Matchmaking on campus with Marriage Pact

 Happy Valentine's Day:)

Here's a story from the Amherst Student (the student newspaper), about an annual event on many campuses that started at Stanford.

True Love or True Disappointment? Students Reflect on the 2024 Marriage Pact by Savita Jani and Erin Sullivan

"With Valentine’s Day just around the corner, love is on the brain for many Amherst students. But Cupid isn’t just around on Feb. 14 — back in September, over 1,200 Mammoths sought romance through the Marriage Pact, an online questionnaire that matches students with their most statistically compatible partner on campus.

"At Amherst, the Association of Amherst Students (AAS) contracts with the Marriage Pact company, a sizable operation available at 100 schools across the country. Marriage Pact has served over 570,000 participants and made over 285,000 matches since its founding. It uses its own algorithm that takes psychology, “market design,” and linear algebra into account in order to find students their ideal match: a perfectly compatible other half whom they can one day marry (if they don’t find someone else).

"Marriage Pact also claims to address the nuances of romance by recognizing when similar values are necessary for a good match and when they aren’t. According to their website, 3-4% of Marriage Pact matches date for a year or longer. But how well has the Marriage Pact worked for Amherst students?

"To answer this question, we interviewed several Mammoths and collected responses from 54 respondents through an anonymous Google Form survey.

 

Here are my previous posts on the Marriage Pact.

Consequences of suspending U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Generally speaking, effective foreign aid to fight infectious diseases is a kind of enlightened self interest, since infectious diseases that go around come around.  And drug-resistent versions evolve when a disease is unchecked anywhere in the world.   

Aid for fighting AIDS, now suspended, is no exception.

Here's an article from the Lancet: about the recent suspension by Executive Order of the operations of the U.S. President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR).

Online first, February 07, 2025
PEPFAR under review: what's at stake for PEPFAR's future, by
Jirair Ratevosiana Jirair.Ratevosian@duke.edu ∙ Gregorio Millettb ∙ Brian Honermannb ∙ Sara Bennettc ∙ Catherine Connord ∙ Linda-Gail Bekkere ∙ Chris BeyreraShow less

 

"Over the past two decades, PEPFAR has been one of the most successful global health initiatives ever undertaken.3 By investing in HIV prevention, treatment, and care services, PEPFAR has saved about 26 million lives and strengthened health-care infrastructure across low-income and middle-income countries.4 However, the political landscape in the USA has become more polarised, creating challenges that threaten US global health financing and the PEPFAR programme's future sustainability. Following the Reevaluating and Realigning United States Foreign Aid Executive Order signed by Trump on Jan 20, 2025,5 the State Department issued a stop-work order for all foreign aid efforts, including PEPFAR, which took effect on Jan 24, 2025.
 

"PEPFAR's impact was highlighted in a recent analysis by amfAR, The Foundation for AIDS Research, of the effect of the 90-day order on health-care services.7 According to this analysis, PEPFAR operates in 54 countries, primarily across Africa, delivering life-saving care to millions of people through a network of more than 19 000 full-time clinical and support staff.7 Each day, over 222 000 people collect antiretroviral therapy (ART) to stay healthy; more than 224 000 HIV tests are done, diagnosing 4374 new HIV cases, including pregnant women in antenatal care; 17 695 orphans and vulnerable children affected by HIV receive support; 7163 cervical cancer screenings are performed; and 3618 women experiencing gender-based violence receive care and support.
 

"In the current context PEPFAR is facing both organisational and operational challenges. Many PEPFAR-funded clinics have faced closures, staff lay-offs, and disruptions in service delivery due to uncertainty surrounding the programme's future.8 On Feb 1, 2025, the US Government issued a limited waiver to restart essential HIV services during the foreign aid review period; the waiver's scope is narrowly focused on ART and the prevention of mother-to-child transmission, but it excludes other key activities.2,9 Programmes that focus on the prevention of HIV in key populations, HIV prevention services for adolescent girls and young women, voluntary male medical circumcision, and support for orphans and vulnerable children are still halted.2 Alarmingly, nearly all HIV prevention efforts under PEPFAR—aside from programmes for the prevention of mother-to-child transmission—are currently on hold.2 This is especially concerning since PEPFAR supports more than 90% of global pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) initiations around the world."

Stable Matching with Interviews, by Ashlagi, Chen, Roghani and Saberi

 Job applicants can now easily submit many job applications, and so interviewing applicants, which is time consuming, has become a major source of congestion in many labor markets.  But even in labor markets that use a clearinghouse to process offers and acceptances (like the market for medical residents in the U.S., the NRMP match) interviews are often organized in a decentralized manner. Here's a paper that tackles the question of how to organize an interview match, under some assumptions about what kind of information is obtained in interviews.  Two approaches are considered: an 'adaptive' algorithm that takes into account the results of previous interviews in assigning subsequent interviews, and a 'non-adaptive' algorithm that matches candidates to interviews before any interview results are known.

