There's a market for economists

The WSJ takes note: Battle for Academic Economists Is Heating Up

A belt plus suspenders for North Carolina on same sex marriage, while Obama comes out (in favor)

When is a repugnant transaction doubly repugnant? When a State that has a law against it passes a constitutional amendment against it, just to be clear.
North Carolina Voters Pass Same-Sex Marriage Ban

"As expected, North Carolinians voted in large numbers on Tuesday for an amendment that would ban same-sex marriages, partnerships and civil unions, becoming the 30th state in the country and the last in the South to include a prohibition on gay marriage in the state constitution.
...
"North Carolina, a religious but also relatively moderate state on social issues, already has a law banning same-sex marriage. But Republican lawmakers pushed an amendment out of concern that the law was in danger of being struck down by judges."
***********


And, as if to make it clear that same sex marriage is in transition as a repugnant transaction, the next day (i.e. yesterday): Obama Says Same-Sex Marriage Should Be Legal (while Mitt Romney reiterated his opposition).

"President Obama on Wednesday ended nearly two years of “evolving” on the issue of same-sex marriage by publicly endorsing it in a television interview, taking a definitive stand on one of the most contentious and politically charged social issues of the day.

“At a certain point, I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married,” Mr. Obama told ABC News in an interview that came after the president faced mounting pressure to clarify his position.
...

"Hours before the president’s announcement, Mr. Romney, the former governor of Massachusetts, restated his opposition to same-sex marriage in an interview with KDVR-TV, a Fox News affiliate in Colorado.

“When these issues were raised in my state of Massachusetts, I indicated my view, which is I do not favor marriage between people of the same gender, and I do not favor civil unions if they are identical to marriage other than by name,” Mr. Romney said. “My view is the domestic partnership benefits, hospital visitation rights and the like are appropriate, but that the others are not.”

"Public support for same-sex marriage is growing at a pace that surprises even professional pollsters as older generations of voters who tend to be strongly opposed are supplanted by younger ones who are just as strongly in favor. Same-sex couples are featured in some of the most popular shows on television, without controversy."

How not to communicate about kidney exchange

Kidney exchange, aka kidney paired donation is a great opportunity, but it has to be communicated to patients and donors. The state of the art is practiced by surgeons like Dr. Adam Bingaman in San Antonio, who makes sure that patients and donors hear about all options before they even begin to be tested for compatibility. That way, if they are incompatible, they're not surprised to hear they still have options.

Other hospitals only mention kidney exchange after testing donors and finding them incompatible with their intended recipient. Here's a few sentences of a story that makes that clear:

"After testing, Hendon received a letter from UCLA saying she was not a good match.

“I was so sad, almost devastated,” she said. “Then at the bottom of the letter, in tiny letters, it mentioned I could still be involved in a kidney exchange. I called them the next day and they seemed surprised that I still wanted to do it and started the process.”

"Once she was approved, it was not long before she was notified that they had a recipient waiting for her kidney."
*********

The donor in question participated in this nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donor (NEAD) chain.

Unraveling of the second year summer associate market: derailed on the fast track

The meltdown of the law firm Dewey & LeBoeuf has consequences for the lawyers they hired years in advance. Here's a story about the students who accepted summer internships a year ago...

For Law Students, Dewey & LeBoeuf Internships Evaporate

"[last week]...about 30 students learned that their plum summer jobs at Dewey & LeBoeuf had vanished. 

[These students] "had expected to walk out of their final exams this week and into a summer position promised back in the fall. Like summer associate jobs at most white-shoe law firms, they would have earned around $3,000 a week, plus free meals, field trips and other goodies. It would be a cushy, two-month courtship that virtually guaranteed equally lucrative employment with Dewey after graduation.

"But now those jobs are gone, and just about every comparable opportunity was booked nearly a year ago.

"The legal industry has an unusually synchronized and suffocatingly compressed hiring schedule. Most big law firms do not have rolling applications for their summer slots. Instead, they interview students during the same two-week period right as their second year of law school begins. At that point students have received only two semesters of grades, but those grades will determine where they work the next summer — and often, for the rest of their lives. That is because firms offer permanent, postgraduation jobs to just about every summer associate, for fear of looking like their business has suddenly dropped off if they do not.

