College admissions and "demonstrated interest"

Signaling is important, says a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed: The Dynamics of Demonstrated Interest

"This year, American University received a record 17,000 admissions applications, a 13 percent increase over last year.

.... as colleges become more selective, they often find themselves competing with institutions a rung or two higher on the ladders of selectivity and desirability, at least for the top students.

Although there's prestige in this kind of association, there's also uncertainty. How many applicants would turn down a super-selective, big-name college to attend a somewhat less-selective, less-famous one? How do you know whether a student considers your college a top choice or a "safety school"? How does an applicant's sense of "fit" with a college relate not only to matriculation, but also retention?

"In recent years, such questions have prompted American's admissions team to look more closely at "demonstrated interest," the popular term for the contact students make with a college during the application process, such as by visiting the campus, participating in an interview, or e-mailing an admissions representative. In theory, it's a way to measure the likelihood that an applicant will matriculate—and succeed if they do.

"The practice is not new, but its importance has grown at some selective colleges in this era of ballooning applications and economic uncertainty. From 2003 to 2006, the percentage of colleges rating demonstrated interest as a "considerably important" factor increased to 21 percent from 7 percent, according to an annual survey by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. Since then, that number has held steady (another 27 percent of colleges now deem it "moderately important"). ...

"Recently, American has created more opportunities for students to do just that. The admissions office has broadened its recruitment strategies to include online chats for prospective applicants. Participation is noted in each student's file. ...

"Demonstrated interest often dovetails with another strategy for managing uncertainty: the waiting list. This year, American offered a spot on its waiting list to about 2,000 students, a seemingly large number considering that the university had accepted approximately 7,300 students for its freshman enrollment target of 1,450.

"Applicants who received waiting-list invitations from American fit a range of descriptions. Some were less competitive than the applicants the university accepted, but others were top-notch students who did not seem like a good fit for the university. In some cases, the reason was a lack of demonstrated interest, Ms. Alston says."

Teachers who tamper with standardized test scores

"John Fremer, a specialist in data forensics who was hired by an independent panel to dig deeper into the Atlanta schools, and who investigated earlier scandals in Texas and elsewhere, said educator cheating was rising. “Every time you increase the stakes associated with any testing program, you get more cheating,” he said."

From the NY Times story: Under Pressure, Teachers Tamper With Test Scores, reporting that "investigations in Georgia, Indiana, Massachusetts, Nevada, Virginia and elsewhere this year have pointed to cheating by educators. Experts say the phenomenon is increasing as the stakes over standardized testing ratchet higher — including, most recently, taking student progress on tests into consideration in teachers’ performance reviews."

Afghan child weddings

The NY Times writes about the floggings administered to twp runaway child brides, in a story that also includes some interesting background: Child Brides Escape Marriage, but Not Lashes.

The case of Khadija Rasoul, 13, and Basgol Sakhi, 14, from the village of Gardan-i-Top, in the Dulina district of Ghor Province, central Afghanistan, was notable for the failure of the authorities to do anything to protect the girls, despite opportunities to do so.Forced into a so-called marriage exchange, where each girl was given to an elderly man in the other’s family, Khadija and Basgol later complained that their husbands beat them when they tried to resist consummating the unions. "

Super duper

Duper of Harvard Got Into Stanford
Student Accused of Lying to Harvard Was Admitted to Stanford, Too

"Adam Wheeler, the Delaware man charged with lying about his credentials to get into Harvard and to secure nearly $50,000 in financial aid and prizes, was later admitted to Stanford as a transfer student, Massachusetts prosecutors said in court documents released Wednesday."
"Cara O’Brien, a spokeswoman for Middlesex Superior Court in Massachusetts, told my colleague Abby Goodnough that the documents reveal that Mr. Wheeler was admitted to Stanford this year as a transfer student for the 2010-11 school year. Massachusetts authorities have said that Mr. Wheeler left Harvard last fall after university officials confronted him with allegations that much of his application for a Rhodes Scholarship had been plagiarized."

See my earlier post for the background: College admissions fraud, at Harvard

Update: and here's the Dec. 16, 2010 Globe story covering his guilty plea and sentencing.

