Further discussion of markets for organs: some new books

Some books that address markets for organs, including an ethnography of transplants in Israel...

A Market in Organs Pp.128-143 Miran Epstein [View Abstract]

This chapter presents a critical overview of the relationship which transplant medicine has had with the market as a source of organs for transplantation. It has three parts. The first two parts discuss the increasing appeal of the market option in practice and theory against the backdrop of the worsening organ crisis and the intensification of pro-transplant interests. The emerging trend suggests that the recent achievements in the struggle against international organ trafficking do not herald the abolition of the organ market but rather presage its reconfiguration in deglobalized, more or less regulated, forms. The third part rephrases the market question. It concludes that the struggle against a market in organs could make sense, let alone stand a chance, only as part of a general struggle against the conditions that have made it so appealing in the first place.

From the eBook Kidney Transplantation: Challenging the Future

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


Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants (Contemporary Ethnography)By Marie-Andree Jacob

The blurb: "While the traffic in human organs stirs outrage and condemnation, donations of such material are perceived as highly ethical. In reality, the line between illicit trafficking and admirable donation is not so sharply drawn. Those entangled in the legal, social, and commercial dimensions of transplanting organs must reconcile motives, bureaucracy, and medical desperation. Matching Organs with Donors: Legality and Kinship in Transplants examines the tensions between law and practice in the world of organ transplants—and the inventive routes patients may take around the law while going through legal processes.

"In this sensitive ethnography, Marie-Andrée Jacob reveals the methods and mindsets of doctors, administrators, gray-sector workers, patients, donors, and sellers in Israel's living kidney transplant bureaus. Matching Organs with Donors describes how suitable matches are identified between donor and recipient using terms borrowed from definitions of kinship. Jacob presents a subtle portrait of the shifting relationships between organ donors/sellers, patients, their brokers, and hospital officials who often accept questionably obtained organs.

"Jacob's incisive look at the cultural landscapes of transplantation in Israel has wider implications. Matching Organs with Donors deepens our understanding of the law and management of informed consent, decision-making among hospital professionals, and the shadowy borders between altruism and commerce.

Paying for human waste tissue used in research: Should it be repugnant? forbidden? allowed? mandated?

Scott Kominers alerts me to the recent debate taking place in the pages of Science.

He writes
"Gary Becker and I have a brief letter in Science supporting the possibility of compensation for donors of waste tissue: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6100/1292.2.full. [Paying for Tissue: Net Benefits}

It is in response to a policy piece by Truog et al. that appeared a few weeks ago, and claims that such compensation is repugnant: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6090/37. [Paying Patients for Their Tissue: The Legacy of Henrietta Lacks]

The authors have published a response to our note: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6100/1293.1.full. [Paying for Tissue: Net Benefits—Response]

There is also a letter from Leonard Hayflick which clears up some of the history: http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6100/1292.1.short [Paying for Tissue: The Case of WI-38].

Science's editors ... have made all the letters [but not the original Policy Forum article on Research Ethics] open access, and also set up a poll: at http://www.sciencemag.org/content/337/6100/1293.2.full.  (Although the poll topic is not quite parallel to Gary's and my argument – they ask whether researchers should be required to pay patients for waste tissue use, rather than whether they should be allowed to do so.)

