Mixed martial arts: a formerly repugnant transaction?

New York State is one of the few holdouts, and a recent Op-Ed in the NY Times anticipates that will end: It Only Looks Dangerous

"MIXED martial arts is one of the fastest-growing sports in America. Yet for years the New York State Legislature has refused to sanction M.M.A. — making New York one of the last states holding out against the sport’s expansion. (Connecticut is a holdout, too.) After helping to block a clause in last year’s budget that would have legalized M.M.A., Bob Reilly, a state assemblyman, called it “a violent sport not worthy of our society.”

...
"There have been only three fatalities in the 17-year history of American M.M.A. But we average almost that many in a single year in boxing: 129 fighters have died in American rings since 1960.


"Some might argue that such statistics only make the case that boxing, too, should be banned. But what about hockey or football? Men’s Health has proudly and without controversy featured Drew Brees, Tom Brady and other N.F.L. stars on our cover — despite the fact that football and hockey combined sent 55,000 Americans to the emergency room for head injuries in 2009 alone.
...
 "The New York State Assembly and Senate both have bills in committee that would allow M.M.A. into the state, and it only makes sense to push them through."

Jon Levin, Clark Medalist

Among a long list of accomplishments, the AEA includes these:

"The Organization and Design of Markets
A second main strand of Levin's research focuses on the success or failure of specific markets in efficiently allocating scarce resources.  Much of it attempts to determine whether changes in market design and institutions would lead to  more efficient outcomes. This research is distinguished by the way it integrates economic  theory, novel empirical methods, and data to obtain interesting new insights.  For example, in a series of papers with Susan Athey (a previous John Bates Clark medalist), Levin studied competitive bidding for federally-owned timber, with the goal of understanding how different auction  rules used by the government have affected competition. These papers are examples of excellent applied work, and they helped establish the frontier for empirical work on auctions, an active and exciting area in the last decade."

Congratulations, Jon.

Edelman on Bloomberg on Google

Antitrust regulation is of course a form of market design. Ben Edelman talks about his concerns here.

Jeff Ely on market design

Jeff Ely is a very serious microeconomist indeed, so it isn't cheap talk when he gives market design a big compliment and writes of: "the most important development in Microeconomics right now:  market design"

High school choice in New York City

The outcome of the main match for positions in NYC high schools has come out, and about 8,000 children (out of somewhat more than 80,000) did not find a match among their listed choices and will have to go through the supplemental round to find a match: Over 8,000 New York eighth-graders rejected from high school choices, forced to apply again

"Pamela Wheaton of Insideschools.org at The New School said every year there are some kids who don't get matched because there aren't enough good schools to go around.

"There simply aren't the spaces," she said, noting the process is also "very complicated" for parents who don't necessarily realize the steep competition at some choice schools.

"The city's record at matching students with at least one of their choices has improved since 2004, when 16% of students got no matches."

A similar problem--shortage of spaces in popular schools--has influenced the kindergarten choice process as well: Kindergarten crunch: Popular schools run out of seats and parents are furious
 
Not enough good schools: that's a problem no school choice system can fix by itself.
(Recall the similar story I blogged about in Boston: Boston Globe on school choice.)

My papers on school choice in NY and Boston are here.

France Enforces Ban on Full-Face Veils in Public

Here's the story in the NY Times.

"A French ban outlawing full-face veils in public, the first to be enacted in Europe, came into force on Monday and faced immediate, if low-key, challenges."

Delayed college admissions

The NY Times reports on a new trend in enrollment management: Admission to College, With Catch: Year’s Wait

"Now, as colleges are increasingly swamped with applications, a small but growing number are offering a third option: guaranteed admission if the student attends another institution for a year or two and earns a prescribed grade-point average.

"This little-noticed practice — an unusual mix of early admission and delayed gratification — has allowed colleges to tap their growing pools of eager candidates to help counter the enrollment slump that most institutions suffer later on, as the accepted students drop out, transfer, study abroad or take internships off campus.