"With Dewey’s announcement, these students’ careful, fastidiously risk-averse career planning collapsed under them, and they fell off the job track not just for Dewey but for its peer firms. Of the dozens of major firms contacted for this article, only one had picked up one of these stranded summer associates, and that was because one of its partners had a personal connection to the student.

American economic association finances; legacy of Mark Perlman

An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the finances of academic professional societies brings back fond memories of my late Pittsburgh colleague Mark Perlman: Scholarly Groups' Choices Yield Diverging Fortunes.

""When new executive-committee members come on, I say, 'Let me explain the finances of the association,'" says John J. Siegfried, secretary-treasurer of the American Economic Association. "We have two products that subsidize everything else."
Most of that subsidy comes from the association's online database, EconLit; the other source is the association's jobs listings, which employers pay to post and which appear chiefly online. "It radically changes our business model," Mr. Siegfried says of EconLit, "though that's flattering it."
His breezy description of the association's economic model acknowledges how the quirks of history and personality can produce long-term consequences. Indeed, the economists' group owes much of its present fiscal strength to choices made decades ago. When asked how his scholarly association went about developing EconLit, Mr. Siegfried answered simply, "You have Mark Perlman."
Mr. Perlman, who died in 2006, was hailed for his encyclopedic knowledge of the discipline's philosophy, history, and institutions. He was an economist at the University of Pittsburgh in 1969, when the Journal of Economic Literature, which he founded, started publishing articles, book reviews, and a bibliography of scholarship in economics.
For several years, Mr. Perlman and association staff collected journals and manuscripts, piling them in eight-foot-high stacks in the narrow corridors of a dark, cramped space next to a beauty parlor on Forbes Avenue, near Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University.
"An earthquake in Pittsburgh would likely have led to our employees being crushed under economics journals," Mr. Siegfried wrote earlier this year in toasting the retirement of Dru Ekwurzel, who served as the association's director of publications.
In the early 1980s, Ms. Ekwurzel was instrumental in transferring tapes of journal citations, abstracts, and bibliographic material to an online information-retrieval service. Scholars would gain access to this database through a terminal and dial-up service at a subscribing library. In 1984 that database, named EconLit, made its debut at the association's annual meeting.
By the time the World Wide Web was born, the association was well positioned. In 2010, EconLit generated nearly $3.9-million in revenue from subscribing libraries and universities, or more than 40 percent of the association's budget.
The group's seven journals, available in print and online, are agenda setters for the field, but they also cost far more to produce than the income they generate. The group's annual meeting breaks even.
With a surplus of more than $1.2-million and income from EconLit and the job listings, the association chose recently to slash by more than half, to as little as $20, its fees for membership, in hopes of stemming a 13-percent decline in members since 2003.
"We have a strange situation of not hanging on by our fingernails," Mr. Siegfried says, "and I know others are."
**********
Mark passed away in May 2006.
Obituary: Mark Perlman / Prominent economist of post-World War II era

Professor Mark Perlman: Historian of economic thought

Same-sex divorce: A predictable repugnant transaction?

A same sex couple who got married in California when same-sex marriages were briefly legal there, wants to get divorced in Maryland, where they live. Both of them have agreed on the details of property etc. But a judge has ruled they can't divorce, since they couldn't get married in Maryland...A court’s conundrum: When same-sex partners want to split

"They both want to get divorced. But a Prince George’s County judge said they could not, reasoning that because same-sex marriage is not legal in the state, neither is same-sex divorce.


"Now the highest court in Maryland will decide whether he was right, and whether the women will be required to maintain a bond they’ve tried for almost two years to sever."

Dress exchange

Joshua Gans points out to me that now there's a dress exchange called 99dresses.comhttp://www.99dresses.com/ (which seems less complicated than kidney exchange).

FREE FASHION

and never wear the same thing twice!

Get Started It's FREE. Learn more about how it works.

1 UPLOAD

Upload your quality unwanted clothes, shoes and accessories into the Infinite Closet.

2 SELL

Sell your fashion to other girls for a virtual currency called buttons.

3 SPEND

Spend your buttons on anything you want in the Infinite Closet.  