Experimental economics at Stanford SITE, Sept 14 and 15

Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics Summer 2012 Workshop
	Segment 5: Experimental Economics September 14 and 15, 2012 Organized by Judd Kesler, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania; Lise Vesterlund, University of Pittsburgh; and Muriel Niederle and Charles Sprenger, both Stanford University.
	The session will meet in Conference Room A in Landau Economics Building. Here is the map to the building. Friday, September 14 9.00 - 9.30 Breakfast 9.30 - 9.45 Welcome and Opening Remarks 9.45 - 10.45 Laboratory Results and Field Inference External Validity and Partner Selection Bias presented by Hunt Alcott, New York University and co-authored with Sendhil Mullainathan, Harvard University Free Riding in the Lab and in the Field presented by Florian Englmaier, University of Wurzburg and co-authored with Georg Gebhardt, Ulm University  10.45 - 11.00 Coffee 11.00 - 12.00 Experimental Methods Incentives in Experiments: A Theoretical Analysis presented by Paul J. Healy, The Ohio State University and co-authored with Yaron Azrieli, The Ohio State University and Christopher P. Chambers, University of California, San Diego Mistakes and Game Form Recognition: Challenges to Theories of Revealed. Preference and Framing presented by Charles R. Plott, California Institute of Technology and co-authored with Timothy N. Cason, Krannert School of Management, Purdue University 12.00 - 1.45 Lunchtime discussion 1.45 - 2.45 Risk and Ambiguity Learning to be Probabilistically Sophisticated presented by Yoram Halevy,University of British Columbia Estimating the Relationship Between Economic Preferences: A Testing Ground for Unifed Theories of Behavior presented by Pietro Ortoleva, California Institute of Technology and co-authored with Mark Dean, Brown University 2.45 - 3.00 Coffee 3.00 - 4.00 Dynamic Inconsistency? Hypobolic Discounting and Willingness to Wait presented by David Eil,  George Mason University Working Over Time: Dynamic Inconsistency in Real Effort Tasks presented by Ned Augenblick, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley and co-authored with Muriel Niederle and Charles Sprenger, both Stanford University 4.00 - 4.15 Coffee 4.15 - 5.15 Shorter Presentation Session Competitive Pricing and the Search for Quality, presented by Daniel Martin, New York University Probability List Elicitation for Lotteries, presented by David Freeman, University of British Columbia Unintended Media E ects in a Conflict Environment: Serbian Radio and Croatian Nationalism, presented by Vera Mironova, Department of Political Science, University of Maryland and co-authored with Stefano DellaVigna, University of California, Berkeley; Ruben Enikolopov and Maria Petrova, New Economic School, Moscow and Ekaterina Zhuravskaya, Paris School of Economics Local Leadership and the Provision of Public Goods: A Field-Lab Experiment in Bolivia, presented by Maria P. Recalde, University of Pittsburgh and co-authored with B. Kelsey Jack, Tufts University 5.30 Continued discussion and dissemination of technical knowledge during dinner Saturday, September 15 9.00 - 9.30 Breakfast 9.30 - 10.30 Bargaining and Voting Behavior The Effect of Negotiations on Bargaining in Legislatures presented by Marina Agranov, California Institute of Technology and co-authored with Chloe Terigman,University of British Columbia Hypothetical Thinking and Information Extraction: Strategic Voting in the Laboratory presented by Emanuel Vespa, Stern School of Business, New York University and co-authred with Ignacio Esponda, New York University 10.30 - 10.45 Coffee 11.00 - 12.30 Game Theory in the Lab Emergent Star Networks with Ex Ante Homogeneous Agents presented by Daniel Houser, Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science Contact Information, George Mason University and co-authored with Rong Rong, also Interdisciplinary Center for Economic Science Contact Information, George Mason University Infinitely Repeated Games with Private Monitoring: An Experimental Analysispresented by Guillaume Frechette, New York University and co-authored withMasaki Aoyagi, Osaka University and V. Bhaskar, University College London Finding the Hidden Cost of Control presented by Judd Kessler, The Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania and co-authored with Stephen G Leider,Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor 12.30 - 2.15 Lunchtime discussion 2.15 - 3.15 Field Experiments Do People Choose What They Think Will Make Them Happiest? Evidence from the National Resident Matching Program. presented by Ori Heffetz, Cornell University and co-authored with Daniel J. Benjamin and Alex Rees-Jones, Cornell University and Miles Kimball, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor Death Probability Shocks and Consumption: Evidence from Denmark presented by Kasper Meisner Nielsen, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and co-authored with Steffen Andersen, Copenhagen Business School  and Charles Sprenger, Stanford University 3.15 - 3.30 Coffee 3.30 - 4.30 Gender and Economic Behavior Gender, Competition and Career Choices presented by Thomas Buser, University of Amsterdam and co-authored with Muriel Niederle, Stanford University andHessel Oosterbeek also University of Amsterdam Breaking the Glass Ceiling with `No': Gender Differences in Doing Favors. Presented by Lise Vesterlund, University of Pittsburgh and co-authored with Linda Babcock, Amanda Weirup, and Laurie Weingart all Carnegie Mellon University. 4.30 - 4.45 Coffee 4.45 - 5.45 Shorter Presentation Session One in a Million: A Field Experiment on Belief Formation and Pivotal Votingpresented by Mitchell Hoffman, University of California, Berkeley and co-authored with John Morgan, University of California, Berkeley An Experiment on Reference Points and Expectations presented by Changcheng Song, University of California, Berkeley Wallflowers Doing Good: Field and Lab Evidence of Heterogeneity in Reputation Concerns presented by Daniel Jones, University of Pittsburgh and co-authored with Sera Linardi, also University of Pittsburgh Costly Information Acquisition in a Speculative Attack: Theory and Experimentspresented by Isabel Trevino, New York University and co-authored with Michal Szkup, also New York University

NBER market design conference Oct 19-20, 2012: preliminary program

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, INC.

