The NYC high school match, continued

When I recently blogged about The NYC High School Match, I focused on the many students who received one of their choices. As I mentioned, "The NYCDOE reports that of 86,000 students looking to enter the 9th grade, 44,012 students received their first choice school, and 7,455 could not be assigned to any of their (up to 12) choices."

Those unmatched students will now go through a supplementary match process. Many of them likely ranked many fewer than 12 choices, and will now have to select among schools that still have vacancies. Needless to say, this is a serious setback for some of them. (Here's a story from the Daily News: Parents fume as kids miss cut for top city high schools).

Michael Hickins, a reporter from Information Week (who writes that his daughter just went through the process) was referred to me by the NYCDOE, because of the work I did to help design the process, along with my colleagues Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag Pathak. Here is how our conversation (and others he had) is reflected in his report: NYC Board Of Ed's Algorithm Not Academic.

Helping kids get into good schools is one of the most important things we can do for them, and this is why it's important for schools to use modern matching technology, as NYC does, to try to get as many kids well matched as possible. It's agonizing that we can't provide enough great school places for everyone. There's only so much that can be done with matching technology, which can allocate existing places, but doesn't create good new schools. School systems need our support in other ways as well.

Markets for organs

In Reward Organ Donors , Sally Satel writes in the Asian WSJ about the recent changes in Singapore law regarding compensation for donors (see my previous posts here and here). She goes on to outline the design of the kind of market she would like to see, and ways in which perceived repugnance might be addressed.

"My colleagues and I suggest a system in which a donor can accept a reward for saving the life of a stranger. A third party (the government, a charity or insurer) would provide the benefit and newly available organs would be distributed to the next in line -- not just to the wealthy. Donors would be carefully screened for physical and emotional impediments to safe donation, as is currently done for all volunteer living kidney donors. Moreover, they would be guaranteed follow-up medical care for any complications.
Many people are uneasy about offering lump-sum cash payments. A solution is to provide in-kind rewards, such as a down payment on a house, a contribution to a retirement fund or lifetime health insurance, so the program would not be attractive to people who might otherwise rush to donate on the promise of a large sum of instant cash.
Not only will more lives be saved through legal means of donor rewards, but fewer people will haunt the black-market organ bazaars of places like China, Pakistan, Egypt, Colombia and Eastern Europe. The World Health Organization estimates that 5% to 10% of all transplants performed annually -- perhaps 63,000 in all -- take place in these clinical netherworlds."

Kidney donors (and advertising)

Several recent stories about kidney transplants are worth noting, not least for their focus on donors: how to find one, how their gifts are effectively used, and how they are and might be compensated. (This leads to some thoughts on the various roles that advertising, through personal communication, news stories, and commercially, might play at various points).

At Salon, Whaddaya have to do to get a kidney around here? Frances Kissling writes about the gratifying responses she received when she carefully let her friends know that she was in need of a kidney transplant. She writes:
"I think I instinctively knew what I had to do. I'd spent a lot of my time raising money, and I had that Bible verse "ask and you shall receive" burned into my consciousness. I decided to compose an e-mail about my need. In it, I shared my sense of the adventure before me and asked if anyone would like to give me one of their kidneys. I noted: "To be dependent on the generosity of others is a new experience for me and I am thinking a lot about what it means to share one's body with another person. Also trying to figure out how I ask for a gift that I really want without expectation or making friends and colleagues uncomfortable." "

About the ongoing discussion of providing compensation for donors, whe writes
"Even without incentives, no group of do-gooders is treated with more suspicion by the medical community than living organ donors. Even a free glass of orange juice or an unnecessary lollipop given to a donor is interpreted by some leaders in the field as a "bribe" or a crime. Appropriate concern for the international organ trafficking problem (WHO estimates that the annual total of internationally trafficked kidneys is about 6,000) has so distorted the concept of altruism and eroded the principle of mutual respect that potential kidney donors are denied the basic safety net that a just and giving society should provide people who offer to risk their own lives to save the lives of others. And let's be clear. The best way to stop first-world people with money from exploiting poor people by bargain basement organ trafficking is to procure more organs from well-informed, healthy and autonomous people in the first world."

Among her bottom lines: if you need a kidney, let your friends know.

From Australia, Kidney Exchange is making continued progress: the news story Chain of goodwill saves lives reports that Western Australia's Paired Kidney Exchange Program has performed an altruistic donor chain, involving three transplants. As the technology progresses for effectively using altruistic kidney donations to enable multiple transplants, the benefits of such donations increase. And as the news of this spreads, it is likely more altruists will be moved to donate.

This brings me to the subject of advertising.

Apart from letting their friends and acquaintances know (and sometimes in preference to doing that) people in need of transplants sometimes advertise (see e.g. the story Ads, Billboard Plead for Organ Donations, or the site MatchingDonors.com).

