networks in influencing access to jobs and information (4). “Understanding networks can really help us understand a lot of persistence in inequality and differences across groups in labor markets,” he says. More recently, Jackson has examined why nations go to war (5) and how social structure affects beliefs (6). For his many contributions to the field, Jackson was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2015.

Role of Social and Economic Networks

During the course of Jackson’s career, social and economic networks have become a prominent focus of study for economists. Through the work of Jackson and others, it has become clear that understanding networks has wide-ranging applications.

“One area in which it has become obvious to people that networks of interactions matter lately is understanding financial …

[Full Text of this Article]

House swapping in the UK

Neil Thakral writes:

Regarding ... public-housing residents switching units, I mentioned that this happens in the UK (https://www.gov.uk/apply-swap-homes-council). 

["You can swap your council or housing association home with another tenant if you follow certain rules and get permission from your landlord. This is often called ‘mutual exchange’."]

I thought there was something like this on Al's blog, and I found posts on buying/selling private homes (http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2009/01/house-swaps.html) and trading homes for vacations (http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/2012/04/home-exchanges.html).

Here is a recent article: http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/leeds-is-revealed-as-the-house-swapping-capital-of-the-uk-1-8028444

["The House Exchange website automatically matches house-seekers with properties that meet their needs. Once a social housing provider signs up with House Exchange, all its tenants can use the service for free. In Leeds, 100 per cent of social landlords have signed up, meaning all 102,000 social households across the city are able to use the service."]

and an example of a six-way swap from a while back:  http://www.mirror.co.uk/money/personal-finance/we-swapped-homes---get-moving-if-you-358806

Here are two platforms that seem to arrange this:

- http://www.houseexchange.org.uk

- https://www.homeswapper.co.uk

Repugnance watch: Deaccessioning art (i.e. selling it)

Some time ago I had a set of posts on Brandeis University's plan to sell some of its art. Apparently the professional ethics of museums allows art to be sold to buy other art, but not to fix the roof or pay for other things.  Sometimes a sale would violate the terms of the gift of the art, but apparently the repugnance applies even when it would not. Now comes a story (in the NY Times) about similar considerations at Fisk University: A Prized Stettheimer Painting, Sold Under the Radar by a University

"When Fisk University, the historically black school in Nashville, tried to sell two paintings several years ago from its storied Alfred Stieglitz art collection, a firestorm erupted. The proposed sale violated conditions of the gift of the collection from Stieglitz’s widow, Georgia O’Keeffe, according to her foundation.

"A drawn-out legal challenge ended in a compromise in 2012 that allowed Fisk to share its collection with Crystal Bridges, the Arkansas museum founded by Alice Walton, the Walmart heiress, bringing the struggling university an infusion of $30 million.

"But what was not revealed at the time, and has only recently come to light, is that before the agreement was completed — and with the debate over the future of Fisk itself swirling around her — Hazel O’Leary, then the university’s president, on behalf of the school quietly sold off two other paintings owned by Fisk.

"The institution was “under duress,” said Patrick Albano of Aaron Galleries, an art dealer from Illinois whom Ms. O’Leary asked to broker the sale.
...
"According to Mr. Albano, Fisk decided to sell work by Stettheimer and the painter and illustrator Rockwell Kent, which had been donated to the university with “no strings attached.”

“Shame on them,” said Lyndel King, director of the Weisman Museum at the University of Minnesota and a chairwoman of the Task Force for the Protection of University Collections, referring to Fisk’s actions. “It’s very much against the ethics of our profession.”

"Though the task force does not have legal authority over universities, its members, who represent several museum associations, can censure those who sell art to pay operating expenses, putting pressure on them not to treat art as an A.T.M. That practice “alienates donors and undermines the purpose of having a museum on campus,” Ms. King said.

"Various museum associations say that deaccessioning art, if not in violation of the original gift, is justified if the proceeds are used to buy more art. It is the cherry-picking of a painting here and a painting there to bolster an endowment or support operating expenses that is frowned upon.

"Universities, however, have argued in several settings that they must consider such sales when the fiscal alternatives — cutting programs or staff — are untenable."

Alex Teytelboym and Scott Kominers wrap up the conference on Market Design Perspectives on Inequality

Two intense days of Market Design Perspectives on Inequality summarized in a slide:

Alex Teytelboym and Scott Kominers

Organ Donation after euthanasia, in the Netherlands

The American Journal of Transplantation discusses the fraught issue of patients who wish to end their lives with medical assistance, and then become deceased donors.

