Crick's Nobel medal, and letter to his son describing DNA

For those of you have been waiting for news since I posted about the auction of Francis Crick's Nobel medal, wait no longer: How Much is a Nobel Prize Worth? If It’s Francis Crick’s, the Answer is $2 Million

Even better, his letter to his 12 year old son describing DNA sold for six million: you can read the whole letter here

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Recommender algorithms for labor market search

Aki Ito has written a nice story at Bloomberg News about ongoing efforts to design labor market search engines to deal with congestion: Algorithms Play Matchmaker to Fight 7.7% U.S. Unemployment: Jobs

She writes about sites like AfterCollege and CareerBuilder and Burning Glass, as well as the online IT marketplace ODesk.

There's a lot going on in labor market matching and matchmaking, and lots of good market design  problems in that space.

Is freedom to do social science research like freedom of the press?

 A group of British social scientists (who appear to mostly be involved in survey research) think that the current system of institutional review of research in Britain is better suited to medical experiments than to social science.

Here's the story:

Social Science Ethics

March 14, 2013 - 3:00am

By

Paul Jump for Times Higher Education

British social scientists are drawing up a common set of ethical principles aimed at freeing research from what they see as excessive ethics oversight frameworks that hamper their ability to improve social understanding.

According to Robert Dingwall, professor of social science at Nottingham Trent University, a "free" social science research base is as important to a healthy democracy as a free press. But in the past decade, British and international funders have required universities to vet all research involving human subjects via institutional ethics committees.

"You can imagine how outraged journalists would feel if they had to pre-check with a committee that their questions would not upset someone," he said.

Dingwall, a member of an Academy of Social Sciences working group on the issue, said committee members often had no expertise in ethics or the research field in question, and were primarily concerned with the university's reputation. Their risk aversion fed back to academics, who were often disinclined to undertake research that could incur disapproval even if it was potentially important.

The situation was exacerbated, Dingwall said, by the application to social science of frameworks developed for biomedicine. He said the balance of individual risk and social benefit was different in the social sciences because most research posed a minimal risk to individuals and offered significant benefit to the community.

He said that although the U.S. and Canada have recognized that the regulatory system was in crisis, Britain has yet to join efforts to redress it.

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/03/14/british-social-scientists-propose-new-approach-ethics-review#ixzz2NYEV2Xos
Inside Higher Ed 

Paul Milgrom's Wikipedia page (and 65th birthday present)

Today is Paul Milgrom's 65th birthday, and is the second day of a conference in his honor that has brought his students and other admirers from all over the world. Joshua Gans led the creation of the birthday present, which involved bringing  Paul Milgrom's Wikipedia page up to snuff. As Joshua announced at the dinner last night, it is presently the longest Wikipedia page for any living economist (maybe for any economist, I didn't get that clear...). Here's a picture of it being presented to Paul in scroll form, held up by those of his students who were present:

Paul' Milgrom's Wikipedia page, printed out for his birthday

 It's a great celebration of Paul's remarkable career, at its midpoint.

Happy birthday, Paul.

Paul Milgrom, rebutting all the toasts in his honor

Conference in Honor of Paul Milgrom's 65th Birthday

Paul Milgrom is a giant, not just in market design, and at 65 he's still going full blast. Here's the program for his birthday party:

Program: Conference in Honor of Paul Milgrom's 65th Birthday

Location: Landau economics, first floor

Friday, April 19

Introduction to Conference

10:30-10:45                 Susan Athey, Yeon-Koo Che and Joshua Gans

Session 1: Market Design Methods in Matching and Auctions

10:45-10:55 a.m.         Al Roth: Introduction

10:55-11:25 a.m.         John Hatfield: “Matching with Contracts”

11:25-11:35 a.m.         coffee break

11:35-12:05 p.m.         Yeon-Koo Che: “Generalized Reduced Form Auctions: A Network-Flow Approach,” with Jinwoo Kim and Konrad Mierendorff

12:05-12:35 p.m.         Paul Klemperer: “Geometry, Auctions, and Matching”

Lunch

12:35-1:35 p.m.

