Should unpaid internships be repugnant? (Many are already illegal...)

The NY Times hosts a debate: most of the debaters think the answer is "yes": Do Unpaid Internships Exploit College Students?

Alex Peysakhovich writes

"I talked to a friend of mine who is in the music recording business about this. He started work in a studio as an unpaid intern (for about 6 months) then got hired onto the staff. For reference: they usually have about 3-4 interns and 1-2 staff in the studio during business hours, so most of their labor hours come in from free sources (but it counts as training since interns do most of the tech work).

"He gave me the "well, that's how the business works... if they want to enter the business they need to put in the time." He didn't really buy the "lots of unpaid internships are exploitative" arguments making the, very economist point, that they're giving a chance to let the interns signal their actual interest and ability.

"How much of this is selection (he thought it was ok so he did it) vs how much is "it's hard to make a man understand something when his paycheck depends on him not understanding it," I'm not sure."

From repugnant, to legal, to mandatory?

The Telegraph reports on the intersection of prostitution law (it's now legal) and unemployment law (you can lose your benefits if you turn down a job) in Germany: 'If you don't take a job as a prostitute, we can stop your benefits'

"A 25-year-old waitress who turned down a job providing "sexual services'' at a brothel in Berlin faces possible cuts to her unemployment benefit under laws introduced this year.

"Prostitution was legalised in Germany just over two years ago and brothel owners – who must pay tax and employee health insurance – were granted access to official databases of jobseekers.

 "The waitress, an unemployed information technology professional, had said that she was willing to work in a bar at night and had worked in a cafe.

 "She received a letter from the job centre telling her that an employer was interested in her "profile'' and that she should ring them. Only on doing so did the woman, who has not been identified for legal reasons, realise that she was calling a brothel.

 "Under Germany's welfare reforms, any woman under 55 who has been out of work for more than a year can be forced to take an available job – including in the sex industry – or lose her unemployment benefit. Last month German unemployment rose for the 11th consecutive month to 4.5 million, taking the number out of work to its highest since reunification in 1990.

 "The government had considered making brothels an exception on moral grounds, but decided that it would be too difficult to distinguish them from bars. As a result, job centres must treat employers looking for a prostitute in the same way as those looking for a dental nurse."
...
"Tatiana Ulyanova, who owns a brothel in central Berlin, has been searching the online database of her local job centre for recruits.

"Why shouldn't I look for employees through the job centre when I pay my taxes just like anybody else?" said Miss Ulyanova."
**************


So we have here a situation in which a formerly repugnant transaction became legal and might, under some circumstances become mandatory (at least for those seeking unemployment benefits). This reminds me of one of the better arguments against legalizing kidney sales and other payments to organ donors: once they were legal, some future Congress might want to make unemployment benefits available only to people who had already utilized their kidney resources, for example… See my posts on the fraught debate about compensation for donors.

HT: Itay Fainmesser

Update from the comments: no women have been forced into prostitution by this potential legal technicality...http://www.snopes.com/media/notnews/brothel.asp

Just as well he's not the French president...

A recent story about the once likely presidential candidate Dominique Strauss-Kahn sheds some light on his lifestyle, and on French law regarding prostitution: French Police Detain Strauss-Kahn for Questioning

"Magistrates are investigating whether Mr. Strauss-Kahn was aware that women who entertained him were prostitutes. One of his lawyers, Henri Leclerc, has ridiculed the idea. “He could easily not have known, because as you can imagine, at these kinds of parties you’re not always dressed, and I challenge you to distinguish a naked prostitute from any other naked woman,” Mr. Leclerc told a French radio station, Europe 1, in December.


"Prosecutors are also seeking to determine whether Mr. Strauss-Kahn knew that some of the escorts may have been paid with embezzled funds. Prostitution is legal in France but it is unlawful to profit from vice or use embezzled funds to pay prostitutes."

AEA announcements of a market design sort: conference organization and part-time teaching

The AEA announcement email of 2/13/12 contains the following bits of market design aimed at managing congestion in a thick market, and creating thickness in a thin one:


Econ-Harmony helps prospective AEA Annual Meetings individual paper submitters find others with similar interests who might join them to form a complete session submission, and provides an opportunity to volunteer as a session chair. Thirty-one percent of submitted complete sessions and 16% of submitted individual papers made it onto the 2012 Program; 39% of submitted complete sessions and 17 % of submitted individual papers made it onto the 2011 Program. Econ-Harmony is at http://www.aeaweb.org/econ-harmony/. 