In a column in the Los Angeles Times about how all sorts of transactions (particularly on the web) are funded these days by advertising, Joshua Gans is interviewed on the subject of repugnant transactions
"According to Joshua Gans, an economist at Melbourne Business School in Australia..., there's a social norm against repugnant transactions, such as paying for a kidney. In the last few years, too many transactions have become repugnant. "And if you need to make money to pay for the content ... and you can't get the consumers to pay, what do you do? Sell a related product, advertising," Gans told me. The good news is that at this point, I'm pretty sure The Times' sales staff will sell space on their kidneys."

Could someone actually finance a kidney donation by advertising? Jeff Ely at Cheap Talk offers this suggestion under the heading Organs for Money:
" I wonder if the following transaction would be considered taboo. I need a kidney, you have a spare. By law, I cannot pay you for the kidney and you would not give it to me without compensation. So instead I buy five minutes of primetime network TV air, say in the middle of American Idol, to broadcast my documentary about you telling the world what a heroic human being you are, how you saved my life and where to send you donations."

(In the nothing is too bizarre to contemplate category, Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution points to a laptop company that offers to help defray the cost of well attended funerals in return for being allowed to advertise at them: Advertising markets in everything)

HT to Lauren Merrill for the Salon story.

More on recommender systems for escorts

Scott Cunningham of Baylor writes:

"I saw today your post on the screening sites that prostitutes use ["Problem customer" registries for prostitutes]. I just wanted to pass along to you a paper I'm currently working on with Todd Kendall called "Prostitution 2.0: Estimating the Effect of the Internet on the Market for Commercial Sex in the US."
http://business.baylor.edu/scott_cunningham/Research_files/pro20-4.pdf
"We have been surveying online prostitutes for the last 10 months using data collected from The Erotic Review, which is a large "mall" that clients use to record detailed information about prostitutes in various cities. In the course of the surveys, we have been studying the way in which the Internet has facilitated improved screening, and even in some cases, signaling between clients and prostitutes. One of the more ingenious things that we have found is a case of signaling from clients to prostitutes wherein they send letters of recommendation to prostitutes, usually in the form of sending along information [from] another prostitute with whom they've already visited. This, we argue, has enabled prostitutes to update their beliefs that a new client is not a cop (or a violent client) because these letters are relatively more expensive for cops to send. A case in point - see this story about two police officers who were sleeping with prostitutes in Beaumont, Texas allegedly in order to make a case on a drug trafficker. When the public learned, the men were fired, and the officers are now suing the Beaumont, Texas police department for wrongful termination. (It's suggestive that indeed the private costs of using these kinds of methods are prohibitively high for cops, which we argue is evidence that the costs of signaling type to prostitutes is such that the separating equilibria and not the pooling equilibria is more likely to be happening). "

Here is The Erotic Review, and here is what they say about customers getting recommendations from escorts:

"TER White List
If you have a good reputation with the ladies, encourage them to visit the TER White List and submit a referral for you. The TER White List is an easy way for providers to give positive references about members they have seen. "

The NYC High School Match

The New York City Department of Education reports that the new high school match process continues to work well: More Than 80 Percent of Students Admitted to a Top Choice High School for Fourth Consecutive Year.


"The Department of Education conducts extensive outreach to families about the high school admissions process, beginning during the sixth grade. High school applicants receive the annual, 500-page High School Directory, which provides them with information about every high school. They also receive several other publications that guide them through the admissions process. In addition, the Department of Education hosts Citywide high school fairs, workshops, and information sessions for several months before students’ applications are due. Middle and high school administrators, guidance counselors, parent coordinators, and community partners help students and families evaluate their options and make informed choices.

"Students can list up to twelve high school programs on their applications in order of preference. Schools also rank students. Then, students are matched to the school they ranked highest that also ranked them. The admission process consists of three rounds: the first round for students applying to the City’s Specialized High Schools, the main round (this round), and the supplementary round for students not matched during the main round. "


The NYCDOE reports that of 86,000 students looking to enter the 9th grade, 44,012 students received their first choice school, and 7,455 could not be assigned to any of their (up to 12) choices.(The figures they give are for what we called rounds 1 and 2 of the new system, described in our paper discussed in a previous post, Matching students to high schools in NYC . The unmatched students will next be informed of the schools that still have vacancies, and be asked for a new preference list of up to 12 choices. Here's a link to the paper again: Abdulkadiroglu, Atila , Parag A. Pathak, and Alvin E. Roth, "Strategy-proofness versus Efficiency in Matching with Indifferences: Redesigning the NYC High School Match,'' revised, November, 2008, American Economic Review, forthcoming. )

Repugnance, and regulation of new markets: surrogate wombs

One of the reasons that people are reluctant to consider legalizing markets for new and possibly repugnant transactions is that it is easy to imagine that bad things can happen in new markets. (Credit default swaps, anyone?). The question of whether it should be legal to buy and sell kidneys for transplantation is the example I've most frequently written about.