Personal data for sale

Web Start-Ups Offer Bargains for Users’ Data

The budgeting Web site Mint.com, for example, displays discount offers from cable companies or banks to users who reveal their personal financial data, including bank and credit card information. The clothing retailerBluefly could send offers for sunglasses to consumers who disclose that they just bought a swimsuit. And location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla ask users to volunteer their location in return for rewards like discounts on Pepsi drinks or Starbucks coffee.

These early efforts are predicated on a shift in the relationship between consumer and company. Influenced by consumers’ willingness to trade data online, the sites are pushing to see how much information people will turn over."...

"New companies including WeShop, Aprizi, Blippy and Dopplr are trying to exploit the data that people seem so willing to give up. Some are even allowing shoppers to set what terms they want — free shipping, half-price discounts, only fair-trade products. They can also list what they are shopping for, like a gray cashmere sweater under $100, for instance, and let the retailers fight it out for the right to make a sale.

“The whole privacy debate has grown up around people using your data without your permission,” said Antony Lee, chief executive of WeShop. “If you want to use your data to your benefit, that’s for you to do,” Mr. Lee said."

Experimental economics and market design

As I prepare my chapter on that subject for volume 2 of the Handbook of Experimental Economics, I've belatedly posted a related paper, which has a section on experiments in market design from which I'll cheerfully borrow:

Roth, Alvin E. " Is Experimental Economics Living Up to Its Promise? , in Frechette, Guillaume and Andrew Schotter (editors), in The Methods of Modern Experimental Economics , Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

Outsourcing online courtship

The Washington Post has a story about services (like Virtual Dating Assistants) that allow online courtship to be outsourced: Online dating assistants help the lonely and busy

"Last June, Valdez, now 25, founded Virtual Dating Assistants -- a company that "specializes in making the dating dreams of busy individuals come true."

"Author Timothy Ferriss popularized the concept when he wrote about outsourcing his online dating accounts to teams of competing writers in his 2007 book, "The 4-Hour Work Week."

"Valdez's Atlanta-based firm is hardly the only outfit to offer such services. Dozens of profile-writing shops such as Arlington County-based TargetLove have popped up in the past few years, and dating coaches are increasingly managing their clients' online pursuits. Not to mention the well-intentioned friends and relatives who have taken over the process for the hapless singles in their lives.

"But Valdez and his team of 45 freelance writers, including Hartshorn, do it all: write a client's profile, pick out potential matches, send introductory e-mails and message back and forth until a date is confirmed. Then they turn over the correspondence and tell the lucky fellow where and when he's meeting Madame X. (And it's almost always that gender dynamic; 80 percent of the firm's clients are men.)...

"Mark Brooks, founder of Online Personals Watch, a site that tracks Internet dating trends, says this type of outsourcing is an ethically questionable form of "misrepresentation." Still, he expects the field to grow.

"Professional matchmakers often charge $5,000 or more a year and have a limited pool of matches. Online dating sites are populated with countless singles but can require more attention than some users are willing to devote. "It may look like instant gratification, like you dive into the pool and instantly come up with a fish, but it doesn't really work like that," Brooks says. "You've got to tap, tap, tap on the keyboard quite a lot to get anywhere."

The market for young soccer players

The NY Times Sunday Magazine reports on How a Soccer Star Is Made . (Shades of both Harry Potter and Ender's Game...)