Organ Donation After Euthanasia: A Dutch Practical Manual

1. J. Bollen^1,*, 
2. W. de Jongh², 
3. J. Hagenaars³,
4. G. van Dijk⁴, 
5. R. ten Hoopen⁵, 
6. D. Ysebaert⁶, 
7. J. Ijzermans⁷, 
8. E. van Heurn⁸ and
9. W. van Mook¹

Version of Record online: 10 MAR 2016

DOI: 10.1111/ajt.13746

© Copyright 2016 The American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons

Issue

American Journal of Transplantation

Volume 16, Issue 7, pages 1967–1972, July 2016

Abstract: "Many physicians and patients do not realize that it is legally and medically possible to donate organs after euthanasia. The combination of euthanasia and organ donation is not a common practice, often limited by the patient's underlying pathology, but nevertheless has been performed >40 times in Belgium and the Netherlands since 2005. In anticipation of patients' requests for organ donation after euthanasia and contributing to awareness of the possibility of this combination among general practitioners and medical specialists, the Maastricht University Medical Center and the Erasmus University Medical Center Rotterdam have developed a multidisciplinary practical manual in which the organizational steps regarding this combined procedure are described and explained. This practical manual lists the various criteria to fulfill and the rules and regulations the different stakeholders involved need to comply with to meet all due diligence requirements. Although an ethicist was involved in writing this paper, this report is not specifically meant to comprehensively address the ethical issues surrounding the topic. This paper is focused on the operational aspects of the protocol."

"Introduction: In September 2013, an article addressing organ donation after active euthanasia was published in the Dutch Journal of Medicine (1). A patient suffering from a progressive neurodegenerative disease was able to donate his liver and both kidneys. Organ donation after euthanasia has been described previously, with excellent transplant outcome (2).

"Prior to December 2015, organ donation after euthanasia was performed 15 times in the Netherlands and resulted in donation of eight pairs of lungs, 13 livers, 13 pancreases and 29 kidneys. These developments necessitated the creation of a practical manual addressing the combination of both procedures because of the unique and complex legal and ethical issues, together with the appropriate medical care (3). This manual can be used as a framework for hospitals that wish to facilitate such successive procedures. The essential components of the practical manual, developed by the collaborative efforts of the Maastricht University Medical Center and the Erasmus Medical University Medical Center Rotterdam, are discussed below.

"Although the manual addresses euthanasia and organ donation in the Netherlands, many of the issues raised and discussed may be similar or comparable to those in any country that allows organ donation in the setting of euthanasia. A discussion of ethical considerations is not included in this paper, but this is not intended to dismiss the necessary ethical discussions to be held in this domain."

Market Design Perspectives on Inequality--conference at HCEO, Chicago, Aug 6-7

The Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group at Chicago is holding a conference on Market Design Perspectives on Inequality

The discussants look exciting:)

Matching refugees and landlords in Sweden, by Tommy Andersson and Lars Ehlers

 After refugees have found a country of asylum, there's still work to do. Here's some help on how to do it in Sweden:

Assigning Refugees to Landlords in Sweden:Stable Maximum Matchings
 Tommy Andersson and Lars Ehlers
June 2016

Abstract In Sweden, asylum seekers are either deported or granted a residence permit. Refugee families with a residence permit are assigned to the different local municipalities. Since almost all accommodation options are exhausted in Sweden, households in some municipalities are asked to state their willingness to accommodate refugee families. In line with the European NGO “Refugees Welcome”, a refugee family and a landlord (household) are mutually acceptable if they have a language in common and if the number of offered beds of the household exceeds the number of beds needed by the refugee family. This paper proposes an algorithm that finds a maximum matching (filling the maximal number of beds) which in addition is stable.


Theorem 1. For any profile R, there exists a stable maximum matching

Dr Jeff Veale in the WSJ on vouchers for living donor kidneys

Give a Kidney, Get a Kidney--An innovative voucher program started in 2014 at UCLA is spreading across the country.  By JEFFREY VEALE Aug. 3, 2016

"The good news is that there were 17,878 kidney transplants in the U.S. last year, the most in a single year, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. And the numbers may keep growing thanks to an innovative voucher program that started in 2014 at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center and is spreading across the country.

Here’s how it works: If you donate a kidney now, you will receive a voucher that a loved one could use to secure a kidney in the future. The Advanced Donation program is coordinated through the National Kidney Registry, which uses a national database to quickly and efficiently match donors and recipients.

The idea was approved by the Ethics Committee of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons in June, and has been sent to that group’s executive committee for formal approval. Ten hospitals across the country have so far joined UCLA to honor the voucher program. Donors currently need to go to one of these hospitals to receive a voucher but many other centers are expected to join."

Here's my earlier post on this:

Donating a kidney today, and getting a promise of a living donor kidney in the future for someone you specify

I'm no lawyer, but I anticipate that there may be contract design details to work out. This will be well worth watching.