School choice in Denver: early reports

Denver has rolled out its new school choice system, and here are some news stories about the results:

DPS school choice program accommodates most students
"In the first year using a new system that centralized school choice applications within Denver Public Schools, a vast majority of students were able to get into their top picks.
"We're seeing enrollment increases all across the city and are thrilled to be serving more Denver families and seeing the high level of participation in SchoolChoice," DPS Superintendent Tom Boasberg said

DPS’ SchoolChoice worked – for most
"Nearly 70 percent of the 23,000 families who participated in Denver Public Schools’ new streamlined enrollment process got into their top choice schools, DPS leaders announced Monday.
"Meanwhile, 80 percent got into their first or second choice school and 83 percent got a spot in their first, second or third choice.
"It was unclear whether the participation in school choice increased this year over previous years, but several parents interviewed said the system seemed more fair and easier to navigate – with less gaming of the system by well-connected parents."

And here's a video news report.

(And here's the IIPSC project page that includes Denver.)

MIT celebrates Parag Pathak

Game theory, in the real world: MIT economist Parag Pathak engineers practical solutions to complicated education problems

...
In 2003, New York City schools chancellor Joel Klein, who wanted to revamp the school-choice system, approached a Harvard University professor named Alvin Roth about the problem. Roth had studied the method for matching medical students to their residencies; New York officials hoped something similar would work for their school system.

In turn, Roth asked Pathak, then a first-year PhD student in economics, to look into New York’s school-choice system: Was it a substantive and interesting problem? Pathak decided it was. A decade later, he is still producing new research on the topic, and in 2011 received tenure at MIT, in part because of his work in the area.

Moreover, that work has produced real-world results. Based on the research of Roth and his collaborators, New York City soon adopted what is known as a “deferred-acceptance algorithm” to assign places. Then, Roth’s group, now including economist Tayfun Sonmez, helped Boston review its choice system, leading the city to adopt a new method in 2005.

Using this method, schools first weigh all the students listing those schools as first-choice venues; then, the students who are rejected are essentially allowed to revise their lists, and the process repeats until every student has been matched with a school selection. The crucial difference is that students and families can simply pick the schools they most want to attend, in order.

“Our whole agenda is to try to make these systems strategy-proof,” says Pathak, now an associate professor of economics at MIT. “All these methods move in the direction of simplifying the system for students.” Complicated tactical guesses about popularity are moot; the entire process is based on the substantive merits of schools.

This positive outcome, Pathak says, is the fruit of “trying to think of economics as an engineering discipline,” in order to construct practical solutions to real-world problems.

Within economics, his growing area of specialization is known as “market design.” Beyond schools, market-design problems can be found in health care, financial markets, even the process of keyword searching on the Internet. “These allocation problems are everywhere,” says Pathak, who now also studies school-performance questions and has produced papers examining the quirks of housing markets.

What makes schools good?


"Pathak is the son of Nepalese parents who immigrated to the United States in the 1970s. He grew up in Corning, N.Y., where his father is a doctor and his mother a writer, before attending Harvard as an undergraduate. A direct line can be drawn between Pathak’s career and a class he took during his senior year at Harvard in the spring of 2002, team-taught by Roth and Paul Milgrom, two leaders in market design; Milgrom advised the Federal Communications Commission on the design of their broadcasting-spectrum auctions.

Pathak, an applied mathematics major who graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, says that class allowed him to recognize the possibility of linking game theory with practical problems. He soon enrolled in graduate school in economics at Harvard, received his PhD in 2007 and joined MIT in 2008.

Since then, Pathak’s research on school-choice issues has expanded in part because other places, including Chicago and much of England, have adopted systems similar to the ones he endorses — but due to their own initiative. “It’s as if they followed the discussion in Boston, although there is no evidence of it,” Pathak says. “It’s a great story of how markets evolve.” 

Although strategy-proof systems are gaining in popularity, many cities do not employ them. And yet Pathak believes that in addition to making the selection process simpler, the new systems can lead to a virtuous circle in assessing school quality: If administrators know what students’ real preferences are — as opposed to their tactics-based selections — they can examine what makes certain schools popular and try to institute those elements of good schools in other places, too.

“If we have programs that are oversubscribed, we should figure out why and consider replicating them,” Pathak says.

