Reverse fraternity and sorority rush at Princeton

Here's a Princeton news release about a decision to delay sorority and fraternity recruiting--"rush"--until after the freshman year: Princeton to ban freshman affiliation with fraternities, sororities as of fall 2012

"Beginning in the fall of 2012, Princeton University will prohibit freshmen from affiliating with a fraternity or sorority or engaging in any form of "rush" at any time during the freshman year.

The decision to institute the ban is being communicated this week to all returning Princeton undergraduates by President Shirley M. Tilghman, who made the decision based on recommendations from a student-faculty-staff working group on campus social and residential life that submitted its report last spring. The decision is being communicated to all entering freshmen and their families by Vice President for Campus Life Cynthia Cherrey and Dean of Undergraduate Students Kathleen Deignan.

In addition to prohibiting freshmen from affiliating with fraternities or sororities or engaging in the recruitment/membership process known as rush, the ban will prohibit students in the other three classes from conducting or having responsibility for any form of rush in which freshmen participate. As recommended by the working group, there will be no prohibition on membership in fraternities and sororities after freshman year, although the University will continue its longstanding policy of withholding official recognition for such organizations.

...

In their letter to entering freshmen, Cherrey and Deignan pointed out that for most of Princeton’s history, membership in fraternities and sororities was prohibited. These organizations began to reemerge at Princeton in the 1980s, although unlike at many other campuses, none of the fraternities or sororities at Princeton has houses. All Princeton freshmen and sophomores live on campus in residential colleges, as do some juniors and seniors, while most juniors and seniors take their meals at off-campus independent eating clubs while continuing to live in University housing.

...

Approximately 15 percent of Princeton undergraduates participate in four sororities and about a dozen fraternities.

*******************

The name "rush" comes from the unraveling of fraternity and sorority recruiting, which became earlier and earlier over time.  Here's an old paper on the subject:

Mongell, S. and Roth, A.E., "Sorority Rush as a Two-Sided Matching Mechanism," American Economic Review, vol. 81, June 1991, 441-464

The Receivables Exchange and the NYSE

I've been following The Receivables Exchange in several prior posts, and now the NYSE is interested too: today's WSJ reports NYSE Euronext Bulks Up In Market for Receivables.

"NYSE Euronext plans to boost its role in helping companies secure short-term funding, hiring a longtime GE Capital executive as part of an initiative that includes buying a stake in an electronic market for corporate receivables.

"The parent of the Big Board aims to use its investment in the New Orleans-based Receivables Exchange as another venue for public companies to borrow money, complementing the long-term funding provided via stock-market listings at a time when businesses face financing difficulties.

"NYSE has taken a minority stake in the four-year-old venture and hired Paul DeDomenico, previously chief executive of GE Capital's working-capital-solutions group, to lead the exchange group's corporate-receivables programs.

"The moves, which come amid a fierce political debate over bank lending to small-and-midsize businesses, could provide an advantage to the NYSE in its battle with competitors over share listings, by allowing the Big Board operator to offer a broader suite of services to companies that choose to list with it. And the moves provide an entry point to a market in receivables estimated by the companies at $17 trillion in size domestically.
...
"The Receivables Exchange formed in 2007 as a platform for companies to auction their accounts receivable to buyers like hedge funds and commercial banks. The eBay-like system lets sellers of receivables generate short-term cash quickly, while buyers can book a profit when debts are paid back.
...
"Upheaval in the corporate lending market has provided an opening for the company, where trading volumes of accounts receivable in its U.S. market for small-and-midsize businesses leapt nearly six-fold from 2009 to 2010.

"This year the value of receivables bought and sold on the platform is on pace to top $1 billion in value, according to Nic Perkin, the Receivables Exchange's president and co-founder.

A choice prediction competition for simple extensive form games

The following announcement was recently circulated, and might be of interest:

A Call for participation in a choice prediction competition for simple extensive form games

Dear Colleagues,

We write to invite you, and your students, to participate in a new choice prediction competition that is conducted as part of the special issue of the journal Games http://www.mdpi.com/search/?s_journal=games&s_special_issue=648

The competition focuses on the prediction of behavior in one-shot extensive form games. In these games a proposer chooses between action Out, which enforces “outside option” payoffs on the two players, and action In. If In is chosen then the responder determines the payoff allocation by choosing between action Left and action Right.  The competition is composed of two independent sub-competitions: one that predicts the proposer’s behavior and another that predicts the responder’s behavior.