Reverse college admissions scramble in British clearing

In Britain, students get admitted to university (sometimes contingently) before their grades are known. So some students don't get the grades they need to fulfill their admissions requirement, and have to scramble for a position at a less selective school. But some students do much better on their exams than they anticipated, and find themselves in a position to go to more selective schools than they applied to (or were admitted to). But they need to scramble to find a place.

The Telegraph has the story: What are my options if I do better than expected at A-level?

First kidney exchange in Nepal

A change in the law removed the last obstacle. The Himalayan Times has the story: Paired kidney exchange first time in Nepal

"Kathmandu, August 1

"The first Paired Exchange of kidneys between two families has taken place in Nepal.

"Khem Raj Niraula, 49, of Phulavari, Taplejung and Bishnu Babu Shrestha, 40, of Manakamana, Gorkha received a kidney at the Human Organ Transplant Centre in Bhaktapur. Both families donated a kidney to a recipient from the other family.
...
“This is the first such kidney transplant in Nepal. It became possible after the amendment of the Organ Transplant Act 1998 in 2015,” said Dr Shrestha. “Such transplants were regarded as illegal in Nepal, which compelled many patients to travel to the India for treatment,” he added.

"The constitution of Nepal has revised the law related to organ transplant in which a family member can donate a kidney to husband, wife, siblings, maternal relatives, in-laws, relatives, step father, mother, grandparents or other family members.

"If the kidney doesn’t match, one can exchange a kidney with other families through mutual understanding. “This is done in western countries while in Nepal this is the first time such transplant has taken place,” Dr Shrestha informed.

“The Act has made it very easy for us to transplant kidney,” said Khem Raj Niraula, a patient. “If the law had not been in place, we would have to suffer a lot. I was even ready to go to India for treatment,” he added."

Mergers of taxi-hailing services in Europe, and China

Europe is preparing to defend itself against Uber. Bloomberg has the story:
Daimler Targets Uber by Merging Mytaxi With U.K.’s Hailo

"Daimler AG will challenge Uber Technologies Inc.’s ride-hailing dominance by merging its Mytaxi unit with one of the U.K.’s most popular cab-calling services, Hailo, to create Europe’s biggest taxi app.
The combined company will operate under the Mytaxi brand, with 100,000 registered drivers in more than 50 cities across nine countries, and be headquartered in Hamburg, the companies announced
...
"Car manufacturers have been investing heavily in apps to keep pace with changing consumer habits that have seen ride-sharing companies such as Uber and Lyft Inc. proliferate. General Motors Co. has invested $500 million in Lyft, Volkswagen AG put $300 million into Israel-based Gett Inc., and Toyota Motor Corp. backed Uber for an undisclosed amount. Uber has raised at least $12.5 billion in funding to date.
Daimler, the maker of Mercedes-Benz cars, also owns the Car2Go car-sharing service and purchased Mytaxi in September 2014. It bought U.S. ride-booking service RideScout LLC at the same time. "
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China appears to have been too much for Uber to swallow. The NY Times has the story: Uber to Sell to Rival Didi Chuxing and Create New Business in China

"In a stark signal of how difficult it is for American technology companies to thrive in China, Uber China said it was selling itself to Didi Chuxing, its fiercest rival there.

The sale, which would create a new company worth about $35 billion, would end the great ride-hailing battle of China. A person with knowledge of the deal said Uber investors had been pushing for such a transaction.

The companies have been fighting relentlessly for market share in mainland China for two years, spending tens of millions of dollars every month to attract riders and drivers. The merger would end that competition and create significant scale, but it would also be a repudiation of Uber’s ambitions to take on local Chinese competitors in their huge home market."

and this:

"...Mr. Kalanick helped Uber overcome the biggest obstacle in China: the Communist Party. By traveling frequently to China, meeting with officials and speaking in language often used by party cadres, Mr. Kalanick helped the company avoid the regulatory tripwire that has led many companies to stumble in the market. Last week, Chinese officials said ride-hailing apps were legal and laid out a framework to license drivers.

"But entry is just the first obstacle to the Chinese internet market. Competition is fierce, and the focus is less on the product than on big spending to lure customers or on tricks to harm competitors. Fraudsters and opportunists also abound.

"Uber’s engineers, operating from San Francisco, had to deal with drivers who simulated or faked rides to get commissions. At the same time, the company was blocked from marketing on China’s biggest social network, WeChat, because the internet giant Tencent was an early investor in Didi. All of that made it much harder to compete with a company that already had an advantage in scale, not to mention the backing of Tencent, Alibaba and Apple. When it raised $7 billion in June, Didi made it clear it was willing to continue the fight for a long time."

