Economics in the Age of Algorithms, Experiments, and A.I., in Seattle

The NABE Tech Economics Conference, Career Fair and Expo will be on the theme   Economics in the Age of Algorithms, Experiments, and A.I.,  tomorrow and Thursday, November 15-16 in Seattle.

I'll speak at lunch tomorrow, on

Marketplaces and Market Design - Matching Markets and Kidney Exchange

Here's the program.

How often should a kidney exchange network run matches? (Often, it turns out...)

Forthcoming in the American Journal of Transplantation:

The effect of match-run frequencies on the number of transplants and waiting times in kidney exchange

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• Accepted manuscript online: 31 October 2017Full publication history
• DOI: 10.1111/ajt.14566  View/save citation
• Cited by (CrossRef): 0 articlesCheck for updates
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• This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/ajt.14566

Abstract

Numerous kidney exchange (kidney paired donor (KPD)) registries in the U.S have gradually shifted to high frequency match-runs, raising the question of whether this harms the number of transplants. We conduct simulations using clinical data from two KPD registries—the Alliance for Paired Donation, which runs multi-hospital exchanges, and Methodist San Antonio, which runs single center exchanges–to study how the frequency of match-runs impacts the number of transplants and the average waiting times. We simulate the options facing each of the two registries by repeated resampling from their historical pools of patient-donor pairs and non-directed donors, with arrival and departure rates corresponding to the historical data. We find that longer intervals between match-runs do not increase the total number of transplants, and that prioritizing highly sensitized patients is more effective than waiting longer between match-runs for transplanting highly sensitized patients. While we do not find that frequent match-runs result in fewer transplanted pairs we do find that increasing arrival rates of new pairs improves both the fraction of transplanted pairs and waiting times.
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Update, Dec. 5: the paper is now in it's final form, early online, and you should be able to see the whole thing here.

Corruption as an equilibrium

WHY I AM CORRUPT | In Defense of Nigerians by Ayo Sogunro

"I am corrupt because the alternative is dangerous. In the final analysis, the price of honesty outweighs the consequences of corruption. Because there is no safety net for the honest person. Because a N100 note privately donated to the policeman is less cumbersome and less problematic than an honest trip to a Nigerian police station. I am corrupt because corruption is a logical process, because integrity is unreasonable. I am corrupt because corruption is ordinary: a mundane fact of life. I am corrupt because corruption works."

Alabama adopts a paid leave program for organ donations

Here's the story:
Alabama adopts a paid leave program for organ donations

"Under a new state provision, a permanent employee with at least one year of state service may be granted living donor leave, with pay, for donating an organ or bone marrow.
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"Based on physician orders, the employer may receive up to 30 days to donate an organ and up to seven days to donate bone marrow. The employee does not have to exhaust his or her leave accruals for the procedures."

Buying body parts is easy, as long as you don't use them for transplants

Cashing in on the donated dead: The Body Trade
A REUTERS SERIES

Part 1: When Americans leave their bodies to science, they are also donating to commerce: Cadavers and body parts, especially those of the poor, are sold in a thriving and largely unregulated market. Grisly abuses abound.
By BRIAN GROW and JOHN SHIFFMAN
"Body brokers are also known as non-transplant tissue banks. They are distinct from the organ and tissue transplant industry, which the U.S. government closely regulates. Selling hearts, kidneys and tendons for transplant is illegal. But no federal law governs the sale of cadavers or body parts for use in research or education. Few state laws provide any oversight whatsoever, and almost anyone, regardless of expertise, can dissect and sell human body parts.
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"Because only four states closely track donations and sales, the breadth of the market for body parts remains unknown. But data obtained under public record laws from those states – New York, Virginia, Oklahoma and Florida – provide a snapshot. Reuters calculated that from 2011 through 2015, private brokers received at least 50,000 bodies and distributed more than 182,000 body parts."