Market Design Working Group Meeting

Susan Athey and Parag Pathak, Organizers

October 19-20, 2012

NBER
2^nd Floor Conference Room1050 Massachusetts Avenue
Cambridge, MA
PROGRAM

Friday, October 19:
8:30 am	Continental Breakfast
9:00 am	Mechanism Design and Congestion William Fuchs, University of California at Berkeley Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University Costs and Benefits of Dynamic Trading in a Lemons Market
	Jacob Leshno, Columbia University Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Systems
10:20 am	Break
10:35 am	Auctions Kenneth Hendricks, University of Wisconsin and NBER Daniel Quint, University of Wisconsin Indicative Bids as Cheap Talk Sergiu Hart, Hebrew University Noam Nisan, Hebrew University The Menu-Size Complexity of Auctions
	Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University Jinwoo Kim, Yonsei University Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University Efficient Assignment with Interdependent Values
12:35 pm	Lunch
1:15 pm	Organ Exchange
	Itai Ashlagi, MIT Alvin Roth, Stanford University and NBER Kidney Exchange in Time and Space
	Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College M. Utku Unver, Boston College Welfare Consequences of Transplant Organ Allocation Policies
2:40 pm	Break
3:00 pm	FCC Incentive AuctionLawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland Paul Milgrom, Stanford University Ilya Segal, Stanford UniversityThe 'Incentive Auctions' and Mechanism Design Peter Cramton, University of Maryland Title to be announced
5:15 pm	Adjourn Saturday, October 20: 8:30 am Continental Breakfast 9:00 am Empirical Market Design Aditya Bhave, University of Chicago Eric Budish, University of Chicago Primary-Market Auctions for Event Tickets: Eliminating the Rents of "Bob the Broker" Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University Nikhil Agarwal, Harvard University Parag Pathak, MIT and NBER Centralized vs. Decentralized School Assignment: Evidence from NY 10:20 am Break 10:40 am Matching Markets Qingmin Liu, Columbia University Marek Pycia, University of California at Los Angeles Ordinal Efficiency, Fairness and Incentives in Large Markets Scott Duke Kominers, University of Chicago Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College Designing for Diversity in Matching 12:00 pm Lunch 1:00 pm New Frontiers Elisa Celis, University of Washington Gregory Lewis, Harvard University and NBER Markus Mobius, Iowa State University and NBER Hamid Nazerzadeh, University of Southern California Buy-it-Now or Take-a-Chance: Price Discrimination through Randomized Auctions Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania Mallesh Pai, University of Pennsylvania Aaron Roth, University of Pennsylvania Jonathan Ullman, Harvard University Mechanism Design in Large Games: Incentives and Privacy David Rothschild, Microsoft Research David Pennock, Microsoft Research The Extent of Price Misalignment in Prediction Markets 3:00 pm Adjourn

Charter schools and waiting lists in D.C. schools

When school choice procedures result in some children having multiple offers, others must wait for an assignment, which can be taxing. Even in cities that have begun to use single-best-offer school choice systems for the public schools, there can be a lot of congestion if the charter schools aren't integrated into the process. The Washington Post has the story:  Parents struggle with ‘wait-list shuffle’ in D.C. schools


"Thousands of seats change hands in the first weeks of class as students leave one school for another, a quiet migration triggered by the intense competition for a good public education in the nation’s capital.

"This is the wait-list shuffle. Parents say it’s a downside of the city’s school-choice movement — a nationally watched experiment that has given Washington families more options than ever but also has injected a new level of agony and instability into the start of the academic year.

"The change has been spurred by the rapid expansion of public charter schools, which operate outside the traditional school system and under different enrollment rules. As parents try to get their children into the best schools, they can apply to an unlimited number of them. Once admitted, students can hold seats in more than one school.

"Those parents seeking to preserve their options often relinquish the extras only when forced to on the first day of class. Principals then scramble to fill their rolls from long wait lists, recruiting students who are enrolled elsewhere. The cascading effect lasts into October.
...
"There has long been a scrum to win seats in the city’s best traditional public schools, but the rise of charter schools — which now enroll more than 40 percent of Washington’s 77,000 students, a larger proportion than any other city except New Orleans — has helped turn that scrum into a frenzy.