Session 2: Auctions and Market Design

1:35-1:45 p.m.             Preston McAfee: Introduction

1:45-2:15 p.m.             Lixin Ye: "Efficient and Optimal Mechanisms with Private Information Acquisition Costs," with Jingfeng Lu

2:15-2:45 p.m.             Daniel Quint:  Indicative Bidding in Auctions with Costly Entry,” with Ken Hendricks

2:45-3:00 p.m.             Coffee Break

3:00-3:30 p.m.             David McAdams, "Secrecy in the First-Price Auction". 

3:30-4:00 p.m.             Ilya Segal, “U.S. Spectrum Reallocation and Heuristic Auctions,” with Paul Milgrom.

4:00-4:15 p.m.             Coffee Break

Panel Discussion: Market Design in Practice

4:15-5:00 p.m.             Panel Discussion

                                   

Dinner

Vidalakis Dining Room, Schwab Center

6:30 p.m.                     Appetizers

7:15 p.m.                     Seated dinner begins serving 

Saturday, April 20

Breakfast

9 a.m.                          at conference site

Session 3: Organizations and Complementarity

9:30-9:40 a.m.             John Roberts: Introduction

9:40-10:10 a.m.           Nick Bloom: Management and Organizations

10:10-10:40 a.m.         Bruno Strulovici: "The Supermodular Stochastic Ordering," with Margaret Meyer

10:40-11:00 a.m.         Coffee Break

Session 4: Incentives and Games

11:00-11:15 a.m.         Bengt Holmstrom: Introduction and Retrospective on Static and Multitask Incentive Theory

11:15-11:45 a.m.         Andy Skrzypacz: Repeated games and incentives 

11:45-12:15 p.m.         Michi Kandori: How to cooperate under private monitoring

12:15-1:15 p.m.           Lunch

Time/Location TBD    Afternoon Hike

6:30 p.m.                     Informal Dinner 

Someone was pretending to be me on Google+ (a story with a happy ending)

The internet is home to a variety of scams, and some of them involve trying to manipulate Google search results. So I was surprised and dismayed, but not entirely shocked, when I noticed that someone was pretending to be me, by establishing a Google+ page for a company called Market Design, whose web page was....this blog.

What could be in it for them?  Well, maybe they were really trying to pretend that by hiring them you were hiring me. But maybe they just were moving up in Google searches through the links that this blog gets.  Here's what you saw if you searched for "market design" on Google:

The first result, on the left, is my blog. But there's an item under it called "Google+ page" and an address, which both link to the spoofer, who is also on the right, with a phone number and a map, and a picture that if you click on it gets you to one of my blog posts.

If you clicked on the link that says Google+ page under the link to my blog, you got to this page, on which my blog URL was clearly displayed as the company web page:

On 4/7/13 I filled out a problem report on the Google+ profile page, and I wrote a review disclaiming any connection between their site and me or my blog...

Apparently Google pays attention to this kind of complaint. When I checked back on 4/9/13 the spoofer was already nowhere to be found.

A recent email confirmed this:

From: Google Maps [mailto:noreply-local-issues@google.com]

Sent: Tuesday, April 16, 2013 1:09 PM

To: Roth, Alvin

Subject: Google Maps Problem Report - Action taken

Bangladesh protesters demand blasphemy law with death penalty for bloggers

One repugnant transaction  isn't repugnant enough for protesters in Bangladesh:

Bangladesh protesters demand blasphemy law
"Hundreds of thousands of marchers call for law that would include death penalty for bloggers who they say insult Islam."

"The religious group, which has the backing of country's largest party Jamaat-e-Islami, organised the rally in support of its 13-point demand including enactment of a blasphemy law to prosecute and hang what they call atheist bloggers.
...
"Under the country's cyber laws, a blogger or Internet writer can face up to ten years in jail for defaming a religion."

Interview with the late Dr Joseph Murray, about the first kidney transplants and related matters

Great interview, conducted in 2000. Lots of detail. For example, he practiced on dogs, removing a dog's kidney and then transplanting it into the same dog, to practice the surgical techniques for kidney transplants without immunological complications...and discussion of repugnance... and of the generosity and courage of early transplant patients ...and the relationship between basic and applied science (18 minutes for the whole thing).