Part 2: After a few emails, a body broker sold reporter Brian Grow two heads and a cervical spine. The spine came from a young man whose parents were too poor to bury him – and they say they never knew his body would be sold.
By BRIAN GROW and JOHN SHIFFMAN


"Whether Restore Life vetted the buyer is unclear. But if workers there had verified their customer’s identity, they would have learned he was a reporter from Reuters. The news agency was seeking to determine how easy it might be to buy human body parts and whether those parts would be useful for medical research. In addition to the spine, Reuters later purchased two human heads from Restore Life, each priced at $300.

"The transactions demonstrate the startling ease with which human body parts may be bought and sold in the United States. Neither the sales nor the shipments violated any laws, say lawyers, professors and government officials who follow the issue closely. Although it’s illegal to sell organs used for transplants, it’s perfectly legal in most states to sell body parts that were donated for research or education. Buying wine over the Internet is arguably more tightly controlled, generally requiring at minimum proof of age.


Part 3: Science Care reaps $27 million in annual revenue by recruiting body donors through hospices, funeral homes and online ads.

"The typical pitch to the dying and their families is two-pronged. The first is altruism: The gift of a body will benefit medical science and, by extension, others in need.

"The second is financial: Body donation saves a family money. The average funeral, including coffin, memorial service and burial, costs about $7,000, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. Simple cremation, an increasingly popular option, costs $400 to $1,000 or more.

"Body brokers like Science Care offer the cheapest option: free cremation in exchange for the body. The deal: Science Care pays for the cremation of a donor’s unused remains and for returning the ashes to the bereaved family, usually after a few weeks."


Part 4: Arthur Rathburn is accused of dismembering donated bodies with a chainsaw and renting HIV-infected parts to medical professionals. Prosecutors hailed his arrest as a crackdown. But for years, Reuters found, authorities let him do business despite signs of his bizarre practices.
By JOHN SHIFFMAN and BRIAN GROW

Legal prostitution and crime in the Netherlands

Here's a new paper on the relationship of legal prostitution and crime.

Street Prostitution Zones and Crime 
Paul Bisschop, Stephen Kastoryano, and Bas van der Klaauw,
American Economic Journal: Economic Policy 2017, 9(4): 28–63

Abstract: "This paper studies the effects of legal street prostitution zones on registered and perceived crime. We exploit a unique setting in the Netherlands where these tippelzones were opened in nine cities under different regulation systems. Our difference-in-difference analysis of 25 Dutch cities between 1994-2011 shows that opening a tippelzone decreases registered sexual abuse and rape by about 30-40 percent in the first two years. For cities which enforced licensing in tippelzones, we also find reductions in drug-related crime and long-term effects on sexual assaults. Effects on perceived drug nuisance depend on the regulation system and the proximity of respondents to the tippelzone."
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See my earlier post, about a paper drawing similar conclusions from a different kind of natural experiment.

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The accidental experiment with legal prostitution in Rhode Island

Kidney exchange authorized in Argentina

A judicially-authorized kidney exchange already took place in Argentina (involving a well known journalist, Jorge Lanata), but now, Julio Elias points out to me,  a regular program of kidney exchange has been authorized:

Donación de órganos
Aprueban la donación renal cruzada, que posibilitó el inédito trasplante de Lanata
El Incucai autorizó el programa que busca reducir los tiempos de espera para quienes necesitan un trasplante de riñón.
[They approve the crossed renal donation, that made possible the unpublished transplant of Lanata
The Incucai authorized the program that seeks to reduce the waiting times for those who need a kidney transplant.]

The formal description of the program's rules is here (in pdf in Spanish):
PROGRAMA DE DONACION RENAL CRUZADA
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See my earlier post:

Tuesday, November 22, 2016

Kidney exchange talk at INCUCAI in Buenos Aires

On my visit to Argentina last week I gave a talk Wednesday on kidney exchange at the Argentine transplant coordination authority INCUCAI, which was followed by a lively and largely positive discussion of how (and whether) to try to bring kidney exchange to Argentina...