Retired Faculty Available for part-time or temporary teaching. JOE now lists retired economists interested in teaching on either a part-time or temporary basis at http://www.aeaweb.org/joe/available_faculty/. Individuals can add or delete their name any time. Listings are deleted on November 30; the service is closed during December and January, re-opening February 12.

Matching in Budapest in July: call for papers

First announcement and call for papers (with apologies if you receive this

more than once):

                           MATCH-UP 2012:

   the Second International Workshop on Matching Under Preferences

                          19-20 July 2012

                         Budapest, Hungary

        http://econ.core.hu/english/res/MATCH-UP_2012.html

  co-located with SING8: The 8th Spain-Italy-Netherlands Meeting

              on Game Theory (http://sing8.iehas.hu)

    

   

Celebrating the 50th anniversary of the seminal paper by Gale and Shapley,

and following the success of the first MATCH-UP workshop in Reykjavík in

2008 (http://www.optimalmatching.com/workshop), we are organising another

interdisciplinary workshop on stable matchings and related topics.

Background

----------

Matching problems with preferences occur in widespread applications such

as the assignment of school-leavers to universities, junior doctors to

hospitals, students to campus housing, children to schools, kidney

transplant patients to donors and so on. The common thread is that

individuals have preference lists over the possible outcomes and the task

is to find a matching of the participants that is in some sense optimal

with respect to these preferences.

The remit of this workshop is to explore matching problems with

preferences from the perspective of algorithms and complexity, discrete

mathematics, combinatorial optimization, game theory, mechanism design

and economics, and thus a key objective is to bring together the research

communities of the related areas.

Invited speakers

----------------

* Nicole Immorlica, Northwestern University

* Rob Irving, University of Glasgow

* Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University (on leave at Columbia University)

* Tayfun Sönmez, Boston College

List of topics

--------------

The matching problems under consideration include, but are not limited to:

* two-sided matchings involving agents on both sides (e.g. college

  admissions, resident allocation, job markets, school choice, etc.)

* two-sided matchings involving agents and items (e.g. house allocation,

  course allocation, project allocation, assigning papers to reviewers,

  school choice, etc.)

* one-sided matchings (roommates problem, kidney exchanges, etc.)

* matching with payments (assignment game, auctions, etc.)

Submissions

-----------

We call for two types of contributed papers.

Format A: original contribution

* at most 12 pages

* accepted papers will be published in proceedings (however, this should

  not prevent the simultaneous or subsequent submission of contributed

  papers to other workshops, conferences or journals)

Format B: not necessarily original work

* no page limit

* only the abstract will be published in proceedings

Authors should indicate which format type their paper should be considered

under.

Important dates

---------------

* Deadline for submission of contributed papers: 19 March 2012

* Notification of acceptance: 20 April 2012

* Early registration deadline: 18 May 2012

* Workshop: 19-20 July 2012

Organising committee

--------------------

* Péter Biró (Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

* Tamás Fleiner (Budapest University of Technology and Economics)

* David Manlove (University of Glasgow)

* Tamás Solymosi (Corvinus University, Budapest)

Programme committee

-------------------

* Péter Biró (Chair, Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences)

* Estelle Cantillon (Université Libre de Bruxelles)

* Katarína Cechlárová (Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Safárika)

* Paul Dütting (EPFL, Lausanne)

* Aytek Erdil (University of Cambridge)

* Tamás Fleiner (Budapest University of Technology and Economics)

* Guillaume Haeringer (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)

* Elena Inarra (University of the Basque Country)

* Zoltán Király (Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest)

* Flip Klijn (Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona)

* David Manlove (University of Glasgow)

* Eric McDermid (21st Century Technologies)

* Shuichi Miyazaki(Kyoto University)

* Marina Nunez (Universitat de Barcelona)

* Ildikó Schlotter (Budapest University of Technology and Economics)

* Tamás Solymosi (Corvinus University, Budapest)

Further information

-------------------

See http://econ.core.hu/english/res/MATCH-UP_2012.html

Is it possible to be too young or too thin?

Could using too young or too thin fashion models become repugnant?
The NY Times is on the case: Checking Models’ IDs at the Door

"IN the five years since fashion designers got serious about protecting the health and well-being of young models, there has been a measurable improvement in the prevailing ideal of beauty as seen on the runways. Many of the top models working today, like Lara Stone, Joan Smalls and Arizona Muse, reflect a changing aesthetic toward healthier figures and at least some representation of diversity in race and age.

"And yet, season after season, we still see models who appear to be dangerously thin or...models who are as young as 14, even though designers and modeling agencies have pledged not to cast girls younger than 16 in the shows. If you believe them.