Here's the video from the Nobel site (I can't figure out how to upload it): http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=732 .

Here are my earlier posts on Dr. Murray who shared the 1990 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for "...discoveries concerning organ and cell transplantation in the treatment of human disease"

Clerkship hiring: early, and concentrated at top schools...

Above the Law reports on Which Law Schools Had the Most Clerkship Placements? and
Clerkship Hiring Is Getting Earlier and Earlier

Here's a quick look at which schools are doing well at placing students into clerkships...


 As for earlier and earlier hiring following the recent abandonment of the most recent timetable by the DC Circuit, here are two announcement over at OSCAR (the Online System for Clerkship Application and Review):

Latest OSCAR News

RSS

Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan Date Change

Apr 10, 2013 4:30 pm

The OSCAR system will release all online third-year law school student applications on June 28, 2013 at 12:00 pm Noon (EDT).

OSCAR Version 7: Limit of 100 Clerkship Applications

Apr 08, 2013 11:10 am

To address judge concerns, Version 7 introduces a 100-application limit per applicant for clerkship applications.

As it happens, a new model of unraveling of markets just came by email:
 STRATEGIC UNCERTAINTY AND UNRAVELING IN MATCHING
MARKETS, by FEDERICO ECHENIQUE AND JUAN SEBASTIAN PEREYRA

From their introduction:
"Strategic unraveling in our model proceeds as follows. There is a loss in efficiency when some agents go early: Information about the quality of the matches arrives late, so it is better for efficiency to wait until the information has arrived to make a match. If some agents go early anyway, this forces later matches to be less efficient. The result is a negative externality that makes it more tempting for all agents to go early. It may push some additional agents over the threshold by which they decide to go early. In turn, these additional agents going early makes it even more tempting to go early|and so on and so forth."

Internal exchanges in financial markets

The NY Times has a story on the increasing volume of trade going on in "dark pools," as opposed to in public exchanges. As Market Heats Up, Trading Slips Into Shadows. One point it makes is that some funds feel the exchanges aren't as safe as they used to be, e.g. because of high frequency traders.

The passage I found most interesting however, was about intercepting the trades of small investors before they get to exchanges:

"Other places besides the 30-plus dark pools are stealing the business of stock exchanges. A handful of firms including Citigroup and Knight Capital pay retail brokers like TD Ameritrade and Scottrade for the opportunity to trade with ordinary retail investors before the orders can reach an exchange, a phenomenon known as internalization. This type of off-exchange trading has also been growing, in part because of the recent revival of interest in the stock market among ordinary investors."

This is a little bit like what we are seeing in kidney exchange, in which big transplant centers withhold their easy to match pairs and transplant them internally.  See e.g.
Ashlagi, Itai and Alvin E. Roth, "New challenges in multi-hospital kidney exchange," American Economic Review papers and proceedings, May 2012, 102,3, 354-59

Buying a place in line to hear Supreme Court arguments

Over at the Volokh Conspiracy Dale Carpenter has the story, and the URL is more informative than the headline: http://www.volokh.com/2013/03/30/misbehavior-at-the-court/ 

"There are actually two lines to get into the chamber, which has very limited seating capacity.  One is for the general public, and in high-profile cases it’s quite long.  The other is for lawyers who become members of the Supreme Court bar.  Bar members enjoy a limited number of reserved seats at the front of the audience, right behind the lawyers for the parties in the case.  ...

I joined the Supreme Court bar ($200 one-time fee) in order to get into the marriage arguments. I knew the lines would be long, so I arrived Tuesday morning at about 3:15 a.m., thinking that would be good enough to get me in.  I was about 57th in line at that point for about 100 seats in the bar section.  In front of me were mostly paid line-standers who had been waiting in the 30-degree temperatures all night.  I talked with quite a few of them.  None were members of the bar.  Almost all were impoverished and black.  Many of them slept on the ground, in cold and wet conditions, for several nights.