“Life happens — we all understand that the size of the freshman class diminishes as they progress,” said Barmak Nassirian, an associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers in Washington. “This is an attempt at what is called enrollment management.”

"But while the practice, known as deferred admission or a guaranteed transfer option, offers applicants another shot at their dream school, it can also place them in limbo, as they start college life on a campus they plan to abandon. And it can create problems for that institution, which is not usually told about the deal the student has struck with a competitor.

"Monica Inzer, the dean of admission at Hamilton College in upstate New York, called the practice “borderline unethical,” saying it had the effect of recruiting students from other colleges. “We would allow a student to defer for a year, but never to matriculate full time at another college,” Ms. Inzer said."

Medical residency scramble

Dr.  Naveed Saleh, writing in New Physician, describes some of the different prognoses suggested for the new resident scramble (SOAP) which will operate next year: Unscrambling the Match.

"Roth predicts that the rules of the SOAP will be subverted by both programs and applicants eager to match. "If it's really, really tempting for people on both sides to break the rules," says Roth, "often the rules get broken."
Roth suggests that instead of the SOAP, the NRMP and ERAS should institute a properly organized second match during Match Week.
Mona M. Signer, executive director of the NRMP, disagrees with Roth's prediction that decision-making during the SOAP will be strategic. Instead, she predicts that programs and applicants will continue to pursue their best opportunities. Additionally, as with the Match, should a program or applicant violate prescribed rules, sanctions would be imposed.

My previous posts on the residency scramble, and the proposed new rules are here.

Live donor teeth (and George Washington)

Owen Ozier writes: "I have been reading Ron Chernow's 2010 biography of George Washington, and came across a passage about the trade in a different body part - teeth. I hadn't ever heard of this before, but it reminded me of your talk, so I thought I would send it along:

"From chapter 36 of Washington: A Life

"Always a tough, leery customer, Washington was skeptical about claims made for transplanted teeth. The following year, when Le Mayeur performed a successful transplant upon Richard Varick, it made a convert of Washington. According to Mary Thompson, Washington bought nine teeth in 1784 from certain nameless "Negroes" for thirteen shillings apiece.[7] Whether he wanted the teeth implanted directly in his mouth, or incorporated into dentures, we cannot say. However ghoulish this trade sounds to modern readers, it was then standard practice for rich people to purchase teeth from the poor. In his advertisements, Dr. Le Mayeur offered to buy teeth from willing vendors and bid "three guineas for good front teeth from anyone but slaves." [8] This suggests a stigma among white people about having slaves' teeth. We can deduce that Washington's dental transplant miscarried, since by the time of his presidential inauguration in 1789, he had only a single working tooth remaining."

Relevant references appear to be:
[5] Brown, Lawrence Parmly. "The Antiquities of Dental Prosthesis:
Part III, Section 2, Eighteenth Century." Dental Cosmos 76, No. 11, November 1934
[7] Henriques, Peter R. Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington. Charlottesville: UVA Press, 2006, p.154
[8] Unger, Harlow Giles. The Unexpected George Washington: His Private Life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006, p.163

(Kant also wrote about sale of teeth: see my earlier blog post Kant on compensation for organ donors )

Swoopo: gone but not forgotten

Swoopo is reported to be bankrupt: Goodnight, Swoopo: The Pay-Per-Bid Auction Site Is Dead

I blogged in 2009 about A proliferation of penny auctions, and when I looked back at it just now, I saw that it attracted a bunch of spammish comments from penny auction sites...

HT: Peter Coles

2011 Summer School: Market Failure and Market Design

2011 Summer School. Market Failure and Market Design, Louvain-la-Neuve, May 23-26, 2011

To submit a paper: Those interested should submit a title for their presentation AND a paper as well as your curriculum vitae by April 10 to Sylvie Mauroy. The selection of speakers and preliminary program will be announced by April 26.