The organizers first ran (in May 2010) an experimental study of 120 games that were randomly selected from a well-defined space of games. The raw experimental results of this study, referred to as the “estimation experiment,” are presented in the competition’s website (http://sites.google.com/site/extformpredcomp/home). In addition, the competition website includes the rules of the competition, and a link to a paper that summarizes the results of the estimation experiment and explores the value of several baseline models (https://sites.google.com/site/extformpredcomp/EEREFG.pdf)

The site explains that the goal of the participants in the competition is to predict the results of a second experiment. This study, referred to as the “competition experiment,” will be kept confidential until 2 December 2011. The competition experiment uses the same method as the estimation experiment, but studies different games (drawn from the same space of games) and different subjects.

You are invited to participate in the competitions, and/or to use it as one of the assignments to your students for the 2011 Fall semester (see details below).  To participate in the competition you will have to email us a computer program (in MATLAB, Visual Basic, or SAS) that reads the parameters of the games (the incentive structure) as input, and predicts the main results as output. The program should be an implementation of your favorite model. To develop and/or estimate your model you are encouraged to analyze the data of the estimation experiment, and to build on the baseline models that were posted in the competition website.  To use the competition as a class assignment you should follow the assignment instructions in the site https://sites.google.com/site/extformpredcomp/registration-1.

The submitted models will be ranked based on the mean squared deviation between the predictions and the results of the competition experiment.

The prize for the winners will include an invitation to publish a paper that describes the winning model in Games, and an invitation to a special workshop. The submission deadline for this competition is 1 December 2011. You are allowed to submit one model as a first author and to co-author up to two additional submissions.

Using the competition as a class assignment:
Professors who want to use the competitions as one of their class assignments are asked to contact us at gamespredcomp@gmail.com.  The professor will receive a course ID to give the students.  To be associated with a course, submissions will specify the course ID and the professor’s name. The models will be treated like any regular submission, except that the professor will also receive a copy of the models’ rankings assigned with his/her class ID.


Best Regards,
Eyal Ert, Ido Erev, and Al Roth

Beautiful work and the beauty premium

It pays to be beautiful, but it's risky to try to make it big on beauty alone.
That's the message from recent books and other work showing that good looking people earn more--there's a "beauty premium," but that a career in modeling is high risk.

Slate reviews Pricing Beauty, by BU's Ashley Mears, a book about an industry with a good looking work force, models and modeling agencies.

"Through interviews, Mears investigated the financial state of the (unnamed) small modeling firm she worked for in Manhattan. She found that 20 percent of the models on the agency's books were in debt to the agency. Foreign models, in particular, seem to exist in a kind of indentured servitude, she writes, often owing as much as $10,000 to their agencies for visas, flights, and test shoots, all before they even go on their first casting call. And once a model does nab a job, the pay is often meager. Mears herself walked runways, sat for photo shoots for an online clothing catalog, modeled for designers in showrooms, and went on countless unpaid casting calls. During her first year of research she worked mornings, evenings, and weekends around her graduate classes and earned about $11,000.
...
"The alternative to high-fashion poverty is to be a "money girl," working for catalogs and in showroom fittings, jobs that pay well and reliably. The best-paid model at Mears' agency, for instance, was a 52-year-old showroom model with "the precise size 8 body needed to fit clothing for a major American retailer. She makes $500/hour and works every day." But the commercial end of modeling is widely derided within the industry as low-rent, as mere work without glamour. Once a model has done too many commercial jobs, she is thought to have cheapened herself, and it's exceedingly difficult for her to return to high fashion."
**********
Over the last few years in economics, there have been a lot of studies about pricing beauty in the general work force, where there seems to be a premium for looking good.
See Dan Hamermesh's Beauty Research Papers, and his book Beauty Pays--Why Attractive People are More Successful

A nice experimental paper in the AER by Markus Mobius and Tanya Rosenblat, Why Beauty Matters, even shows that some of the beauty premium can be collected through telephone interviews in which the interviewer can't actually see how attractive the interviewee is. This suggests that some of the beauty premium may come from the increased self confidence that beauty bestows.

(Of course not only the beautiful can get the part of the premium available over the phone: this must be what people mean when they tell me I have a face for radio...:)

Things we cannot forget

9/11

http://www.september11news.com/AATower2ExplodeGettyImages.jpg

http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/fallingman-lg.jpg

Magic and market design

I was struck by some of Michael Trick's thoughts on Operations Research, and how they applied as well to Market Design: Explaining Operations Research to, and being, a Muggle.