To be sure, it can be very difficult for people to assess whether or not schools are good in the first place, and for what reasons. In part because of this, Pathak’s interests have developed to include measuring school performance. Along with MIT economists Joshua Angrist and David Autor, he is a founding director of the School Effectiveness &; Inequality Institute at MIT, a new center that launched this year.

Angrist, Pathak and a variety of co-authors have published multiple studies about the performance of charter schools in Massachusetts, for instance, using random samples of students from schools’ admissions lotteries. While recognizing that this can be a “politically charged” issue, Pathak says their aim is simply to shine some empirical light on the matter. So far, the results they have found are nuanced: Some charter schools in urban areas such as Boston have dramatically improved student performance, but charter schools in other parts of Massachusetts have generally performed worse than their non-charter public counterparts.

The researchers are still trying to determine exactly why this is, and aim to expand their studies geographically. But the technical expertise of Pathak and Angrist — a pioneer in developing and refining “natural experiments” in economics — makes them confident they can rigorously equitably assess thorny questions about student performance.

“Through school assignment, we have an engine to measure a lot of things about education production,” Pathak says. And now, students have a vehicle for choosing schools on their merits.
********

Let me add that, along with Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Neil Dorosin and yours truly, Parag continues to assist school districts in the design and implementation of school choice systems via the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC).

Facebook promotes deceased organ donation

Facebook Is Urging Members to Add Organ Donor Status

"The company announced a plan on Tuesday morning to encourage everyone on Facebook to start advertising their donor status on their pages, along with their birth dates and schools — a move that it hopes will create peer pressure to nudge more people to add their names to the rolls of registered organ donors.


"It is a rare foray by Facebook into social engineering from social networking, and one with a potentially profound effect, according to experts in the field of organ donation.

"They say people declaring on Facebook that they are organ donors could spur others to sign up at motor vehicle departments or online registries. But these experts say Facebook could create an informal alternative to such registries that could, even though it carries less legal weight, lead to more organ donations.
"That is because a disclosure on Facebook could provide the evidence of consent that family members need when deciding whether to donate the organs of a loved one, said Dr. Andrew M. Cameron, the surgical director of liver transplantation at Johns Hopkins Hospital."
*********

And here's the Facebook page that explains how to do it (complete with instructional video): Sharing Your Organ Donor Status

HT: Judd Kessler, Peter Coles

*********
At The Atlantic, Megan Garber talked to several economists:
Organ Donation Is a Market Problem -- And Facebook May Have Just Solved It

Here's what she had to say about her conversation with me:

"I think it's great news that Facebook is going to encourage people to register as organ donors, and (maybe as important) to communicate to family and friends their intention," says Alvin Roth, an economics professor at Harvard who specializes in, among other things, market design and game theory -- both fields he has applied to his work with ... kidney exchange "We need to be facilitating all sorts of donation," he notes, "if we're going to turn the tide on the shortage of transplantable organs."

"When I started working on kidney exchange," Roth told me in an email, "there were 40,000+ patients on the waiting list for deceased donor kidneys. Today there are 90,000+." And while kidney exchange "is winning some important battles," he notes -- among other things, it's currently the fastest-growing part of kidney transplantation -- "we're losing the war." There simply aren't enough suppliers to fill the demand. But the advent of online registries, like that of Facebook partner Donate Life, can change those dynamics -- and Facebook's social platform can, in turn, amplify them.   "

The NSF celebrates kidney exchange

Over at Science Nation, the NSF  published a short news article yesterday, together with a video, to  note the success of NSF funded research in helping establish kidney exchange (also called kidney paired donation, KPD).

Here's the article:
New Software Matches More Kidney Donations, Faster: Game theory and market dynamics inspire new software that streamlines complicated matches

"With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Harvard University economist Alvin Roth helped develop a suite of computer programs that match living kidney donors with recipients. His team includes market designer Itai Ashlagi and operations researcher David Gamarnik at MIT and economists Utku Unver and Tayfun Sonmez at Boston College."
...
"Transplant surgeon Michael Rees at the University of Toledo Medical center is CEO of the Alliance for Paired Donation (see www.paireddonation.org) [says]
..."game theory and market design have come together to find practical solutions for kidney disease patients."

