Dov Samet on marrying well

Dubi Samet has a paper on stable marriage, explaining why you might have married as well as you did, and explaining how, when there is substantial agreement on rankings, you and your spouse can't have done too differently well.

(I conclude that if, like me, you "married up" it is because your spouse has contrarian tastes.)

The paper is "Matching of like rank and the size of the core in the marriage problem" by Dov Samet

"Abstract: When men and women are objectively ranked in a marriage problem, say by beauty, then pairing individuals of equal rank is the only stable matching. We generalize this observation by providing bounds on the size of the rank gap between mates in a stable matchings in terms of the size of the ranking sets. Using a metric on the set of matchings, we provide bounds on the diameter of the core---the set of stable matchings---in terms of the size of the ranking sets and in terms of the size of the rank gap. We conclude that when the set of rankings is small, so are the core and the rank gap in stable matchings."

Game theory from A to Z

I'll be travelling this morning to Stony Brook, to participate in the part of their annual festival that is celebrating Bob Aumann's 80th birthday, and Shmuel Zamir's 70th.

Here's a picture I took of the two of them at a Stony Brook party in honor of Lloyd Shapley in the summer of 2003.

"Aumann" and "Zamir" were two of the first names I learned to conjure with, when I started studying game theory in the 1970's.

יום הולדת שמח, Happy birthday Bob and Shmuel.

And here's the program.

The Stony Brook Game Theory Festival of the Game Theory Society in Honor of Robert Aumann’s Eightieth Birthday

July 15, 2010 in Honor of Shmuel Zamir’s Seventieth Birthday

9:00 - 9:45	Olivier Gossner (Paris School of Economics & London School of Economics) The robustness of incomplete codes of law
9:45 - 10:00	Coffee Break
10:00 - 10:30	Alfredo Di Tillio (Bocconi University) Reasoning about Conditional Probability and Counterfactuals
10:30 - 11:00	Eduardo Faingold (Yale University) The strategic impact of higher-order beliefs
11:00 - 11:15	Coffee Break
11:15 - 11:45	Marco Scarsini (LUISS) On the Core of Dynamic Cooperative Games
11:45 - 12:15	Todd Kaplan (University of Haifa) The Benefits of Costly Voting
12:15 - 13:45	Lunch Break
13:45 - 14:30	Robert John Aumann (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) My Shmuel
14:30 - 14:45	Coffee Break
14:45 - 15:30	Abraham Neyman (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) The Rate of Convergence in Repeated Games with Incomplete Information
15:30 - 16:15	Shmuel Zamir (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem) On Bayesian-Nash Equilibria Satisfying the Condorcet Jury Theorem: The Dependent Case
16:15 - 16:30	Coffee Break
16:30 - 17:15	Al Roth (Harvard University) Matching with Couples: Stability and Incentives in Large Markets
18:00 - 21:30	Reception Dinner (Three Village Inn)

Hiring Indian wombs

Steve Leider writes:

The Indian Parliament will be considering legislation to regulate the practice of commercial surrogacy in India. There are approximately 350 clinics overseeing an estimated 1500 pregnancy attempts annually, one third of which involve foreigners, making up a $445 million industry. Surrogacy in India is much cheaper than in the United States: “The entire process costs customers around $23,000 — less than one-fifth of the going rate in the U.S. — of which the surrogate mother usually receives about $7,500 in installments.”

Surrogacy in India has been largely unregulated since being legalized in 2002 - the Indian Council of Medical Research issued guidelines in 2005, but IVF clinics often establish their own policies. The draft legislation proposes several substantial restrictions:

“Exploitation of surrogates by infertile couples, and vice versa, has been a serious concern ever since in-vitro fertilization (IVF) started in India. ‘But this will put an end to it. Infertile couples don't have to go hunting for surrogate mothers. The bank will help them get one. As a result, the couple will have all information about her background and medical history before hiring her womb,’ said Dr R S Sharma, deputy director general of Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR), who has been involved in the process of drafting the Bill.”

“These banks - both private and government - will be accredited by state boards. The board will also have a registration authority which will maintain a list of all IVF centres and monitor their functioning. ‘So far we didn't have any law regarding surrogacy. This is a step towards legalizing surrogacy and fixing responsibilities of the parties involved in the process," said Dr Sharma’”….

