Bone marrow and blood stem cell update

Here's an article that recounts the recent events regarding payment to donors of blood stem cells.

Hope for to-marrow: the status of paid peripheral blood stem cell donation under the National Organ Transplant Act 
Kelly Todd
Journal of Law and the Biosciences, Volume 4, Issue 2, 1 August 2017, Pages 412–423

Abstract

The National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA), enacted in 1984, bans the exchange of bone marrow and a number of other human organs for valuable consideration. At the time NOTA was enacted, bone marrow could only be harvested by aspirating bone marrow tissue from a donor's bone cavities. However, recent medical and technological advances now allow doctors to use a much less invasive apheresis method, which collects the transplantable stem cells from a donor's peripheral blood stream. In 2009, the Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that such donations do not fall into the category of “bone marrow” under NOTA, and can therefore be compensated. Not long after the court's final ruling, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) proposed a rule to explicitly bring hematopoietic stem cells back under the purview of NOTA. The transplant community, seeing compensated donation as a solution to the shortage of altruistic bone marrow donors, fiercely opposed the rule. After years of limbo, HHS officially withdrew the proposed rule in August, 2017, which will allow groups to financially incentivize potential peripheral blood stem cell (PBSC) donors. This commentary addresses the moral and ethical issues implicated by paid PBSC donation, the role that regulation could play, and the potential impacts of paid PBSC donation on the transplant community, Ultimately, this article concludes that providing financial incentives to PBSC donors will likely have an overall positive impact on the transplant community by encouraging more donors to join the registry, and motivating donors to follow through with their donations once matched.

Fake peer reviews appear to be a problem in some fields

Scientific publishing is full of challenges, but fake peer reviews are an issue which as far as I am aware is not a significant problem in Economics, although it appears to be in some other fields.

E.g. here's a post from Retraction Watch:
Major publisher retracting more than 100 studies from cancer journal over fake peer reviews
"Springer is retracting 107 papers from one journal after discovering they had been accepted with fake peer reviews. Yes, 107.

"To submit a fake review, someone (often the author of a paper) either makes up an outside expert to review the paper, or suggests a real researcher — and in both cases, provides a fake email address that comes back to someone who will invariably give the paper a glowing review. In this case, Springer, the publisher of Tumor Biology through 2016, told us that an investigation produced “clear evidence” the reviews were submitted under the names of real researchers with faked emails. Some of the authors may have used a third-party editing service, which may have supplied the reviews. "

And this:
Can you spot a fake? New tool aims to help journals identify fake reviews
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Here's a related NY Times article:
Fraud Scandals Sap China’s Dream of Becoming a Science Superpower

"Having conquered world markets and challenged American political and military leadership, China has set its sights on becoming a global powerhouse in a different field: scientific research. It now has more laboratory scientists than any other country, outspends the entire European Union on research and development, and produces more scientific articles than any other nation except the United States.

"But in its rush to dominance, China has stood out in another, less boastful way. Since 2012, the country has retracted more scientific papers because of faked peer reviews than all other countries and territories put together, according to Retraction Watch, a blog that tracks and seeks to publicize retractions of research papers.
...
"In April, a scientific journal retracted 107 biology research papers, the vast majority of them written by Chinese authors, after evidence emerged that they had faked glowing reviews of their articles. Then, this summer, a Chinese gene scientist who had won celebrity status for breakthroughs once trumpeted as Nobel Prize-worthy was forced to retract his research when other scientists failed to replicate his results.

"At the same time, a government investigation highlighted the existence of a thriving online black market that sells everything from positive peer reviews to entire research articles."

Bleeding (and more) for Canada

Peter Jaworski in USA today discusses Canadian repugnance for paying for blood or sperm.

If it weren’t for America's free-market ways, more Canadians would have trouble getting pregnant.

"Canada used to have a sufficient supply of domestic sperm donors. But in 2004, we passed the Assisted Human Reproduction Act, which made it illegal to compensate donors for their sperm. Shortly thereafter, the number of willing donors plummeted, and sperm donor clinics were shuttered. Now, there is basically just one sperm donor clinic in Canada, and 30-70 Canadian men who donate sperm. Since demand far outstrips supply, we turn to you. We import sperm from for-profit companies in the U.S., where compensating sperm donors is both legal and normal.
...
"Canada has never had enough domestic blood plasma for plasma-protein products, such as immune globulin. Our demand for those products, however, is increasing. Last year, we collected only enough blood plasma from unremunerated donors to manufacture 17% of the immune globulin demanded. The rest we imported from you, in exchange for $623 million, or $512 million U.S.