 And here's the 2-minute video:
(Key question in the video, read in an incredulous tone: "What's an economist doing organizing kidney transplants?" Answer: "Turns out, an understanding of game theory and market dynamics is key...")

Who gets what in medical resident matching

Here's a paper that reports on the many residency positions filled outside of the match, in large part by graduates of foreign medical schools. "In 2007, 1 in 5 positions in primary care was offered outside the match."

    Out-of-Match Residency Offers: The Possible Extent and Implications of Prematching in Graduate Medical Education.
    Wetz RV, Seelig CB, Khoueiry G, Weiserbs KF, J Grad Med Educ; 2010 Sep;2(3):327-33 
 *********

    Another paper reports that students from higher prestige American schools match disproportionately into "controllable lifestyle" specialties ("anesthesiology, dermatology, emergency medicine, neurology, ophthalmology, otolaryngology, pathology, psychiatry, and radiology") ...

    Match rates into higher-income, controllable lifestylespecialties for students from highly ranked, research-based medical schoolscompared with other applicants.
    Patel MS, Katz JT, Volpp KG,  J Grad Med Educ; 2010 Sep;2(3):360-5 

 ***************

    And here's my paper on the history of the match...

    Roth, Alvin E., "The origins, history, and design of the resident match, JAMA. Journal of the American Medical Association, vol. 289, No. 7, February 19, 2003, 909-912.

Home exchanges

In the WSJ, a retired California couple discuss the (approaching three dozen) home exchanges they have done, bartering a stay at their San Diego condo for visits of a few weeks to a month all over the world, via two networks, homeexchange.com and homelink.org.

"Exchanging homes involves some negotiating. Your leverage depends on the desirability of the home you have to exchange. In the U.S., New York, San Francisco and Washington, D.C., are favorites of international exchangers. After that, there is a second tier of cities, which includes San Diego.

"(One tricky area in negotiations: whether to exchange cars. Our preference is to rely on local transportation. Some cities, like Paris and London, have great public transportation. Unfortunately, San Diego doesn't, and our exchange partners feel strongly that we need to exchange cars. We've done so about half the time.)
...
"On each Internet site, we have a page with photos of our home, information about San Diego and ourselves, and details about when, where and with whom we want to exchange. Once we make contact with a potential partner, we discuss details of dates, number of people, transportation, etc. On average, an exchange takes about 20 emails and an occasional phone call to work out all the arrangements.
...
"We are often asked if we have any problems with our exchanges. We do. The biggest problem is cancellations. Since our first choice is to exchange with other older adults, unexpected medical problems can be an issue. With younger exchangers, you can encounter job or financial problems. In a few cases, my guess is that people cancel because they get a better offer—but they never admit that.

"We have had seven cancellations in connection with our 32 exchanges. Fortunately, all except one were early enough that we hadn't made plane reservations and could arrange alternative exchanges."

The OPTN Kidney Paired Donation Program --progress report, April 2012

Since opening for business in late 2010, the UNOS/OPTN kidney exchange pilot program has succeeded in enrolling many transplant centers. But so far it has not completed many transplants compared to other kidney exchange networks. (What to do about this was one subject of the recent conference I blogged about here: Competition among kidney exchanges.)

Here's the latest report from UNOS: Everything You Wanted to Know about the OPTN Kidney Paired Donation Program
"The OPTN kidney paired donation pilot program (KPDPP) continues to expand; as of mid-April, 114 transplant centers are participating – view list. The goal is to increase the number of living donor kidney transplants, so center participation is crucial to the success of the national KPD program. Results from recent match runs indicate an upward trend in the number of donors and candidates matched. In the match run conducted in March, 24 matches of compatible potential donors and recipients were found from a pool of 163 donors and 145 candidates, about twice as many matches as the previous month. So far, 19 kidney candidates have received a transplant in the program as of mid-April. "
************

The page at the link contains a link to some background reports, including the one below which (together with the comments) gives some insights into the kind of debates about kidney exchange policies that have been going on at the program:

• Board briefing paper: proposal to include non-directed donors and donor chains in the KPD pilot program  

And here is some of the evidence that long chains are good for kidney patients, particularly for highly sensitized patients:

• Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, ; ''Nonsimultaneous Chains and Dominos in Kidney Paired Donation -- Revisited,'' American Journal of Transplantation, 11, 5, May 2011, 984-994.
• Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, "NEAD Chains in Transplantation," American Journal of Transplantation, December 2011, 11:2780-2781.