To register (without presenting a paper): Just send an e-mail to Nancy De Munck or Sylvie Mauroy with your complete affiliation. There is no registration fee, but registration is NECESSARY before May 10.

Keynote Speakers:


Douglas BERNHEIM, Stanford University
Lecture 1: Poverty and Self-Control
Lecture 2: Applied Behavioral Welfare Economics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Lecture 3: Revealed Preference without Choice

Vincent CRAWFORD, University of Oxford
Lecture 1: Strategic Thinking
Lecture 2: Level-k Auctions (paper 1 - paper 2 )
Lecture 3: Efficient Mechanisms for Level-k Bilateral Trading

Parag PATHAK, Massuchusetts Institute of Technology


Organizing committee:
Jean Hindriks, CORE, Université catholique de Louvain

Georg Kirchsteiger, ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles
François Maniquet, CORE, Université catholique de Louvain

 
HT: Bettina Klaus

Should there be a donor kidney market? Latest version of a familiar debate

The Los Angeles Times published a short debate between two familiar interlocuters, Ben Hippen and Frank Delmonico: Pro/con The consequences of a donor kidney market

"With a waiting list for a kidney at almost 83,000 Americans, the push to offer cash and other incentives grows. Two experts offer their opposing views on a donor kidney market."

"People who need kidneys are dying unnecessarily, and an organ market would save lives."
Dr. Benjamin Hippen is a transplant nephrologist at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C.
"The most compelling reason for setting up a market for organs is that there really isn't any other plausible solution to the growing disparity between the demand for and supply of organs. Even if we were to maximize organ procurement from deceased donors, we still couldn't meet the demand.

"As that demand grows, it's not just potential kidney recipients who get desperate — it's also potential donors, who often have a close-up view of what their loved ones are going through. We then see people with health problems, like high blood pressure or obesity, say that they're willing to take on a certain amount of risk so that their loved one can live a better life.

"A regulated market would be, in some sense, safer — the pressure would be taken off folks who want to be donors but perhaps shouldn't be for medical reasons. Transplant professionals could then select the healthiest donors, who are at the lowest risk for long-term complications. With a regulated market, we could say to high risk-donor candidates, "No, you shouldn't be a donor, and your loved one isn't going to suffer as a consequence of that decision."

"There's also a significant difference between what it costs to maintain a transplant versus what it costs to maintain someone on dialysis. In 2007, $28 billion was spent nationally on people on dialysis; about $2.2 billion was allocated to kidney transplantation. So transplants are vastly more cost-effective, and in general they confer a longer survival benefit. Also, a larger proportion of people are able to go back to work compared with people on dialysis.

"The unregulated, underground black market in organs in developing countries has been catastrophic for both donors and recipients. But the reason that someone who is desperately poor may be able to sell their kidney on the black market is that people in countries of comparative wealth have failed to solve their own supply problem. That is a policy failure. If the demand for organs could be met through legal, ethical strategies, some of the driving forces that support black markets would disappear.

"If, indeed, the current system isn't meeting demand, then there's a sense in which it's unethical not to establish regulated incentives for living donors or to think more carefully about not doing so. The cost is being paid by the people who are dying on the waiting list, getting sicker on dialysis or selling their kidneys under terrible circumstances."

"An organ market would exploit the world's poor and set the precedent for medical transplant tourism that puts everyone at risk."
Dr. Francis Delmonico is the director of renal transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is also the medical director of the New England Organ Bank in Newton, Mass.

"Despite the good intentions of those who would suggest that an organ market could be regulated, it's impossible to do so. A market for organ sales enables brokers and extra payments, and in a global society, the market could not be restricted to the United States.

"Right now, our country sets the tone on this issue. Once we say it's OK to have a market here, it condones markets everywhere else in the world, and with medical tourism being what it is, those in search of kidneys will go to the place where it's the cheapest price — Americans won't be limited to undergoing transplants locally.

"From there, transplant tourism in global markets brings unanticipated consequences. It increases the risk for diseases like hepatitis, tuberculosis or malignancy, and it also opens the door to a variety of unethical practices involving the donor and their medical care.