"Assessing the impact of a campaign to curb reckless behavior in their industry, Diane Von Furstenberg, the president of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, said this week that some progress had been made but that much work remained to be done. This season, the council urged its members to insist on seeing identification from models to prove that they are 16 by the time of their shows. (Ms. Von Furstenberg herself was embarrassed a year ago, when, after promoting the age requirement, it was discovered that one of the models in her own show was still 15.)

“If we haven’t done anything else,” Ms. Von Furstenberg said, measuring her words, “we certainly have created awareness.”

False positives in the reporting of experiments

Here's an article suggesting that _lots_ of false positives get introduced into the experimental literature, and they suggest some experimental protocols that if widely adopted by authors and journals might help reduce the number.

False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant
by Joseph P. Simmons, Leif D. Nelson, and Uri Simonsohn
Psychological Science, November 2011, vol. 22, 1359-1366

"First, we show that despite empirical psychologists’ nominal endorsement of a low rate of false-positive findings (<_ .05), flexibility in data collection, analysis, and reporting dramatically increases actual false-positive rates. In many cases, a researcher is more likely to falsely find evidence that an effect exists than to correctly find evidence that it does not. We present computer simulations and a pair of actual experiments that demonstrate how unacceptably easy it is to accumulate (and report) statistically significant evidence for a false hypothesis. Second, we suggest a simple, low-cost, and straightforwardly effective disclosure-based solution to this problem. The solution involves six concrete requirements for authors and four guidelines for reviewers, all of which impose a minimal burden on the publication process."
**************



A very nice paper, in a venerable literature. See my earlier attempt, which also focused on more carefully reporting all aspects of how an experiment was conducted and reported.

Roth, A.E., "Lets Keep the Con out of Experimental Econ.: A Methodological Note" Empirical Economics (Special Issue on Experimental Economics), 1994, 19, 279-289. 


HT: Eyal Ert

Unraveling of college admissions: more students apply early

When markets unravel, we often see dates at which transactions are finalized move earlier and earlier.
Something different is going on in college admissions: the dates for early admissions are staying the same, but more students are applying early, and colleges are filling a higher percentage of their entering class early.
Here's a story on the rise in early applicants: As a Broader Group Seeks Early Admission, Rejections Rise in the East

"Early admission to top colleges, once the almost exclusive preserve of the East Coast elite, is now being pursued by a much broader and more diverse group of students, including foreigners and minorities.
...
"Duke, for example, received 400 early applications this year from California or overseas; in 2005, it was fewer than 100. Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, saw early applications from abroad double this year from last. And at the University of Chicago, there were double-digit rises in the percentage of early applications from black and Hispanic students."

Peer review as a club good

Peer review is a system that scientists love to criticize, and occasionally changes are suggested in the design of this important part of the system of open science. Below is a story about a recently proposed clearinghouse, Peerage of Science, meant to turn peer reviewing into a kind of restricted public good: only reviewers can be reviewed.

Online Social Network Seeks to Overhaul Peer Review in Scientific Publishing
"The current peer review system in which journal editors send potentially publishable manuscripts to experts for review is hotly debated. Many scientists complain that the system is slow, inefficient, of variable quality, and prone to favoritism. Moreover, there's growing resentment in some quarters about being asked to take valuable time to provide free reviews to journals that are operated by for-profit publishers or that don't make their papers open-access. Several suggestions have been made to improve the peer review system, such as introducing credits for reviewers, using social media, and making the process more transparent.

"Peerage of Science aims to combine these ideas, explains co-founder Mikko Mönkkönen, an applied ecologist at the University of Jyväskylä. A researcher would initially upload a manuscript to Peerage of Science. It will then be made anonymous and posted on a Web site that is exclusively accessible to other members, which currently stands at around 500 scientists. Along with the manuscript, the authors can add a short pitch explaining why peers should review this manuscript.

"Potential reviewers receive an e-mail if tagged keywords reflecting the manuscript match their expertise—bird migration, for example. After reviewing a paper, peers are allowed to grade the quality of the other reviews, by awarding a grade between one and five.  Editors of journals partnering with Peerage of Science can anonymously track reviews, get automated updates on the paper and make an offer to publish the paper, perhaps after a requested revision. Authors are free to accept or decline their offers.

"Scientists receive one credit for every review they finish. These credits are required to upload a manuscript, which costs two credits divided by the number of coauthors. The author who uploads a manuscript is also obliged to have a positive balance. "This formalises an unwritten rule: he who wants his manuscripts reviewed, reviews other manuscripts in return," explains Janne-Tuomas Seppänen, a postdoc at University of Jyväskylä, who came up with the initial idea for Peerage of Science service in February 2010."