"A growing number of parents are entering lotteries for D.C. public schools, especially for pre-
kindergarten — but they are limited to six applications each year and can’t enroll in more than one at a time.

"The charter school process is a free-for-all: There are 57 different charter schools, and parents can enter as many lotteries as they like. Many track their options with elaborate spreadsheets, relying on word of mouth, test scores and gut feelings to identify favorites.
...
"Each year, lucky students win seats in more than one charter school, or one traditional school and several charters. Other families spend the summer months eagerly refreshing school Web sites, watching their children move slowly up long lists.

"This spring, the waiting lists for charter and D.C. public schools topped out at more than 35,000 names, many of them duplicates. 


"The lists begin to move during the summer, as families settle on choices or move away. Then they accelerate after the first day of school, when principals see who doesn’t show up and turn to their wait lists.

"According to the D.C. Public Charter School Board, 1,141 students withdrew from a charter school within the first month of classes in fall 2011. Another 2,671 entered a charter school within that same time frame.
...
"Parents who take multiple seats say they’re playing by the rules of the game and doing what’s necessary to get what’s best for their children.

"One mother of a kindergartner — who spoke on the condition of anonymity to avoid angering school officials and other parents — spent the first week of classes this fall holding slots at two of the city’s most coveted charter schools, weighing whether she could afford after-school care at the one she preferred."

30 years of the ultimatum game

Come celebrate in Cologne at the 2012 ESA European Conference, Sept. 12-15.

"In 1982 Güth, Schmittberger, and Schwarze published their seminal paper on the ultimatum game. The experiments were conducted at the University of Cologne. We will celebrate this 30th anniversary and invite submissions of papers that review insights from the ultimatum game and/or deal with new results. "

They also encourage submissions concerning "Bounded Ethicality."

The Keynote speakers are
• Max Bazerman (Harvard Business School)
• Urs Fischbacher (University of Konstanz)
• Werner Güth (Max Planck Institute of Economics, Jena)

Gastroeconomics

There has been a lot of interest in neuroeconomics lately, focusing on decision-making and the brain. But there are also a lot of neurons in the gut, which raises the possibility of a part of neuroeconomics that might be called gastroeconomics.

This Scientific American article brought all this to mind:
Microbes Manipulate Your Mind: Bacteria in your gut may be influencing your thoughts and moods

(This shouldn't be confused with the gastroeconomics associated with the market for gastroenterologists:)

The supply of American doctors

American medicine is a market with tightly restricted entry, at all levels. Proposed legislation offers a glimpse: Bill Would Create More Medical-Residency Slots, Potentially Easing Physician Shortage

"Legislation introduced in Congress on Monday would expand the number of Medicare-sponsored training slots for new doctors by 15,000, a step that two medical-education groups said would go a long way toward easing a projected shortage of physicians.

"The bill, the Physician Shortage Reduction and Graduate Medical Education Accountability and Transparency Act (HR 6352), is sponsored by Rep. Aaron Schock, an Illinois Republican, and Rep. Allyson Schwartz, a Pennsylvania Democrat.

"Medical schools have been expanding their enrollments and new schools have been opening up as concerns have grown about a shortage that could reach more than 90,000 physicians by 2020, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges.

"Those worries have intensified with passage of the Affordable Care Act, which will greatly increase the number of people seeking medical care by providing insurance coverage to 32 million more people.

"But while more students are making their way through the medical-school pipeline, they're likely to run into bottlenecks because of a cap on the number of Medicare-supported residency training slots that Congress imposed in 1997."

Medical internships in Australia are in short supply

Medical students languish in a critical condition

"The Australian Medical Students' Association estimates almost 500 students will miss out on an internship next year because of insufficient places. Under the internship system students must work for a year under supervision in a hospital before they can work as doctors.

"Recent changes to the application process have further complicated the situation in Victoria. International students will now have priority for internships over Victorian students who have studied interstate but want to return for hospital placements.
 ...

"Australian Medical Association president Steve Hambleton points to the curious situation where the nation has a shortage of doctors, yet there are too few internships. A report by Health Workforce Australia has forecast a shortfall of 2701 doctors by 2025.

"The placement system has fallen apart, he says, because the federal government regulates the number of students universities can enrol while its state counterparts oversee the provision of internships. ''Nobody's got the control levers for the pipeline,'' he says.

"A complicating factor has been the ability of universities to enrol an unlimited number of full-fee-paying international medical students without guaranteeing a hospital placement at the end of the course."