School choice in Indianapolis, and elsewhere

The Indy Star has the story on the imminent rollout of centralized school choice in Indianapolis:
Major changes await those wanting to enroll at IPS and charters, but no wait lists

"Wait lists for a spot in Indianapolis' most-desired schools are about to be a thing of the past.

Nearly all of the city's charter schools and all Indianapolis Public Schools programs will have a common application through the a new unified enrollment system called Enroll Indy. Starting next month, families can apply for a spot in up to 10 schools for the 2018-19 school year with just one application. "
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Earlier posts on school choice in Indianapolis here. Indianapolis has a full school choice system that elicits a rank order preference list of schools from each family and assigns each student to the single most preferred available.  This is the kind of school choice system that has been promoted by  IIPSC.

This is not to be confused with school systems that offer a common application, without centralized admissions. These remove the congestion involved in making multiple applications, but don't do anything about the congestion involved in some students receiving multiple offers which must be resolved before other students can be assigned to a school. (This raises a number of potential problems.)

For a school district that has just adopted a common application without a centralized school assignment, see e.g. Houston:
50 Houston Charter Schools Accept New Common Application, whose common app is here: Welcome to ApplyHouston!, organized by Schoolmint

The American market for machine guns

Here's an extensive excerpt from a long article on thefirearmblog.com on the (complicated) legal status of machine gun sales in the U.S. (Machine guns have some similarities to artifacts made of elephant ivory: it is legal to own old ones but not new ones...)

Machine Guns Are Legal: A Practical Guide to Full Auto

"For the sake of this article, the word “machine gun” will meet the ATF’s definition: Any weapon which shoots, is designed to shoot, or can be readily restored to shoot, automatically more than one shot without manual reloading, by a single function of the trigger.

The machine gun was invented by American Hiram Maxim, and interestingly enough, the USA is one of the few countries on the planet where regular folks can in fact own a fully automatic firearm. In fact, machine guns have never been illegal in the USA on a federal level. They are heavily regulated, but not illegal at all.

The timeline of machine gun legislation is as follows:

Prior to 1934, machine guns were not regulated any differently than any other firearm. You could quite literally order a machine gun from a mail order catalog… and people did. Thompsons for example initially did not interest the military too terribly much, but the gunsfound a niche with individuals seeking personal protection, police agencies, and unfortunately, gangsters.  ...

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"Prompted by prohibition era gangsters and the rise of organized crime (law enforcement was seriously outgunned by the likes of bad guy like Dillinger), the United States drafted the National Firearms Act which passed in 1934. The National Firearms Act did not ban machine guns, but it made them impossible to afford for most people. To buy a machine gun under the 1934 NFA, an individual needs to submit the following (the procedure remains unchanged even today):

• Pay a tax of $200, which in 1934 was worth over $3,500
• Fill out a lengthy application to register your gun with the federal government
• Submit photographs
• Submit passport photos
• Get your chief law enforcement official to sign your application
• Wait for the results of your background check to come back

A violation of the national firearms act results in a felony punishable by up to 10 years in federal prison, a $100,000 fine, and forfeiture of the individual’s right to own or possess firearms in the future.

The next big piece of legislation pertinent to machine guns occurred in 1968 with the GunControl Act. The Gun Control Act established that imported firearms that had “no sporting purpose” were not able to be sold to civilians. Machine guns as a whole were determined to have no sporting purpose, and thus any MG imported after ’68 are able to be owned only by dealers, military, and police agencies. One bit of good this act did was allowed for a registration amnesty. It became apparent that there were so many unregistered machine gunsin the US that had been brought back by veterans, that they should be able to register them tax free. Luckily many of them did, but the amnesty ended after just one month (the feds owe us another few months, this humble author believes).

The last piece of machine gun legislation is to many the coup de grace. In 1986 the FirearmOwners Protection Act was intended to prevent the federal government from creating a registry of gun owners. At the last minute, William Hughes added an amendment that called for the banning of machine guns. Charlie Rangel said that the “amendment in the nature of a substitute, as amended, was agreed to.” However, after the voice vote on the Hughes Amendment, Rangel ignored a plea to take a recorded vote and moved on to Recorded Vote 74 where the Hughes Amendment failed. The bill passed on a motion to recommit. Despite the controversial amendment, the Senate adopted H.R. 4332 as an amendment to the final bill. The bill was subsequently passed and signed on May 19, 1986 by President Ronald Reagan. Thus, Reagan’s signature banned the registration of new machine guns in the USA.

