Another mail order catalog throws in the towel (Sic transit gloria mundi .)

 The mail order catalogs of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were as innovative in the late 1800's as Amazon is today, bringing retail shopping to customers who otherwise had relatively little access to the wide variety of goods available in major cities.  Those catalogs lasted more than a century before giving way to other business models.

Now, IKEA is discontinuing its catalog.  The WSJ has the story:

The IKEA Catalog Defined Home for Millions. Now It’s Gone.  Flat-pack giant says it will discontinue publication of the book as readership declines  By Saabira Chaudhuri

"IKEA’s decision to stop publishing its annual catalog marks the end of a tome that served as much as an aspirational lifestyle guide for millions as it did a marketing tool for the flat-pack furniture giant.

"After 70 years, the catalog had become a relic in the digital age, the company said, calling the decision “emotional but rational.” The 2020 edition, which was sent out earlier this year, will be the last. The catalog will also no longer be published online.

"Like an international version of the Sears catalog, which ceased publication in 1993, the IKEA book sold not only housewares, but a lifestyle."

Designing centralized marketplaces that work gracefully with pre-existing decentralized ones, in Management Science, by Benjamin Roth and Ran Shorrer

 In Management Science (online ahead of print):

Making Marketplaces Safe: Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design

 Benjamin N. Roth , Ran I. Shorrer 

Published Online:8 Dec 2020 https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3643

Abstract: Often market designers cannot force agents to join a marketplace rather than using pre-existing institutions. We propose a new desideratum for marketplace design that guarantees the safety of participation: dominant individual rationality (DIR). A marketplace is DIR if every pre-existing strategy is weakly dominated by some strategy within the marketplace. We study applications to the design of labor markets and the sharing economy. We also provide a general construction to achieve approximate DIR across a wide range of marketplace designs.

Introduction: "Many marketplaces operate in a broader economic environment, and often participants cannot be forced to use a marketplace rather than the pre-existing institutions it was meant to displace. For instance, although most hospitals and residents use the clearinghouse known as the National Residency Matching Program (NRMP) to coordinate job offers, there is no legal barrier that prevents members of either side of the market from finding matches outside of the clearinghouse.1 In school choice, charter schools sometimes opt not to participate in clearinghouses, instead recruiting students in a decentralized manner. In the private sector, marketplaces that comprise the gig and sharing economies demonstrate the primacy of attracting participants who have many outside alternatives. In each of these settings marketplaces are actively engaging with the challenge of recruitment. In other words, these are marketplaces in which participation is not always safe.

...

"A designer may introduce a mediator (alternatively referred to as a marketplace), to which players may delegate their decision rights (i.e., participate in the marketplace). The mediator comprises a message space and a mapping from messages to outcomes (strategy profiles for the delegators). Players who delegate their decision rights select a message to send to the mediator, who then acts on their behalf according to the outcome mapping, as a function of the whole set of messages it receives. The mediator is voluntary in the sense that players may choose one of their original (outside) actions instead of sending it a message. And the mediator is restricted to condition the actions of participants only on the messages of other participants and not on the outside actions of nonparticipants.

"This framework highlights the endogeneity of the individual rationality constraint with respect to both the set of players who sign away their decision rights and the actions they take. We show by example that mediators that satisfy attractive criteria such as incentive compatibility and efficiency assuming that everyone participates may no longer do so in equilibria with partial participation. This motivates the search for mediators that can guarantee the safety of participation. In Section 3 we present our key desideratum: dominant individual rationality (DIR)."

Milgrom's "Discovering Prices" reviewed in the JEL by Kominers and Teytelboym

 In the December Journal of Economic Literature:

The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's Discovering Prices

by Scott Duke Kominers and Alexander Teytelboym, JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC LITERATURE, VOL. 58, NO. 4, DECEMBER 2020, (pp. 1180-96)

Abstract: Designing marketplaces in complex settings requires both novel economic theory and real-world engineering, often drawing upon ideas from fields such as computer science and operations research. In Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints, Milgrom (2017) explains the theory and design of the United States' "incentive auction" that reallocated wireless spectrum licenses from television broadcasters to telecoms. Milgrom's account teaches us how economic designers can grapple with complexity both in theory and in practice. Along the way, we come to understand several different types of complexity that can arise in marketplace design."

And from the conclusion:

"So what have we discovered from Prices? Modern marketplace design increasingly wrestles with complexity; as it does so, we need novel, tailor-made theory as well as supporting infrastructure. Complexity has real economic meaning—and can take multiple forms."

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research (apply or nominate now...)

 Here's the announcement of a new award, for promoting research integrity, reproducibility, and or other elements of research quality.

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research

"Objective

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research aims to provide recognition and publicity for outstanding efforts that enhance the rigor, reliability, robustness, and transparency of research, and stimulate awareness and activities fostering research quality among scientists, institutions, funders, and politicians. To acknowledge the outstanding role early career researchers (ECRs) have in promoting research quality, ECRs will be invited to propose projects that foster research quality and value. Projects will be competitively selected for funding and internationally showcased.

Find out more about the objectives.

Award Categories

Individual Award: Individual scientist or small teams of collaborating scientists can be nominated. The laureate will be awarded €200,000.

 

Institutional Award: Governmental and non-governmental organizations, institutions, or other entities can apply or be nominated. The award-winning organization or institution will receive €200,000. If governmental organizations or institutions are the recipients of the award, they will not receive any funds in addition to the award itself.

 

Early Career Award: Early career researcher can submit a project proposal for an award of €100,000.

Find out more about the nomination and application requirements in the different categories."

***************

See a full description at the link...