An interview with the late Lloyd Shapley, on incentives, in Spanish

In Argentina's La Nacion

Para aliviar la suba de tarifas, el camino son los incentivos

SEGUIR

Juan Carlos de Pablo

LA NACION

DOMINGO 24 DE JULIO DE 2016

Scalping Hamilton

The NY Times has the story: How Scalpers Make Their Millions With ‘Hamilton’

"For most of May, the median price of a ticket on the secondary market was around $850. Between the Tonys and the July 9 performances, it pushed toward $1,600. Before Mr. Miranda’s announcement of his departure, ticket holders were offering a seat for the July 9 performance at an average of $2,700. With the news of his exit, the average asking price quickly climbed to $10,900 a seat.

"Mind you, the average face value of a “Hamilton” ticket was $189.
...
"Scalping can be explained with high school textbook economics. When ticket prices are set too low to balance demand against the supply of seats, any person holding a ticket can find a sea of buyers willing to pay more than asking price for the seat.

"Increasingly, that ticket holder is not a guy at the theater door with an extra ticket. It’s a person employing sophisticated software, a so-called ticket bot, to buy a huge number of tickets moments after the theater releases them. In the time a human buyer can find the calendar feature on a ticket site, a scalper’s network of hundreds of bots has already bought the maximum limit of tickets for multiple days of shows.
...
"Because the secondary market is scattered across dozens of websites and storefront services, its size is hard to establish. Overlapping ticket inventories also make prices hard to track. Websites like StubHub, SeatGeek and Ticketmaster re-list more than 35 percent of the 1,321 seats sold in the Richard Rodgers Theater, on average, for each of the eight “Hamilton” performances a week. By placing initial box office sales and secondary market resales side by side, they provide a veneer of legitimacy (and an illusion of regulatory transparency) for scalpers.

"Such a strong scalper-driven secondary market is relatively new to Broadway, though sports fans and concert goers have long encountered inflated prices for big games or Beyoncé concerts.

Every performance of “Hamilton” is a miniature Super Bowl, in terms of demand and resale activity. Fans can still get a seat at “Hamilton” for less than a thousand dollars, if they are willing to wait for it — either buying months in advance from the theater or just hours before a performance, as scalpers drop their asking price.

"Looking across nearly 100 days of “Hamilton” performances, we found that the median resale ticket price was nearly $1,120 a seat. By our analysis, scalpers were earning more than six times what they paid for their tickets.

"The “cheap” seats in the mezzanine and orchestra sides sell for more than 10 times their face value on average. Premium orchestra seats sell for nearly six times their face value on average.
...
"For a website that is trying to detect scalping, the challenge is finding the bots among the humans. It is not as easy as it sounds. To avoid detection, sophisticated scalpers use bots designed to look like humans, although they use the website far more efficiently. Bots don’t misclick or need to use the delete key, though they may do that as well, in order to further obscure the evidence of a nonhuman purchase.

"The masquerade is important because “Hamilton” cancels what it deems to be bulk ticket purchases. The lead producer, Jeffrey Seller, has described canceling the purchases of one bot that had accumulated 20,000 tickets for “Hamilton.”

It is an uphill battle. Bot-driven ticket buying has been illegal in New York since 2010, yet its use is still widespread. When they are networked, bots can play a big role in distorting ticket prices. Bots can drive significant traffic on Ticketmaster.com, up to 90 percent of ticketing-purchasing activity at times."

Exorcism: "Mistress dispellers" in China

The NY Times has the story: China’s Cheating Husbands Fuel an Industry of ‘Mistress Dispellers’

"Mistress-dispelling services, increasingly common in China’s larger cities, specialize in ending affairs between married men and their extramarital lovers.

"Typically hired by a scorned wife, they coach women on how to save their marriages, while inducing the mistress to disappear. For a fee that can start in the tens of thousands of dollars, they will subtly infiltrate the mistress’s life, winning her friendship and trust in an attempt to break up the affair. The services have emerged as China’s economy has opened up in recent decades, and as extramarital affairs grew more common.
...
"Mistress dispelling typically begins with research on the targeted woman, said Shu Xin, Weiqing’s director. An investigation team — often including a psychotherapist and, to keep on the safe side, a lawyer — analyzes her family, friends, education and job before sending in an employee that Weiqing calls a counselor.

“Once we figure out what type of mistress she is — in it for money, love or sex — we draw up a plan,” Mr. Shu said.