As daylight approached, a lot of equality advocates arrived to take their premium places in line.  These “clients,” as the line-standers called them, paid about $50 an hour to line-standing-service middlemen organized as businesses (I don’t know what the actual line-standers earn per hour).  For the Prop 8 case,  it cost as much as $6,000 to get to the front of the line and guarantee a seat in the courtroom.  Neither the Supreme Court nor any law-enforcement authorities prohibit this practice.

I don’t categorically object to line-placement capitalism, especially for private functions like buying tickets to a rock concert.  It’s an economic exchange in which the highest bidders get what they want and others sell their services and earn money they wouldn’t otherwise get.  It does seem odd to hold what’s effectively a private-market auction for seats at a public hearing of the country’s highest court.  Many of the buyers who participated in this particular market, given what I know of their other political preferences, would be hard put to defend this system in a public forum. 

They started letting us into the Court at about 7:30 for the Prop 8 argument on Tuesday.  I got into the main room, third row from the front, not more than 50 feet from the Justices.  Getting there early — and being able to stand in a separate bar-members line – had paid off.

But what happened the next day for the DOMA argument was appalling.  I arrived at 2:15 a.m. when the temperature was a balmy 40 degrees and was headed down.  I was 46th in line, again with a group consisting almost entirely of paid line-standers in front of me.  There were very few bar members personally waiting in line at that time.  The Court had space for fewer bar members that day in order to make room for an extra table for counsel arguing the jurisdictional issues.  But even with more limited seating, #46 was still sure to get in.

As 7 a.m. approached and the lawyers arrived to take their pre-paid places in line, something else happened.  They started inviting their friends to join them at the front of the line, pushing back people who had waited all night to get in.  The lawyer-clients of several of the line-standers near me never arrived to relieve their assigned line-standers, no doubt because they cut in line further up than what they had paid for.  Pretty soon, I was #55 and then #65 and then I lost count. "

Robert Edwards, R.I.P. Brought in vitro fertilization from repugnant transaction to Nobel prize

Robert G. Edwards Dies at 87; Changed Rules of Conception With First ‘Test Tube Baby’


"Working with Dr. Patrick Steptoe, Dr. Edwards essentially changed the rules for how people can come into the world. Conception was now possible outside the body — in a petri dish.

"The technique has resulted in the births of five million babies, many in multiple births, according to the International Committee Monitoring Assisted Reproductive Technologies, an independent nonprofit group.

"Yet, like so many pioneers of science, Dr. Edwards and Dr. Steptoe achieved what they did in the face of a skeptical establishment and choruses of critics, some of whom found the idea of a “test tube baby” morally repugnant. Denied government support, the two men resorted to private financing. And they did their work in virtual seclusion, in a tiny, windowless laboratory at a small, out-of-the-way English hospital outside Manchester.

"It was there, after outwitting a crowd of reporters, that they delivered their — and the world’s — first IVF baby, Louise Brown, on July 25, 1978. Her parents, John and Lesley Brown, had tried for nine years to have a child — a period that virtually coincided with Dr. Edwards’s research."
*****************

Here's my earlier post on the occasion of his Nobel, including some dissenting voices at the time:

From repugnant transaction to Nobel Prize in Medicine

Law schools forming law firms to employ new graduates

The NY Times has the story. The quote is from the dean of the Arizona State U. Law School: To Place Graduates, Law Schools Are Opening Firms

"“I realized that was what we needed,” Mr. Sylvester recalled. “A teaching hospital for law school graduates.”

"The result is a nonprofit law firm that Arizona State is setting up this summer for some of its graduates. Over the next few years, 30 graduates will work under seasoned lawyers and be paid for a wide range of services provided at relatively low cost to the people of Phoenix."

The economics of designing markets, and the sociology of "civilizing" them

Jose Ossandon emailed me to alert me about his thoughtful blog post comparing some developments in market design and in the sociology of markets. In particular, he draws connections between market design and some of the work of Michel Callon.

Ossandon's blog post is called Are markets matching Callon and Roth?