But now comes a story about the market for surrogate wombs. A company that did the matchmaking between infertile couples and surrogate moms, and had the couples set up escrow accounts to make guaranteed payments to the surrogate mom over the course of the pregnancy, has collapsed, and the funds with which it was entrusted have disappeared. Here's the story in Slate: If you stop paying a surrogate mother, what happens to the fetus?

"That's the scenario unfolding in California. The victims are couples and surrogates who met through SurroGenesis, a company "dedicated to assisting infertile couples to have a baby through third-party assisted reproduction." Hiring a surrogate through the company is expensive, as you'll see from its long list of fees. But don't worry: The company offers to "arrange for opening of [a] trust account" that will cover your expenses. Specifically, according to the Los Angeles Times, its clients say "SurroGenesis recommended that prospective parents set up trust funds administered by the Michael Charles group," its partner company.
The parents handed over the money. From this, the companies were supposed to pay the surrogates. Now, the Times reports, payments have stopped. In fact, the New York Times adds, "SurroGenesis told clients on March 13 via e-mail that their money was gone. Lawyers say that as much as $2 million may be missing, with some couples losing as much as $90,000."
...
"Surrogates aren't mercenaries. But they do need to be paid for their sacrifices. With every week that passes, they endure more of pregnancy's burdens. They submit to exams, tests, and other procedures. They take on serious medical risks. They forgo activities that might harm the fetus. They lose the ability to commute to and work at other jobs. They have bills to pay. At least one abandoned surrogate says she has received an eviction notice.
"If you stop paying your surrogate, she needs to quit and find another job, just like any other worker. But surrogacy isn't like any other job. The only way to quit a pregnancy is to abort it."

So, we've got a very bad market failure here. Either surrogacy needs to be better regulated, or private institutions have to emerge that will provide more security for these difficult transactions.

Is this kind of failure a reason to make surrogacy illegal? I think that would be way premature; I'm guessing there are happy children being brought up in loving families, borne by surrogates who feel well compensated. But it does mean that, when we debate whether to legalize selling kidneys, for example, the "market design" questions of how any such market might be regulated, and whether the worst failures could reliably be avoided, should be at the center of the discussion.

HT (and congratulations) to Steve Leider (who just took a job at Michigan)

In MA, proposed law makes 60 _obscenely_ old

Eugene Volokh reports Proposed Ban on Making and Distributing Pornography Involving >60-Year-Olds and the Disabled (Including Spouses or Lovers Consensually Photographing Each Other):
"Yup, the law (in Massachusetts) would make it a very serious crime — tantamount to child pornography — to make, and distribute "with lascivious intent," "any visual material that contains a representation or reproduction of any posture or exhibition in a state of nudity" involving anyone age 60 or over, or anyone who has "a permanent or long-term physical or mental impairment that prevents or restricts the individual’s ability to provide for his or her own care or protection."
..."The bill text is here; the provisions that would be amended are here and here; and the definitions of "elder" (anyone age 60 or older) and "person with a disability" ("a person with ) are here. "

HT: Steve Leider

A no-longer repugnant marriage transaction?

The Telegraph reports: Gordon Brown has opened talks with Buckingham Palace on removing the 308-year-old law which bars members of the Royal Family from marrying Roman Catholics.

"Monarchs and members of their family in the order of succession have been banned from marrying Roman Catholics since the Glorious Revolution of 1688, when the Catholic James II was overthrown in favour of the Protestant William of Orange. The prohibition is enshrined in the Bill of Rights passed that year, and the 1701 Act of Settlement.
Rewriting the Act of Settlement requires the consent of all 53 Commonwealth countries, and Mr Brown hopes to discuss the proposal at the Commonwealth summit in November. He has already held private talks about his plans with some Commonwealth leaders.
Sources close to the Prime Minister stressed that the plans would not undermine the Establishment of the Church of England, and that the monarch would retain the role of head of the Church."
...
"During the current Queen's reign, two members of the Royal Family - Prince Michael of Kent and the Earl of St Andrews - renounced their rights of succession after marrying Roman Catholics. Last year, it was announced that Autumn Kelly had renounced her Catholic faith before she was able to marry Mr Phillips."

"Dr Harris said of his Bill: "The Bill will remove the uniquely discriminatory stipulation which currently exists - that an individual in the line of succession to the throne can have a civil partnership with a Catholic, can marry a Muslim or atheist, but can not marry a Catholic."

College admissions: waiting lists

Today is the day when the most highly selective (i.e. lowest percentage of admits) colleges will inform students who they have decided to admit in their regular admissions cycle. (The Ivies are due to announce at 5PM Eastern time, Stanford and some others tomorrow...most less selective colleges and universities have already announced...).