Concerns about remote interviewing for the surgery match

 I don't doubt that every year people are nervous about the residency Match, and worries this year are related to the special situation of the Covid pandemic, in which interviews will be remote.

Irene Wapnir forwards the following:

From the AM College of Surgeons Bulletin: Interview crisis:

It May Be Too Late toAvoid a Crisis in the Surgery Match This Year

Ronald J. Weigel, MD, PhD, FACS; Steven C. Stain, MD, FACS; and L. Scott Levin, MD, FACS, FAOA

Are you hearing that outstanding medical students applying for surgical residencies are being wait-listed for an interview at top training programs? The problem may be yet another unfortunate consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In normal years, programs have cancellations because there is a physical limitation for how many interviews a student can do. This year, the pandemic forced programs to go to virtual interviews, and a small group of top students nationally appear to be filling all the interview slots for the top programs. If this is true, then many of those programs may go unfilled in the match.

For example, if the average number of interviews offered by a program is 100, and these programs are all competing for the same pool of 100 intern applicants, the pool of top students interviewed may be too small to fill all the slots in these programs. Additionally, the current interview process may create disadvantages for minority applicants and students from schools that are not considered "top tier."

With virtual interviews allowing students to interview at a larger number of programs, we may need a different system nationally for the allocation of interview slots, such as rolling acceptances for interviews with students being required to commit only to a set number of programs, which would allow additional students the opportunity to be interviewed. The solution will require program directors and surgical leaders nationally to discuss this issue. It may be too late to avoid a crisis in the match this year.

Surgery Match: Considerations and Possible Solutions

In their article, "It May Be Too Late to Avoid a Crisis in the Surgery Match," Drs. Weigel, Stain and Levin highlight challenges with this year's surgery match. Regarding this, the ACS proposes that program directors, deans and chairs, as well as candidates, consider the following to ensure as fair and equitable a process as possible during this extraordinary time:

Program Directors, Deans, Chairs

• Review the consequences that oversubscribing to slots has to programs and other candidates with students
• Don't offer slots to more candidates until those offered have a reasonable time to respond
• Make lists of candidates of interest who are not interviewed to ensure slots are offered when available

Candidates

• Consider limiting the number of interviews scheduled to a reasonable amount. Consider the impact on your colleagues of taking up too many interview slots—be fair to other applicants
• Release interview slots if you know you will not use them
• Release slots when you have completed enough interviews and experienced reciprocal interest that you are confident you have a well-prepared rank list

 

Susan Athey wins the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications

 The seminar is tomorrow, it appears that registration is required.

CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications: Virtual Seminar Honoring Stanford Professor Susan Athey

DATE: December 11, 2020 TIME: 10:15 a.m. CT 8:15 a.m. PT

 

The virtual event honoring Athey will feature presentations focused on topics related to market design, including how food banks use markets and the intersection of markets with the COVID-19 pandemic response. Several distinguished economists and academics will be participating in the program, including:

• Scott Kominers – MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor, Entrepreneurial Management Unit, Harvard Business School
• Paul Milgrom – Shirley and Leonard Ely professor of Humanities and Sciences in the Department of Economics at Stanford University; 2017 CME Group-MSRI Prizewinner; 2020 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences   
• Canice Prendergast – W. Allen Wallis Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
• Christopher Snyder – Joel Z. and Susan Hyatt Professor in the Economics Department, Dartmouth College 

Advance Market Commitments for Vaccines

 David Warsh, in his weekly Economic Principals (not a mis-spelling, it's often about economists, and newspapers) writes about Advance Market Commitments for vaccines, as we await the rollout of the various vaccines for Covid-19: A Victory for Vaccine Market Design (and a scoop for a well-designed newspaper as well)

"the mechanism known as advanced market commitment is of comparatively recent origin. It is the discovery, if that is the word, of University of Chicago economist Michael Kremer, in a series of papers he wrote while teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard University some twenty years ago, culminating in the publication, in 2004,  of Strong Medicine: Creating Incentives for Pharmaceutical Research on Neglected Diseases, with his wife, Rachel Glennerster, in 2004.

"The new mechanisms they advocated were similar to those that in the eighteenth century gave rise to the development of the naval chronometer, necessary to determining longitude at sea. Governmental “pull” methods could complement the inherently risky “push” of private research and development.  AMCs – legally binding commitments to buy specified quantities of as yet unavailable vaccines at specified prices – were the most promising of the lot for bringing into existence medicines that otherwise might not pay. 

...

"I asked Kremer last week if he had been involved in the Warp Speed journey, The answer was no.  He and co-authors had spoken to staff at the Council of Economic Advisors in the run-up to the creation of Operation Warp Speed. They had co-authored an op-ed article in the NYTimes in May. But they had not met with Slaoui. He seems to have imbibed the basic idea as long ago as 2013, when he organized a session on the industry’s stock of common knowledge for the Aspen Ideas festival

"Kremer was recognized with a Nobel Prize in economics, with two others, in 2018, for work on policy evaluation, including the work on vaccines. But I was struck when Wall Street Journal editorial-page columnist Daniel Henninger suggested last week that the scientists at the pharmaceutical companies who developed vaccines against Covid-19 were “the obvious recipient for 2021’s Nobel Peace Prize.”

******************

It would be exciting to see an economist win two Nobels, one of them in Peace. Michael Kremer would be a great choice...