Taking his cue from the Harry Potter novels, he writes:
"A wonderful aspect of working in operations research, particularly on the practical side of the field, is that you both work with Muggles and get to be a Muggle."
...
"Over the years, I have started as a Muggle about cell-phone production, sports scheduling, voting systems, and a number of other areas.  And I got to read about these areas, and talk to smart people about issues, and, eventually, become, if not a Wizard, then at least a competent student of these areas.

"Some fields are, by their nature, inward looking.  The best operations research is not, and that is a true pleasure of the field."

*********

There's some additional pleasures to being a market designer, aside from those of being both a novice among experienced market participants, and at the same time an economist among market participants who may not fully understand the forces buffeting their particular market. It has to do with the fact that economists and economics used to be confined to the study of existing markets, and now we sometimes get to help build them.

This reminded me of a different book about magicians, “Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell:  A Novel” by Susanna Clarke.  The novel describes a world in which magic used to exist, but no longer does…until some new students of the craft come along.

“Mr Segundus wished to know, he said, why modern magicians were unable to work the magic they wrote about….

“The President of the…society…explained that the question was a wrong one.  ‘It presupposes that magicians have some sort of duty to do magic—which is clearly nonsense.  You would not, I imagine, suggest that it is the task of botanists to devise more flowers?  Or that astronomers should labour to rearrange the stars?  Magicians…study magic which was done long ago.  Why should anyone expect more?’ ”

Two-career couples and economic development (in Denmark)

Someone in Denmark is taking married couples seriously: Get help finding a job for your international employee’s partner

"There is a greater chance your international employee will stay in your organisation if his or her partner is also happy in Denmark. The best way to develop a network and a good social life is if the relocating partner is working during his or her stay in Denmark. Having a job is important for many relocating partners. Many partners are well-educated and bring experience from a previous career.

"If you wish to help your international employee, it is a good idea if your organisation helps the family to clarify how the relocating partner can find a job and to support their job hunt. A good starting point is to direct the relocating family to workindenmark.dk. In the Workindenmark job bank, the partner can find English job ads from Danish companies and create a profile in the cv-bank. You can also advice them to contact their regional Workindenmark-centre. Here, they can get professional help with their job-seeking, free of charge. They can attend seminars on how to write an application and CV which appeals to Danish employers and they can get individual guidance.

"If your organization wants to go the extra step to retain the international employee you can freely join Workindenmark's "Partner Link". Click here to read more about Workindenmark's "Partner Link".

HT: Stephanie Hurder

Instructions are part of a market's design

Whenever my colleagues and I help design a new marketplace, we're very aware that a part of the market mechanism are the instructions that accompany it. There's no reason to assume that the benefits of a strategy-proof mechanism, for example, will be realized if the participants aren't made fully aware that it is strategy-proof, so that it is safe for them to reveal their true preferences.

That is why I was glad when the HBS MBA program invited me to explain the modified serial dictatorship mechanism that Clayton Featherstone and I designed for the first year of operation of a 2nd year MBA field experience module, in which Harvard MBA students will choose countries in which to spend time at a company.  (We felt it was particularly important to start with a strategy-proof mechanism, for reasons we hope to write about in the not too distant future.)  Here's the video of my explanation (which can also be found at http://video.hbs.edu/videotools/play?clip=aroth_field2_algorithm or, if that is gated, http://stream.hbs.edu/remediated/cd/aroth_field2_algorithm.mp4)

While I think of it, let me mention that Clayton is an unusually talented and versatile market designer, theorist and experimenter who will be on the econ job market this year.

School choice around the U.S.: some short video interviews

Northwestern's journalism school has a project on school choice that allows you to click on a map of the U.S. and see very short (1 minute) clips of video interviews they did about school choice in the indicated cities:
 One size does not fit all

You can glimpse my filing system for journals in the background of interviews they did with me and Neil Dorosin of IIPSC about Boston, New York, and Denver...

Mechanism design conference: Copenhagen, Sept. 6-9.

WORKSHOP: NEW TRENDS IN MECHANISM DESIGN, Sept 6-9, 2011.

"A main focus of the workshop will be contributions from computer science to the field of mechanism design."