HT: Scott Kominers

A call for fair-trade pornography

Fair-trade pornography: Ethically sourced food and beauty products are labeled. Why not porn? asks Erika Christakis in the Boston Globe.

"WE HAVE fair-trade coffee and humanely raised chicken. So why can’t we create a market for ethically sourced pornography?"

Parentage, and citizenship, and the market for reproductive services

One of the ways a baby can automatically be an American citizen is if one of its parents is an American citizen. So new options in fertility concern American consulates. The rules were written when there were fewer ways to have a baby. So one question now asked of American moms giving birth in Israel: "was it your egg?"

U.S. demands proof of parentage for IVF babies born in Israel: As Israel continues to evolve as a world leader in fertility treatments, some legal circles are suggesting that the U.S. government may be concerned about fraudulent efforts to secure U.S. citizenship.

A long nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donor chain in the NY Times

60 Lives, 30 Kidneys, All Linked

A nice NY Times story, about a nonsimultaneous chain organized by Garet Hil's  National Kidney Registry .

Mike Rees gets a nod for the revolution he began at the  Alliance for Paired Donation  with the first nonsimultaneous chain: Advances in kidney exchange, in the New England Journal of Medicine

Here's why they're important: Nonsimultaneous kidney exchange chains produce more transplants than simultaneous chains

See previous blog posts on kidney exchange chains here.

Update: here an NKR press release that touches on some work that Itai Ashlagi and I are doing with them.

Horse meat at the Harvard faculty club

At the Harvard faculty club (starting I believe in WW I or II) "members happily consumed horsemeat, obtained from the racetrack at Suffolk Downs. It was so popular, chicken-fried and served up with onion gravy that it stayed on the menu until 1985 when the new French chef refused to cook frozen food."

Note what the chef found repugnant.

Peter Coles snapped the following picture by the club's coat room, of a French political cartoon about the pleasures of hippophagy .

Markets for cadavers

ABC news has an 18 minute video on the market for cadavers used in recent popular anatomy exhibits. They conclude that many of these are obtained from illicit Chinese sources, and may include the bodies of executed prisoners: http://abcnews.go.com/2020/video?id=4300207

HT Itay Fainmesser

A public good of a sort: a community gun

The NY Times reports: In a Mailbox: A Shared Gun, Just for the Asking

"Hidden and shared by a small group of people who use them when needed, and are always sure to return them, such guns appear to be rising in number in New York, according to the police. It is unclear why. The economy? Times are tough — not everyone can afford a gun.

“The gangs are younger, and their resources are less,” said Ed Talty, an assistant district attorney in the Bronx.

"The police believe that a community gun is now in play in a series of gang-related shootings in East New York, Brooklyn, between the Rock Starz and their colorfully named rivals, the Very Crispy Gangsters.

 "Sharing guns predates the Wild West, but the sophistication of maintaining today’s community gun can be striking. “You call it a community gun, so that name has to be able to market itself,” Senator Smith said. “You have a business model behind this concept, a schedule, which is a shame. If they used that intellect for something positive, who knows how successful that person could be?”

 "Sometimes the hiding place is human. “One guy will hold the gun down,” Captain Dee said. “They call him the ‘holster.’ Often, it’s a female. Someone who is above suspicion.”

Penny wise and pound foolish: now in the NEJM

It's truer than ever that in the United States we have a foolish Medicare policy of only paying for three years of anti-rejection drugs following a kidney transplant, even though Medicare covers the larger costs of dialysis and/or re-transplantation.

And now it's peer reviewed: the New England Journal of Medicine picks up the story in its February 1 2012 issue: "Penny Wise, Pound Foolish? Coverage Limits on Immunosuppression after Kidney Transplantation" by Gill and Tonelli.

"As a treatment for end-stage renal disease (ESRD), kidney transplantation is superior to dialysis for improving patient survival rates and quality of life. Its long-term success, however, requires ongoing treatment with immunosuppressive drugs. Ironically, although many of the pivotal discoveries related to immunosuppression have been made in the United States, U.S. kidney-transplant recipients do not benefit from a coherent funding policy for these drugs, and thousands of such patients are therefore at risk for allograft failure and premature death. Ensuring lifetime access to these medications for all Americans with kidney transplants would save lives as well as reduce the total cost of treating patients with ESRD.
...
"Premature transplant failure is the fifth leading cause of initiation of dialysis in the United States. Unfortunately, approximately 25% of patients whose transplants fail die within 2 years after returning to dialysis. This outcome is worse than the 2-year mortality among patients with a functioning transplant from a deceased donor (6%) and still worse than that among age-matched dialysis patients who have never received a transplant (20%).
A second transplant is the best treatment option for a patient whose transplant has failed, but the opportunities for repeat transplantation are much more limited than those for initial transplantation. Candidates for repeat transplantation account for about 20% of patients on the waiting list but (because of sensitization from their failed allograft) receive only 12% of the deceased-donor kidneys transplanted annually in the United States."