"The central problem of organ sales is that it's a victimization and exploitation of poor people, notwithstanding good intention. The source of these organs is always the lowest socioeconomic class of a particular country — we know that has been the case in the Philippines, in Pakistan, in Egypt and in Iran. And the payment isn't that substantial of an amount, so rather than making them better off or helping them, the money is quickly used, and the donor is left with one less kidney. It's a reality that there's no escaping.

"It's true that there has been a plateau of living donors in this country, and something has to be done. For that reason, I do believe in eliminating disincentives for donors. The living donor who doesn't have health insurance should have it — and even life insurance — provided for them, as it pertains to the donation event."

HT: Ted Roth

Medicare payments for dialysis

The New York Times describes the growing federal expenses for dialysis, and some surrounding controversy: When Ailments Pile Up, Asking Patients to Rethink Free Dialysis

"Of all the terrible chronic diseases, only one —end-stage kidney disease — gets special treatment by the federal government. A law passed by Congress 39 years ago provides nearly free care to almost all patients whose kidneys have failed, regardless of their age or ability to pay.


"But the law has had unintended consequences, kidney experts say. It was meant to keep young and middle-aged people alive and productive. Instead, many of the patients who take advantage of the law are old and have other medical problems, often suffering through dialysis as a replacement for their failed kidneys but not living long because the other chronic diseases kill them.


"Kidney specialists are pushing doctors to be more forthright with elderly people who have other serious medical conditions, to tell the patients that even though they are entitled to dialysis, they may want to decline such treatment and enter a hospice instead. In the end, it is always the patient’s choice.
...
"When Congress established the entitlement to pay for kidney patients in October 1972, dialysis and transplants were new procedures that were not covered by health insurance. There were horrifying stories — rich people got dialysis and lived while poor people died. In Seattle, a committee meted out dialysis by voting on who could get it. A man who was supporting a family, for example, took precedence over a single woman.


"It also was expected at that time that fewer than 40 patients per million would need dialysis, and that most of those patients would be healthy — except for their failed kidneys — and under age 54.

"Now more than 400 people per million start dialysis each year. More than a third of the patients are 65 or older, and they account for about 42 percent of the costs. People over 75 make up the fastest-growing group of dialysis patients. And most elderly dialysis patients have other serious diseases like diabetes, heart failure, stroke and even advanced dementia. One-third of them have four or more chronic conditions.

"The federal program, said Dr. Peter S. Aronson, a professor of nephrology at Yale University’s School of Medicine “is so emblematic of good intentions misapplied.”

“The question,” Dr. Aronson said, “is how to dial it back.”

"Recent studies have found that dialysis does not prolong life for many elderly people with other serious chronic illnesses. One study found that the procedure’s main effect is to increase the chances that such patients will die in the hospital rather than at home.

"Meanwhile, costs are soaring — end-stage kidney disease will cost the nation an estimated $40 billion to $50 billion this year."

Donation after cardiac death

When are you dead? An article in Stanford Medicine explores the question, which becomes pointed when the subject is deceased organ donation. The standard criterion in the U.S. is brain death, but of course irreversible cessation of heartbeat is an older standard. The trouble is that organs have to be preserved fast after cardiac death, unlike the case of a brain dead patient on a ventilator.

So there are obstacles to donation after cardiac death (DCD). Most of the discussion of restricting organ donation to brain dead patients focuses on the desperately needed organs that are made unavailable to the patients who need them. So I was struck by this view from another angle, by Nikole Neidlinger, MD, the medical director of the California Donor Transplant Network.

“A lot of people think that it’s all about the organ recipient, but really, I think, the donors’ families get the biggest benefit,” Neidlinger says. “They have spent perhaps weeks dealing with the hardship of seeing loved ones on life support and coming to terms with their death. And the fact that the donor gets a chance to help another person live — it’s a legacy that counts so much for families.”