Jacob Leshno defends his Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 4

Dr. Jacob Leshno (in suit:), and Al Roth, Susan Athey, and Ariel Pakes (Drew Fudenberg on skype)

And here is what the picture would have looked like if Drew had used photoshop instead of skype:

Drew looks on approvingly (in a photo doctored by the new doctor...)

The title of Jacob's dissertation is Essays in Market Design.  (How cool is that?)

The three papers he chose to include in his dissertation are

Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Systems (Job Market Paper)

In many assignment problems items arrive stochastically over time. When items are scarce agents form an overloaded waiting list and items are dynamically allocated as they arrive; two examples are public housing and organs for transplant. Even when all the scarce items are allocated, there is the efficiency question of how to assign the right items to the right agents. I develop a model in which impatient agents with heterogeneous preferences wait to be assigned scarce heterogeneous items that arrive stochastically over time. Social welfare is maximized by appropriately matching agents to items, but an individual impatient agent may misreport her preferences to receive an earlier mismatched item. To incentivize an agent to avoid mismatch, the policy needs to provide the agent with a (stochastic) guarantee of future assignment, which I model as putting the agents in a priority buffer-queue. I first consider a standard queue-based allocation policy and derive its welfare properties. To determine the optimal policy, I formulate the dynamic assignment problem as a dynamic mechanism design problem without transfers. The resulting optimal incentive compatible policy uses a buffer-queue of a new queueing policy, the uniform wait queue, to minimize the probability of mismatching agents. Finally, I derive a robustly optimal policy which uses a simple rule: giving equal priority to every agent who declines a mismatched item (a SIRO buffer-queue). This robustly optimal policy has several good properties that make it a compelling market design policy recommendation.

A Supply and Demand Framework for Two-Sided Matching Markets, with Eduardo Azevedo
(Extended abstract published in EC11 under the former name: "The college admissions problem with a continuum of students" )

We give a version of the Gale and Shapley (1962) college admissions problem where colleges have a large capacity and show that the resulting model allows for tractable analysis of matching markets. When colleges are large stable matchings can be described concisely by cutoffs, the admission thresholds at each college. Under broad conditions the model corresponds to the limit of large discrete matching problems.

Will a Decrease In The Minimum Wage Improve Training?, with Michael Schwarz

We show that firms that have a cost advantage in providing training can recoup training cost even in an almost frictionless labor market. Lowering the minimal legal wage can reduce the efficiency of training and harm welfare. In our model training contracts give positive surplus to workers that is not competed away. This explains the existence of intermediary services that essentially sell internship positions to college graduates.

Jacob is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12)

He will be going next year to a postdoc at Microsoft Research in Cambridge, after which he'll take up a position at Columbia GSB.

This concludes my defenses for the week (and the Offense never even got a point up on the board...)

Welcome to the club, Jacob.

Eduardo Azevedo defends his Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 3

Eduardo Azevedo (in suit:) having just fended off his committee: from left, Eric Budish, Al Roth, Oliver Hart, Susan Athey, Andrei Shleifer

Eduardo chose the following three of his papers to constitute his dissertation:

A Supply and Demand Framework for Two-Sided Matching Markets (Job Market Paper #1)
with Jacob Leshno
extended abstract published in EC11

Strategyproofness in the Large as a Desideratum for Market Design (Job Market Paper #2)
with Eric Budish

Evolutionary Origins of the Endowment Effect - Evidence from Hunter-Gatherers (PDF available upon request)
with Coren Apicella, Nicholas Christakis, and James Fowler

I earlier blogged about two of those papers:

A supply and demand model for stable matchings, by Eduardo Azevedo and Jacob Leshno
and

Market design in a future of trusted smart markets: paper by Eduardo Azevedo and Eric Budish

Eduardo is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12)

As I write it isn't clear whether he'll be working next year in Philadelphia, NYC, or Chicago, which will depend on his fiance's jobmarket, which is still to be concluded.

Welcome to the club, Eduardo.
*********
Update: May 11--It's Wharton.