In the meantime, here's the latest in Kremer's string of papers on AMC, this one a theoretical treatment:

Designing Advance Market Commitments for New Vaccines

Michael Kremer, Jonathan D. Levin & Christopher M. Snyder

NBER WORKING PAPER 28168 DOI 10.3386/w28168    December 2020

Abstract: Advance market commitments (AMCs) provide a mechanism to stimulate investment by suppliers of products to low-income countries. In an AMC, donors commit to a fund from which a specified subsidy is paid per unit purchased by low-income countries until the fund is exhausted, strengthening suppliers' incentives to invest in research, development, and capacity. Last decade saw the launch of a $1.5 billion pilot AMC to distribute pneumococcal vaccine to the developing world; in the current pandemic, variations on AMCs are being used to fund Covid-19 vaccines. 

"This paper undertakes the first formal analysis of AMCs. We construct a model in which an altruistic donor negotiates on behalf of a low-income country with a vaccine supplier after the supplier has sunk investments. We use this model to explain the logic of an AMC—as a solution to a hold-up problem—and to analyze alternative design features under various economic conditions (cost uncertainty, supplier competition). A key finding is that optimal AMC design differs markedly depending on where the product is in its development cycle."

From the introduction:

"Mechanisms such as patents and prizes that stimulate research and development (R&D) for products sold in high-income markets may fall short in low-income markets. Patents generate deadweight loss along with the monopoly rents intended to incentivize investment; furthermore, the monopoly rents may be limited in countries with mostly poor consumers, particularly if the country or aid agency acting on its behalf ignores these patents or uses bargaining power or public pressure to push down prices. Prizes may lead to the development of products that, while meeting the letter of the competition’s technical specifications, fail to meet consumers’ true needs.

"The difficulty in meeting the needs of poor countries is particularly apparent in the marketfor vaccines. Vaccines are a highly cost-effective tool to improve global public health.1 Yet the provision of vaccines in poor countries lags widespread use in rich countries and the development of vaccines targeting diseases of poor countries has been disappointingly slow.2 This situation has sparked a host of initiatives to catalyze vaccine markets in developing countries. Among the most prominent has been an Advance Market Commitment (AMC) piloted last decade for a pneumococcal vaccine."

Top trading cycles (and recollections of New Orleans), in AER:Insights, by Abdulkadiroğlu, Che, Pathak, Roth and Tercieux

A decade ago I was part of the team that designed the new school choice system for the New Orleans Recovery School District.  On the District side, the effort was led by Gabriela (Gaby) Fighetti. The design team was organized by the (then) Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC), led by Neil Dorosin. The heavy lifting on the design was done by Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Parag Pathak.  Until the district expanded and developed more complex requirements for expressing priorities (and we had to switch to a deferred acceptance algorithm) the design was based on a top trading cycles (TTC) mechanism. It was the first time I know of that TTC was adopted and deployed in a widely used market design. It came to be called OneApp (since it replaced the old system of applications to each school with one application followed by the matching algorithm).

Some of the data from that system make their way into this new (primarily theory) paper, about some of the distinctive virtues of top trading cycles. The paper itself is a merged effort between the New Orleans design team, and work on TTC initiated separately by various combinations of Che, Tercieux and Abdulkadiroğlu.

Efficiency, Justified Envy, and Incentives in Priority-Based Matching†

By Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth and Olivier Tercieux, 

American Economic Review: Insights, December, 2020, 2, (4), 425–442.

Abstract: Top Trading cycles (TTC) is Pareto efficient and strategy-proof in priority-based matching, but so are other mechanisms including serial dictatorship. We show that TTC minimizes justified envy among all Pareto-efficient and strategy-proof mechanisms in one-to-one matching. In many-to-one matching, TTC admits less justified envy than serial dictatorship in an average sense. Empirical evidence from New Orleans OneApp and Boston Public Schools shows that TTC has significantly less justified envy than serial dictatorship. 

The first footnote of the paper suggests something of it's long history, and says in part:

"This paper supersedes “The Role of Priorities in Assigning Indivisible Objects: A Characterization of Top Trading Cycles,” cited by others as Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, and ˇ Yeon-Koo Che (2010) or Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, ˇ Yeon-Koo Che, and Olivier Tercieux (2010), and “Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans’ OneApp” (2017) by Abdulkadiroglu, Atila, ˇ Yeon-Koo Che, Parag A. Pathak, Alvin E. Roth, and Olivier Tercieux. Roth is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC). IIPSC was involved in designing OneApp in New Orleans. Abdulkadiroglu, Pathak, and Roth also advised Boston Public Schools and New York City’s Department of Education on designing their student assignment systems, discussed herein. This article does not represent the views of the New Orleans Recovery School District or any other school district."

And here's a paragraph that offers a different kind of historical context:

"In 2011–2012, the New Orleans Recovery School District pioneered a unified enrollment process called OneApp, integrating admissions to all types of schools under a single offer system. Officials identified three major priority groups: sibling, applying from a closing school, and geography. The discussion about mechanism centered on the trade-off between efficiency and eliminating justified envy, and eventually TTC was selected based on the desire for “as many students as possible to get into their top choice school” (New Orleans Recovery School District 2012a). Vanacore (2011) and Vanacore (2012) provide additional details."

In conclusion:

"In the field, there is growing momentum for DA over TTC (see Abdulkadiroglu 2013 and Pathak 2017). This trend may be driven by a first-mover advantage of DA and its use in other contexts. New York City and Boston adopted DA in 2003 and 2005, and DA is widely used in residency matching (Roth and Peranson 1999). In 2013, New Orleans also switched from TTC to DA. One of the most important reasons for this switch involved challenges in explaining how TTC handles priorities.  Under DA, officials could explain that an applicant did not obtain an assignment at a higher ranked seat because another applicant with higher priority was assigned to that seat. At the time of the change, a clear explanation of how TTC reflects priorities was not available.