Reliance on your blood plasma looked like it might change a little bit when, in 2012, a company called Canadian Plasma Resources announced plans to open clinics in Ontario dedicated to collecting blood plasma. The trouble is that its business model included compensating donors. Almost immediately, groups such as the Canadian Union of Public Employees and the Canadian Health Coalition began to lobby the Ontario government to pass a law to stop CPR from opening clinics. Ontario obliged in 2014, passing the Safeguarding Health Care Integrity Act, which among other things made compensation illegal.

When CPR shifted attention to Alberta, so did the groups opposing them. Just this year, the Alberta government introduced the Voluntary Blood Donation Act, which would prohibit compensation.

British Columbia’s government is just now looking at options to ban it as well.

What persuaded these governments? The anti-compensation groups argued that blood plasma from compensated donors was less safe, that people should donate blood plasma for free rather than for money, and that there is something wrong with having a for-profit business model in health care.

The latter two concerns are strangely specific. They don’t seem to apply to you Americans. If they did, the groups would have lobbied to make importation of anything other than products made from unremunerated donors also illegal. But they didn’t.

Instead, they object to a Canadian for-profit company compensating Canadian blood plasma donors in Canada, but American for-profit companies compensating American donors in America does not appear to register on their moral radar. Like the importation of sperm from for-profit U.S. companies that compensate donors, it has all the appearance of moral NIMBYism. It’s fine if it happens in your backyard, and we’ll happily buy the products, but we object to it happening in our backyard."

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And here, in Canada's National Post:

Peter Jaworski: Canada needs blood plasma. We should pay donors to get it

Canada buys the vast majority of its plasma-protein products from American companies that attract plasma donors by paying them. Yet we ban the same practice here

More debate about legalizing kidney sales

There's nothing new in this debate, but here is more on compensating kidney donors.  As far as I can see, the weakest argument against compensating donors is that the illegal black markets for kidneys work badly...

From Gizmodo:
Should You Be Allowed to Sell Your Kidney?

Gabe Danovitch, a distinguished transplant nephrologist and an active opponent of compensation for donors, is quoted saying this about markets:
"Any attempt at so-called regulating… a market, by definition, is not regulated. Markets don’t like regulations. Let’s say we were to allow a regulated market, and a donor would get $30,000. I’m just throwing this out. Why wouldn’t Singapore say you can get 50? In Doha you can get 80? And why wouldn’t the donors go around the world to get the best price? If we were to do that in the United States, it would be a disaster."

This argument strikes me as strange: is the problem with compensating donors  that it might open up competition for American transplant centers??

Danovitch also makes an argument that, as a nephrologist who evaluates potential donors, he couldn't trust them as much if they were getting paid.
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On a related matter, this from the LA Times
'Kidney for sale': Iran has a legal market for the organs, but the system doesn't always work

More on organ vouchers, in the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy

Following up on an earlier  post, there is a special issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy focusing on organ "vouchers" for donors who give a kidney today in exchange for the opportunity to specify a recipient (at the end of a chain) in the future.  Below are the articles, starting with the introductory one:

Organ Vouchers and Barter Markets: Saving Lives, Reducing Suffering, and Trading in Human Organs

Mark J Cherry

The Journal of Medicine and Philosophy: A Forum for Bioethics and Philosophy of Medicine, Volume 42, Issue 5, 1 October 2017, Pages 503–517, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmp/jhx019

Published:

13 September 2017

Abstract

The essays in this issue of The Journal of Medicine and Philosophyexplore an innovative voucher program for encouraging kidney donation. Discussions cluster around a number of central moral and political/theoretical themes: (1) What are the direct and indirect health care costs and benefits of such a voucher system in human organs? (2) Do vouchers lead to more effective and efficient organ procurement and allocation or contribute to greater inequalities and inefficiencies in the transplantation system? (3) Do vouchers contribute to the inappropriate commodification of human body parts? (4) Is there a significant moral difference between such a voucher system and a market in human organs for transplantation? This paper argues that while kidney vouchers constitute a step in the right direction, fuller utilization of market-based incentives, including, but not limited to, barter exchanges (e.g., organ exchanges, organ chains, and organ vouchers), would save more lives and further reduce human suffering.