“These ART [Assisted Reproductive Technology] banks will be independent of IVF clinics. Oocyte (unfertilized egg) and semen preservation will be their main focus. ‘In the past few years, IVF clinics have mushroomed in the country. There is no check on their practices. There is no quality check on the semen and oocytes preserved by them and offered to infertile couples. These banks will have a proper system, where every minor detail about gametes and surrogates will be documented,’ said a senior doctor at AIIMS who too is involved in the drafting of the bill.”

“Experts say that once a bank is in place, it will maintain a database of surrogate mothers. A woman is allowed five live births, including her own children. ‘It has been seen that poor women sell their womb several times for money. This has a damaging effect on their body. The new bill clearly states that a woman can't have more than five live births and donate oocytes more than six times in her life,’ said Dr Sharma.”….

“The bill proposes stringent rules for foreigners looking for surrogate mothers. It will be mandatory for foreign couples to submit two certificates - one on their country's policy on surrogacy and the other stating that the child born to the surrogate mother will get their country's citizenship. "They also have to nominate a local guardian, who will take care of the surrogate during the gestation period," said Dr Sharma.”

Prominent IVF doctors like Dr. Nayna Patel (who was featured on the Oprah Winfrey Show in 2007) have objected to the new regulations:

It's a suggestion that has caused a stir in the medical community. Patel insists that she will not accept a surrogate sent to Akanksha unless she herself is permitted to perform medical and background checks. She maintains that ART banks will not have enough experience to determine whether a woman is fit for surrogacy, let alone replicate the personal bonds she cultivates with her surrogates. ‘The trust they have with me is what makes the whole thing secure and safe,’ she says. ‘And at the end, when they want to buy a house or a piece of land for farming, we get them the best deal. With this bill, we will not know what they are going to do with such a big amount of money.’”

Two recent court cases highlighted the need for increased regulation. In 2008 a Japanese couple divorced during the surrogacy:

“The husband still wanted to raise Manji, but his ex-wife did not. The father found himself in a catch-22. India requires that a child be legally adopted before leaving the country, but bars single men from adopting. Manji's father was denied travel documents for the baby. The situation was widely covered in Indian and global media, and grew into a legal and diplomatic crisis. Manji was eventually permitted to leave for Japan [after custody was granted to the child’s grandmother].”

A German couple also experienced legal problems:

“Since the day they were delivered more than two years ago, twin toddlers Nikolas and Leonard Balaz have been stateless and stranded in India. Their parents are German nationals, but the woman to whom the babies were born is a 20-something Indian surrogate from Gujarat. The boys were refused German passports because the country does not recognize surrogacy as a legitimate means of parenthood. And India doesn't typically confer citizenship on surrogate-born children conceived by foreigners. Last week, Germany relented, issuing the Balazes travel visas, and the entire family is finally going home.”

Surrogacy is also subject to substantial disapproval within India, being criticized as the "commoditisation of motherhood" and “a peculiar form of prostitution”. Surrogates often hide their pregnancy by moving away from friends and family temporarily: "Otherwise, we'll be treated like social pariahs… This isn't a respectable thing to do in our society." Others say it is their husbands’ baby, and then after giving the baby to the intended parents say the newborn has died. The Catholic Church has also opposed the new law for legitimizing surrogacy:

“An Oriental-rite Catholic Church in Kerala says it plans to try and torpedo an upcoming bill to legalize surrogacy in India, which it says will destabilize a family system already struggling ‘under Western influence.’ ‘The Church will take all possible steps to stop the bill and will alert elected state representatives about the impact it will have on family life,’ Syro-Malabar Church spokesman Father Paul Thelakat told ucanews.com on June 24. ‘We have been teaching our faithful about moral living, so if the government enacts a bill which is against our teachings, how can we sit idle,’ the priest said.”

A documentary focusing on the outsourcing of surrogacy (particularly to India) called Google Baby recently premiered on HBO (an additional trailer is available on the director’s website).

The market for musicians (in top orchestras)

Need a Job? Help Wanted at the N.Y. Philharmonic . These posts, naturally, are rarefied and have little to do with the normal job picture nationwide. But the number of openings prompts the question of why so many spots stand vacant in a market glutted with talented musicians looking to move up to better orchestras or just to find jobs.

"The economy has had an effect. It is cheaper to leave jobs unfilled and to pay substitutes, who usually receive close to the minimum base pay and fewer benefits. Starting salaries at the 10 top-paying orchestras next season range from $101,600 (Minnesota) to $136,500 (Los Angeles), but principal players can earn two or three times that.