"It remains to be seen whether TTC will be used in the field again. But policymakers cannot ignore efficiency, which TTC delivers but DA does not. For this reason, TTC should remain a serious policy option. Our formal results may make it easier to explain how TTC incorporates priorities. It’s possible that TTC would have been chosen in some settings with knowledge of this result, and at the very least, advocates now have a new argument in its favor."

************

Some long ago posts on school choice in New Orleans:

Saturday, November 19, 2011

School choice in New Orleans

Thursday, February 2, 2012

School choice design in New Orleans Recovery School District

Tuesday, February 7, 2012

New Orleans launches its new school choice process

Tuesday, April 17, 2012 

School Choice in New Orleans with top trading cycles

Friday, May 11, 2012

New Orleans school choice goes live

Thursday, September 27, 2012

New Orleans School Choice: bringing one application process to all schools

Friday, February 15, 2013

School choice in New Orleans, evolving

Sunday, May 12, 2013

Looking back at the first year of New Orleans' One App school choice system

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

New Orleans School Choice in the WSJ

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

School Choice Index from Brookings

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

A look back at school choice in New Orleans

*******************

†Code for: Efficiency, Justified Envy, and Incentives in Priority-Based Matching

Principal Investigator(s):  r Principal Investigator(s) Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University; Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University; Parag Pathak, MIT; Alvin Roth, Stanford University; Olivier Tercieux, Paris School of Economics

 

Interfaith marriage under attack in India--"love jihad"

 The Washington Post has the story:

It was never easy being an interfaith couple in India. Now some states are making it harder

"Marrying across religious lines has always been a challenge in India, a vast multifaith democracy where the pull of family and tradition remains strong.

"Now politicians in India’s ruling party are contemplating laws to thwart such unions, driven by a conspiracy theory that views them as a tool for conversions.

"At a rally last month, the leader of the country’s largest state warned of the danger of “love jihad,” an inflammatory slur referring to an alleged plot by Muslim men to convert Hindu women through marriage."

Officer assignment in the U.S. Army

In a recent post I discussed the NAS report on the military labor force, focusing on the new Talent Marketplaces, and some of the difficulties they are facing in the Air Force, and (more briefly) in the Army.  

The Modern War Institute at West Point has a related article, published last month, on the implementation of these labor market clearinghouses in the Army, by Major Kyle Greenberg, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Crow  and Colonel Carl Wojtaszek. (They all have Ph.D.s in economics, and are associated with the Army's Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA).)

Winning In The Marketplace: How Officers And Units Can Get The Most Out Of The Army Talent Alignment Process 

by Kyle Greenberg, Mark Crow and Carl Wojtaszek 

"Not too many years ago, if the Army had wanted you to have an opinion about your next assignment, it would have issued you one with your duffel bag. The same had been true for units, as well. Leaders at every level largely left it to the Army to fill their formations with individuals based not on talent, but on having the right rank, branch, and availability date. In 2019, this changed when the Army introduced a market into its assignment system.

...

"Officers can greatly influence their chances of receiving the jobs they prefer in the market. Most importantly, moving officers should build their resumes in AIM 2.0. If officers are the engine of the marketplace, then the information they share on their AIM 2.0 resumes is the fuel that keeps it humming along smoothly. Complete and informative resumes allow units to better identify officers with backgrounds or experiences that are a particularly good fit for a specific job or type of work. Surprisingly, though, only 60 percent of officers in last fall’s marketplace took the time to describe their talents within the AIM 2.0 resumes. Choosing not to do so is a missed opportunity as officers with resumes benefited significantly, receiving 40 percent more #1 votes from units than officers without detailed resumes.

...

"moving officers should interview with units they are interested in joining. In a survey given to all units at the end of last year’s marketplace, 35 percent said that interviews were the most important factor in determining how to rank officers in the market. Even though AIM 2.0 is online, the marketplace is designed to facilitate person-to-person interaction, albeit predominately via phone or video conference. Moving officers who reach out to unit POCs and schedule interviews early in the marketplace have better chances of finding the jobs they want than officers who wait for units to contact them.

"A third way an officer can maximize the benefit of ATAP is to submit truthful preferences to the assignment market. While this is not immediately obvious, it becomes clearer once an officer understands how they are paired to jobs after the marketplace closes. The Army uses a deferred acceptance algorithm to match officers to jobs. While that might sound complicated, it is a relatively straightforward process—but one that works best when officers and units submit truthful preferences. ... "officers cannot achieve a better outcome by misreporting their actual preferences, or “gaming the system.” In fact, officers often hurt themselves when they do this. The design is intentional and allows officers to list “reach assignments” without penalty. So, go ahead and reach for that dream job knowing your chances of success in the market will not be diminished. (You can learn more about deferred acceptance algorithms at here or here.)

"There is substantial evidence that officers did not understand this point in the 2019 market. Post-marketplace surveys revealed that 31 percent of officers admitted that they did not place their true first preference #1 in the marketplace. Furthermore, roughly 75 percent admitted that at least some of their preferences were not truthful.

...

"Just like officers benefit if they truthfully preference as many jobs as possible, units benefit by ranking as many officers as possible. Units that rank all of the officers they are interested in will do better than units that only consider officers who rank their jobs #1. 

...

"A second suggestion for units is to put your best foot forward and professionalize your hiring processes. Many officers in last year’s market found little more than boilerplate job descriptions and had difficultly contacting units and scheduling interviews.

...

"Finally, there are several changes the Army should implement to make the marketplace more effective for both officers and units. First, the Army should better educate the force on how officers pair to units. 

...