He begins:
"The last meeting of our “Copenhagen market group”[i] was devoted to an increasingly influential stream within current economics, namely “market design”. The discussion left me with the somehow perplexing puzzle I am trying to unfold in this post: isn’t this type of economics almost too close to the ‘markets as calculative collective devices’[ii] approach developed by Michel Callon and colleagues so influential among us -non-economists market researchers- in the last years?

During the meeting we discussed two articles (here and here) written by the 2012 Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth. As Roth explains, see also his very clear Nobel Prize speech, his and his colleagues’ work has been dedicated to very practical problems."

And after come comments on my earlier posts on performativity, Ossandon concludes:

"Are the new² economic sociology and market design the same? Avoiding the obvious methodological splits that separate a highly formalized and a rather descriptive-reflexive ethnographic approach, there are still important conceptual differences. The ideal situation for Roth’s designers seems to be “give me some choosing things[iii] to match and I will rise a technologically equipped market”, while for Callon - especially in his work connecting his thoughts on technical democracy, hybrid forums and markets- the ideal situation is where what is traded, who can participate in the exchange, and who and what is equipping the market encounter are collectively and heterogeneously defined. Civilizing (Callon) and engineering (Roth) markets are therefore two different programs of market design. More practically, for instance, in school choice, for Roth et al. what a good school is or who can choose or what is chosen while matching school places is defined before the market. In Callon et al.’s view such an arrangement would not only match pre-calculating families and schools but it would include the consequence of making the involved agents calculative, changing accordingly the way they understand and deal with education. In other words, in Callon’s view markets are never only about matching, or matching would need to beunderstood also as a mode of per-formatting new agencies and things.

But, despite these differences, it seems like finally engineer economists and engineer sociologists are finding a common starting point. Isn’t that scary? I don’t think so. This is a much better place to start and try a dialogue that is not so limited by pre-existing disciplinary boundaries (see also Callon here). Let’s agree: markets are not pre-social metaphysical forces that need to be left alone, but they are practical arrangements that can be more or less, better or worse, designed[iv]. In those cases where there is an already functioning market or quasi-market mechanisms (for instance: school choice or carbon trade) let’s try to make them work the best we can. In other words, social researchers should not only criticize marketization but also spend time, energy and knowledge onengineering and/or civilizing these complex arrangements. This is, I think, a nice pragmatic starting point for market researchers at large.

But is this just good?  No it isn’t, there is also a serious flaw. These two streams of market research seem to share a somewhat excessive optimism about markets as devices that can solve social and environmental issues. As a product of neoliberal Chile, I would happily pay for not having to make choices in areas like health insurance, pension funds, schools or long distance phone carriers. And certainly many people have argued that these and other sectors (have you heard about trains in the UK?) are not necessarily working better years after features such as competition, choice and providers able to select or exclude their potential users have been introduced. Market design risks becoming the face of the latest round of social and environmental reforms (for instance: emissions trading or the announced Job Match interface in the UK). And the new reformers seem to believe something like: it is not that markets were necessarily a bad social policy but that they were not properly designed. But, shouldn’t we also be experimenting with other ways of doing things? I am not saying that markets are always bad, but that the same brilliant ideas currently oriented at designing better markets could also be spent devising other forms of solving our common problems. In my opinion market civilizers and engineers will become fully respectable technicians the day they are also able to advise something like: “thank you for contacting me, but here you don’t need a market”."

I haven't yet had a chance to do more than glance at the links he provides: it's clear that some translation will be needed between econ and soc, in order for me to try to understand all the connections that he sees.

Congressional briefing on the role of economic research in health policy: April 12

I will participate in this event remotely, but if you are in Washington you can come and enjoy it in person...

 Invitation: 4/12 Luncheon/Briefing on Health Economics Research
You are invited to a Congressional briefing on the role of economics research in health policy.
Economic Research: Saving Lives and Money

Friday, April 12, 2013
12:00 pm – 1:30 pm
Rayburn House Office Building Room B-338

This will be a widely attended event
(Complimentary box lunches will be provided)

Rising health costs make it increasingly difficult to fund other national priorities, such as defense, education, and public safety. Health economics research can provide the building blocks for responsible reforms that moderate health care spending, improve health system performance, and reduce the deficit. A panel of distinguished economists discusses the contributions of economics research to our health and well-being.