Boston kindergartens and preschool places

Boston is short of good public kindergarten places. This in turn creates a demand for preschool places, since preschool kids move up automatically to kindergarten in the same school, so even parents who wouldn't ordinarily send their kid to preschool may be tempted to do so since it gives them two chances at a good kindergarten.

Rise in kindergarten demand leaves many in city scrambling: Hundreds of students remain unassigned

"Demand for kindergarten seats in the Boston Public Schools for this fall has risen by more than 25 percent, an unanticipated increase that has left hundreds of students without an assigned school and has prompted officials to add more classrooms.

The enrollment boom surfaced in the past few months during the first round of registration for kindergarten classrooms that will serve students who will be 5 by Sept. 1. The School Department received 2,306 such applications, up from 1,823 during that same period last year.
...
"Predicting kindergarten enrollment in a city as large as Boston can be a tricky endeavor, school officials say. The transient nature of the city - with many young, middle-class families moving out and a number of immigrant families moving in - creates volatility in relying on birth rates.

"The city school system also faces immense competition for kindergarten students from dozens of private and parochial schools and a growing number of independently run public charter schools. City school officials often do not know until after the school year begins if all the kindergarten students offered a seat will show up
...
"The School Department is trying to respond to the rising demand by adding a kindergarten classroom at five schools: Umana Academy in East Boston, Harvard-Kent in Charlestown, Mission Hill in Jamaica Plain, and Haley Elementary and Sumner Elementary, both in Roslindale.

"Kindergarten is not the only grade experiencing a rise in applications. The city’s preschool program for 4-year-olds also has an increase, with 2,518 applications filed during the first registration cycle, compared with 2,070 during the same period last year. That has left 745 4-year-olds without preschool assignments, an increase of 513 from last year.

The city is not obligated under state law to make a seat available for all preschool students who apply, as it is with kindergarten.
...
"Margaret Day’s 4-year-old son is near the bottom of waiting lists at three schools for preschool, leaving little chance of admittance. Now, the Jamaica Plain mother is resigned to going through the lottery again next year for kindergarten, even though many seats will be snatched up as preschoolers move up. She said she does not understand how the School Department was “blindsided’’ about the enrollment increase, and is pushing for changes.

“We are going to be picking through the bones to get a good seat next year,’’ Day said. “The reason we went through the [preschool] lottery is because of the difficulty of getting into kindergarten.’’

Game theory in Operations Research

The venerable journal Operations Research has a new subject area, with distinguished area editors:

Games, Information, and Networks

David Gamarnik and Asu Ozdaglar, editors

Networks have become pervasive in every aspect of our lives and have emerged as a crucial tool for understanding the world we live in. The World Wide Web, which links us to and enables information flows with the rest of the world, is the most visible example. Physical networks play a similarly vital role in wireless communication, data transmission, and energy production and distribution. Equally central are social and economic networks that shape opinions, information flows, and transactions. A fundamental understanding of network behavior, including the nature of interconnections, issues of stability, and decision making place operations research methodology at the core of this emerging research program.

We invite high-quality submissions that advance the theory and application of operations research methods, including graph theory and optimization, economic analysis, game theory, and stochastic models, in the emerging field of network science. In addition to works contributing to the analysis of networks, we also encourage submissions using tools and concepts from network analysis in other application domains.

Associate Editors: Mung Chiang, Ayalvadi Ganesh, Ali Jadbabaie, Ramesh Johari, Andrea Montanari, Yannis Paschalidis, Devavrat Shah, Sanjay Shakkottai, and Adam Wierman

I'm hopeful that this may mark a return to a high level of interaction between game theorists and the operations research community. (Market design seems like an area that is ripe for this kind of interaction.)

Yuichiro Kamada defends his Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 2 (Offense 0)

Yuichiro (in suit:), with Tomasz Strzalecki and Al Roth (and Drew Fudenberg and Attila Ambrus via skype)

Yuichiro with the full defense team

Yuichiro had to choose three out of his many papers for his dissertation, which he called "Essays on Revision Games." Those papers all concern the difficult problem of analyzing incentives in non-stationary environments.