Keynote Speakers:

• Rick Antle, Yale School of Management, Yale University
• Peter Cramton, University of Maryland
• Uriel Feige, the Weizmann Institute
• Jason Hartline, Northwestern University
• Nicole Immorlica, Northwestern University
• Hervé Moulin, Rice University
• Tim Roughgarden, Stanford University

Repugnant markets involving altruistic motivations

Kim Krawiec follows up on Kieran Healy's work on markets for organs, and how the distinction between gift giving and buying and selling isn't so clear.

Krawiec writes (I quote at length, but not the whole thing):

"...I agree with Kieran that financial incentives for human organs are more likely to win social acceptance if they resemble the gift-based allocation systems that have already gained social legitimacy. And the oocyte market – a clearly market-based system with the trappings of gift, including the language of donation -- is a good example of this phenomenon. 

In fact, as I’ve discussed before, this disconnect between market realities and gift narrative is an important feature of many taboo trades.  By normalizing otherwise jarring transactions, gift narratives may facilitate markets that otherwise would stagnate under the weight of social disapproval. For those, like me, who believe there is social value in enabling the infertile to reproduce or those dying from kidney failure to live – and, by corollary, allowing those who consider themselves better off by the receipt of compensation in exchange for an egg or kidney – to do so, this is a good thing. 

At the same time, though, the oocyte market example also illustrates the costs of denying market realities in favor of the pretense of gift exchange -- gifts in name only: 

(1) Legal misfit

Gift-based exchange regimes are typically governed by a different set of legal rules than are market-based exchange regimes.  We tend to recognize, for example, the possibilities for opposing interests and opportunistic behavior in a regime of market-based exchange.  And many legal rules governing market-based regimes are designed with these considerations in mind. In contrast, we often assume (incorrectly, especially when the gift is one in name only) an absence of opportunism and an alignment of interests in the case of gift-based exchange. 

(2) Social stereotypes

I do not know if, or how, this would play out in organ markets, but it has for some time concerned me with respect to reproductive markets, especially the oocyte and surrogacy markets.  Scholars have long noted the presumption that many services provided by women, including reproductive and domestic labor, should be provided altruistically, despite their high economic value.  Says Mary Anne Case, for example:

Much of what women have market power over, such as their sexual and reproductive services, they have long been expected not to commodify at all. Even when monetary compensation is allowed, it is often kept low and female providers are expected to be interested in rewards other than money.

The continued insistence that egg donors are, and should be, motivated primarily by altruism and the desire to help others, rather than by the desire for monetary compensation, threatens to reinforce gendered notions that the market activities of women are driven in large part by altruism and that women as a group are uninterested in reaping the full gains of trade from the provision of their goods and services. 

The comparison to sperm markets is especially telling. The insistence on the altruistic motivations of egg donors is in stark contrast to the presumed motivations of sperm donors, who are recruited through materials that ask, “Why not get paid for it?” and advertise, “your sperm can earn!” 

...

In the end, gifts in name only represent a trade-off.  On the one hand, the language of donation coupled with the realities of market-based exchange has the capacity to legitimate otherwise troubling exchanges, facilitating life-saving operations and parenthood for the infertile.  At the same time, gift-in-name-only exchange has consequences for the social, legal, and market structure of these industries, and for the consumers, producers, and others, including the public-at-large, affected by them."

Call for papers: NBER market design conference, October 28-29, 2011

Susan Athey and Parag Pathak have circulated the following call for papers.

From: Susan Athey and Parag Pathak

To: NBER Market Design Working Group

The National Bureau of Economic Research workshop on Market Design is a forum to discuss new academic research related to the design of market institutions, broadly defined. The next meeting will be held in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on Friday and Saturday, October 28-29, 2011.

We welcome new and interesting research, and are happy to see papers from a variety of fields. Participants in the past meeting covered a range of topics and methodological approaches.  Last year's program can be viewed at:  http://www.nber.org/~confer/2010/MDf10/MDf10prg.html

The conference does not publish proceedings or issue NBER working papers - most of the presented papers are presumed to be published later in journals.

There is no requirement to be an NBER-affiliated researcher to participate.  Younger researchers are especially encouraged to submit papers.  If you are interested in presenting a paper this year, please upload a PDF version by September 9, 2011 to this link:

http://www.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf11

Preference will be given to papers for which at least a preliminary draft is ready by the time of submission. Only authors of accepted papers will be contacted.

For presenters and discussants in North America, the NBER will cover the travel and hotel costs. For speakers from outside North America, while the NBER will not be able to cover the airfare, it can provide support for hotel accommodation.