"Second, the Army should limit the number of “signals” officers can send to units to indicate their interest. During last year’s marketplace, officers adjusted their preferences multiple times to signal interest to different units at different times. This resulted in an unlimited number of signals for officers to use and generated substantial problems. It also frustrated many units who could no longer be certain which officers were genuinely interested in them and which officers were likely to change their preferences immediately after a phone call or interview.

"The Army should give every officer a specific number of “market coins” to be sent to units of their choosing independent of their preference list. This would help units learn which officers are interested in their jobs without requiring officers to repeatedly change their preferences. The method of using signals to quickly identify interested participants has a proven record of making other matching markets more efficient.

************

In an email, Major Greenberg elaborates:

"The Army determines officer assignments through the Army Talent Alignment Process, which is implemented through an online portal known as the Assignment Interactive Module, Version 2.0. Within AIM2, officers can rank jobs they are eligible for and units can rank officers who are eligible for their unit’s jobs. Units are not able to observe an officer’s exact preference for their jobs, but they are able to observe if an officer ranked one of their jobs among the officer’s top 10% of all possible choices.  Likewise, officers cannot observe the exact rankings units give them, but they are notified if a unit ranked them at all. Officers and units are free to interact and adjust their preferences at all times while the marketplace is open. The marketplace closes at a pre-announced time, at which time both officer and unit preferences “lock.” After the marketplace closes, officers are matched to jobs according to a deferred acceptance algorithm (this is still a relatively new phenomenon, as the Army just started testing the DAA last year).

"One of the problems we are noticing is that a large number of officers are not being truthful with their preferences. It appears that units will frequently press officers to rank one of their jobs as their number one choice, and will often make their ranking for officers conditional on the officer’s ranking for one of the unit’s jobs. Army officers can always respond to these requests with cheap talk, but most dislike doing this: maybe because integrity is critical to our profession, or maybe because officers feel there is a reasonable chance they will one day have to work with the unit representative who is interviewing them.  To make the marketplace more safe for officers, OEMA advocates for removing all signals that are a function of officer preferences, but replacing them with a limited number of signals that officers can send to units, completely separate from preferences."

*************

Here's my earlier post:

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

The labor market that is the military: a report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine   

"To summarize, the Talent Marketplace has to also become an information marketplace that allows position owners and Airmen to make appropriate information available to each other in order to develop informed, accurate preferences."

The international scope of kidney disease

 During the Covid-19 pandemic we've all become aware of the importance of public messaging--about wearing masks and other behaviors that reduce the spread of infection, etc.  For those of us interested in transplantation, communication about the prevalence and international scope of kidney disease is important

Here's an article from Kidney International (from a year ago) that focuses on just that:

A single number for advocacy and communication—worldwide more than 850 million individuals have kidney diseases by Kitty J. Jager, Csaba Kovesdy, Robyn Langham, Mark Rosenberg, Vivekanand Jha, Carmine Zoccali

"On a world scale the total number of individuals with chronic kidney disease (CKD), acute kidney injury (AKI), and those on renal replacement therapy (RRT) exceeds 850 million, a truly concerning figure that is twice the estimated number of people with diabetes worldwide and >20 times higher than the number of individuals affected by AIDS/HIV worldwide. Thus kidney diseases are one of the most common diseases worldwide.

"CKD is now an unquestionable global public priority.1,  2 Even though the prevalence of CKD and its impact on health has been mainly studied in economically developed countries, the burden of this disease is even greater in developing countries.3,  4 In 2016, this disease was 13th on the list of causes of death on a world scale,5 and in 2040, it is expected to be the 5th leading cause of years of life lost.6 In 2010, 2.6 million individuals were receiving some form of kidney replacement therapy worldwide, but an almost equal number might have died during the same year because of a lack of access to dialysis and transplantation.7 This scenario contrasts with that of other major chronic diseases, such as cardiovascular diseases and respiratory diseases, whose effects on mortality are declining."

HT: Mike Rees

Marijuana in the House (but not yet in the Senate)

 The NY Times has the story:

House Passes Landmark Bill Decriminalizing Marijuana  By Catie Edmondson, Dec. 4, 2020

"The House passed sweeping legislation that would decriminalize marijuana and expunge nonviolent marijuana-related convictions. The measure is all but doomed in the Republican-led Senate.

"The 228-164 vote to approve the measure was bipartisan, and it was the first time either chamber of Congress had ever endorsed the legalization of cannabis. The bill would remove the drug from the Controlled Substances Act and authorize a 5 percent tax on marijuana that would fund community and small business grant programs to help those most impacted by the criminalization of marijuana.

...

"The legislation intends to give states power and incentives to enact their own reforms, and its passage came as states around the county, including some conservative-leaning ones, have become increasingly open to decriminalizing marijuana amid a growing consensus that the war on drugs has been destructive. Fifteen states have legalized recreational cannabis, and voters in five states last month voted on legalization issues, bringing the number of states where medical marijuana is legal to 35."

The black market for endangered birds

Laws that ban markets are sometimes the blueprints for the black markets that arise in the place of legal markets. That turns out to be the case in the black market for endangered birds.

 The NY Times has the story:

He Once Trafficked in Rare Birds. Now, He Tells How It’s Done.--After a chance encounter in Brazil, Johann Zillinger became one of the world’s most prolific wildlife smugglers. Three decades and two prison stints later, he says he has gone straight.

"In the early years, Mr. Zillinger was able to get the birds through customs in Brazil by greasing some palms. Over time, though, airport officials’ demands rose too high, Mr. Zillinger said, and he focused on eggs. Strapped to his body, the eggs would keep warm crossing the ocean to Portugal, where he would transfer them from human to conventional incubator. The hardest part, he said, was not cracking them. “That’s the 10 percent we lost, but other than that, it was foolproof.”