“It happens that you do save money,” Mr. Mehta acknowledged, but he said the lingering vacancies in New York were not cost-saving measures."...

"The elaborate logistical demands of orchestral auditions cause delays. First auditions are advertised. Then time must pass for applicants to send in résumés and tapes and practice the assigned excerpts from the orchestral literature. A committee of players, usually in the section, has to be formed, and preliminary rounds of auditions have to be scheduled. After the finalists are chosen, a time must be found when the busy music director and committee members can hear them. The process can easily stretch out for many months.

"Often no winner is chosen. That happened last year with the Philharmonic’s principal clarinet job. Two rounds of auditions for associate principal horn player and a double bassist also produced no result. The music director in New York has final say but makes the decision in consultation with the committee.

"The Boston Symphony usually has a high number of openings, because the demands on the players — the Tanglewood festival, the Boston Pops and regular concerts — make scheduling auditions especially difficult, as does the orchestra’s system of hiring based on a two-thirds majority in committee.

"The finest musician can have a bad day: it’s a paradox of the process, in which less than an hour of playing is supposed to determine whether a musician is suitable for the continual day in, day out life of an orchestra member. And in another contradiction, the aspirants play alone for a job that depends on group effort. (Winners are usually on probation for a year or two, effectively a tryout with the ensemble.) On occasion, when no winner is chosen, established orchestral players from elsewhere will be invited to play as guests in a kind of informal tryout. It’s an imperfect system, but no one has figured out a better one."

The orchestra audition process is the topic of the paper"Orchestrating Impartiality: The Effect of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians" by Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse American Economic Review (September 2000)

"The practical power of game theory"

That's the title of Northwestern's news release about my 2010 Nancy L. Schwartz Memorial Lecture. (The title of the lecture was "Market Design," and after some general introduction to market design I focused mostly on kidney exchange.) Here's the video (1 hour, 20 minutes).

Egg shortage in Britain

Desperate hunt for donor eggs forces couples to seek IVF abroad, the Telegraph reports.

"Waiting lists for fertility treatment involving donated eggs have risen in this country since laws were changed to prevent women from donating anonymously.

"Now research shows the national shortage is the main reason couples go abroad for fertility treatment, with almost half of British "fertility tourists" going to Spain, where anonymity is allowed, and donors receive generous compensation.
"The study for the Economic and Social Research Council found that women who left Britain for IVF treatment were most likely to do so in search of a donor eggs, after encountering long waits in this country. "...
"Almost half of the women went to Spain thanks to policies which pay women up to 1000 euros to donate eggs, while remaining anonymous.
"Next was the Czech Republic, which also allows anonymous donation, and more generous payments than this country, where clinics are only allowed to provide £250 to those who donate eggs.
"Others went to the United States, South Africa, Barbados, Russia and Ukraine."...
"Research collaborator Dr Allan Pacey, a fertility expert from Sheffield University, said the findings of the research suggested more should be done to encourage egg donation in this country, including more generous compensation payments for those who underwent the procedure.
"Since legislation was passed in 2004 ending donor anonymity, the number of egg donors fell for three years, only rising marginally in 2008, the last year for which figures are held, when 1,084 eggs were donated.
"Experts believe more than double that number of donations would be required to meet current demand.
"Dr Pacey said he believed the shortage of donors in Britain was more to do with the small amount of compensation women were given rather than the lack of anonymity.
"Egg donation is a pretty horrendous thing to go through, so I think you could easily argue that £250 [the limit set in Britain] is not sufficient," he said.
"Regulators are currently reviewing the rules they set in 2006 which set the current limits.
"Prof Lisa Jardine, the chairman of the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Authority, has said that a rise in payment levels could encourage more women to donate eggs, meaning fewer infertile women would feel forced to seek treatment abroad."

Same sex marriage in Kagan's confirmation hearings

The confirmation hearings for Supreme Court nominee Elena Kagan provide an excuse for a NY Times OpEd by Jonathan Rauch to speculate on how she might feel about same sex marriage, based on some general principles she admitted to. (Rauch writes that he is himself a spouse in a same sex marriage that is recognized where he works, in Washington DC, but not where he lives, in Virginia.) A ‘Kagan Doctrine’ on Gay Marriage

"Civil rights, she implies, are important, but so is judicial modesty, and a sensible judge balances the two. A sensible judge can say something like, “Same-sex marriage may indeed be a civil right, but not all civil rights demand immediate judicial intervention, and other important interests militate against imposing this one on the whole country right now.”