And here are the other articles:

Ethical and Logistical Issues Raised by the Advanced Donation Program “Pay It Forward” Scheme

Lainie Friedman Ross James R Rodrigue Robert M Veatch 
Abstract
The advanced donation program was proposed in 2014 to allow an individual to donate a kidney in order to provide a voucher for a kidney in the future for a particular loved one. In this article, we explore the logistical and ethical issues that such a program raises. We argue that such a program is ethical in principle but there are many logistical issues that need to be addressed to ensure that the actual program is fair to both those who do and do not participate in this program.

Kidney Vouchers and Inequity in Transplantation

Samuel J Kerstein
Abstract

This article probes the voucher program from an ethical perspective. It focuses mainly on an issue of inequity. A disparity exists in US kidney transplantation. Although African-Americans suffer far higher rates of ESRD than whites, African-Americans are much less likely than whites to get a transplant (Ilori et al., 2015, 1). The article explores the voucher program in light of this disparity. It motivates the view that, at least in the short term, more whites than African-Americans are likely to take advantage of the voucher program. The program is, thus, likely to increase the gap in transplantation rates between the two groups. If this is correct, what impact does it have on the moral acceptability of the program?

The Body as Gift, Commodity, or Something in Between: Ethical Implications of Advanced Kidney Donation  

Julian J Koplin

Abstract
An innovative program recently initiated at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Medical Center allows people to donate a kidney in exchange for a voucher that a loved one can redeem for a kidney if and when needed. As a relatively new practice, the ethical implications of advanced kidney donation have not yet been widely discussed. This paper reflects on some of the bioethical issues at stake in this new donation program, as well as some broader philosophical issues related to the meaning and moral salience of commodification. I first consider whether the literature on commercial markets in organs––a longstanding topic of bioethical debate––can meaningfully inform ethical analysis of kidney voucher programs. Specifically, I consider whether and to what extent common objections to the exchange of kidneys for cash also apply to the exchange of kidneys for “kidney vouchers.” Second, I argue that the contrast between the ethical issues raised by these two practices highlights the need to understand commodification as existing on a continuum, with different degrees of commodification giving rise to different ethical issues. Doing so can help sharpen our understanding of commodification as a moral concept, as well as its relevance to broader debates about the moral limits of markets.

Banking on Living Kidney Donors—A New Way to Facilitate Donation without Compromising on Ethical Values

Dominique E Martin  Gabriel M Danovitch

Abstract

Public surveys conducted in many countries report widespread willingness of individuals to donate a kidney while alive to a family member or close friend, yet thousands suffer and many die each year while waiting for a kidney transplant. Advocates of financial incentive programs or “regulated markets” in kidneys present the problem of the kidney shortage as one of insufficient public motivation to donate, arguing that incentives will increase the number of donors. Others believe the solutions lie—at least in part—in facilitating so-called “altruistic donation;” harnessing the willingness of relatives and friends to donate by addressing the many barriers which serve as disincentives to living donation. Strategies designed to minimize financial barriers to donation and the use of paired kidney exchange programs are increasingly enabling donation, and now, an innovative program designed to address what has been termed “chronologically incompatible donation” is being piloted at the University of California, Los Angeles, and elsewhere in the United States. In this program, a person whose kidney is not currently required for transplantation in a specific recipient may instead donate to the paired exchange program; in return, a commitment is made to the specified recipient that priority access for a living-donor transplant in a paired exchange program will be offered when or if the need arises in the future. We address here potential ethical concerns related to this form of organ “banking” from living donors, and argue that it offers significant benefits without undermining the well-established ethical principles and values currently underpinning living donation programs.

Matching and more: Continuing Education at the AEA meetings in Philadelphia

2018 Continuing Education, January 7-9, 2018, Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown

The AEA's 2018 Continuing Education Program will be held at the Sheraton Philadelphia Downtown on January 7-9, 2018, immediately following the close of ASSA. Participants can choose from three concurrent programs. Registration now open. (Alternatively, download PDF Registration form.)

Matching Market Design

Atila Abdulkadiroglu (Duke University)

Atila Abdulkadiroglu joined the Department of Economics at Duke University in the Fall of 2006. He taught at Northwestern University and Columbia University before coming to Duke. He received his PhD in Economics at the University of Rochester. His research has led to the design and implementation of better admissions policies in school choice programs in the US, He has consulted several school districts in redesigning student assignment systems, including Boston (MA), Chicago (Il), Denver (CO), New Orleans (LA), New York City (NY). His current research also focuses on economics of education. He is a recipient of an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship and a National Science Foundation CAREER award. Abdulkadiroglu serves as an Editor-in-Chief of Review of Economic Design. He serves on the board of The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice.