Stable Matching with Interviews, by Itai Ashlagi, Jiale Chen, Mohammad Roghani, and Amin Saberi (all at Stanford)

Abstract
"In several two-sided markets, including labor and dating, agents typically have limited information about their preferences prior to mutual interactions. This issue can result in matching frictions, as arising in the labor market for medical residencies, where high application rates are followed by a large number of interviews. Yet, the extensive literature on two-sided matching primarily focuses on models where agents know their preferences, leaving the interactions necessary for preference discovery largely overlooked. This paper studies this problem using an algorithmic approach, extending Gale-Shapley’s deferred acceptance to this context. Two algorithms are proposed. The first is an adaptive algorithm that expands upon GaleShapley’s deferred acceptance by incorporating interviews between applicants and positions. Similar to deferred acceptance, one side sequentially proposes to the other. However, the order of proposals is carefully chosen to ensure an interim stable matching is found. Furthermore, with high probability, the number of interviews conducted by each applicant or position is limited to O(log^2 n).
"In many seasonal markets, interactions occur more simultaneously, consisting of an initial interview phase followed by a clearing stage. We present a non-adaptive algorithm for generating a single stage set of in tiered random markets. The algorithm finds an interim stable matching in such markets while assigning no more than O(log^3 n) interviews to each applicant or position. "

Trump halts enforcement of US law banning bribery of foreign officials

If we expect tariffs to elicit reciprocal tariffs, what should we expect of allowing American firms to bribe foreign officials?

The Guardian has the story:

Trump halts enforcement of US law banning bribery of foreign officials  by Léonie Chao-Fong

"Donald Trump signed an executive order on Monday directing the US justice department to halt prosecuting Americans accused of bribing foreign government officials to win business.
"The order instructs the US attorney general, Pam Bondi, to pause prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act of 1977 until she issues revised enforcement guidance that promotes American competitiveness.

...

"According to the White House, the law puts US firms at a disadvantage to foreign competitors because they cannot engage in practices that are “common among international competitors, creating an uneven playing field”.

...

"Trump signed the order in the Oval Office in front of reporters. “It’s going to mean a lot more business for America,” he said.

Institutions, Technology and Prosperity: Daron Acemoglu's Nobel lecture (now an NBER working paper)

 Here's an NBER paper in this morning's email...

Institutions, Technology and Prosperity  by Daron Acemoglu, NBER Working Paper 33442
DOI 10.3386/w33442, February 2025
 

"This paper reviews the main motivations and arguments of my work on comparative development, colonialism and institutional change, which was often carried out jointly with James Robinson and Simon Johnson. I then provide a simple framework to organize these ideas and connect them with my research on innovation and technology. The framework is centered around a utility-technology possibilities frontier, which delineates the possible distributions of resources in a society both for given technology and working via different technological choices. It highlights how various types of institutions, market structures, norms and ideologies influence moves along the frontier and shifts of the frontier, and it provides a simple formalization of the social forces that lead to institutional persistence and those that can trigger institutional change. The framework also enables us to conceptualize how, during periods of disruption, existing—and sometimes quite small—differences can have amplified effects on prosperity and institutional trajectories. In this way, it suggests some parallels between different disruptive periods, including the onset of European colonialism, the spread (or lack thereof) of industrial technologies in the 19th century, and decisions related to the use, adoption and development of AI today."
 

Super bowl markets in ads and gambling (and also a football game)

 Today is a big celebration of advertising.  But the advertisements have to be fitted into pauses in a football game.  That takes some doing.

The NYT has the story:

During N.F.L. Games, Going to Commercial Requires Its Own Playbook
TV advertising is the lifeblood of the league, but knowing when to pause the games is a task undertaken by N.F.L. executives, network producers and on-field officials.  By Ken Belson

"Most games have 18 commercial breaks. A few timeouts, like at the end of the first and third quarters and at the two-minute warnings, are fixed. The league and networks avoid taking breaks if a team’s opening drive of the game ends quickly, because they want fans to settle into the broadcast. If all goes well, the last commercials run at the two-minute warning in the fourth quarter.

"Most commercial breaks, though, are chosen in real time as league executives, network producers and officials on the field look for natural breaks in the action. Finding them is more art than science because every game unfolds differently, with long drives, three-and-outs, injury timeouts and coaches’ challenges.

...

"The logistics of determining when to call television timeouts require an intricate phone tree over a three-hour game. The referee, who controls when a game starts and stops and can overrule a request for a break, communicates with the back judge, who is in constant contact with two sideline officials standing near the 20-yard line. One of them wears a green hat and represents the league. The other has on orange gloves and works for the network."

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Gambling (on apps, during the game, about anything and everything) is still relatively new:

Here's the Guardian:

Americans expected to place record $1.39bn in bets for Super Bowl LIX
The US sports betting industry has boomed since 2018 – with it brings a ‘dark side’ as gambling addiction also rises  by Lauren Aratani 

"Since the supreme court overturned a federal law that made sports betting illegal in 2018, the industry has boomed, with 38 states opting to legalize. Gambling revenue hit $99.4bn in 2022, according to the American Gaming Association (AGA), the industry lobby group.

‘A serious disease’: Congress weighs federal gambling crackdown amid growing concerns

Read more

"Super Bowl Sunday – the biggest sports event of the year – will be no exception. Even as TV networks have struggled to maintain audience numbers, with more people tuning in to video content online, the Super Bowl has continued to grow in viewership. In 2024, a record 123 million viewers tuned into the game, making it the most-watched telecast in history.

"The AGA estimated that $1.39bn worth of legal bets will be placed for Super Bowl LIX. This is the first year the trade association reported estimated bets solely from legal channels. In previous years, AGA relied on surveys that included all betting, including those placed illegally and casually among friends. Last year, research firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming estimated $1.25bn of legal bets were placed for the Super Bowl last year.

...

"Betting companies have also become more aggressive at advertising. Last year, BetMGM, the sports betting arm of MGM Resorts, aired a star-studded commercial promoting its platform during the Super Bowl. Fong said that it has all contributed to a normalizing of sports betting in American culture."