"The counselor might move into the mistress’s apartment building or start working out at her gym, getting to know her, becoming her confidante and eventually turning her feelings against her partner. Sometimes, the counselor finds her a new lover, a job opening in another city or otherwise convinces her to leave the married man. Weiqing and other agencies said its counselors were prohibited from becoming intimately involved with the mistress or from using or threatening violence.
...
"The companies say it typically takes about three months to dispel a mistress. Yu Feng, director of the Chongqing Jialijiawai Marriage and Family Service Center, said his team has dispelled 260 mistresses in the last two years."

British immigration: more time combating clandestine immigrants means less time investigating scams

What do immigration inspectors do?

The Telegraph has the story: Overwhelmed border guards diverted from other immigration scams to deal with threefold increase in migrants arriving by lorry and Channel Tunnel

“It's worrying that problems at the border meant that that organised crime and sham marriages were not properly investigated. In addition overstayers were not returned and illegal working was not tackled."

Refugees from Central America

The NY times has the story: U.S. to Admit More Central American Refugees

"The White House on Tuesday announced a substantial expansion of a program to admit Central American refugees to the United States, conceding that its efforts to protect migrants fleeing dangerous conditions had left too many people with no recourse.

The administration said it would broaden an initiative that currently lets unaccompanied Central American children enter the United States as refugees, allowing their entire families to qualify, including siblings older than 21, parents and other relatives who act as caregivers.

It is unclear how many refugees might be eligible, but during its two years, the program for children has drawn 9,500 applicants, which could eventually grow to many times that with the broader criteria.

The expansion was denounced by Republicans and it sharpened a contrast with Donald J. Trump, who has centered much of his presidential campaign on a call to shut out immigrants.

Republicans said the Obama administration should be focused on tackling what they called a border crisis. The expansion would instead essentially open an entirely new channel for Central American families escaping endemic violence to gain legal entrance to the United States.

“What we have seen is that our current efforts to date have been insufficient to address the number of people who may have legitimate refugee claims, and there are insufficient pathways for those people to present their claims,” Amy Pope, a deputy Homeland Security adviser, said in a conference call to announce the changes. She said the revisions showed a recognition that “the criteria is too narrow to meet the categories of people who we believe would qualify under our refugee laws, but they just don’t have the mechanism to apply.”

The White House also said it had reached an agreement with Costa Rica to serve as a temporary host site for the most vulnerable migrants from El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras while they wait to be processed as refugees. These migrants would first undergo security screening in their home countries. Costa Rica would accept up to 200 people at a time among those who are found to be eligible, for periods of six months.


The United Nations high commissioner for refugees has agreed to set up an unusual process to review requests from potential refugees while they are in their home countries. Administration officials also said they would begin reviewing applications from refugees in their home countries, a step they hoped would discourage people from making the dangerous trip to the United States border.

Republicans said the expansion was the latest example of the White House’s misuse of its authority."

An unusual kind of sex worker in Malawi

Here's a story (and video) and then a followup story from the BBC that reports a surprising twist in sex for hire: The man employed to have sex with teenage girls
"In some remote regions of Malawi, it's traditional for parents to employ a man to have sex with their daughter when she reaches puberty."

And here:
"In some remote southern regions of Malawi, it's traditional for girls to be made to have sex with a paid sex worker known as a "hyena" once they reach puberty. The act is not seen by village elders as rape, but as a form of ritual "cleansing". However, as Ed Butler reports, it has the potential to be the opposite of cleansing - a way of spreading disease.
...
"Aniva is by all accounts the pre-eminent "hyena" in this village. It's a traditional title given to a man hired by communities in several remote parts of southern Malawi to provide what's called sexual "cleansing". If a man dies, for example, his wife is required by tradition to sleep with Aniva before she can bury him. If a woman has an abortion, again sexual cleansing is required.
And most shockingly, here in Nsanje, teenage girls, after their first menstruation, are made to have sex over a three-day period, to mark their passage from childhood to womanhood. If the girls refuse, it's believed, disease or some fatal misfortune could befall their families or the village as a whole.
"Most of those I have slept with are girls, school-going girls," Aniva tells me."
...
"All of those involved in these rituals are aware that these customs are condemned by outsiders - not just by the church, but by NGOs and the government as well, which has launched a campaign against so-called "harmful cultural practices".
"We are not going to condemn these people," says Dr May Shaba, permanent secretary of the Ministry of Gender and Welfare. "But we are going to give them information that they need to change their rituals."