Nikhil Agarwal (MIT)

Nikhil Agarwal is the Castle Krob Career Development Assistant Professor of Economics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he has been teaching since 2014. He completed his PhD in Economics at Harvard University in 2013, and was a Postdoctoral Associate at the Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics at Yale University. Agarwal specializes in the empirical study of matching markets. He has developed tools that have been applied to labor markets, education markets and organ allocation systems.

Parag Pathak (MIT)

Parag A. Pathak is the Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics at MIT, found­ing co-director of the NBER Working Group on Market Design, and founder of MIT's School Effectiveness and Inequality Initiative (SEII), a laboratory focused on education, human capital, and the income distribution.  Pathak has helped to design the Boston, Chicago, Denver, Newark, New Orleans, New York, and Washington DC school choice systems.   His work on mar­ket design and edu­ca­tion was garnered numerous recognitions including a Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers and the 2016 Social Choice and Welfare prize.  He has also authored leading studies on charter schools, high school reform, selective education, and school vouchers.  Pathak is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and has served on the editorial boards of Econometrica, American Economic Review, and the Journal of Political Economy.

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Machine Learning and Econometrics

Susan Athey (Stanford University)

Susan Athey is the Economics of Technology Professor at Stanford Graduate School of Business.  She received her bachelor’s degree from Duke University and her PhD from Stanford, and she holds an honorary doctorate from Duke University. She previously taught at the economics departments at MIT, Stanford and Harvard. Her current research focuses on the economics of digitization, marketplace design, and the intersection of econometrics and machine learning.  She has worked on several application areas, including timber auctions, internet search, online advertising, the news media, and virtual currency. As one of the first “tech economists,” she served as consulting chief economist for Microsoft Corporation for six years, and now serves on the boards of Expedia, Rover, and Ripple.  She also serves as a long-term advisor to the British Columbia Ministry of Forests, helping architect and implement their auction-based pricing system.

Guido Imbens (Stanford University)

Guido Imbens is Professor of Economics at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. After graduating from Brown University Guido taught at Harvard University, UCLA, and UC Berkeley. He joined the GSB in 2012. Imbens specializes in econometrics, and in particular methods for drawing causal inferences. Guido Imbens is a fellow of the Econometric Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Guido Imbens has taught in the continuing education program previously in 2009 and 2012.

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DSGE Models and the Role of Finance

Lawrence Christiano (Northwestern University)

Larry Christiano's research has been focused primarily on the problem of determining how the government's monetary and fiscal instruments ought to respond to shocks over the business cycle. This research has two parts: one involves formulating and estimating an empirically plausible model of the macroeconomy, and the second involves developing economic concepts and computational methods for determining optimal policy in an equilibrium model. He is a Fellow of the Econometric Society, and a research associate of the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Thomas Philippon (New York University)

Thomas Philippon is Professor of Finance at New York University - Stern School of Business. Philippon was named one of the “top 25 economists under 45” by the IMF in 2014, he won the 2013 Bernácer Prize for Best European Economist under 40, the 2010 Michael Brennan & BlackRock Award, the 2009 Prize for Best Young French Economist, and the 2008 Brattle Prize for the best paper in Corporate Finance. He was elected Global Economic Fellow in 2009 by the Kiel Institute for the World Economy. He has studied various topics in finance and macroeconomics: financial distress, systemic risk, government interventions during financial crises, asset markets and corporate investment. Recently his work has focused on the evolution of the financial system and on the Eurozone crisis. He currently serves on the Monetary Policy Advisory Panel of the NY Federal Reserve Bank, and as a board member and director of the scientific committee of the French prudential regulator (ACPR). He was the senior economic advisor to the French finance minister in 2012-2013. Philippon graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, received a PhD in Economics from MIT, and joined New York University in 2003.

Information, school quality and school choice

Here's a recent article by Gail Cornwall in The Atlantic, summarizing some of the work on school choice which points out that it is easier for parents to judge the test scores of graduates than the value-added by the school.

Why Parents Make Flawed Choices About Their Kids' Schooling
A new study shows that families act on insufficient information when it comes to figuring out where to enroll their children.

It covers (among other things) work by Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak and various colleagues, including the recent NBER working paper

Do Parents Value School Effectiveness?