There are a limited number of spaces available for graduate students to attend to conference, though we cannot cover their costs. Please email ppathak@mit.edu a short nominating paragraph.

Please forward this announcement to any potentially interested scholars.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Dating sites for French farmers

If a dating site specializing in French farmers sounds specialized to you, consider the special problems of farmers: they are unusually immobile, as their work is typically tied to a specific plot of land, and they don't meet many potential marriage partners in the course of a typical work day.  So their problem combines those that have given rise to other kinds of specialized dating sites that make a thick market for e.g. particular ethnic groups or people with disabilities, as well as location and career choice.

The NY Times has a nice article by MAÏA de la BAUME covering several such sites: With Help Online, French Farmers Now Playing the Field

"The lack of love in the countryside is a serious topic for a country that sees its bedrock in small farmers and their produce, which is supposed to be uniquely of the place where it is grown. According to the Agriculture Ministry, about 30 percent of male French farmers did not have a partner in 2009."

Signaling in Internet Dating Markets (and welcoming Soo Lee to Harvard)

 Soohyung Lee arrived today at Harvard where she'll spend the coming academic year as a research visitor, on leave from the University of Maryland. (She'll be sitting in Baker Library, come by and join us for coffee some morning and say hello.)

Here's a recent paper that I admire:
Propose with a Rose? Signaling in Internet Dating Markets, (ungated version here)
by Soohyung Lee, Muriel Niederle, Hye-Rim Kim, Woo-Keum Kim
NBER Working Paper No. 17340
August 2011

"Abstract: The large literature on costly signaling and the somewhat scant literature on preference signaling had varying success in showing the effectiveness of signals. We use a field experiment to show that even when everyone can send a signal, signals are free and the only costs are opportunity costs, sending a signal increases the chances of success. In an online dating experiment, participants can attach “virtual roses” to a proposal to signal special interest in another participant. We find that attaching a rose to an offer substantially increases the chance of acceptance. This effect is driven by an increase in the acceptance rate when the offer is made to a participant who is less desirable than the proposer. Furthermore, participants endowed with more roses have more of their offers accepted than their counterparts."

One of the things I like about this paper (aside from the fact that it reports an experiment in market design, that is), is that it also sheds some light on the signaling mechanism for new Ph.D.s on the economics job market.

First class tomorrow morning: slides on website

For students in our market design class which starts tomorrow, some material for the first lecture is on the course website...http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k80599&pageid=icb.page425742 .

From now on I won't announce course material on the blog...keep an eye on the course website for that.

See you tomorrow morning.

Theory of privacy

Several courses are being offered that deal with new theories of data privacy, concerning how to usefully answer queries from a database while preserving the privacy of individuals in the database, even if the queries can be combined with auxiliary information from other data sources.

These concerns arise in response to the practical observation that even "anonymized" databases can often be "de-anonymized" by combining them with other information.

All the course sites below link to papers in the literature, and, at least at this early stage of development, there seems to be a great deal of consensus on which papers to cover.

The Algorithmic Foundations of Data Privacy taught by Aaron Roth this Fall at Penn

Algorithmic Challenges in Data Privacy taught at Penn State by Sofya Raskhodnikova and Adam D. Smith

Foundations of Privacy taught at Weizmann by Moni Naor.

Multiple publication and plagiarism in economics journals

An unusual insight into the culture of academic publication comes in a recently published letter from David Autor, the editor of the Journal of Economic Perspectives to a famous economist who published an article there that was substantively identical to papers he had published elsewhere.

David Autor writes:
"...There is a very substantial overlap between these articles and your JEP publication. Indeed, to my eye, they are substantively identical. Based on discussions with the editors of these journals, we have confirmed that the JEBO article was in press and the R&S article under review while your article was under revision for JEP. At the time we accepted your paper for JEP, we could not readily have learned of these two overlapping articles since they were at the time unpublished. Further obscuring the links among these articles is the fact that none of your four articles cites any of the other three. Had you chosen to inform us of the JEBO and R&S articles prior to the publication of your JEP article, we would of course have no grounds for complaint. In that case, however, we would not have published your article.

"We view your publication of this substantive material in multiple journals simultaneously as a violation of the spirit of the editorial agreement with American Economic Association that you signed in the winter of 2010, which states "The Author(s) warrant(s) that the above-named manuscript is his or her own original work of authorship and has not been published previously." The AEA does not intend to pursue legal action against you for violation of copyright. However, we find your conduct in this matter ethically dubious and disrespectful to the American Economic Association, the Journal of Economic Perspectives and the JEP's readers..."