...

"The key to laundering animals, Mr. Zillinger said without irony, is the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), a treaty adopted in 1975 to ensure that the legal trade in wildlife does not drive threatened species to extinction. Those can be traded only if they fall under one of many exceptions. The crucial exception for traffickers was captive breeding.

"Mr. Zillinger and other traffickers found that they could obtain a valid CITES document to disguise smuggled animals as captive bred. They simply needed to claim that they were, and, after all but the most incredible claims, officials would issue paperwork declaring wild, trafficked birds to be born in captivity. CITES officials have admitted that such documents were wrongfully issued."

********

And here's the report on CITES corruption, from TRAFFIC.org:

Addressing corruption in CITES documentation processes

Unraveling of neurology fellowships

 From the journal Neurology:

Current controversies in neurology subspecialty education: Insight from clinical neurophysiology  by Heidi M. Munger Clary, Michelle Bell  Neurology® 2020;95:669-670. doi:10.1212/WNL.0000000000010754

"Juul et al. help elucidate factors contributing to the unraveling of neurology’s fellowship application market. There has been mounting discontent among neurology residents and residency leadership regarding the timing of fellowship applications. Seventy-eight percent of residency program directors believe that the fellowship application cycle occurs too early, and 87% of residents believe that the process should start no earlier than the second half of postgraduate year 3.4,5 With each subsequent year, it appears that the application process occurs progressively earlier, a phenomenon described in economics as unraveling. This phenomenon is seen in unstable markets and has been described in fellowship applications for other specialties before the establishment of a match."

Chinese college admissions reform: some consequences, by Yan Chen, Ming Jiang and Onur Kesten in PNAS

 An empirical evaluation of Chinese college admissions reforms through a natural experiment by Yan Chen, Ming Jiang, and Onur Kesten

PNAS first published November 24, 2020; https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2009282117

Abstract: College admissions policies affect the educational experiences and labor market outcomes for millions of students each year. In China alone, 10 million high school seniors participate in the National College Entrance Examination to compete for 7 million seats at various universities each year, making this system the largest centralized matching market in the world. The last 20 years have witnessed radical reforms in the Chinese college admissions system, with many provinces moving from a sequential (immediate acceptance) mechanism to some version of the parallel college admissions mechanism, a hybrid between the immediate and deferred acceptance mechanisms. In this study, we use a natural experiment to evaluate the effectiveness of the sequential and parallel mechanisms in motivating student college ranking strategies and providing stable matching outcomes. Using a unique dataset from a province that implemented a partial reform between 2008 and 2009, we find that students list more colleges in their rank-ordered lists, and more prestigious colleges as their top choices, after the province adopts the parallel mechanism in its tier 1 college admissions process. These listing strategies in turn lead to greater stability in matching outcomes, consistent with our theoretical prediction that the parallel mechanism is less manipulable and more stable than the sequential mechanism.

The labor market that is the military: a report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine

 I recently served as a member of a National Academies committee on the issues facing the Air Force in managing its human capital, i.e. its labor force.  It resulted in a long report covering many aspects of Air Force policy.  

One of the fun things about that assignment was meeting with people throughout the U.S. armed forces (and some allies).  Yesterday I had the privilege of attending the promotion ceremony for a very thoughtful Air Force officer, Tobias Switzer. Congratulations, Colonel!.*

Readers of this blog are likely to be most interested in the evolving ways that military personnel are matched to new assignments, from time to time during their careers.  A first order problem has to do with retention, since the armed services compete with the private sector for highly trained people (e.g. pilots, cyber warriors, special operators, to name a few), which is most visible at times when the person in question doesn't have any further military service obligation.  Below, I excerpt some paragraphs concerning one new aspect of this process, called the Talent Marketplaces. (The page numbers refer to sections of the report, e.g. "p2-7" refers to page 7 of section 2.)

Here's the report:

A Consensus Study Report, from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine 2020:

Strengthening U.S. Air Force Human Capital Management: A Flight Plan for 2020-2030. Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. https://doi.org/10.17226/25828

Committee on Strengthening U.S. Air Force Human Capital Management, Board on Human-Systems Integration, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education

Committee and Staff: Julie J.C.H. Ryan (Co-Chair), William J. Strickland (Co-Chair), Terry A. Ackerman, David S.C. Chu, Lt. Gen. Gina M. Grosso, Usaf (Retired), Brig. Gen. Leon A. Johnson, Usafr (Retired), Judith S. Olson, Dan J. Putka, Alvin E. Roth, Ann Marie Ryan, Stephen Stark, Cherie Chauvin, Study Director, Elizabeth T. Cady, Senior Program Officer, Daniel Talmage, Program Officer, Margaret Kelly, Sr. Program Assistant, Tina M. Latimer, Program Coordinator

Below are some snippets drawn from various sections of the report.