"The youth academy of the famed dutch soccer club Ajax is grandiosely called De Toekomst — The Future. ...Ajax once fielded one of the top professional teams in Europe. With the increasing globalization of the sport, which has driven the best players to richer leagues in England, Germany, Italy and Spain, the club has become a different kind of enterprise — a talent factory. It manufactures players and then sells them, often for immense fees, on the world market.
...
"Like other professional clubs in Europe and around the world, Ajax operates something similar to a big-league baseball team’s minor-league system — but one that reaches into early childhood. ... for some families, the first time they realize their boys are under serious consideration is when a letter arrives from Ajax requesting that they bring their sons in for a closer look, an invitation that is almost never declined.
...
"Ajax puts young players into a competitive caldron, a culture of constant improvement in which they either survive and advance or are discarded. It is not what most would regard as a child-friendly environment, but it is one that sorts out the real prodigies — those capable of playing at an elite international level — from the merely gifted.
...
"About 200 players train at De Toekomst at any given time, from ages 7 to 19. (All are male; Ajax has no girls’ program.) Every year, some in each age group are told they cannot return the following year — they are said to have been “sent away” — and new prospects are enrolled in their place.
...
"I asked Martin Jol, the coach of Ajax’s first team, if it was difficult for him to nurture young players knowing he would lose them just as their talent blossomed. “I think that is the purpose of Ajax, to develop players and bring them up to the first team as young as possible,” he answered. “And then we sell them, not for peanuts but for a lot of money.”
...
"In the U.S., we think of money as corrupting sport, especially youth sport. At Ajax, it is clarifying. With the stakes so high — so much invested and the potential for so much in return — De Toekomst is a laboratory for turning young boys into high-impact performers in the world’s most popular game. "
...
"Parents pay nothing except a nominal insurance fee of 12 euros a year, and the club covers the rest — salaries for 24 coaches, travel to tournaments, uniforms and gear for the players and all other costs associated with running a vast facility. Promising young players outside the Ajax catchment area usually attend academies run by other Dutch professional clubs, where the training is also free, as it is in much of the rest of the soccer-playing world for youths with pro potential. (The U.S., where the dominant model is “pay to play” — the better an athlete, the more money a parent shells out — is the outlier.)
" How the U.S. develops its most promising young players is not just different from what the Netherlands and most elite soccer nations do — on fundamental levels, it is diametrically opposed.
Americans like to put together teams, even at the Pee Wee level, that are meant to win. The best soccer-playing nations build individual players, ones with superior technical skills who later come together on teams the U.S. struggles to beat. In a way, it is a reversal of type. Americans tend to think of Europeans as collectivists and themselves as individualists. But in sports, it is the opposite. The Europeans build up the assets of individual players. Americans underdevelop the individual, although most of the volunteers who coach at the youngest level would not be cognizant of that.
...
"De Toekomst is not where you come to hear a romantic view of sport. No one pretends that its business is other than what it is. “We sold Wesley Sneijder for a ridiculous amount of money,” Versloot said. “We can go on for years based on what he was sold for.”
...
"Versloot said that, on average, one and a half products of De Toekomst per season will rise to the first team and go on to a significant, well-compensated pro career. Some of the others will gravitate to second- or third-tier pro circuits or the high amateur ranks in the Netherlands, where the best players make “black money,” under-the-table payments. The pressure to emerge from the academy as one of its top products — and to produce them — is immense. “It is always a very tense atmosphere here, for everyone,” Versloot said. “You have to just get used to it.”
...
"Fulham, like Ajax, is often a seller of talent. It recently sold a 20-year-old to Manchester United for seven million pounds, or more than $10 million. “It’s a little ugly talking about the financial terms,” Jennings said. “I don’t like to do it. It feels not too far off from the slave trade."

"Everyone draws the line somewhere. Jennings told me that he recently received a call from a rival club asking if it could schedule a game against his “elite 5s” — 5-year-olds. He replied, “We don’t have elite 5s, but we’ll play your expectant mothers.”
...

"Ronald de Jong invited me to go scouting with him one Saturday. He had his eye on a specific target — “a 2004,” he said, referring to a birth year. A 5-year-old whom he had seen and was checking in with every month or so. This boy might not even be in school yet, I pointed out. “I don’t think he is,” de Jong said with a slight smile, as if he recognized the absurdity. “I believe he’s in day care.”

Auction design patents

My market design colleagues and I have tried to put our algorithms for school choice, kidney exchange, and labor market clearinghouses in the public domain. But in one very competitive commercial area of market design, involving auction rules, it is not uncommon for designers to seek patents.

System and method for a hybrid clock and proxy auction is a patent issued on June 1, 2010 to Larry Ausubel, Peter Cramton, and Paul Milgrom. (Here is a link to other auction patents by Ausubel et al.)