The prospects for college admissions this year sound a little confusing, at least in the NY Times: I'll start with a longish quote that gives the gist of their analysis, and then follow with some comments of my own.

For Top Colleges, Economy Has Not Reduced Interest (or Made Getting in Easier)
"Representatives of Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Yale, and Brown, among other highly selective institutions, said in telephone and e-mail exchanges in recent days that applications for the Class of 2013 had jumped sharply when compared to the previous year’s class. As a result, the percentage of applicants who will receive good news from the eight colleges of the Ivy League (and a few other top schools that send out decision letters this week) is expected to hover at – or near – record lows.
"Bill Fitzsimmons, dean of admissions and financial aid at Harvard since 1986, said that the 29,112 applications Harvard received this year represented an all-time high, and a 6-percentage point increase from last year. He said the percentage of applicants admitted would be 7 percent, down from 8 percent a year ago. Dartmouth said that the 18,130 applications it received was the most in its history, too, and that the 12 percent admitted would be its lowest.
"Stanford said that the 30,350 applications it received represented a 20 percent increase, and that while it estimated a 7.5-percent admission rate, which would be its lowest, it declined to specify a final figure until later in the week.
"Yale, Brown, Columbia, Cornell and Princeton declined to release their final admission rates in advance of sending out most of their decision letters via e-mail at 5 p.m. eastern time on Tuesday. But Brown said it had received 21 percent more applications, overall, compared to a year ago; Yale was up 14 percent; Columbia was up 13 percent and Cornell was up 3 percent. Princeton said that, as of January, it had tallied a 2 percent increase in applications, but anticipated the pool had gotten even larger since then. At the University of Pennsylvania, the number of applications increased by 4 — to 22,939, from 22,935.
"However, applications to highly selective colleges were not up universally. Many of the best-known liberal arts colleges had fewer applications this year."

The reduced applications to liberal arts colleges are probably good news for the high school seniors who made those applications. But it is much less clear that the increased numbers of applications to selective universities will be such good news for those universities (or quite such bad news as the story anticipates for their applicants). In particular, while there may be record numbers of high school graduates this year, it seems likely that they are also applying to more universities than they have in the past.

This may be recession related, as people look for more competing financial aid offers. But it may also just be everyone's reaction to being told by their high school guidance counsellor that this year may be unusually competitive, so that no one can count on getting in at the schools they traditionally expected to go to. That is, if everyone else is applying to more universities, and if additionally, in reaction, universities are going to admit a smaller percentage of applicants, then a rational response is to apply to more schools yourself.

But if this is the case, and if universities' preferences are correlated (as they must be, since they all like high grades and exam scores), then many universities will be admitting the same applicants. Since applicants can accept only one offer of admission, this may mean that the percentage of admitted students who accept their offers ("yield") will be unusually low for many elite universities. (Maybe not for Harvard.)

If that is the case, there should be an unusual number of admits from wait lists this year. Universities have likely prepared for this by putting lots of students on their wait lists. But still, there should be some movement on those lists this year.

So, if you are a high school senior on a wait list, stay cool.

Singapore kidney update

To follow up on my post yesterday about Organ donation and compensation in Singapore: new legislation, Sally Satel points me to The Human Organ Transplant (Amendment) Bill-Closing Speech by the Health Minister, Khaw Boon Wan.

It contains a number of points, not least of which is that the new legislation will legalize Kidney Exchange in Singapore. (It's interesting to note that they are thinking of legislating simultaneous exchange.) More interestingly, the speech elaborates on the manner in which the legislation is meant to continue to prohibit "organ trading," while allowing the reimbursement of donor expenses by the recipients.

All of this will make it interesting to see how procedures in Singapore evolve. Will willing donors become abundant, and will they thrive in the long term? Will the availability of compensation crowd out the familial donors who drive kidney exchange? Will it be possible to restrict payments to expenses and lost wages? As Jeff Ely noted yesterday in his post Organs for Money, "Whether or not the new laws truly legitimize organ sales, markets have a way of organizing themselves around and in-between the cracks of legislation."

Some excerpts from the speech (emphasis added):

"(II) Allow Paired Matching4. All supported the proposal to allow paired matching. Dr Fatimah called for the establishment of a “systematic, proactive and well-organised living donor registry” to support paired matching. I agree. The National Organ Transplant Unit of the Ministry of Health will take charge of this.
5. The same unit will also take charge of setting up a Donor Care Register to monitor the health of the donors. Mdm Halimah and some other Members are curious about the long term health of the living donors. If the donors are well selected, there is good medical evidence overseas to suggest that there are few adverse medical impacts. But there is little local research on this. The proposed register will help us track long-term clinical outcomes and allow us to better understand the long-term impact of organ donation, if any.
6. Prof Thio asked how “pair matched” organ transplants will be regulated. She noted that in other jurisdictions, the transplant surgeries are carried out simultaneously to avoid situations where one of the donors decides to back out. Dr Lim Wee Kiak stressed the need to carry out such procedures simultaneously. Indeed, this will be the requirement for paired matching, that the surgeries will all have to be done simultaneously. Our Bill includes provisions for subsidiary legislation to be made to regulate organ transplant arrangements, including mandating that paired transplants be simultaneously performed, if this is necessary. We can achieve such an outcome administratively since the operations are carried out in our hospitals, but we will study if there is a need for an explicit regulation."
...