Multi-Agent Search with Deadline (joint with Nozomu Muto), December 31, 2011.(An earlier version of this paper referred to in the new version is here)

Revision Games (joint with Michihiro Kandori), December 31, 2011

Asynchronicity and Coordination in Common and Opposing Interest Games (joint with Riccardo Calcagno, Stefano Lovo, and Takuo Sugaya), March 2012, Revise and Resubmit, Theoretical Economics. (This paper is a result of a merger between two independent papers: Preopening and Equilibrium Selection by Calcagno and Lovo, and Asynchronous Revision Games with Deadline: Unique Equilibrium in Coordination Games by Kamada and Sugaya)

I earlier blogged about another of his papers, on the design of the market for new Japanese doctors:

Matching Japanese Doctors: problems with the current mechanisms, and suggestions for improvement by Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima

Yuichiro is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12)

 He will be going next year to a postdoc at Yale, after which he'll take up a position at Berkeley-Haas.

Two more defenses are coming up this week.

 Welcome to the club, Yuichiro.

Katie Baldiga defends her Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 1 (Offense 0)

Katie Baldiga and her committee of admirers: Iris Bohnet, Al Roth, Jerry Green (and Drew Fudenberg via skype)
(Alternative caption: Katie B. got her Ph.D.)

The three papers in Katie's dissertation are so wide ranging that she characterizes them together as "Essays in Microeconomics." (I blogged about her experimental paper here.)

A Failure of Representative Democracy (Job Market Paper 1) 
In this paper, we study representative democracy, one of the most popular classes of collective decision-making mechanisms, and contrast it with direct democracy. In a direct democracy, individuals have the opportunity to vote over the alternatives in every choice problem the population faces. In a representative democracy, the population commits to a candidate ex ante who will then make choices on its behalf. While direct democracy is normatively appealing, representative democracy is the far more common institution because of its practical advantages. The key question, then, is whether representative democracy succeeds in implementing the choices that the group would make under direct democracy. We find that, in general, it does not. We analyze the theoretical setting in which the two methods are most likely to lead to the same choices, minimizing potential sources of distortion. We model a population as a distribution of voters with strict preferences over a finite set of alternatives and a candidate as an ordering of those alternatives that serves as a binding, contingent plan of action. We focus on the case where the direct democracy choices of the population are consistent with an ordering of the alternatives. We show that even in this case, where the normative recommendation of direct democracy is clear, representative democracy may not elect the candidate with this ordering.

Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess and the Implications for Test Scores (Job Market Paper 2) 
Multiple-choice tests play a large role in determining academic and professional outcomes. Performance on these tests hinges not only on a test-taker's knowledge of the material but also on his willingness to guess when unsure about the answer. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment that explores whether women skip more questions than men. The experimental test consists of practice questions from the World History and U.S. History SAT II subject tests; we vary the size of the penalty imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task. We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers and the task is explicitly framed as an SAT, women answer significantly fewer questions than men. We see no differences in knowledge of the material or confidence in these test-takers, and differences in risk preferences fail to explain all of the observed gap. Because the gender gap exists only when the task is framed as an SAT, we argue that differences in competitive attitudes may drive the gender differences we observe. Finally, we show that, conditional on their knowledge of the material, test-takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our experimental test, putting women and more risk averse test-takers at a disadvantage.

Assent-Maximizing Social Choice with Jerry R. Green, forthcoming in Social Choice and Welfare
We take a decision theoretic approach to the classic social choice problem, using data on the frequency of choice problems to compute social choice functions. We define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population's preferences and on the probability distribution over the sets of feasible alternatives that the society will face. Our methods generalize the well-known Kemeny Rule. In the Kemeny Rule it is known a priori that the subset of feasible alternatives will be a pair. We define a distinct social choice function for each distribution over the feasible subsets. Our rules can be interpreted as distance minimization -- selecting the order closest to the population's preferences, using a metric on the orders that reflects the distribution over the possible feasible sets. The distance is the probability that two orders will disagree about the optimal choice from a randomly selected available set. We provide an algorithmic method to compute these metrics in the case where the probability of a given feasible set is a function only of its cardinality.

Katie is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12).

She and her significant other LC solved the two-body problem this year (!), and will be together at The Ohio State University, which is now more than ever a hotbed of experimental economics.

Three more defenses are coming up this week.

Welcome to the club, Katie.