National Kidney Foundation: End the Wait

Here's a press release from the NKF: NKF Names Co-Chairs for END THE WAIT! Exec Committee

"Transplant surgeon Dr. Francis L. Delmonico and non-directed kidney donor Bill Singleton were named the first co-Chairs of the END THE WAIT! Executive Committee, the National Kidney Foundation (NKF) announced June 4.

NKF launched the END THE WAIT! initiative at the start of 2009 to address the urgent need to increase the number of organs available for transplantation in the United States.

"The END THE WAIT! initiative is a virtual call-to-arms that the current system of organ donation and transplantation is not sustainable to fulfill the needs of our patients. In collaboration with other major organizations in the kidney care, donation and transplant communities, we are leading this charge to address the inconsistent practices across the United States that are no longer acceptable," said John Davis, National Kidney Foundation CEO. “We know that Dr. Delmonico's vast professional experience as one of the nation's preeminent transplant experts and Mr. Singleton's personal experience as a living donor will help provide the knowledge and perspective needed to move our ambitious agenda forward and implement our END THE WAIT! recommendations.”

END THE WAIT! recommendations focus on improving the donation process, eliminating barriers to donation, instituting best practices and increasing living and deceased donation.

The recently-passed Healthcare Reform Bill prohibits insurance companies from denying medical coverage to those with pre-existing conditions. In the past, living kidney donors had been viewed as having a pre-existing medical condition by some insurance companies and denied medical coverage. Certainly, such practices constitute barriers to donation and eliminating that was one of the END THE WAIT! recommendations," Davis added.

“We will continue to fight for patients to receive comparable care from one region of the country to another, for example by maximizing programs such as paired kidney donation that are not currently accessible to all patients,” said Dr. Delmonico, transplant surgeon at Massachusetts General Hospital and Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School. “Others priorities will focus on removing disincentives to living donation, including covering all donation-related expenses.”

“The list of Americans now waiting for organs continues to increase each day,” said Singleton, a long-time NKF volunteer and former board member who became a kidney donor in December 2009 as part of the largest kidney exchange in the world to date. “I'm committed to helping other potential donors learn more about the process. I know we can help educate people and remove barriers through END THE WAIT!”

Market design at 9am

A former student, Abe Othman, endorses our market design course even though it was held early Friday mornings: Foundational Paper: The Economist as Engineer

College waiting lists and double depositing

An article on congestion in college admissions: The Dirty College Admissions Trick.

"Why are waitlists so long this year? Marc Zawel on the increasingly common practice of "double depositing," and how a few bad apples could land you in waitlist limbo all summer long."
HT: Steve Leider

A market design collaboration between an economist and computer scientists

I've written earlier about the work on course allocation by Eric Budish. The new mechanism he proposed is by no means computationally trivial to implement, and together with Abe Othman, a computer science grad student at CMU (who took my Market Design class when he was an undergraduate at Harvard), he has been working on making this a practical too. A report of their work has now appeared:

Finding Approximate Competitive Equilibria: Efficient and Fair
Course Allocation, Abraham Othman, Eric Budish, and Tuomas Sandholm, Proc. of 9th Int. Conf. on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2010), van der Hoek, Kaminka, Lespérance, Luck and Sen (eds.), May, 10–14, 2010, Toronto, Canada, pp. 873-880


Abstract: In the course allocation problem, a university administrator seeks to efficiently and fairly allocate schedules of over-demanded courses to students with heterogeneous preferences. We investigate how to computationally implement a recently-proposed theoretical solution to this problem (Budish, 2009) which uses approximate competitive equilibria to balance notions of efficiency, fairness, and incentives. Despite the apparent similarity to the well-known combinatorial auction problem we show that no polynomial-size mixedinteger program (MIP) can solve our problem. Instead, we develop a two-level search process: at the master level, the center uses tabu search over the union of two distinct neighborhoods to suggest prices; at the agent level, we use MIPs to solve for student demands in parallel at the current prices. Our method scales near-optimally in the number of processors used and is able to solve realistic-size
problems fast enough to be usable in practice.