Redesigning the market for bribes (by making some bribes legal to give)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kaushik Basu, currently on leave from Cornell as Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, has been thinking about how to reduce the incidence of bribe taking in India by officials who require bribes to deliver (legal) services that they are supposed to provide as part of their government duties. His idea is to make it legal to give a bribe in such a case, while keeping it illegal to demand or receive one, so that after the fact the bribe givers could report/testify against corrupt officials without being treated as their partners in crime.

Here's the WSJ story: Kaushik Basu Says Make Bribe Giving Legal, and here's the working paper from the Indian Ministry of Finance: Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a Bribe should be Treated as Legal

HT: Tabarrok at MR

Review of kidney exchange

Here's a new article reviewing developments in kidney exchange, aka kidney paired donation (not "published" yet, but just appeared online):

Kidney paired donation
C. Bradley Wallis; Kannan P. Samy; Alvin E. Roth; Michael A. Rees
Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 2011; doi: 10.1093/ndt/gfr155

Full Text: https://academic.oup.com/ndt/article/26/7/2091/1896342

Abstract

Kidney paired donation (KPD) was first suggested in 1986, but it was not until 2000 when the first paired donation transplant was performed in the USA. In the past decade, KPD has become the fastest growing source of transplantable kidneys, overcoming the barrier faced by living donors deemed incompatible with their intended recipients. This review provides a basic overview of the concepts and challenges faced by KPD as we prepare for a national pilot program with the United Network for Organ Sharing. Several different algorithms have been creatively implemented in the USA and elsewhere to transplant paired donors, each method uniquely contributing to the success of KPD. As the paired donor pool grows, the problem of determining allocation strategies that maximize equity and utility will become increasingly important as the transplant community seeks to balance quality and quantity in choosing the best matches. Financing for paired donation is a major issue, as philanthropy alone cannot support the emerging national system. We also discuss the advent of altruistic or non-directed donors in KPD, and the important role of chains in addition to exchanges. This review is designed to provide insight into the challenges that face the emerging national KPD system in the USA, now 5 years into its development.

The gastro fellowship match after five years

A recent article takes stock of the Gastroenterology fellowship match, five years after it was reinstated with some new design rules (about exploding offers):
The Match: Five Years Later, by Deborah D. Proctor et al., Gastroenterology 2011;140:15–18

Proctor et al. report considerable progress, although they continue to monitor violations of market policy. There seems to be a particular issue with respect to research positions.

"...the NRMP/SMS was uniquely set up for our many diverse program offerings. Four tracks were created—Clinical, Clinical Investigator Research, Basic Science Research, and Research—and a reversion process was implemented for the 4 tracks, such that unfilled slots from 1 track could revert to open slots in another track. The GI Match successfully reopened in January 2006 with a match day in June 2006 for fellowship positions starting in July 2007."
...
"However, we must recognize that not all programs are eager or willing to participate in the Match process."
...

"The number of fellowship applicants genuinely committed to an academic research career has been
slowly declining. Simultaneously, competition has stiffened for the grant dollars that pay for these research training positions, and the criteria to renew grant support has become more demanding.
Needless to say, the competition for these increasingly scarce, well-qualified, research-track applicants has become fierce, and the authors are aware of several examples during the last application cycle of candidates interested in research being offered fellowship positions outside the Match.

...
"Although the statistics continue to demonstrate that Match participation is robust, healthy, and gradually increasing, there is also a growing desire to close the loopholes in Match rules that allow a small minority of programs to take unfair advantage of applicants and colleagues."

***************
To summarize the overall encouraging statistics, in the (2006) Match for 2007 positions, 283 positions were offered and 585 applicants applied, of whom 276 were matched. In the Match for 2011 positions, 383 positions were offered to 642 applicants, of whom 362 were matched.

Here are some papers reporting various elements of the Gastroenterology market design.
The match offers programs the ability to have unfilled positions of one kind (e.g. research positions) revert to other kinds of positions via the Roth-Peranson algorithm (see
Roth, A. E. and Elliott Peranson, "The Redesign of the Matching Market for American Physicians: Some Engineering Aspects of Economic Design American Economic Review, 89, 4, September, 1999, 748-780.)