The letter from Autor is followed by a letter of apology from the senior author of the papers in question, Zurich's Professor Bruno Frey.
"...It was a grave mistake on our part for which we deeply apologize..."
**********

RePEc maintains a plagiarism page on which it includes links to offending authors and some of the case material, including the present case.

More on the taking of photos

Here are two followups on my earlier post today on British Airways' claims about photographs. The first via Paola Manzini, concerns US Airways' similar claims. The second, via Ben Edelman, concerns a very recent court victory in the U.S. by the ACLU, regarding citizens' rights to photograph police officers.

Woman thrown off U.S. Airways flight for taking a picture of rude air steward's name tag.
"A photographer was thrown off a U.S. Airways flight and branded a security risk after she took a photo of a rude air steward's name tag so she could complain about her."


A Victory for Recording in Public!
"The CMLP is thrilled to report that in the case of Glik v. Cunniffe, which the CMLP has blogged previously and in which the CMLP attempted to file an amicus brief, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit has issued a resounding and unanimous opinion in support of the First Amendment right to record the actions of police in public."

British Airways Conditions of Carriage

A disturbing incident at British Airways raises interesting questions about their Conditions of Carriage, the fine-print online contract that you and they enter into when you buy a ticket. (In many markets what is bought and sold is at least partly a legal contract.)

To make a long story short, we were accosted in the public (pre-security) area of London's Heathrow airport by a bizarrely aggressive BA employee who declined to identify himself. I took his picture. When I was about to board the plane an hour and a half later, I was asked to step aside, where another BA employee told me that photographing BA employees was forbidden, and it was a condition of carriage that I delete the photo.

I have not been able to find that clause in the published COC, and have written to BA for clarification.

Conference on Frontiers in Market Design

Bettina Klaus has announced two conferences on market design. The one that is imminent is

Market Design Workshop on September 14th, 2011, Maastricht University, The Netherlands:

The speakers are Bettina Klaus, Flip Klijn, Scott Duke Kominers, Morimitsu Kurino, Alexey Kushnir, Markus Walzl, and Alexander Westkamp. The workshop program and abstracts of presented papers can be downloaded here:Workshop Program and Abstracts of Presented Papers

And here's a "pre-announcement" of one in May...

Frontiers in Market Design: Matching Markets
May 20 – 23, 2012
Centro Stefano Franscini (http://www.csf.ethz.ch/), MonteVerità, CH

"Dear colleagues,


Together with Itai Ashlagi, Péter Biró, Federico Echenique, Flip Klijn, and Alvin Roth, I am planning a conference on Market Design with a focus on Matching Markets at a very nicely located Swiss conference centre.


We aim to organize a worthy follow-up to the conference that celebrated the 20th anniversary of Two-Sided Matching: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis by Alvin Roth and Marilda Sotomayor (http://econ.duke.edu/erid/conferences/roth-and-sotomayor-twenty-years-after). We hope to bring together researchers from different fields (economics, computer science, etc.) and attract many young researchers.


With this pre-announcement, we would like to see how many participants we might be able to count on (we will be able to accommodate up to 22 talks). The reason for this unorthodox procedure is that I will have to make a reservation of the conference room and of the needed accommodation capacity at the Conference Centre hotel well in advance (with penalties applying if the reserved capacities are left unused).


Depending on the exact number of participants, the conference fee will amount to about 800 CHF (this conference fee includes the accommodation for 3 nights at Hotel Monte Verità and full board during the conference). Unfortunately, this currently amounts to almost 1000$ (the Swiss Franc is quite strong). We did not yet succeed in obtaining further funding for the conference that would allow us to subsidize the on-site costs), but we are still working on that. If you can think of any funding opportunity we might be able to apply for, please let me know.


In order for us to facilitate the conference planning and later also reserve the corresponding conference room and conference accommodation, I would like to ask you to send an e-mail to me (Bettina Klaus at econlausanne@yahoo.com) before October 1st indicating the following:


(A) You are very likely to attend this conference (this would be an indication for me to count you as a participant of the conference for the conference room and accommodation reservation).


(B) You are very interested in attending this conference, but not sure yet (I can then keep you informed via a conference mailing list).


(C) You are not likely to attend the conference. In this case, no need to send an e-mail (you will not receive further mailings concerning the conference).


Thanks a lot & have a great (remaining) summer,
Bettina et al."