"(III) Allow Payment for Living Donors
7. Let me now address the more controversial issue of payment for living donors.
Safeguards against Organ Trading
8. While all Members supported the good intention to reduce the financial losses incurred by donors through reasonable payment, Members were concerned that it might lead to organ trading, and Singapore becoming a regional organ trading hub. For example, Miss Sylvia Lim was concerned that the reimbursement value could become a backdoor to organ trading. During the public consultation stage, the World Health Organization and many Singaporeans expressed a similar concern.
9. Let me reiterate that this Bill does not legalise organ trading. During the public consultation, decriminalising organ trading and the Iranian model were often cited. But this Bill is not to legalise organ trading. Hence, Mdm Halimah’s concern about the Bill affecting Singapore’s relationship with its ASEAN neighbours does not arise. Our Bill in fact contains an amendment to raise the penalty on syndicates involved in organ trading. The Bill is to catch up with what many OECD countries have already done for many years. In drafting our amendments, we took reference from similar legislations in several of these countries. We are correcting our current extreme position of criminalizing all kinds of payment to the donor. For example, currently donors are charged by the hospitals for all their transplant-related medical and surgical expenses. The recipients are prevented by HOTA from reimbursing the donors for these expenses. The proposed amendments will bring us in line with jurisdictions such as the US and UK to allow some payments to be made to the donor.
10. Let me also clarify that we are not making it compulsory to reimburse living donors. We are merely allowing organ recipients, if they wish, to make some payment to cover the financial losses incurred by their donors. In fact, I will not be surprised if many living donors continue the current practice of not requiring any reimbursements from the recipients. This would address the concern of some members that low income recipients may not be able to afford such payment. But in the event that some donors may need such reimbursements and the recipients agree to do so, the law should not prevent it from happening.
11. I must also explain that reimbursement only applies to living donors. It does not apply to cadaveric donation where allocation of organs will continue to be based on tissue matching, time on the waiting list and other clinical factors as objectively determined by an expert committee. Hence the concern of Mdm Halimah and Mr de Souza about rich patients jumping the queue for the cadaveric organs does not arise. Indeed, as carefully pointed out by Mr Sam Tan, the Bill does not discriminate against the poor. Among living donors today, there is a mix of high and low income donors.
12. But as Members put it, the real challenge in donor reimbursement lies in the practical difficulties of making a distinction between what is reasonable payment and what is inducement. I agree with Members that the key lies with putting in place appropriate safeguards. ..."
...

"21. Some of the Members asked who would pay the donors. The organ recipients would make the payment. Some Members suggested that a third party should administer the payment. Some payments will indeed be via a third party. For example, reimbursement for hospital expenses incurred by the donor can be done via the hospital. But there will also be payments which are made directly between the donors and the recipients, without going through a third party. Mdm Halimah suggested that part of the payment can be made via the donor’s Medisave Account. I think it is a good idea, provided the CPF rule allows such a voluntary contribution. Mr Ang Mong Seng suggested having a trust to hold half of the money received by the donor to ensure that it is not frittered away. But such arrangements are best left to the donor and recipient to decide."

"Problem customer" registries for prostitutes

High end prostitutes and others who do business as "escorts" are vulnerable to booking bad customers, who may be abusive, fail to pay, be undercover police officers, insist on unsafe sex, or simply fail to keep their appointments. Because the services prostitutes sell are largely illegal, and because their customers may be anonymous, the market design problem of establishing a recommender/reputation feedback system to identify problem customers is considerable.

But there are several efforts in this direction, including sites which attempt to be available to the profession only (e.g. ProviderBuzz and DangerZone411), and, more accessibly, the National Blacklist Deadbeats Registry (Serving the Escorts Community)
"Our Vision: To see the day when female escorts (meaning; adult service providers, sex workers, call girls, courtesans, etc.) can work free from harm, and with peace of mind from pests, scammers, abusers, harassers, and stalkers."

The site (which requires a paid subscription to be able to search the reports) invites escorts to report and (try to) identify problem customers. The "incident report" form prompts the reporter for any available information identifying the customer (name, email address or phone number, "stated occupation," etc.), for a full physical description, and for a description of the incident, including an address (but with the warning "DO NOT put your address if the incident was at your incall location. You do not want to show YOUR address!")