And here is the followup story, yesterday:
Malawian 'hyena man' arrested for having sex with children

"An HIV-positive Malawian man, who says he is paid to have sex with children as part of initiation rites, has been arrested on the president's orders.
Eric Aniva, a sex worker known in Malawi as a "hyena", was the subject of a BBC feature last week.
He told the BBC that he did not mention his HIV status to those who hire him.
President Peter Mutharika said the police should investigate and charge him over the cases of defilement he had seemingly confessed to.
...
""While we must promote positive cultural values and positive socialisation of our children, the president says harmful cultural and traditional practices cannot be accepted in this country," presidential spokesman Mgeme Kalilani said in a statement
Mr Aniva would "further be investigated for exposing the young girls to contracting HIV and further be charged accordingly", he said.
The president had also ordered all men and parents involved to be investigated, Mr Kalilani said.
"All people involved in this malpractice should be held accountable for subjecting their children and women to this despicable evil," the statement said.
"These horrific practices although done by a few also tarnish the image of the whole nation of Malawi internationally and bring shame to us all."
Last year Malawi banned child marriage, raising the legal age of marriage from 15 to 18 - something activists hoped would put an end to early sexual initiations."

Sperm banks may need some regulation

The NY Times has the story: Sperm Banks Accused of Losing Samples and Lying About Donors

Some of the problems reported in the story are of the banking sort: when depositors sought to withdraw the sperm they had deposited (e.g. before undergoing chemo for testicular cancer) they found the bank no longer had it.  Others problems have had to do with incorrect information about donors...

"Frozen sperm has become a major industry, dominated by a few large sperm banks, but with smaller stocks of sperm maintained at hundreds of assisted-reproduction centers nationwide. The Food and Drug Administration requires that donor sperm be tested for infectious diseases. Beyond that, sperm banks are lightly regulated. Several states require health department licensing of the labs, but only New York conducts routine inspections.

"Some of the new cases accuse sperm banks of careless record-keeping, or mishandling or misappropriation of sperm banked for a client’s personal use. Others say the banks use hyped, misleading descriptions to market their donors.

"Several cases accuse a Georgia facility of marketing sperm as belonging to a neuroscientist with a genius-level I.Q. who turned out to be a schizophrenic felon, and who has fathered at least 36 children.
...
"Sperm banks are not required to verify the information provided by donors, and lawyers familiar with the industry say many do not. They set their own limits on how many children a donor can sire, but unless the mothers voluntarily report the births, they may not know how many half-siblings are out there. Some, including the two largest, California Cryobank in Los Angeles and Fairfax Cryobank, headquartered in Virginia, test for many genetic conditions, while others test for very few.

"So it is buyer-beware — for people banking their own sperm for personal use after cancer treatment, and for those relying on a sperm bank’s description of an anonymous donor.

"Sean Tipton, a spokesman for the American Society of Reproductive Medicine, said his group does not see a need for further regulation and believes that the industry is generally reliable.

“All indications are that sperm donation has been a terrific way to help people start a family even if, as with anything that involves humans, there are mistakes and some less-than-perfect actors,” he said."

Trust and crime: Reputation in the (illegal) market for sex

Quartz has an article on how sex workers can vet new customers, in the age of the internet: Sex workers have created the perfect method for keeping people honest online. (I like the url better than the headline: http://qz.com/621994/trust-and-crime/

"If you work at Goldman Sachs in New York City and you want to tie up a woman and then have sex with her, there’s a good chance you’ll first have to speak to Rita.
She’ll insist on calling your office, speaking to the switchboard operator, and being patched through to your desk. Then she will want to check out your profile on the company website and LinkedIn. She’ll demand you send her message from your work email, and require a scan of either your passport or driver’s license.
...
"Mid-range prostitution is a relatively new market, enabled by technology. Before the internet, it was hard for escorts to find customers: They had to either walk the streets searching for customers (the lower end of the market), rely on word-of-mouth, or work with agencies. Walking the streets was dangerous, while agencies ate up a large share of workers’ profit and autonomy, and created a bottleneck to entering the market. The internet changed all that.

“Before the internet, agencies provided the steady flow of clients and screening, but their capacity was capped,” Baylor University economist Scott Cunningham said. Soon after Craigslist launched in 1995, US escorts quickly started marketing directly to customers online. This newfound ability to advertise on the internet grew the market, said Cunningham, because more women and men could work independently
...
"Even criminals need someone they can trust

"If you’re selling something illegal, you can’t rely on the law to make sure the buyer upholds their end of the deal. Once the bill comes, clients might turn violent, or turn out to be cops. That means trust commands a large premium and that’s the centerpiece of Rita’s business model: watertight background checks on would-be johns.

"Rita represents sex workers who offer BDSM in addition to sex. When rough play is on the list of services you offer, a high level of trust is essential; hence, Rita’s elaborate screening process, which can take days. “I am looking to weed out police and crazies,” she said. She estimates that only one in four potential customers ultimately passes. Those who do win some time with a professional escort/dominatrix, but it comes at a hefty price: Each hour can cost up to $800, and Rita’s cut is 30%."