Fishery management in ancient Hawaii

Ancient Civilizations Reveal Ways to Manage Fisheries for Sustainability

"The authors of the study, titled "Multicentury trends and the sustainability of coral reef fisheries in Hawai‘i and Florida", point to the U.S. National Ocean Policy as an example of emerging attempts to manage ocean ecosystems more holistically, and local fisheries co-management as a modern way of including community members in designing effective fishing regulations. However, the authors caution that effective enforcement needs to go hand in hand with the development of local governance. “The ancient Hawaiians punished transgressors with corporal punishment,” observed Kittinger. “Clearly, we don’t recommend this, but it’s easy to see there’s room to tighten up today’s enforcement efforts.”

HT: Ben Greiner

Bill of Health: new blog on health law policy

Here's the announcement of a new blog (in which I hope to find a way to cross-link some posts related to health related market design issues):

The Petrie-Flom Center is excited to announce our latest venture – the launch of a new blog, titled Bill of Health, edited by Petrie-Flom faculty co-director, I. Glenn Cohen, and Petrie-Flom executive director, Holly Fernandez Lynch.  The blog will go live Wednesday, September 5, 2012, and can be accessed at http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/billofhealth/.  

Our goal is to provide a one-stop shop for readers interested in news, commentary, and scholarship in the fields of health law policy, biotechnology, and bioethics.  You can expect to find regularly updated posts reacting to current events, testing out new scholarly ideas, reviewing the latest books, and announcing conferences, events, and job openings.  We also hope to cultivate a strong community of commenters, so that the blog becomes an interactive discussion forum.

A widely collaborative effort, Bill of Health features content from Petrie-Flom affiliates, as well as leading experts from Harvard and beyond.  Institutional collaborators include HealthLawProfs Blog, the Yale Interdisciplinary Center for Bioethics, and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Public Health Law Research program at Temple.  We’ve also lined up a stellar cast of bloggers so far, including:  

Tom Baker
Cansu Canca
Arthur Caplan
Daniel Carpenter
Amitabh Chandra
Greg Curfman
Einer Elhauge
Richard Epstein
Nir Eyal
Michele Goodwin
Rebecca Haffajee
Russell Korobkin
Greg Koski
Katie Kraschel
Stephen Latham
Ted Marmor
Max Mehlman
Michelle Meyer
Abby Moncrieff
Efthimios Parasidis
Wendy Parmet
Frank Pasquale
Suzanne Rivera
Al Roth
Ted Ruger
Bill Sage
Laura Stark
Erin Talati
Nicolas Terry
Katharine Van Tassel
Daniel Vorhaus

In addition, we’ll be joined by some great guest bloggers, including Mark Hall, Allison Hoffman, Adam Kolber, Jon Kolstad, Kristin Madison, Anup Malani, Arti Rai, Annette Rid, Chris Robertson, Nadia Sawicki, Seema Shah, Talha Syed, Dan Wikler, and Susan Wolf, as well as a several Petrie-Flom graduate student affiliates.   Read more about our team here.

Please take a moment to stop by and check out Bill of Health!

For more information, contact:

Holly Fernandez Lynch, hlynch@law.harvard.edu, 617.384.5475

Unravelling of product announcements--ahead of the new iPhone

Lucas Coffman points me to the following unravelling story (which I figured I had better post without further delay :)  Rivals Jostle Before Apple Announces New iPhone

"...technology companies are watching every one of Apple’s moves — and scrambling to get out in front of them.

"Several major tech companies are cramming product announcements into this holiday-shortened workweek.

"Nokia and Motorola Mobility, former leaders in the mobile race who are now also-rans, have scheduled events for Wednesday at which they are likely to announce new smartphones. And the next day, Amazon is expected to introduce new Kindle devices.

"Sony and Samsung, among others, got a jump on things last week with announcements of new tablets and phones at a consumer electronics conference in Berlin.

"But next week, the tech event calendar is largely blank — with the exception of an Apple news conference that is said to be scheduled for Sept. 12, where the company will reveal its latest iPhone, according to a person briefed on the company’s plans, who declined to be named because those plans had not yet been made public.

“It seems that the rumor of an Apple announcement is having an effect on competitors’ announcements, unless it’s an amazing coincidence” that several events are scheduled this week and none the next, said Michael Gartenberg, a technology analyst at Gartner. "

Cass Sunstein on the regulator as market designer

Here's his essay: Empirically Informed Regulation
It was written while Sunstein was Administrator, Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs, Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President. It focuses on what he sees as the lessons from behavioral economics.