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag A. Pathak, Jonathan Schellenberg, Christopher R. Walters

NBER Working Paper No. 23912
Issued in October 2017
NBER Program(s):   ED   LS 

School choice may lead to improvements in school productivity if parents' choices reward effective schools and punish ineffective ones. This mechanism requires parents to choose schools based on causal effectiveness rather than peer characteristics. We study relationships among parent preferences, peer quality, and causal effects on outcomes for applicants to New York City's centralized high school assignment mechanism. We use applicants' rank-ordered choice lists to measure preferences and to construct selection-corrected estimates of treatment effects on test scores and high school graduation. We also estimate impacts on college attendance and college quality. Parents prefer schools that enroll high-achieving peers, and these schools generate larger improvements in short- and long-run student outcomes. We find no relationship between preferences and school effectiveness after controlling for peer quality.

The AEA and the job market

Should the American Economic Association make further interventions to facilitate the job market for new economists?  Should it issue a code of conduct to guide behavior in various realms in which economists interact?  Both of those are under consideration, as announced today on the society's website.

Here's the text of the email announcement to members:

Statement of the AEA Executive Committee

October 20, 2017 To: Members of the American Economic Association From: Peter L. Rousseau, Secretary-Treasurer Subject: Statement of the AEA Executive Committee Many members of the economics community have expressed concern about offensive behavior within our profession that demeans individuals or groups of individuals. The American Economic Association strongly condemns misogyny, racism, homophobia, antisemitism and other behaviors that harm our profession. AEA President Alvin E. Roth has charged an ad hoc committee on professional conduct to formulate a set of guidelines for economists to be considered by the Executive Committee. The ad hoc committee is charged with evaluating various aspects of professional conduct, including those which stifle diversity in Economics. It will submit a report in time for discussion in January. There will be a period for comment by the AEA membership on that report following its release. The Association is also exploring the possibility of creating a website/message board designed to provide additional information and transparency to the job market for new Ph.D.s, and will be surveying departments to assess what information about their search processes might be shared.

Repugnance watch: Appeals court in SF allows challenge to state law banning prostitution

The SF Chronicle has the story: Appeals court in SF allows challenge to state law banning prostitution

"Advocates of legalized prostitution took their challenge to California’s 145-year-old ban on commercial sex before a federal appeals court Thursday and appeared to get a hint that they’ll have another chance to show why the law should be cast aside.


The case was brought by three former prostitutes, a would-be client and the Erotic Service Providers Legal, Educational and Research Project. They contend the law violates the right to engage in consensual sex, as defined by the U.S. Supreme Court in a 2003 ruling overturning criminal laws against gay sexual activity.

U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White of Oakland rejected their argument last year, saying the high court ruling protected only intimate personal relationships, not commercial sex. He said the state had adequately justified the current law as a deterrent to violence against women, sexually transmitted diseases and human trafficking.

But at Thursday’s hearing, members of a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco suggested that the law might need closer scrutiny, given today’s less restrictive standards, as recognized by the high court, on sex between consenting adults.

“Why should it be illegal to sell something that it’s legal to give away?” asked Carlos Bea, one of the court’s most conservative judges.

Another conservative, Judge Consuelo Callahan, pointed out that prostitution, like gay sex, had historically been “subject to moral disapproval.” Just as in 2003, the current case, she said, “deals with individuals’ rights,” so why wouldn’t a ruling for the right to engage in prostitution be “a natural extension of Supreme Court precedent?”


Deputy Attorney General Sharon O’Grady, the state’s lawyer, responded that the difference is in “the commercial aspect ... the commodification of sex.”

“The state is not telling anyone who they can sleep with,” O’Grady said. It is prohibiting only a harmful category of business transactions, not intimate or enduring relationships, she said.

But Bea said the 2003 Supreme Court ruling might require the court to send the case back to White for another review, and perhaps even a full-scale trial, in which the state would have to show a compelling need for the law.

California made prostitution a crime in 1872, defining “every common prostitute” as a “vagrant” subject to a $500 fine and six months in jail. The law was updated in 1961 to reclassify prostitution or soliciting prostitution as disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor punishable by a $1,000 fine and six months in jail.

The Ninth Circuit left the state law intact in a 1988 ruling that said the relationship between a paid escort and a client “possesses few, if any, of the aspects of an intimate association.” H. Louis Sirkin, the plaintiffs’ lawyer in the current case, argued that the ruling is no longer binding.