Repugnance watch: Pokemon in Saudi Arabia

Reuters has the story:
Top Saudi clerical body renews fatwa against Pokemon

"The General Secretariat of the Council of Senior Religious Scholars said it had revived a 2001 decree against a Pokemon card game in response to queries from believers.

The Council argued that the mutations of the creatures in the game, who are given specific powers, amounted to blasphemy by promoting the theory of natural evolution.

"It is shocking that the word 'evolution' has been much on the tongues of children," the fatwa read.

It also said the game contained other elements prohibited by Islamic law, including "polytheism against God by multiplying the number of deities, and gambling, which God has forbidden in the Quran and likened to wine and idols".

The fatwa added that symbols used in the game promoted Japan's Shinto religion, Christianity, Freemasonry and "global Zionism".

In conservative Saudi Arabia, home to Islam's two holiest sites, cinemas are banned and women's sports are discouraged as promoting sin."

ABC video about a long kidney chain (old, but well done)

This is about a 2015 chain organized by NKR:
http://abcnews.go.com/Health/donating-kidney-complete-stranger-order-save-loved/story?id=30288400

Bride Price and Female Education by Ashraf, Bau, Nunn and Voena

A new NBER working paper suggests that the institution of bride price, often regarded as a repugnant transaction, may provide incentives to educate girls, which increases their price.

Bride Price and Female Education

Nava Ashraf, Natalie Bau, Nathan Nunn, Alessandra Voena

NBER Working Paper No. 22417
Issued in July 2016

Traditional cultural practices can play an important role in development, but can also inspire condemnation. The custom of bride price, prevalent throughout sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia as a payment by the groom to the family of the bride, is one example. In this paper, we show a perhaps surprising economic consequence of this practice. We revisit one of the best-studied historical development projects, the INPRES school construction program in Indonesia, and show that previously found small effects on female enrollment mask heterogeneity by bride price tradition. Ethnic groups that traditionally engage in bride price payments at marriage increased female enrollment in response to the program. Within these ethnic groups, higher female education at marriage is associated with a higher bride price payment received, providing a greater incentive for parents to invest in girls' education and take advantage of the increased supply of schools. However, we see no increase in education following school construction for girls from ethnicities without a bride price tradition. We replicate these findings in Zambia, where we exploit a similar school expansion program that took place in the early 2000s. While there may be significant downsides to a bride price tradition, our results suggest that any change to this cultural custom should likely be considered alongside additional policies to promote female education.

Matching Markets and Market Design: Theory and Application at the NBER on Tuesday July 26

Here's the email from the NBER

"As a reminder, on Tuesday afternoon, July 26, Alvin Roth, Parag Pathak, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Nikhil Agarwal and Itai Ashlag will be delivering a set of lectures on "Theory and Applications of Market Design" at the NBER Summer Institute.  An outline for the lectures can be found at:

http://conference.nber.org/confer/2016/SI2016/ML/MLprg.html

The lectures will be presented in Ballroom A, West Tower, second floor, at the Royal Sonesta Hotel in Cambridge, MA beginning at 1:15 pm.  The lectures will also be recorded and posted on the NBER's website.  To assist us with our space planning, we ask that everyone who is planning to attend register by July 22 through the Conference Department's web reply form at https://www.nber.org/ll?u=alvin_roth&p=yTvD&url=/conf/reply/SI16ML  ."

A reading list is here.

Update on compensation for bone marrow donors

Frank McCormick emails about a new movie concerning the 9th Circuit court case which ruled that it might be legal to compensate certain kind of bone marrow/blood stem-cell donors, and the subsequent administrative battle to prevent that: Film inspired by Lewiston mom premieres

"A mission to help her three young daughters — Jordan, Julia and Jorja Flynn — stay healthy despite their Fanconi anemia, a rare genetic blood disorder that destroyed their bone marrow and made them extremely susceptible to cancer.

She's fighting to increase America's pool of bone-marrow donors by getting the federal government to allow some donors to be paid — a significant change she believed would help both donors and those in need, like her daughters.

Four years later, the Lewiston mom is still fighting, both for her daughters' health and against the federal government. But she's getting attention for it in a new way.

Today, a short film inspired by her battles will premiere at the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville.

...
"Hoping to help donors ease the financial burden of donation and give them an incentive to see the process through, Gummoe became lead plaintiff in a lawsuit spearheaded by the Institute for Justice.

For years, federal law has prohibited bone-marrow donors — and organ donors — from being compensated. The suit argued that advances in medicine made bone-marrow donation more like plasma donation, which can be compensated under the law, than to kidney donation, which cannot.