"In recent years, a number of social scientists have been incorporating empirical findings about human behavior into economic models. These findings offer useful insights for thinking about regulation and its likely consequences. They also offer some suggestions about the appropriate design of effective, low-cost, choice-preserving approaches to regulatory problems, including disclosure requirements, default rules, and simplification.

"A general lesson is that small, inexpensive policy initiatives can have large and highly beneficial effects.  The purpose of this Essay is to explore relevant evidence, to catalogue recent practices and reforms, and to discuss some implications for regulatory policy. And while the primary focus is on small, inexpensive regulatory initiatives, there is a still more general theme, which involves the importance of ensuring that regulations have strong empirical foundations, both through careful analysis in advance and through retrospective review of what works and what does not."

School choice in Harlem

The Times reports on school choice in Harlem: School Choice Is No Cure-All, Harlem Finds

"Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg has made school choice a foundation of his education agenda, and since he took office in 2002, the city opened more than 500 new schools; closed, or is in the process of closing, more than 100 ailing ones; and created an environment in which more than 130 charter schools could flourish. No neighborhood has been as transformed by that agenda as Harlem.

 "When classes resume on Thursday, many of its students will be showing up in schools that did not exist a decade ago. The idea, one that became a model for school reform nationwide, was to let parents shop for schools the same way they would for housing or a cellphone plan, and that eventually, the competition would lift all boats.

"But in interviews in recent weeks, Harlem parents described two drastically different public school experiences, expressing frustration that, among other things, there were still a limited number of high-quality choices and that many schools continued to underperform."

Gender-pricing discrimination

The NYC Department of Consumer Affairs is on the case, the WSJ reports: City Nails Sex-Based Pricing.

Among the targets are salons that charge men and women differently for manicures and haircuts. But are those really the same products?

""It's ridiculous. I have some guys who need to come in every two weeks," said Ania Siemieniaka, the owner of Freckle Skin and Hair, which had to pay $175 for a violation. "If I raise my prices, I'll lose all my male customers."

"The city's Department of Consumer Affairs began stepping up enforcement of the law last year, when it issued 580 gender-pricing violations to businesses, more than double the 212 doled out the year before.

"We wanted to really send a strong message to businesses about this kind of illegal pricing, so we did a very focused sweep over the course of the year," said the department's commissioner, Jonathan Mintz. "That sweep was largely targeted at salons and barbershops and laundry and dry cleaning."

"Nearly all of the violations were the result of sweeps rather than complaints, said Mr. Mintz, because businesses and industry groups weren't correcting the practice on their own."
********

Here are earlier posts on a related topic: "Girl taxi" and "Ladies Nights", and The wheels of justice and Ladies' Nights

Uri Rothblum's intellectual legacies

The journal Linear Algebra and its Applications has published an article in memoriam of Uri Rothblum, who passed away in March of this year:   Uriel G. Rothblum (1947–2012) by Raphael Loewy.

The article has discussions of aspects of Uri's work by a number of his collaborators, one of whom is Hans Schneider, a longtime editor of LAA. I recently corresponded with Professor Schneider about the beginning of his long and productive collaboration with Uri, and (with his permission) here is some of that correspondence.

 Dear Professor Schneider: Eric Denardo shared with me the memoir of Uri Rothblum, and encouraged me to write a note to you about his very first interaction with you. My memory of it isn't all that clear.

It must have been in 1974 (the year that he and I graduated from Stanford) that you contacted him about his paper on nonnegative matrices. As I recall, your letter suggested that perhaps his results and some of yours should appear in collaboration. He wasn't sure that his English was up to the task of saying "no" in a diplomatic way, and so he asked me to help draft the letter, which explained that he had a special emotional attachment to that paper since it was a central part of his dissertation.

He valued enormously his subsequent collaboration with you, and never tired of telling me that the letter I had drafted for him might be the most productive piece I have written.

The world is certainly less complete without Uri in it.

All the best,

Al Roth
http://kuznets.fas.harvard.edu/~aroth/alroth.html
http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/

 From: Hans Schneider [hans@math.wisc.edu]
 Sent: Saturday, September 01, 2012 1:15 PM
 To: Roth, Alvin
 Cc: Eric Denardo
 Subject: Re: Uri's write-up in Linear Algebra and its Applications
 Dear AL,
 Thank you for your very interesting letter and  apologies for my slow reply. 
 ...