Here's my earlier blog post on the subject:

Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Penny wise and pound foolish on kidneys and antirejection drugs

HT: Scott Kominers

The nursery school for the kid who has everything...

...costs more than Harvard... Bracing for $40,000 at City Private Schools

"Over the past 10 years, the median price of first grade in the city has gone up by 48 percent, adjusted for inflation, compared with a 35 percent increase at private schools nationally — and just 24 percent at an Ivy League college — according to tuition data provided by 41 New York City K-12 private schools to the National Association of Independent Schools.

"Indeed, this year’s tuition at Columbia Grammar and Preparatory ($38,340 for 12th grade) and Horace Mann ($37,275 for the upper school) is higher than Harvard’s ($36,305).
...
The median number of applications to New York schools has increased 32 percent over the past decade, according to the association, and in some schools the acceptance rate is staggeringly low. At Trinity, only 2.4 percent of children from families with no previous connection to the school were admitted to kindergarten last year. Far from being deterred by the sticker prices, more families seem to be hiring consultants — at an additional cost — in hopes of getting a leg up.

" One consulting firm, Manhattan Private School Advisors, said it worked with 1,431 families this school year, up from 605 three years ago. The company’s fee has gone up, too: It was $21,500 this year and $18,500 three years ago."

Matching and market design for Valentine's day

Valentine's day always inspires lots of stories about matching, and lately some of these are also about market design.  Here are some that caught my eye.

Ray Fisman, one of the pioneers in the experimental study of dating, writes in Slate about a market design experiment by my colleagues Soo Lee and Muriel Niederle: Will You Accept This Digital Rose? How little flower icons could solve Internet dating’s biggest problem. (see my blog post on that experiment here).

A more pessimistic view is expressed over at the Guardian: Is online dating destroying love? That article includes some discussion of Dan Ariely's efforts at designing a more interactive dating site.

The NY Times weighs in with a return to optimism (at least for educated women) in a story titled The M.R.S. and the Ph.D., which says that education is no longer the barrier to marriage that it once may have been for women.

And speaking of education, a NY Times profile of Harvard Ph.D. economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers points out that even if you let the tax consequences stop you from officially marrying, you can still arrange your joint lives in a way that looks very married indeed: It’s the Economy, Honey.

Happy Valentine's day to all, and happy hunting to all of you in matching mode.

Incentive compatibility in a giant outdoor 18th century restaurant

"the waiters were prevented from cheating the management by being made to pay cash from their own pockets for everything they ordered from the kitchens, reimbursing themselves when the customers settled their bills."

That detail is from The English pleasures of Vauxhall, a large, long lived "pleasure gardens" on the banks of the Thames that was both an outdoor concert venue and an innovative early large scale caterer to its customers, founded in the 1700's.

The Common App and college admissions

An article on updated software to be used for college admissions by the Common Application process reflects how the process of applying to colleges, once entirely decentralized, has changed: Common App 4.0

"The Common App, the all-purpose form accepted by 456 colleges and universities, is getting a digital makeover, down to the most fundamental swatches of code, with the end result intended to be a smoother, faster, more intuitive application. (The application itself will still be a rigorous exercise, complete with 250- to 500-word essays.)
"The new electronic form, now on the drawing board, is scheduled to make its debut in 2013.
...
"In the application season beginning to wind down this month, an estimated 750,000 students will have submitted three million online applications. That represents an increase of about 25 percent in only the last year. Meanwhile, teachers, counselors and school administrators are expected to submit 10 million transcripts, recommendations and other school forms through the Common Application’s electronic pipeline this year.

"For that matter, it has only been in the last decade that most students began to apply to college by pushing the “send” button instead of walking their applications to the post office. The Common App itself — which made it possible, for the first time, for a student to type up one form and photocopy it for multiple submissions — is only 36 years old.
...
"The number of applications filed through the Common Application portal by the end of this decade could exceed 10 million — and the number of schools accepting it could grow to 1,000 or more. That workload is well beyond what the latest Common Application is built to withstand."

HT: Neil Dorosin