INFORMING HEALTH POLICY
Mark McClellan, MD, PhD (Brookings) CMS Administrator (2004-2006), FDA Commissioner (2002-2004), and CEA member (2001-2002) and Joseph Antos, PhD (American Enterprise Institute) explore the important role economics research plays in informing government decisions about health policy.

IMPROVING MEDICAL MARKETS
Alvin Roth, PhD (Stanford) Nobel Prize 2012, describes how fundamental research in theoretical and experimental economics supported by the National Science Foundation is being applied in medical markets in ways that save lives by increasing organ donations and improving the efficiency of medical residencies.

ENCOURAGING HEALTHY BEHAVIOR
Kevin Volpp, MD, PhD (Penn) presents his National Institutes of Health supported research on innovative ways of applying insights from behavioral economics to improve patient health behavior and affect provider performance.

We hope you will be able to attend this important briefing.

Positive RSVPs only by April 10th to lplavnik@cossa.org

Sponsored by: AcademyHealth, American Economic Association, Consortium of Social Science Associations, Council of Professional Associations on Federal Statistics, Population Association of America, Research!America

Columbia Engineering (my alma mater) interview

Here's the interview, called The ultimate matchmaker.

High school matching in New York City

Two stories caught my eye about the results of the recent high school match in New York City.

The first reminded me of the recent paper on college applications by Chris Avery and Caroline Hoxby
which finds that students from rural areas are less likely to apply to highly selective colleges than are equally well qualified students from high schools that more traditionally send students to top colleges

Disparities Found in N.Y.C.'s System for Matching Students to Schools
"Low-achieving students were less likely to rank as first choice a school rated an A or B on New York City's school-quality system, and nearly twice as likely to choose one graded C, D, or F. The first-choice schools of students in the bottom 20 percent in math and language arts achievement also had 10-percentage-point lower average graduation rates than the first-choice schools of higher-achieving students, 68 percent versus 78 percent.
"The gaps between everybody's first-choice schools and the schools where they are matched are about the same, but the starting points for low-achieving students are much lower," said Lori Nathason, a research associate at the research alliance, who spoke about the study at the policy conference."

Another story caught my eye because it has to do with the high school that I attended:

"Parents refuse to send their kids to the only zoned high school in the area, the C-rated Martin Van Buren High School, until it shakes its poor reputation.
In a twist, Alvin Roth — a graduate of Van Buren — won the Nobel Prize in October for creating the algorithm on which the city’s public high school admissions process is based."

Marketing gurus: how would you advertise the need for organ donors?

You can see how the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services does it at http://organdonor.gov/index.html

How American transplant policy is made: some policies put out for public comment

A view of the OPTN policy-making process for organ transplants can be glimpsed by looking at some of the many recent proposals put out for public comment. Here are a few...

1

Proposal to Substantially Revise The National Kidney Allocation System (Kidney Transplantation Committee)

Proposal (1.81 MB)

9/21/2012 - 12/14/2012

7

Proposal to Clarify Priority Status for Prior Living Organ Donors Who Later Require a Kidney Transplant (Kidney Transplantation Committee)

Proposal (313 K)

3/16/2012 - 6/25/2012

8

Proposal to Establish Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) Policy (Kidney Transplantation Committee)

Proposal (669 K)

3/16/2012 - 6/25/2012

9

Proposal to Include Bridge Donors in the OPTN Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) Program (Kidney Transplantation Committee)

Proposal (646 K)

3/16/2012 - 6/25/2012

Job markets in Korea

I had an interesting discussion yesterday at the Korean Finance Ministry about the interconnectedness of job markets and child care...

Google translate caption: Was hyeonohseok Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Strategy and Finance to discuss the policy last year, won the Nobel Prize in economics, Professor Ross Elliot Alvin (Alvin Elliott Roth) and job creation.