"Viewed in that light, the argument for upholding California’s gay marriage ban has merit — not because the policy is fair or wise (it isn’t) but because it represents a reasonable judgment that the people of California are entitled to make. Barring gay marriage but providing civil unions is not the balance I would choose, but it is a defensible balance to strike, one that arguably takes “a cautious approach to making such a significant change to the institution of marriage” (as the lawyers defending Proposition 8 write in one of their briefs) while going a long way toward meeting gay couples’ needs."

Boston Judge Rules Federal Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

Judge Rules Gay Marriage Ban Unconstitutional

"A U.S. judge in Boston has ruled that a federal gay marriage ban is unconstitutional because it interferes with the right of a state to define marriage.

"U.S. District Judge Joseph Tauro on Thursday ruled in favor of gay couples' rights in two separate challenges to the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA.

"The state had argued the law denied benefits such as Medicaid to gay married couples in Massachusetts, where same-sex unions have been legal since 2004.

"Tauro agreed, and said the act forces Massachusetts to discriminate against its own citizens.

"The federal government, by enacting and enforcing DOMA, plainly encroaches upon the firmly entrenched province of the state, and in doing so, offends the Tenth Amendment. For that reason, the statute is invalid," Tauro wrote in a ruling in a lawsuit filed by Attorney General Martha Coakley.

"Ruling in a separate case filed by Gays & Lesbian Advocates & Defenders, Tauro found that DOMA violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution.

"We've maintained from the very beginning that there was absolutely no basis for this law treating one class of married Massachusetts couples different from everybody else and the court has recognized that," said Gary Buseck, GLAD's legal director.

"The Justice Department argued the federal government has the right to set eligibility requirements for federal benefits -- including requiring that those benefits only go to couples in marriages between a man and a woman.

"The law was enacted by Congress in 1996 when it appeared Hawaii would soon legalize same-sex marriage and opponents worried that other states would be forced to recognize such marriages. The lawsuit challenges only the portion of the law that prevents the federal government from affording pension and other benefits to same-sex couples.

"Since then, five states and the District of Columbia have legalized gay marriage."

Here's an earlier post: Same sex spouses versus Defense of Marriage Act, and here's an even earlier one: When a protected transaction meets a repugnant one: The MA suit over the Defense of Marriage Act

Deceased organ donor registry in NY

The NY Organ Donor Network has issued the following news release about a change in NY State to facilitate online registration. NEW YORK ORGAN DONOR NETWORK APPLAUDS GOVERNOR PATERSON’S SIGNING OF ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE ACT

"New York, NY - July 8, 2010: Governor David Paterson today signed into law an electronic signature bill that will dramatically improve the organ donation process in New York. The law will allow New Yorkers to register online to become organ donors. The bill passed the Assembly unanimously on April 27 and the Senate on May 12. The Electronic Signature Act eliminates the need to download enrollment forms and mail them in."

Here's a previous post on the issue.

HT Judd Kessler

Cryonics as a repugnant transaction

The NY Times has an article on those who wish to have their remains frozen after death, in the hope of eventual resurrection at a time when medical technology might make that feasible. Much of the story focuses on economist Robin Hanson of GMU, and his wife Peggy Jackson, a hospice worker who finds the idea unpleasant. The article goes on to say that this is quite common: many people, in particular the spouses of enthusiasts, find the idea repugnant. (It's not every NY Times article about an economist that includes references to Gilgamesh and Voldemort...)

Until Cryonics Do Us Part

"Robin, a deep thinker most at home in thought experiments, says he believes that there is some small chance his brain will be resurrected, that its time in cryopreservation will be merely a brief pause in the course of his life. Peggy finds the quest an act of cosmic selfishness. And within a particular American subculture, the pair are practically a cliché.

"Among cryonicists, Peggy’s reaction might be referred to as an instance of the “hostile-wife phenomenon,” as discussed in a 2008 paper by Aschwin de Wolf, Chana de Wolf and Mike Federowicz.“From its inception in 1964,” they write, “cryonics has been known to frequently produce intense hostility from spouses who are not cryonicists.” The opposition of romantic partners, Aschwin told me last year, is something that “everyone” involved in cryonics knows about but that he and Chana, his wife, find difficult to understand. To someone who believes that low-temperature preservation offers a legitimate chance at extending life, obstructionism can seem as willfully cruel as withholding medical treatment. Even if you don’t want to join your husband in storage, ask believers, what is to be lost by respecting a man’s wishes with regard to the treatment of his own remains? Would-be cryonicists forced to give it all up, the de Wolfs and Federowicz write, “face certain death.”