Money and medicine in Britain's National Health Service

The London Times reports NHS bars woman after she saw private doctor

"A WOMAN has been denied an operation on the NHS after paying for a private consultation to deal with her severe back pain.
Jenny Whitehead, a breast cancer survivor, paid £250 for an appointment with the orthopaedic surgeon after being told she would have to wait five months to see him on the NHS. He told her he would add her to his NHS waiting list for surgery.
She was barred from the list, however, and sent back to her GP. She must now find at least £10,000 for private surgery, or wait until the autumn for the NHS operation to remove a cyst on her spine. "

The managing of waiting lists for scarce resources is a tough business.

Kidney exchange at VA hospitals

It's exciting to see kidney exchange growing. The issues that the Veterans Affairs hospitals face reflect the progress in the last few years at other kinds of hospitals and kidney exchange networks.

Paired kidney exchange attracts VA: Growing practice may be allowed at four hospitals that do transplants

"Sometime in the next month, more than 600 veterans waiting for kidney transplants at VA hospital transplant centers in Pittsburgh and three other locations across the country could have a new option for finding an organ match.
William Gunnar, national director of surgery for the Veterans Health Administration, said he is reviewing the idea of letting the four VA hospitals that do kidney transplants -- in Pittsburgh, Nashville, Iowa City and Portland -- join the still novel but growing practice known as paired kidney exchange."
...
"Kidney transplant administrators at all four VA hospitals said they would like to take part in paired kidney exchanges after discussing it for four years, and are hoping for a favorable review from the central office.
"It's a no-brainer," said Mohan Ramkumar, kidney transplant program medical director at VA Pittsburgh Healthcare, which has 194 people on its waiting list and does about 40 transplants annually. "The more transplants you can do, the more money you save from dialysis, and the more people you help."
"I don't know if it will do a tremendous amount to cut down on our waiting list, but it could help. It would be one more option," said Dr. Ramkumar.
Last year, of the roughly 17,000 kidney transplants done nationally, 304 of them were the result of paired exchanges. But that's up from just 74 in 2006, according to The United Network for Organ Sharing, an organization that oversees the nation's organ and transplant network. Experts expect those figures to continue to grow rapidly as the concept takes hold."
...
"The VA used to have 20 hospitals that did kidney transplants. But when Medicare in 1973 started paying for all kidney transplants, veterans chose private hospitals for transplants, and the VA closed its programs.
When Medicare started charging co-pays for its services in the 1990s, veterans asked the VA to do kidney transplants. In 2001, the VA chose three hospitals to restart their programs, with Pittsburgh joining them a year later."
...
"Though most of the nation's kidney transplant centers already are members of at least one of the various paired kidney exchange consortium -- which orchestrate exchanges between different hospitals -- the VA has moved more cautiously.
"There have been some accusations over the years that this ethically and legally borders on potentially selling organs," said Dr. Gunnar.
A 2007 federal law specifically said that paired kidney exchanges was not selling organs, which would be a violation of the National Organ Transplant Act, but Dr. Gunnar said a legal opinion was still needed to move forward.
Ethically, a big issue for paired kidney exchanges is dealing with altruistic donors not tied to a specific transplant recipient, said Judy Kazmar, kidney transplant coordinator for the Portland VA hospital, which has 152 people on its waiting list and does about 30 transplants a year there.
"We're pretty conservative here. And with donors, we need to know, what's their motive for donating?" Ms. Kazmar said. "I think paired donations is a good idea, but it has a lot of logistics to it to work out."
If the VA does decide to go ahead with paired exchanges, one idea would be to start with its own pilot program of sorts.
"I think a consortium among ourselves would be best to start with, and then look at joining a larger consortium or national program," said Anthony Langone, kidney transplant medical director for the Nashville VA hospital, which has about 200 people on its waiting list and does about 30 kidney transplants a year.
The VA also is debating how to pay the thousands of dollars to pre-screen potential donors -- some of whom might not donate -- and how to assign long-term, post-surgical care to donors who aren't veterans, said Dr. Thomas.
"We as a nation have done badly dealing with long-term care for living donors," he said. "We want to make sure we get it right." "