"since 2014, the Air Force has lost more fighter pilots annually than its annual production rate, and forecasts of the commercial airline pilot marketplace are an important variable in long-term workforce planning to develop and sustain the career field." (p2-7)

"A lack of clear data on why Airmen are leaving the force diminishes the Air Force’s ability to do such evaluations or establish an “early warning system” to identify recruits at risk of early attrition. Increased use of assignment tools like the Talent Marketplace will allow relevant longitudinal data to be collected on the extent to which Airmen’s separation decisions may be related to their preferences over the positions to which they could have been assigned as compared to the one to which they were assigned (see Appendix D)."  (p4-22)

"the recently implemented Talent Marketplace provides an innovative online means for matching Airmen with assignments based on expressed preferences of Airmen and position owners for post-accession job assignments. However, the usefulness of expressed preferences depends a good deal on how much information is available to Airmen about positions and to position owners about Airmen (through the Talent Marketplace), given that such information profoundly shapes preferences. Consequently, the most effective version of the Talent Marketplace would also serve as an information marketplace that allows position owners and Airmen to make appropriate information available to each other to form informed, accurate preferences (e.g., realistic job previews, using video and written descriptions). The key point is that matching, and the overall functioning of the USAF HCM system, may be improved by developing new methods of sharing preferences as well as new algorithms for taking preferences into account (see Appendix D)" (p4-26)

"In 2019, the Air Force began using the web-based platform, the Talent Marketplace, for making officer assignments (Lieutenant Colonel and below). The Talent Marketplace was initiated in an effort to meet a stated goal: “To the maximum extent possible, assign individuals on a voluntary basis and in the most equitable manner feasible while meeting mission and commander needs” (USAF, 2018a, p.2)." (p5-10)

"The Air Force is investigating implementing the Talent Marketplace to manage enlisted assignments, but a decision is still pending at this time."(p5-11)

"There are two officer assignment cycles per year. To support the Officer Assignment System for all assignments of Lieutenant Colonel and below (except for Judge Advocate General officers), the Air Force uses its newly developed Talent Marketplace. The web-based system provides transparency for available positions, provides visibility on an officer’s preferences to their commander, and incorporates gaining commander input as well for the first time. The technology behind it examines officer assignment solutions by incorporating specific prioritizations from both the officers who are eligible to move and the gaining unit (see Appendix D for discussion of preference informed matching). Officers on the vulnerable-to move list use the Talent Marketplace to indicate a desirability rating for assignment location preferences using a list of locations with jobs to fill, in alphabetic order. There is limited information on each position in the system: duty title, command, and location, but the officer can see how many other officers are interested in the position and make their decision accordingly.17 Any additional information the officer would like to know about the position is gathered through their own independent research. After the window closes for officers to bid for positions, the position owners access the system to see the final list of volunteers to fill their positions. The results of the matching algorithm are used as a first step in the process, which is further adjusted as needed and finalized by AFPC." (p5-11)

"As the Air Force expands its use of the Talent Marketplace for officers and develops a more modern approach to the antiquated Enlisted Quarterly Assignments List, it could benefit from considering the research conducted on and the implementation and results of similar marketplace initiatives (see for example, Malia, 2020). The U.S. Army, in particular, recently implemented its Army Officer Assignment Marketplace via Assignment Interactive Module (AIM).30 AIM is a centralized clearinghouse that requires officers and units to finalize preferences for the other side of the market at the same time, typically 6–9 months before officers are expected to move to their next assignment. The Army studies its assignment system in the Office of Economic and Manpower Analysis (OEMA), Department of Social Sciences, West Point.31 Information provided to the committee on the design and administration of AIM indicated that it is something of a hybrid model that involves a lot of hand-processing of assignments by assignment officers. However, it was reported that the “Human Resources Command received permission from the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Manpower and Reserve Affairs to test the concept of matching officers to jobs according to a deferred acceptance algorithm similar to that of the National Resident Matching Program,”32 which matches new doctors to residency programs (Roth, 1984; Roth and Peranson, 1999). 

"One aspect of the Army Cadet Branching process (used to assign new West Point graduates to branches) is that Cadets can bid for preferred assignments by offering to extend their service obligation. Although a detailed review of AIM was outside the scope of this study, the committee notes that analysis has suggested that its use of a deferred acceptance algorithm is seriously flawed in implementation (e.g. Switzer, 2011), and this may be important for the designers and administrators of the Air Force Talent Marketplace to study and understand." 

"As of May 15, 2019, the Army reports that 90,952 officers of all ranks had participated in AIM. Officers are encouraged to submit resumes, but the majority have not done so (from 7% of Colonels, up to 42% of Majors). Resume-writers are encouraged to include unique Knowledge, Skills, and Behaviors (KSBs), but almost none have done so. Units seeking to fill jobs are encouraged to submit (long) preference lists of officers for each job they are seeking to fill, and so far, participation has been spotty: “The best participation is from [the 10 percent of] units who submit preferences for many jobs, and for multiple officers on each job” (U.S. Army, 2019, p. 2). Although no explanation was provided to the committee, the Army’s overall low participation numbers suggest that the Air Force and Army could benefit from joint efforts to understand the reaction Airmen and Soldiers have had to these initiatives as well as to develop approaches to improve participation and therefore its overall utility.

"Turning back to the Air Force, the present (preliminary) use of deferred acceptance algorithms in the Talent Marketplace is not an evidence-based decision; rather it arises from a perhaps too-hasty parallel with the operation of the private-sector clearinghouse for American physicians (see discussion of preference informed matching in Appendix D). To guide Air Force research into post-accession assignment decisions to improve and expand the effectiveness and validity of the Talent Marketplace, the committee identified the following research questions:

 How do assignments affect separation decisions? 33 (Collect data on “Who stays, who leaves, where they go, would they have stayed for a better assignment?”)

 How are preference data related to family data? (Collect family data on jobs of spouses, age, and schooling of children)

 How is the new blended retirement system changing separation choices?

 How do pilot separations interact with airline hiring demands? (E.g., could new arrangements be initiated between the Air Force and commercial airlines to better meet fluctuating needs of both?34)

 Can exit interviews be combined with interventions that might prevent or delay separation by the most effective Airmen?

 How should the Talent Marketplace be organized for minimizing early separation of the most effective Airmen?