"Premonitions of this problem can be found in the deepest reaches of cryonicist history, starting with the prime mover. Robert Ettinger is the father of cryonics, his 1964 book, “The Prospect of Immortality,” its founding text. “This is not a hobby or conversation piece,” he wrote in 1968, adding, “it is the struggle for survival. Drive a used car if the cost of a new one interferes. Divorce your wife if she will not cooperate.” Today, with just fewer than200 patients preserved within the two major cryonics facilities, the Michigan-based Cryonics Institute and the Arizona-based Alcor, and with 10 times as many signed up to be stored upon their legal deaths, cryonicists have created support networks with which to tackle marital strife. Cryonet, a mailing list on “cryonics-related issues,” takes as one of its issues the opposition of wives. (The ratio of men to women among living cyronicists is roughly three to one.) “She thinks the whole idea is sick, twisted and generally spooky,” wrote one man newly acquainted with the hostile-wife phenomenon. “She is more intelligent than me, insatiably curious and lovingly devoted to me and our 2-year-old daughter. So why is this happening?” "
...
"Whether or not the human race subconsciously equates attempts to defeat death with treachery, it’s true that a general air of menace hangs over the quest for immortality in Western literature. Think Gilgamesh or Voldemort. “There is a lot of ancient cultural stereotyping about the motives and moral character of people who pursue life extension,” says James Hughes, the executive director of the Institute for Ethics and Emerging Technologies, a nonprofit organization enamored of life extension. Hughes has chosen not to participate in what he considers a worthy experiment. “Although it’s a rather marginal bet for a potentially huge payoff,” he says, “I value my relationship with my wife.” "

HT to Tyler Cowen at MR, whose post contains some related links.

The Market for scientists

"It’s not an education story, it’s a labor market story,” says Harold Salzman in a Miller-McCune story by Beryl Lieff Benderly about the market for scientists:The Real Science Gap

"It’s not insufficient schooling or a shortage of scientists. It’s a lack of job opportunities. Americans need the reasonable hope that spending their youth preparing to do science will provide a satisfactory career."...

"Many young Americans bright enough to do the math therefore conclude that instead of gambling 12 years on the small chance of becoming an assistant professor, they can invest that time in becoming a neurosurgeon, or a quarter of it in becoming a lawyer or a sixth in earning an MBA. And many who do earn doctorates in math-based subjects opt to use their skills devising mathematical models on Wall Street, rather than solving scientific puzzles in university labs, hoping a professorship opens up."

Growth of kidney donation by unrelated donors

Kidney exchange has allowed more people to receive kidneys from unrelated donors, but that isn't all that's going on, it has also become more acceptable for people to receive a kidney from friends and even people who they met on the internet.

George Taniwaki--a prospective donor who publishes a very interesting blog--has a post on this, The rise of unrelated donor transplants.

It includes admirably clear data graphics and analysis.

"Even more interesting is the extremely rapid rise of alternative sources of living donors. The last three lines from the figure above are rescaled in the figure below. The fastest growing source of living donors is paired exchanges. ... Kidney exchanges have the potential of becoming the leading source of live donor kidneys within a few years."

In addition, he has some insights into some of the complicated politics of kidney transplantation, in which there is some over-claiming of "firsts."

"The final fast-growing source of donors are people who donate without a specific recipient in mind. They are called nondirected or altruistic donors. Johns Hopkins Medicine claims to have performed the first nondirected live donor transplant in September, 1999. However, UNOS data shows two earlier donors in 1998 and one in 1988, the first year data is available. In addition to increasing the total number of donations, nondirected donors also play an important role in starting donor chains in kidney exchanges. Donor chains reduce the risk to recipients of their matched donors backing out an exchange after the first transplant takes place. Thus, nondirected donors reduce the need to perform the transplant surgeries simultaneously. This simplifies scheduling personnel and operating rooms for kidney exchange transplants."

Grade inflation in law schools

The NY Times report that some law schools are retroactively raising the grades they have given to their students, in an effort to improve their prospects in the difficult market for many law grads: In Law Schools, Grades Go Up, Just Like That.