Profile in the Boston Globe: "The Matchmaker"

Leon Neyfakh writes about me and market design in the Sunday Boston Globe:

The Matchmaker: The Harvard economist who stopped just studying the world and began trying to fix it

LCD Soundsystem and ticket scalping

Jacob Leshno (who is a fan of both market design and LCD soundsystem) writes to alert me to some stories about their "final" concert today, how scalpers using software bots acquired most of the tickets as soon as they went on sale, and how the band responded by scheduling more concerts.

Hipsters v. Scalpers: How LCD Soundsystem is trying to foil professional ticket resellers.
"But LCD fans were not left out in the cold. The debacle attracted the wrath of the band's charismatic front man, James Murphy. On LCD Soundsystem's blog, he wrote: "this here is just to say that we were more than taken aback and surprised about the speed of ticket sales for the april 2nd MSG gig, as well as the effectiveness of scalper pieces of fucking shit at getting their hands on said tickets before fans could, and it's knocked us on our asses."

"The market had failed in his mind. He told fans not to pay thousands of dollars to get into the Madison Square Garden show: "I will try to figure a way out to fuck these fuckers. NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, IT IS NOT WORTH THAT KIND OF MONEY TO SEE US!" Soon enough, he realized he had an ace up his sleeve. He flooded the market, adding shows, upping ticket supply, and hopefully pushing prices down. (Those shows will go on sale this Friday.)"

See also
Tickets To Hide: Bands that scalp their own tickets and other true tales from the world of live music.
and
fuck you, scalpers. terminal 5 shows added.

Matching and Price Theory

That's the name of a conference being held at the Milton Friedman Institute: Matching and Price Theory, May 6-7, 2011

Friday, May 6:
9:00 - 9:50 am The College Admissions Problem with a Continuum of Students
Eduardo Azevedo (Harvard University) and Jacob Leshno (Harvard University)

9:50 - 10:40 am Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading Networks
John Hatfield (Stanford University), Scott Kominers (Harvard University), Michael Ostrovsky (Stanford University), Alexandru Nichifor (University of Maastricht) and Alexander Westkamp
(University of Bonn)

10:55 - 11:45 am Sorting and Factor Intensity: Production and Unemployment across
Skills, Jan Eeckhout (University of Pennsylvania) and Philipp Kircher (London School of Economics)

11:45 - 12:20 pm Discussion led by Eric Budish (University of Chicago)

12:20 - 1:50 pm Lunch

1:50 – 2:40 pm Hedonic Price Equilibria, Stable Matching, and Optimal Transport: Equivalence, Topology, and Uniqueness, Pierre-André Chiappori (New York University), Robert McCann (University of Toronto), and Lars Nesheim (University College London)

2:40 – 3:30 pm Distinguishing the Payoffs of Upstream and Downstream Firms in Matching Games, Jeremy Fox (University of Chicago)

3:30 – 4:05 pm Discussion led by Ariel Pakes (Harvard University)

4:20 – 5:10 pm Strategyproofness and Manipulability in Large Economies, Eduardo Azevedo (Harvard University) and Eric Budish (University of Chicago)

5:10 – 5:45 pm Discussion led by John Hatfield (Stanford University)

Saturday, May 7:
9:00 - 9:50 am Decentralized Matching with Aligned Preferences, Muriel Nederle (Stanford University) and Leeat Yariv (California University of Technology)

9:50 - 10:40 am TBA, Ilya Segal (Stanford University)

10:40 – 11:15 am Discussion led by Alvin Roth (Harvard University)

11:30 - 12:30 pm Panel and Audience Discussion on Open Questions, Gary Becker (University of Chicago), James Heckman (University of Chicago), Paul Milgrom (Stanford University) and Alvin Roth (Harvard University)

Register online here