Veil travails

French cabinet approves veil ban
" The French cabinet has approved a draft law to ban the wearing of full-face veils in public spaces, opening the way for the text to go before parliament in July.The bill calls for $185 fines and, in some cases, citizenship classes for women do not comply with the ban.
Addressing the cabinet meeting on Wednesday, Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, said: "Citizenship should be experienced with an uncovered face. There can be no other solution but a ban in all public places."...
"The bill includes a new offence - inciting to hide the face - with anyone convicted of forcing a woman to wear such a veil risking a year in prison and a $18,555 fine."
...
"The bill is set to go before parliament in July and is widely expected to become law."

Design of financial clearinghouses: Over the counter derivatives markets

The Bank for International Settlements' Committee on Payment and Settlement Systems has, in a followup to the recent financial crisis, issued two reports.


The first concerns clearinghouses-- Central Counterparties (CCPs). Here is the summary, and the report. From the summary:

"Over the past several years, public and private sector entities have undertaken a coordinated effort to improve the post-trade infrastructure for OTC derivatives transactions. The recent financial crisis demonstrated the need to further enhance the safety and transparency in the OTC derivatives markets. As a result, authorities in many jurisdictions have set out several important policy initiatives encouraging greater use of CCPs for OTC derivatives markets. The CPSS and the Technical Committee of IOSCO support these positive developments.
A well designed CCP can reduce the risks and uncertainties faced by market participants and contribute to the goal of financial stability. Nevertheless, because of the complex risk characteristics and market design of OTC derivatives products, clearing them safely and efficiently through a CCP presents unique challenges that clearing listed or cash-market products may not. "


Some of the challenges seem to be in making the products well defined...


These apply also to Trade Repositories, which are meant to be simple registers of what positions are held. Again, here's the summary and the report.

Promoting young faculty at Harvard

The Chronicle reports At Harvard, Tenure Isn't Just for Old People Anymore (and the issue, they surmise, is two career households).

"For decades, assistant professors at Harvard University knew better than to get too comfortable. After all, they probably wouldn't be staying there very long.
Unlike the typical university, Harvard didn't have a tenure track. Instead, most young scholars spent several years capitalizing on the university's famous name and resources, then moved on to a tenured job somewhere else. Meanwhile, Harvard usually reserved tenure for senior stars with established reputations whom it lured away from other universities.
In the last several years, however, Harvard has changed. Of the 41 people to whom the university offered tenure last year, half started as junior scholars there. The university had been finding it harder to persuade senior faculty members to pick up their families and move, even to storied Cambridge, so it has developed a tenure track and begun grooming those coming up through the ranks."...

"Plucking senior scholars from other campuses worked well for Harvard when the desired scholars had spouses or other partners who didn't work. "It used to be that if you were Harvard, you crooked your finger and people came," says Susan Carey, who heads the university's psychology department.
But over the last couple of decades, as dual-career couples became the norm, Harvard's offers were less compelling. Many senior scholars were unwilling to move if it meant spouses had to give up their jobs.
"The old days when the guy came home and said, 'Honey, we're moving to Cambridge, pack up,' just don't exist anymore," says Lizabeth Cohen, chairwoman of the history department. "We were investing huge amounts of time in senior searches and not getting the yield to make it worth it." "

Spousal Hiring

In The Intricacies of Spousal Hiring, David Bell, a former Johns Hopkins dean writes

"My experience in the dean's office confirmed my impressions as to the need for spousal hiring. Johns Hopkins simply could not have built its faculty without a willingness to create positions for spouses and partners.
In case after case, that willingness was, by far, the single most important factor in recruitment. We could increase a salary offer by tens of thousands of dollars a year; provide lavish research accounts; promise a scandalous number of sabbatical leaves—none of it mattered if it meant that a candidate still faced the prospect of a long-distance commute or a major professional sacrifice by a spouse."

Paul Milgrom on spectrum auctions in India and Germany

Paul Milgrom writes on Success in Spectrum Auctions in India and Germany, in which he played an active role consulting to bidders.