"[Loyola Law School in Los Angeles] is retroactively inflating its grades, tacking on 0.333 to every grade recorded in the last few years. The goal is to make its students look more attractive in a competitive job market.
In the last two years, at least 10 law schools have deliberately changed their grading systems to make them more lenient. These include law schools like New York University and Georgetown, as well as Golden Gate University and Tulane University, which just announced the change this month. Some recruiters at law firms keep track of these changes and consider them when interviewing, and some do not.
Law schools seem to view higher grades as one way to rescue their students from the tough economic climate — and perhaps more to the point, to protect their own reputations and rankings. Once able to practically guarantee gainful employment to thousands of students every year, the schools are now fielding complaints from more and more unemployed graduates, frequently drowning in student debt.
They have come up with a number of strategic responses. Besides the usual career counseling measures, many top schools have bumped up their on-campus interview weeks from the autumn to August, before the school year even starts, because they want their students to have a chance to nab a job slot before their counterparts at other schools do. "
...
"Harvard and Stanford, two of the top-ranked law schools, recently eliminated traditional grading altogether. Like Yale and the University of California, Berkeley, they now use a modified pass/fail system, reducing the pressure that law schools are notorious for. This new grading system also makes it harder for employers to distinguish the wheat from the chaff, which means more students can get a shot at a competitive interview. "


For a paper on grade inflation and job markets, see

Michael Ostrovsky and Michael Schwarz, 2010, "Information Disclosure and Unraveling in Matching Markets." American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 2(2): 34–63.

It's behind a subscription wall, but here's the abstract:

"This paper explores information disclosure in matching markets. A school may suppress some information about students in order to improve their average job placement. We consider a setting with many schools, students, and jobs, and show that if early contracting is impossible, the same, "balanced" amount of information is disclosed in essentially all equilibria. When early contracting is allowed and information arrives gradually, if schools disclose the balanced amount of information, students and employers will not find it profitable to contract early. If they disclose more, some students and employers will prefer to sign contracts before all information is revealed."

Future organ replacement

I expect that your grandchildren will have the luxury of viewing all the work on kidney exchange and transplantation generally as primitive medicine ("Grandpa, they used to take an organ from one person and sew it into another??").

At the XXIII International Congress of the Transplant Society next month there will be some discussion of Stem Cells and Regeneration, along with more prosaic, current clinical issues.

A small step towards that future is reported in Science: Rats Breathe With Lab-Grown Lungs
and in the Boston Globe: N.E. researchers create functioning lung tissue--A vital step in the quest to build organs.

From the Globe: "Two teams of researchers from New England have built living, breathing lung tissue in the laboratory — feats of engineering that could speed up the development of new drugs and bring researchers a step closer to the tantalizing dream of growing replacement lungs for patients."

In the meantime, I'm cheered by the progress we're making in primitive medicine, back in these days at the dawn of the 21st century (see here and, more generally, here, or my post last summer at which a prize was awarded to Mike Rees for some of that progress).

HT: Steve Leider

Ribald 4th of July: memories of July 1970

The title of this post comes from a typo in an article about the 4th of July celebrations that have been conducted since 1912 at Rebild National Park in Denmark, after the land for the park was donated by Danish-Americans. Here's the story that gets the name right:
"Every July 4 since 1912, except for the two world wars, large crowds have gathered in the heather-covered hills of Rebild in Jutland, Denmark to celebrate US Independence Day.
The site of the celebration is the beautiful Rebild National Park (20 kilometers south of Aalborg), presented to the Danish nation by Danish-Americans in 1912. "

This reminds me that in July of 1970 I was in Fredericia Denmark, briefly employed by the J.P. Schmidt cigarfabrik (sold in 1982 to the Scandinavian Tobacco Group). I wasn't rolling cigars, but programming computers, or rather a computer, an IBM 360 model 20, that used a language called Report Program Generator (RPG) that apparently has descendents still in use today. (To compile, a giant stack of punchcards had to be turned upside down to be placed on the card reader...I know that some of you don't know what punchcards were...)

On July 1, 1970, the second Vietnam War draft lottery was conducted back in the United States, to determine the draft order of men born in my year. This was long before the internet, and so I waited a day for the International Herald Tribune to report on the story, but they only reported the first number chosen, and the last. I called the American consulate in Copenhagen to try to find out my lottery number, but they didn't have the whole list either (I got the impression they thought that most Americans living in Denmark at the time may have already decided not to respond to the draft...). I had to wait for a letter from my parents to arrive, telling me that I had a number that might have made me an infantryman had I been a year older, but that with the war winding down left me free to remain a student.