 But now to your remarks. You are right, I proposed that Uri and I combine our papers and he turned this  down. I did not know that you were involved until Eric told me this year.

 It was a good decision on his part and I need to thank you for your help to Uri.  The sequence of letters (mine, his) spectacularly achieved what I desired, viz. cooperation with a young mathematician who was interested in the same area as I. I think it is impossible for me to explain how mathematically isolated I felt at the time without sounding like a petulant child.

 BTW, I first saw Uri's paper #3 in early 1975. The correction is worth making for I spent calendar 1974 at  TU Munich and before I left my student Richman had essentially completed results for his Ph.D. which  were  waiting to be writtten up when I saw Uri's paper. That's the paper I offered to combine with Uri's. I recall that Uri said there was room for both papers; I wish I still had his letter. Richman-S finally appeared in LAMA in 1978.

 I have never again offered to make a joint paper of a submission to LAA, even when I felt I could improve it significantly. I got increasingly worried that this is crossing a line for an EIC.  (Full disclosure, there is another paper joint with me that was originally submitted by my co-authors, but it became joint at the suggestion of an editor when he saw my referee's report.)

 Finally , I am very glad to hear from you, AL, that Uri saw the events that brought us together so positively. To my recollection, we never discussed them in any meaningful way.

 best wishes

 hans

 ps The obit is now on line on the LAA site under 'articles in press'. 

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

Some quick recollections of my own, of an intellectual history sort.

Uri and I were office mates in grad school, and I often benefited from his advice. I recall one time in particular, when I needed to prove that a certain interval was compact, and he showed me a proof that allowed me to complete the theorem that formed the basis for my dissertation. I later realized that a corollary of his proof was that _every_ interval was compact, so unfortunately I had to use another proof (and I recall a tense week between weekly visits to my advisor, at the end of which I was able to say "there was a problem with the proof I outlined last week" instead of "...with the theorem...").

Uri and I didn't collaborate as grad students, but we eventually wrote four papers together:

Roth, A.E. and Rothblum, U. "Risk Aversion and Nash's Solution for Bargaining Games With Risky Outcomes," Econometrica, Vol. 50, 1982, 639‑647.

Roth, A.E., Rothblum, U.G., and Vande Vate, J.H. "Stable Matchings, Optimal Assignments, and Linear Programming," Mathematics of Operations Research, 18, 1993, 803-828. 

 Blum, Y., A.E. Roth, and U.G. Rothblum "Vacancy Chains and Equilibration in Senior-Level Labor Markets," Journal of Economic Theory, 76, 2, October 1997, 362-411.

Roth, A.E. and U.G. Rothblum "Truncation Strategies in Matching Markets--In Search of Advice for Participants," Econometrica, 67, January, 1999, 21-43.
  

The two two-author papers each began when, in the course of a long walk somewhere, I indicated that I was working on a problem that was too hard for me to solve.  The paper with John Vande Vate came about by combining two different such conversations. But the most unusual of the collaborations was initiated by Uri in connection with work he had started with his student Yossi Blum. I believe they figured out that a paper by Blum and Rothblum would look better if they had a third author named Roth.

Readers of this blog may already be familiar with his other papers on matching and market design:

H. Abeledo and U.G. Rothblum, “Stable matchings and linear inequalities,” Discrete Applied Mathematics 54 (1994), pp. 1-27.

H. Abeledo and U.G. Rothblum, “Courtship and linear programming,” Linear Algebra and Its Applications 216 (1995), pp. 111-124.

H. Abeledo and U.G. Rothblum, “Paths to marriage stability,” Discrete Applied Mathematics 63 (1995),  pp. 1-12

H. Abeledo, Y. Blum and U.G. Rothblum, “Canonical monotone decompositions of fractional stable matchings,” The International Journal of Game Theory 25 (1996), pp. 161-176.

Y. Blum and U.G. Rothblum, “ ‘Timing is everything’ and marital bliss,” Journal of Economic Theory 103 (2002), pp. 429-443.

N. Perach, J. Polak and U.G. Rothblum, “Stable matching model with an entrance criterion applied to the assignment of students to dormitories at the Technion,” The International Journal of Game Theory 36 (2008),
pp. 519-535.

N. Perach and U.G. Rothblum, “Incentive Compatibility for the Stable Matching Model with an Entrance Criterion,” accepted for publication in The International Journal of Game Theory, 17 pages.