Abbreviations for frequently reported categories are helpfully provided:
"Legend For Abbreviations
BC Boundary Crosser or Rule Breaker
BAYR Book At Your Risk
BBBJ Bare Back Blow Job
BBFS Bare Back Full Service
BBG Bare Back Greek (Anal)
DNS DO NOT SEE!!! "Bad Client Warning" (Various Reasons)
FDFK Forced Deep French Kissing
ILE Impersonating LE
LE Law Enforcement
M Manipulative, or Threatens to "out you" or ruin your working reputation
PST Phone or internet harasser/phone stalker
RAPE Rapist, any forced penetration without consent
ROB Refuse to pay or took back $ after
RCON Sneaks off condom
SC Short Changer
ST Stalker
NS No Show (NSNC - No Show, No Call)
STD Visible STD
V Violent
VP Physically violent or rough, assault, battery
VA Verbally abusive, rude, threatening, demeaning"

Organ donation and compensation in Singapore: new legislation

A new law was passed on March 24 in Singapore, allowing compensation for live organ donation. It's not yet clear what this will mean in practice: I excerpt below from a number of stories.

Singapore allows payment for living organ donors
"After a heated two-day debate, in which some legislators raised concerns that the new law might lead to open organ trading, four of the 84 members of parliament abstained the final vote and one voted against, the Straits Times newspaper reported.
...
"Not all legislators were convinced, although Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan had assured parliament that the new law "is not to legalise organ trading."
"We are correcting our current extreme position of criminalising all kinds of payment to the donor," Khaw said.
Singapore already had a legal system to prevent organ trading, he said. "And we will be strengthening it," Khaw added.
The new law, which also contained some other changes, allows living organ donors to be reimbursed the costs for items like travel, accommodation, costs of domestic care and child care, loss of income and long-term medical care.
..
"Another dissenter, Halimah Yacob, said that many foreign workers in Singapore, who are hit hard by the recession, could become "a ready and vulnerable pool of organ donors to be exploited and abused.""To a desperate foreign worker, even a reimbursement of S$10,000 would be attractive compared to going home empty-handed with a huge debt waiting for him," the report quoted her as saying.
The Singapore government proposed to change the law after ailing retail magnate Tang Wee Sung was jailed for a day and fined S$17,000 in June last year for trying to buy a kidney from an Indonesian donor.Tang finally received a kidney from former organised crime boss Tan Chor Jin, who was hanged in a Singapore prison in December for the killing of a nightclub owner."

A tough moral choice : Slew of safeguards promised as MPs approve recompense for organ donors, though five remain unconvinced.
"IT WAS a moral dilemma Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan apologised for imposing on Members of Parliament, after two days of intense debate.
Their tough choice: Should they correct the unfairness against: altruistic organ donors by allowing them reimbursement for their financial losses, but at the risk of opening a backdoor for abuse? "

Singapore allows financial payment to organ donors
"Previously, it was illegal for a living donor to be financially compensated but the issue came to a head last year when a local tycoon was jailed for one day for attempting to pay off a prospective Indonesian kidney donor.
"This is a bill about fairness, being fair to donors who do suffer financial consequences as a result of their act of donation," Health Minister Khaw Boon Wan told parliament Tuesday during the final debate on the issue.
"I know the controversial nature of paying donors," Khaw said. "But we also realise that it is unfair to allow genuine donors to bear all the financial consequences of their altruistic acts."
Khaw said he disagreed with the suggestion made by some lawmakers that foreign donors be barred from accepting financial compensation to prevent exploitation of nationals from poor countries.
"How can we discriminate against the foreign donors in this fashion?" Khaw said.
"Once we decide that some payments can be ethically made, our law cannot unfairly discriminate against organ donors based on their nationalities," he said."

Singapore's Human Organ Transplant Act dates from 1986, when it instituted an opt-out system for all of the country's non-Muslim citizens. Under the law, citizens could opt out of becoming organ donors, but all those who did not would be considered as organ donors upon their death, and would in turn receive priority (over those who opted out) for receiving deceased organs. Unusually among countries with opt out policies, organ donation has been enforced even over the objections of next of kin.
As amended in January 2008, the Human Organ Transplant Act (HOTA) now includes Muslim citizens of Singapore.

Giving anonymously, for a fee

How to give money to a friend anonymously (and be sure that it is received)? Try Giving Anonymously, established "to facilitate giving in such a way that "money" does not hinder friendship." They will send along your gift via their own check, and send you a copy of the cancelled check.

Anonymity when giving charity has a long history. It plays a big role in Jewish thought, for example, as codified by the 12th century scholar Rabbi Moshe ben Maimon (aka Maimonides, or the Rambam).

When looking at repugnant transactions, often the addition of money is what arouses repugnance (e.g. kidney donations don't arouse the repugnance of kidney sales). Something like that seems to be at work here; you might like to give someone a gift, they might need and want one, but the complications of giving and receiving money from a friend might prevent an otherwise mutually desired transaction from going through.