Two days after July 4 I heard cannon (or maybe fireworks) on the old town wall, and came in to work to hear that this was an annual celebration of the Danish victory in The Battle of Fredericia 6th of July 1849, in which the Danes had beaten back a German siege of the fortified town. I recall my colleagues told me that it had been celebrated each year since, "except when we are occupied by the Germans."

Let's all celebrate independence with a boisterous (if not ribald) 4th of July.

The market for fireworks, July 4th 2010

“Happy Fourth of July—made in China.”
"“there are virtually no fireworks being manufactured in the U.S.,” says John Rogers, who travels to China three to four times a year with the American Fireworks Standards Laboratory, a Bethesda, Md.–based nonprofit focused on consumer safety. Rogers says 90 percent of the world’s fireworks originate in China"
...
"As for the other 10 percent, James Widmann, president of Connecticut Pyrotechnic Manufacturing, says some originate in India, Spain and other parts of Europe. Mexico, he says, could eventually become a major supplier to the U.S. because of its ability to send fireworks here by truck rather than shipping them overseas—a process fraught with obstacles. “Most shipping companies don’t want to risk sacrificing 99 percent of their cargo” for the sake of the “1 percent that can blow it all up”

Sidney Siegel and Psychology & Economics

That's the subject of a recent article: Innocenti, Alessandro, "How a psychologist informed economics: The case of Sidney Siegel," JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC PSYCHOLOGY,31, 3, 421-434, JUN 2010

"Abstract: In the 1950s before Kahneman and Tversky showed how behavioral economics could bring economics and psychology into a unified framework, a social psychologist, Sidney Siegel, entered the realm of economics and laid the foundation of experimental economics. This paper gives an assessment of Siegel's effort to meld psychology and economics and shows that Siegel was not only a contributor to the methodology of experimental economics but also a pioneer of behavioral economics. Although his legacy was paramount in the work of the Nobel Prize winner Vernon Smith, Siegel endorsed a very different approach to making interdisciplinary research effective. "

White House aides aren't lured by their current salaries

White House salary information released, including a database by name.

Advertising versus data on dating web sites

Advertising is easier to come by than data: apparently no one really knows much about the effect of online dating sites on producing marriages and relationships. A recent story in the Washington Post points this out (while suggesting the numbers may have peaked):Are dating Web sites past their prime?

And here is an older WSJ story:Marriage-Maker Claims Are Tied in Knots--Online Dating Sites Say Hordes of People Ultimately Marry, but Their Methods Have Plenty of Hitches of Their Own,along with an online post pointing out that there may be special selection problems facing online surveys of online activity: How Many Marriages Started Online?

School choice in Spain

Flip Klijn writes:

"Hey Al,
Recently, a letter in the Spanish newspaper "La Vanguardia" questions the new mechanism to assign students to universities in Spain.

Link to the letter in Catalan:http://www.lavanguardia.es/lv24h/20100623/53951521785.html

The writer of the letter (a high school student) wonders whether the introduction of *multiple* access grades (the novelty) is desirable. He discusses a hypothetical scenario in which multiples access grades may in fact lead to an undesirable assignment.

I was happily surprised with his analysis. Basically, he implicitly describes the deferred acceptance mechanism through a simple but very nice example that has a priority structure with a cycle (as in Ergin, Econometrica 2002). Then, he makes the point that the assignment is fair (or stable) but not very desirable (since it is inefficient).

It was impossible for me to not react to the letter. My response (in Spanish) was published in the Blog section of the same newspaper:http://www.lavanguardia.es/lv24h/20100624/53951867284.html

In my response, I first mention that with a single access grade there is indeed no incompatibility between stability and efficiency. Next, I argue that in certain situations it might be convenient, however, to have multiple access grades in which case the deferred accepted mechanism is a natural candidate mechanism (referring to the original work of Gale and Shapley, 1962, and the application in the National Resident Matching Program). I also point out that the incompatibility between stability and efficiency in the situation with multiple access grades cannot be solved by using some other mechanism. Finally, I mention that the deferred acceptance mechanism is "hassle-free" (i.e., strategy-proof) and that the experience in Boston and New York (high schools) has been very positive. Therefore, there are reasons to believe that the deferred acceptance mechanism with multiple access grades will work satisfactorily in the assignment of students to Spanish universities."