The Supreme Court’s 2003 decision established “the right of individuals to make their own individual choices as to how they want to behave” in consensual sexual relationships, Sirkin told the court. “If people put a dollar amount on it, that should not alter the intimate relationship.”

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting tomorrow and Saturday

The market design meeting starting tomorrow in Boston includes two "New Directions" sessions, one on Transportation and Market Design and one on Development Economics and Market Design.

Here's the program: Market Design Working Group Meeting

Michael Ostrovsky and Parag A. Pathak, Organizers

October 20-21, 2017

NBER
Feldstein Conference Room, 2nd Floor
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA

Friday, October 20
9:00 am	Haluk Ergin, University of California at Berkeley Tayfun Sönmez, Boston College Utku Unver, Boston College Efficient and Incentive Compatible Liver Exchange
9:45 am	Nikhil Agarwal, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Itai Ashlagi, Stanford University Michael A. Rees, University of Toledo Medical Center Paulo J. Somaini, Stanford University and NBER Daniel C. Waldinger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology An Empirical Framework for Sequential Assignments: The Allocation of Deceased Donor Kidneys
10:30 am	Break
11:00 am	Eric Budish, University of Chicago and NBER Robin S. Lee, Harvard University and NBER Will the Market Fix the Market? A Theory of Stock Market Competition and Innovation
11:45 am	Albert "Pete" Kyle, University of Maryland Jeongmin Lee, Washington University in St. Louis Toward a Fully Continuous Exchange
12:30 pm	Lunch
2:00 pm	Paul Milgrom, Stanford University Ilya Segal, Stanford University Deferred-Acceptance Clock Auctions and Radio Spectrum Reallocation
2:45 pm	Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland Christina Aperjis, Power Auctions LLC Oleg V. Baranov, University of Colorado Boulder Market Design and the FCC Incentive Auction
3:30 pm	Ulrich Doraszelski, University of Pennsylvania and NBER Katja Seim, University of Pennsylvania and NBER Michael Sinkinson, Yale University and NBER Peichun Wang, University of Pennsylvania Ownership Concentration and Strategic Supply Reduction
4:15 pm	Break
	New Directions: Transportation and Market Design
4:30 pm	Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University and NBER Michael Schwarz, Google Research To Be Announced
5:00 pm	Peter Cramton, University of Maryland Richard Geddes, Cornell University Axel Ockenfels, University of Cologne Markets for Road Use: Eliminating Congestion through Scheduling, Routing, and Real-Time Road Pricing
5:30 pm	Juan Camilo Castillo, Stanford University Dan Knoepfle, Uber Technologies Glen Weyl, Microsoft Research Surge Pricing Solves the Wild Goose Chase (slides)
6:00 pm	Adjourn
Saturday, October 21
8:15 am	Coach Bus leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 am	Continental Breakfast
9:00 am	Parag A. Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Peng Shi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology How Well Do Structural Demand Models Work? Counterfactual Predictions in School Choice
9:45 am	Georgy Artemov, University of Melbourne Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University Yinghua He, Rice University Strategic `Mistakes': Implications for Market Design Research
10:30 am	Break
11:00 am	Jacob D. Leshno, Columbia University Irene Y. Lo, Columbia University The Cutoff Structure of Top Trading Cycles in School Choice
11:45 am	Esen Onur, CFTC David Reiffen, CFTC Lynn Riggs, CFTC Haoxiang Zhu, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Mechanism Selection and Trade Formation on Swap Execution Facilities: Evidence from Index CDS
12:30 pm	Lunch
2:00 pm	Constantinos Daskalakis, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Christos H. Papadimitriou, University of California at Berkeley Christos Tzamos, Microsoft Research Does Information Revelation Improve Revenue?
2:45 pm	Dirk Bergemann, Yale University Tibor Heumann, HEC - Montreal Stephen Morris, Princeton University Information and Market Power
3:30 pm	Break
	New Directions: Development Economics and Market Design
4:00 pm	Jean-François Houde, Cornell University and NBER Terence R. Johnson, University of Notre Dame Molly Lipscomb, University of Virginia Laura A. Schechter, University of Wisconsin, Madison Using Market Mechanisms to Increase the Take-up of Improved Sanitation in Senegal
4:30 pm	Reshmaan N. Hussam, Yale University Natalia Rigol, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Benjamin N. Roth, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field
5:00 pm	Yusuke Narita, Yale University Experimental Design as Market Design: Billions of Dollars Worth of Treatment Assignments
5:30 pm	Adjourn