In traditional bone-marrow harvesting, doctors stick a needle through a hip bone and remove bone marrow. The alternative method, peripheral blood stem cell donation, is now used most of the time. In stem cell donation, donors receive injections to increase the production of blood-forming stem cells that are then siphoned out of their blood in a process similar to dialysis.

The lawsuit was successful: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the new form of bone-marrow donation did not fall under the category of organ donation as the law was written and could be compensated. At least one nonprofit was planning a pilot program to see how compensation — a $3,000 housing allowance, scholarship or charity donation — might boost bone-marrow donation.

But in 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed a new rule that would explicitly include peripheral blood stem cell donation in the definition of organ donation. With that looming for nearly three years, no group has felt comfortable moving forward with a pilot program to compensate donors.

"If they were to raise money and start pursuing this research and then the department issued its rule and blocked it, it would be a waste of their time and resources, which are precious," Kramer said. "In good faith, they couldn't move forward."

The department has until the end of this year to either move forward to prohibit bone-marrow donors from being compensated or drop the issue. A Health and Human Services spokesman said Wednesday that the department was "working toward being responsive to this deadline."

The department has said a ban on compensation would help ensure that, among other things, donors aren't coerced or exploited.

Gummoe and the Institute for Justice believe a ban only ensures that there aren't enough people willing to donate.  "

"Black market" surrogacy in England, and subsequent legal complications

Organizing markets without a strong legal framework can be tricky; here's a British surrogacy story from the law blog Above the Law: I Want To Put A Baby In You: Underground Surrogacy And The Burger King Baby

"Last month, an English court held that a surrogate to an “underground” arrangement could nevertheless keep custody of the baby she carried. This was despite the fact that the surrogate was not genetically related to the child. Instead, she was hired via a “secret” matching service and matched with a gay couple. They hoped to be parents through surrogacy for a second time.

The intended parents and surrogate met only once for 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the meeting was at a Burger King. And now, this poor child is forever linked to the fast-food franchise.

After the meeting, the surrogate was flown to Cyprus. (As I mentioned previously, Cyprus is a hot destination for surrogacy arrangements.) There, she underwent the transfer of two embryos to her uterus. The eggs were from a donor, and one was fertilized by one of the intended parents and the second egg was fertilized with sperm from the other intended parent. The transfer was successful, and the surrogate became pregnant with twins. But sadly, she later miscarried one of the babies.

Issues continued to mount. The intended parents missed payment deadlines. The surrogate learned that the couple’s first surrogate had a negative review of the intended parents. Ultimately, the surrogate decided to keep the remaining child. She lied, and told the intended parents that she had miscarried both babies. But she was caught when the intended parents saw her very pregnant toward the end of the pregnancy.

The intended parents brought legal action against the surrogate to try to obtain their child. But they also had unclean hands. They had offered to “pay” the surrogate 9,000 pounds in exchange for carrying the baby. While British law allows “reimbursement” of expenses to a compassionate surrogate, no “paying” of a surrogate is permitted. Additionally, the court held that the surrogate herself had a learning difficulty that made her consent to the agreement invalid.

Ultimately, the court awarded full custody to the surrogate—I hope that learning difficulty isn’t too severe—while the intended parents get very limited visitation rights:  one weekend every eight weeks.

While it sounds shocking to award a surrogate the parental rights over a child to which they have no genetic connection, this unfortunately happens throughout the world. Even in the United States. And “underground” surrogacy arrangements are not unusual.
...
"the Chinese Ministry of Heath all but outlawed surrogacy in 2001. So the estimated 10,000 surrogacy births in China a year are all via its underground surrogacy industry. And due to the illegality of the arrangement, intended parents in China can lack legitimate parental rights to their children born via surrogacy."
...
"It Happens To U.S. Too. Surrogates change their minds in the United States as well. In the Robinson case, a gay couple in New Jersey asked the sister of one of the men to carry their children for them. Like the China case, this one also involves twin girls. The children were not related to the sister, but the result of an anonymous egg donor and the sperm from the spouse of her brother. After the girls were born, the relationship between the surrogate and the intended parents deteriorated..."

Acquiring the first thousand customers in a two-sided market

HBS Working Knowledge has a nice piece about a case study by Professor Thales Teixeira,

How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers

On Airbnb:
"founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia thought like customers themselves, trying to figure out where they would go if Airbnb didn’t exist. It didn’t take them long to figure out the answer: Craigslist. The entrepreneurs figured they could do a better job of making apartments appealing than the online classified site, but first they had to siphon away its customers. To do that, Chesky and Gebbia created software to hack Craigslist to extract the contact info of property owners, then sent them a pitch to list on Airbnb as well.

The strategy worked. With nothing to lose, property owners doubled their chances of finding a potential renter, and Airbnb had a ready supply of homes with which it could attract customers."