 Does the Talent Marketplace assure an appropriate distribution of talent across units?

 How does the Talent Marketplace affect individual and unit performance?" (pp5-27-28)

"Similar to the Army, the Air Force is implementing a “Talent Marketplace” that gives Airmen increased agency in decisions about their assignments, which should improve “fit” and career satisfaction. But early results suggest the Air Force could benefit from a better understanding of how Airmen view this initiative, perhaps working jointly with the Army which seems also to be encountering early implementation problems. At a minimum, any review should re-consider whether the deferred acceptance algorithm the Air Force Talent Marketplace currently employs is being deployed as effectively as possible, or whether some other preference-informed matching procedure might better fit Air Force needs. In any case, a better understanding of what information participants require to form their preferences reliably will help support the information exchange needed by any matching and assignment system that incorporates preferences." (p5-38)

Among the recommendations for the Talent Marketplace, the report includes:

"—Initiate a Talent Marketplace promotion campaign across the entire service to stimulate use and buy-in through formal training, consumer feedback, and success stories.

—Expand the use of the Talent Marketplace, or a conceptually similar technology, to modernize the approach to enlisted Airmen assignments.

—Leverage data and create processes to further enable the operational goals of the Talent Marketplace for both officers and enlisted Airmen.

 Ensure that the Talent Marketplace is also an information marketplace that gives position holders and candidates enough information about one another to form informed preferences.

 For job openings already using the Talent Marketplace, encourage position owners to post detailed job descriptions, and review many candidates (i.e., submit long preference lists), and encourage candidates to review many jobs.

 Incentivize true preference revelation for both “hiring” and “being hired” parties (i.e., make it safe to rank opportunities in their honest order of desirability.

 Use data to predict and recommend person-job match in a contextual manner, including preferences on both sides. Better leverage exit survey and other data for insights such as hidden reasons for attrition, the influence of preferences on separation decisions, and diversity concerns related to retention.

—Expand the Talent Marketplace to strategically fill hard-to-fill jobs and improve retention, especially in critical career fields.

 Analyze whether and why certain job assignments predictably cause top choices to resign rather than take the assignment.

 Consider alternative approaches and incentives to offer declined jobs to someone who would prefer the position.

 Develop flexible procedures that preserve the possibility of retaining candidates who have chosen to separate rather than accept an assignment, by exploring whether other assignments would cause them to reconsider." (pp6-16-17)

From Appendix D: Preference-Informed Matching in Job Assignment

"Many of the current Air Force assignment procedures have grown out of the historical low-tech assignment tool consisting of a whiteboard covered with colored sticky notes, a longstanding system later augmented by spreadsheets. Often assignment teams worked with very little information about job requirements and candidate preferences. Although candidates with particular preferences or special needs could sometimes have these recognized by having their current commander (i.e., the “losing commander” who would be losing them, but who knew them) advocate for them to the assignment team, there were few ways of communicating preferences in a general and easily-used way.

"In recent years the United States Air Force and other services have moved towards somewhat more market-oriented assignment procedures, such as the Talent Marketplace developed for use by the officer assignment system,1 that make it easier for candidates and also for hiring authorities to share information and express preferences. This approach is shaped by the idea that sometimes the mutual needs and preferences of the candidate and the hiring authority could be better expressed and met. But the equivalent of whiteboards and sticky-notes still plays a role, as the information needed for hiring authorities and candidates to gain information with which to form and express preferences is still limited." (pD-1)

"Benefits of Deferred Acceptance Algorithms: DA algorithms use the information contained in the preferences of both candidates and hiring authorities, and they produce what are called stable matchings, which don’t have “blocking pairs” (i.e. there is never a service member and Air Force job that would have both, mutually, preferred each other) or “justified envy” (in which a lower-priority candidate receives a job preferred by a higher priority candidate with equal qualifications). This approach also renders it safe for members of the proposing side to reveal their preferences truthfully. Deferred acceptance algorithms have been used to match new doctors to their first positions in the U.S., and in other health care labor markets, and to match children to schools in a number of American cities (see Roth 2002, 2008 and the references cited there, and Roth 2015).

"Drawbacks of Deferred Acceptance Algorithms: The blocking pairs the Air Force needs to be most concerned with for retention don’t involve Air Force positions and service members. They instead involve private-sector jobs and service members who might choose to separate from the Air Force to take a private-sector job instead of the offered Air Force assignment. Because of this, it isn’t clear that the form of stability produced by deferred acceptance algorithms is the best goal for an Air Force assignment system. Eliminating blocking pairs involving Airmen and alternative assignments within the Air Force comes at a cost, since a stable matching (i.e., one with no such blocking pairs) may not be Pareto optimal for candidates (i.e., it may be possible to give all of some groups of candidates assignments for which they are all qualified and which they all prefer, which might better facilitate retention of service members who have no further military obligation). This is worth further study, particularly if (as is now the case) deferred acceptance algorithms are being employed to generate an initial matching that is then modified by assignment teams." (ppD6-7)

"To summarize, the Talent Marketplace has to also become an information marketplace that allows position owners and Airmen to make appropriate information available to each other in order to develop informed, accurate preferences. The key point is that matching, and the overall functioning of the human capital system, may be improved by developing new methods of sharing preferences as well as new algorithms for taking preferences into account.#" (pD-10)

#"Much of the academic literature on matching assumes that institutions that allow participants to form accurate preferences already exist. One of the tasks facing the Air Force is to develop such institutions in parallel with the development of the Talent Marketplace."

**********

*In these complicated times it's good to remember that the oath that U.S. military officers take is to defend the Constitution of the United States.