So what does this mean? This is where it gets complicated:

• Machine guns are not illegal, but it is illegal to make and register new ones on a form 1 (as you would do for an SBR)
• There is no way around the May 19th, 1986 date. if the machine gun in question was made after that date, you may not own it (unless you are a dealer)

Also, there are three types of machine guns that determine the gun’s legal status:

• Transferable: Guns registered prior to May 19th, 1986 that are able to be owned by everyone. There are only 182,619 transferable machine guns according to the ATF.
• Pre-Samples: Machine guns imported after 1968 but before May 19th, 1986. The 1968 GCA established that machine guns with no sporting purposes could not be sold to civilians. Dealers can however buy them and keep them after they give up their licenses. As a general rule, pre-samples cost about half that of a transferable.
• Post-Samples: Machine guns made after the May 19th, 1986 cutoff date. These are only for dealers, manufacturers, military, and police. A manufacturer who pays $500 a year is permitted by the federal government to manufacture these. A dealer (who is not a manufacturer) may acquire these if a police agency provides a “demo letter”. A demo letter is simply a letter from a PD asking you to acquire a sample gun for them to test and evaluate for potential purchase. Unfortunately dealers must sell or destroy post samples when they give up their license.

The market for hunting exotic animals without traveling to exotic places

The NY Times has a story about the Ox Ranch, which describes itself as offering  "18,000 acres of the best Texas Hill Country Hunting."  Some of the prey on offer are not native, however, and the business model arouses repugnance in some quarters.

Blood and Beauty on a Texas Exotic-Game Ranch

"The price to kill a bongo at the Ox Ranch is $35,000.

"Himalayan tahrs, wild goats with a bushy lion-style mane, are far cheaper. The trophy fee, or kill fee, to shoot one is $7,500. An Arabian oryx is $9,500; a sitatunga antelope, $12,000; and a black wildebeest, $15,000.
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"The ranch’s hunting guides and managers walk a thin, controversial line between caring for thousands of rare, threatened and endangered animals and helping to execute them. Some see the ranch as a place for sport and conservation. Some see it as a place for slaughter and hypocrisy.
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"The ranch has about 30 bongo, the African antelopes with a trophy fee of $35,000. Last fall, a hunter shot one. “Taking one paid their feed bill for the entire year, for the rest of them,” said Jason Molitor, the chief executive of the Ox Ranch.

"To many animal-protection groups, such management of rare and endangered species — breeding some, preventing some from being hunted, while allowing the killing of others — is not only repulsive, but puts hunting ranches in a legal and ethical gray area.

“Depending on what facility it is, there’s concern when animals are raised solely for profit purposes,” said Anna Frostic, a senior attorney with the Humane Society of the United States.

"Hunting advocates disagree and say the breeding and hunting of exotic animals helps ensure species’ survival. Exotic-game ranches see themselves not as an enemy of wildlife conservation but as an ally, arguing that they contribute a percentage of their profits to conservation efforts.

“We love the animals, and that’s why we hunt them,” Mr. Molitor said. “Most hunters in general are more in line with conservation than the public believes that they are.”

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The ranch also offers other activities, including these related to guns, which in the U.S. are sometimes regarded simultaneously (by different parts of the population) as both repugnant and protected transactions.

Guns & Shooting

Tank Driving

Drive a WWII Sherman Tank, shoot it's guns, and run cars over!

Machine Gun Shooting

Shoot Machine Guns... MP5, SAW, M4, PKM, P90, and .50 BMG!

Skeet Shooting

Learn to shoot Skeet, Trap, 5 Stand, and Wobble Trap.

.50 cal Shooting

Shoot the biggest and scariest semi automatic gun in the world!