Book review: U.G. Rothblum, Two Sided Matchings: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis (by A.E. Roth and M.A. Oliviera Sotomayor), Games and Economic Behavior 4 (1992), pp.161-165

Here is Uri's listing on Google Scholar.
Here is his list of publications in chronological order.
Here is the obituary by Boaz Golany in INFORMS online.

Internet dating survey

Quantifying the Online-Dating Revolution

"The internet is especially important in “thin” dating markets, those in which people encounter a dearth of potential partners in their daily lives. That helps to explain the same-sex numbers and also why it’s not tech-savvy twentysomethings who make the most use of the internet, for romantic connections, but people in their 30s and 40s—another finding."

Bad market design by design at U of Central Florida...and Craigslist?

Course registration can be a pain, but at the University of Central Florida they apparently don't want anyone trying to make it easier: Student Is Punished for Creating Class-Registration Web

"A student at the University of Central Florida has been placed on academic probation for creating a Web site that tells students when a seat becomes available in a given class.

"Tim Arnold, a senior at Central Florida, built the U Could Finish site this year. The site became available in June, but, within days, was blocked from accessing the university site without notice. The Office of Student Conduct then told Mr. Arnold that he had violated university policy regarding technology use..."
*********

It's easier to see how Craigslist might have a legitimate interest in preventing entrepreneurs from developing superior front ends (recall eBay vs. Bidder's Edge): The SF Chronicle has the story.
3taps, PadMapper face Craigslist challenge

"Kidd's 3taps and a website that uses the data it collects, PadMapper, are the latest in a long line of Web developers to face legal action from Craigslist, the San Francisco company that has dominated the online classified advertising market for 17 years. Since 2008, at least three dozen similar services such as MapsKreig, Craiglook and CraigsFish have received cease-and-desist letters from Craigslist, most for building websites that presented Craigslist listings in ways they considered to be more dynamic, visually appealing and helpful.
...
"Craigslist has never added features such as mapping, videos and mobile apps, or any other tools that would improve user experiences. It still sorts items in chronological order, and doesn't allow nationwide searches of all its local websites at once. Its reluctance to update its Web services has opened the door for Kidd and other developers like him.

"Some of the developers shut down by Craigslist pulled data directly from its website, but 3taps uses a novel approach - searching Craigslist through Google, copying the data off Google, reordering it and then formatting it in a way other websites can easily display. PadMapper uses content generated by 3taps for its mapping services.

"Kidd noted that Craigslist chooses to allow price, location and description information from listings to appear on Google. As a result, he said, it shouldn't be allowed to stop other websites from displaying the same information in unique maps and tables. And the online classifieds leader certainly can't claim that data points as crucial to commerce as prices, locations and basic descriptions can be copyrighted.

"Legal experts say presenting the entirety of listings in the same format as Craigslist would be troublesome, but that's not what PadMapper is doing. And a 1991 case dealing with phone books suggests that the bare-bones data in listings is not subject to copyright law, these experts say.
...
"Craigslist and its lawyers did not respond to requests for comment. In the lawsuit, Craigslist says that "the originality, simplicity, and clarity" of its website "are fundamental to Craigslist's reputation and garner substantial and valuable goodwill with users." 

Kidney donation and (loss of) medical insurance

Some things are so far off the equilibrium path that they drive me crazy: The Reward for Donating a Kidney: No Insurance

"Like most other kidney donors, Mr. Royer, a retired teacher in Eveleth, Minn., was carefully screened and is in good health. But Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Minnesota rejected his application for coverage last year, as well as his appeals, on the grounds that he has chronic kidney disease, even though many people live with one kidney and his nephrologist testified that his kidney is healthy. Mr. Royer was also unable to purchase life insurance."

File this under "negative compensation for donors."

Collusion, for fun and profit: Marshall and Marx

I was delighted to receive in the mail the new book The Economics of Collusion: Cartels and Bidding Rings, by Robert C. Marshall and Leslie M. Marx.

The book is devoted to the description and analysis of explicit collusion (their emphasis). I haven't read it yet, but one of the things that makes explicit collusion so entertaining to study and read about is that there are often detailed accounts (typically from court cases) about just how the collusion was accomplished.

Examples:
Marshall:  "Collusive Bidder Behavior at Single Object Second price and English Auctions," with D. Graham, Journal of Political Economy, 1987, 95, 1217-1239.

John Asker: A Study of the Internal Organisation of a Bidding Cartel

American Economic Review, v100(3), 724-762, 2010.