What is the price of anonymity? Doing it through this particular anonymizing service costs $2.50 + 2.5% of your gift.

Update (and sign of the hard times): Today's Boston Globe has a story on a related theme: Colleagues pitch in to ease the pain.
"As the economic downturn persists, specialists who follow workplace trends say more employees are trying to save colleagues' jobs through voluntary pay cuts or freezes, furloughs, and donations. "

Markets for (viewing) bodies

Among the oldest repugnant transactions are those that involve dealing with the dead. In the early 1800's, British medical schools illegally purchased cadavers for anatomy classes from grave robbers called "resurrection men," because the only cadavers legally available for dissection were the bodies of executed murderers. (The Harvard Medical School is in Boston rather than Cambridge, I understand, because of an arrangement offered by the city of Boston to supply unclaimed cadavers.) But those constraints have been relaxed over time, and in my 2007 paper Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets, I used as an example the "Bodyworlds" museum shows that tour the world, allowing museum goers to see cadavers (posed as if engaged in lifetime activities) in detail previously available only to medical students (and here is an essay on the value of that experience to medical students: Dead Body of Knowledge).

But while the laws governing the trade in corpses have been relaxed, there remain considerable feelings of repugnance about desecrating corpses, and these museum shows have also aroused opposition. The latest news is that such a show is planned as a travelling exhibit in Israel. Judaism has strong norms about respect for the dead, and it seems likely that there will be considerable controversy: Controversial 'Body Worlds' exhibit based on preserved human bodies scheduled to arrive in Israel next month. Various religious body gearing up for battle against show, arguing it violates the dignity of the dead .

(Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Middle East, the tensions between secular and religious, ancient and modern, is of a very different sort:
Hardline Saudi Clerics Urge TV Ban on Women, Music.
" ''No Saudi women should appear on TV, no matter what the reason,'' the statement said. ''No images of women should appear in Saudi newspapers and magazines.'' ")

Google's auction for TV ads (and some thoughts on Practice and Theory)

Noam Nisan at Algorithmic Game Theory posts a preliminary version of his paper Google's auction for TV ads.

It is part of a post titled AGT and practice, which is worth reading along with the paper. In the paper, Nisan and his coauthors first describe the Google system and some of its requirements, then outline a (too) simple model (an ascending auction of the Demange, Gale, Sotomayor line), and then discuss ways in which the model is too simple.

All of this made me think of writing a post sometime called "Practice and Theory." I don't know that I have enough to say on that right now, but the main idea would be to reflect on some of the ways that market design, and the theoretical work that supports it, differ from traditional (theoretical) game theory.

In a traditional theory paper, a problem is presented, along with a model of that problem, and an exact solution. Producing such a paper is a bit like finding a fixed point: in the course of proving the theorem, it may be necessary to adjust the model, and the statement of the theorem, and perhaps the definition of the problem, in order that the parts all fit together properly.

In a market design paper, in contrast, the problem and to a large extent the model may be fixed in advance, and so what has to be adjusted is the solution. Sometimes an exact solution can't be found (perhaps an impossibility theorem shows that there is no exact solution), and instead some sort of approximate solution is found. Traditional theorists sometimes look at the results and say that they don't look like a good theory paper, which should find an exact solution. Part of our job as market designers, and theorists who do market design, is to help explain this difference.

Update on scalping

My old friend the sports economist Larry DeBrock writes to update my recent post on Scalping and intermediation:

"...the Cubs won a big lawsuit in 2003 after they set up a wholly separate firm “Premium Ticket Services” and transferred GREAT seats to them before opening tickets to the general public. They made some tremendous markups (reported to be 30 times face) on these seats.
Attached is the law review paper about this case.
Jasmin Yang, A Whole Different Ballgame: Ticket Scalping Legislation and Behavioral Economics?, 7 VAND. J. ENT. L. & PRAC. 111, 111 (2004)."

I can't resist adding that, long, long before Larry became Dean of the College of Business at the University of Illinois in Urbana Champaign (so long ago that it was still called the College of Commerce, and the Rand Journal was still the Bell Journal), he coauthored what I always hoped would become the definitive paper on strikes in major league baseball.

Market for book reviews: Amazon version

Here's a nice description of how Amazon's reviews are ordered: at the top are the ones rated most useful, both positive and negative: The Magic Behind Amazon's 2.7 Billion Dollar Question

"Even the behavior of clicking Yes or No is elegant. Amazon tracks who rates each review as helpful, allowing each person to only vote once. This prevents "gaming the system" by voting for a friend's (or your own) review multiple times. Clicking either Yes or No pops up a quick message, saying the vote will take effect within 24 hours. (This delay also reduces gaming.)
Amazon quietly bumps the three most helpful reviews to the top. It tries to balance positive and negative reviews, so shoppers get a balanced perspective. An interesting side effect is how these selected reviews get more votes. If they are controversial (in that not everyone agrees they were helpful), their ratio goes down, allowing the most helpful reviews to bubble up past them."

And here is a discussion of how online recommendation systems might decrease the total diversity of products: Online Monoculture and the End of the Niche (HT to MR)

Algorithmic Game Theory blog

Noam Nisan the eminent Hebrew University computer scientist, has a new blog, called Algorithmic Game Theory.

For economists who may not yet know, Nisan is one of the pioneers on the interface of computer science, game theory, and economics. He's also one of the editors of the book Algorithmic Game Theory, and the advisor of a host of students and postdocs whose work we are going to need to be familiar with as the connections between CS and Econ grow closer.

Here is Nisan's blogroll of related blogs:
Adventures in computation
Combinatorics and more
Computational Complexity
Godel’s lost letter and P=NP
In theory
Market design
Michael Nielsen
My biased coin
My Slice of Pizza
Paul Goldberg
Shtetl optimized
TCS blog aggregator
Terry Tao
WebDiarios de Motocicleta,

and here are some links from my web page on Game Theory and Computer Science.

''Not everything that is immoral has to be illegal'

The quotation in the title of this post is from Romanian Justice Ministry legal expert Valerian Cioclei, and it comes from the NY Times story Romania Weighs Decriminalizing Consensual Incest .

"Three European Union nations -- France, Spain and Portugal -- do not prosecute consenting adults for incest, and Romania is considering following suit.
...
"Incest is defined as sexual intercourse between people too closely related to marry legally. In the United States, all 50 states and the District of Columbia prohibit even consensual incest, although a few states impose no criminal penalties for it..."

Incest is surely one of the prototypical repugnant transactions, namely one that people don't like to have others engage in. Such repugnance is often reflected in law, but by no means always. (E.g. there is no law against going to the front of a long line at the supermarket checkout counter and asking a person near the front to sell you their spot, i.e. to move to the back of the line and let you into their place in return for a cash payment. But here's a story of an economist , Oz Brownlee, who, after trying to do that, decided that the best course of action was to leave the store without buying anything.)

A famous article by Jonathan Haidt (Haidt, J. (2001). The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 108, 814-834 ) begins with an example of consensual incest.
"Julie and Mark are brother and sister. They are traveling together in France on summer vacation from college. One night they are staying alone in a cabin near the beach. They decide that it would be interesting and fun if they tried making love. At very least it would be a new experience for each of them. Julie was already taking birth control pills, but Mark uses a condom too, just to be safe. They both enjoy making love, but they decide not to do it again. They keep that night as a special secret, which makes
them feel even closer to each other.
What do you think about that, was it OK for them to make love?

"Most people who hear the above story immediately say that it was wrong for the siblings to make love, and they then set about searching for reasons (Haidt, Bjorklund, & Murphy, 2000). They point out the dangers of inbreeding, only to remember that Julie and Mark used two forms of birth control. They argue that Julie and Mark will be hurt, perhaps emotionally, even though the story makes it clear that no harm befell them. Eventually,
many people say something like “I don’t know, I can’t explain it, I just know it’s wrong.” But what model of moral judgment allows a person to know that something was wrong, without knowing why?"

Haidt (and colleagues, particularly Paul Rozin) have studied the emotion of disgust, and think that a lot of moral judgements may be mediated by the disgust reaction (whose initial evolutionary significance is presumably to prevent us from eating spoiled food, etc.). This makes a lot of sense for incest (because evolution should help us avoid inbreeding, with the excessive concentration of recessive genes in offspring).

I suspect that many of the more clearly economic transactions that are or have been regarded as repugnant are less closely tied to hard-wired disgust. That is not to say that, as people who are culturally acclimated to find some kind of transaction repugnant (e.g. charging interest on loans was repugnant for centuries in Europe), we may not be able to recruit our disgust reaction to make sense of things we disapprove of. Just as not every repugnant transaction is against the law, they may not all originate with (or even activate in a secondary manner) feelings of disgust. (See my other posts on repugnant transactions for a variety of examples...)

Update: see an article on disgust and moral judgement in the March 2009 issue of The Jury Expert (a very task oriented journal focused on picking and persuading jurors): Grime and Punishment: How Disgust Influences Moral, Social and Legal judgments

School choice in Belgium: update

In an earlier post, I discussed some of the problems in the school choice systems in Belgium, and noted that Estelle Cantillon had organized a conference on the subject in Brussels in January.

Estelle's conference has had some effect. She writes "The parliament of the French-speaking Community will adopt tomorrow a new school enrollment decree. The article says that it will be centralized (coordination among networks), that parents will be asked for their preferences, ... The details will be worked out after the elections in June. " Inscriptions: un nouveau décret, trois mesures