A sociologist looks at the design of electricity capacity markets

The discussion among sociologists of the "performativity" of economics is taking more sophisticated note of market design.  Here's a recent paper from the journal Social Studies of Science.

Designing a market-like entity: Economics in the politics of market formation
Daniel Breslau
Department of Science and Technology in Society, Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, USA

Abstract: Recent work on the relationship of economics to economic institutions has argued that economics is constitutive of economic institutions, and of markets in particular. In opposition to economic sociology, which has treated economics as a competing disciplinary frame or an ideology, the ‘performativity’ literature takes economics seriously as a set of market-building practices. This
article demonstrates the compatibility of these perspectives by analyzing the role of economics
in the politics of market formation. It presents a case study of the formation of a new institution:
capacity markets connected to wholesale electricity markets in the United States. The case
demonstrates how economic framing shapes the politics of markets by imposing a specific set of
terms for the legitimate conduct of the struggle over market rules.

Project Renewal: Kidney donation in faith-based communities

It appears that many American non-directed kidney donors (perhaps a third, judging from informal evidence from the programs with which I deal) come from faith-based communities. (I understand that policemen and firemen are also well represented among nondirected donors.) Non-directed donors are particularly important because they can initiate chains of donations among patient-donor pairs waiting for kidney exchange.

A Jewish organization that has contributed many non-directed donors is Renewal, founded by Mendy Reiner.

Here's an article about Renewal, by Rabbi Boruch Wolf, which focuses on the big effect of these living donors from the religious Jewish community, and contrasts it with the reluctance of members of that community to sign deceased-donor registration cards, because of concerns among other things about what is involved in deciding that someone is deceased.
Do Chareidim Contribute Their ‘Fair Share’ of Organs?

Kidney transplantation in Nepal

From (the blog) The Kidney Doctor, comes these remarks and links on kidney transplantation in Nepal. They surely apply to other countries as well, since many countries have laws against living donor transplants from unrelated donors.

The first kidney transplant program in Nepal was launched in 2009 by Dr. Dibya Singh Shah at Tribhuban University Teaching Hospital (TUTH) with the help of an Australian transplant surgeon. Over 200 transplants have been performed, but these are exclusively living related. Launching and maintaining a quality kidney transplantation has been a heroic effort on the part of Dr. Dibya Singh. Many in her place would probably not pulled off what she has done. 

However, more needs to be done. No living unrelated transplants are allowed under Nepalese law and there is no deceased donor program. 

 The government of Nepal needs to change it's policy on unrelated donor transplantation. By not allowing this to happen, a sizable number of patients are denied the opportunity of receiving a transplant and a new lease on life. It is a pity that the price of avoiding a small number of bad actors doing commercially motivated transplantation in Nepal means patients who have an unrelated donor being unable to undergo transplantation. It doesn't seem either feasible or sensible to limit a whole country to an approach that is essentially driven by fear. 

Ashlagi and Shi on community cohesion in school choice

Itai Ashlagi and Peng Shi have a paper motivated by some of the recent discussions of school choice in Boston:

Improving Community Cohesion in School Choice via Correlated-Lottery Implementation
Itai Ashlagi and Peng Shi
Draft Date: August 6, 2013

Abstract:
In school choice, children submit a preference ranking over schools to a centralized assignment algorithm, which takes into account schools’ priorities over children and uses randomization to break ties. One criticism of current school choice mechanisms is that they tend to disperse communities so children do not go to school with others from their neighborhood.
We suggest to improve community cohesion by implementing a correlated lottery in a given school choice mechanism: we find a convex combination of deterministic assignments that maintains the original assignment probabilities, thus maintaining choice, but yields increased cohesion.

To analyze the gain in cohesion for a wide class of mechanisms, we first prove the following characterization which maybe of independent interest: any mechanism which, in the large market limit, is non-atomic, Bayesian incentive compatible, symmetric and efficient within each priority class, is a “lottery-plus-cutoff” mechanism. This means that the large market limit can be described as follows: given the distribution of preferences, every student receives an identically distributed lottery number, every school sets a lottery cutoff for each priority class, and a student is assigned her most preferred school for which she meets the cutoff. This generalizes Liu and Pycia (2012) to allow arbitrary priorities. Using this, we derive analytic expressions for maximum cohesion under a large market approximation. We show that the benefit of lottery-correlation is greater when students’ preferences are more correlated.

In practice, although the correlated-lottery implementation problem is NP-hard, we present a heuristic that does well. We apply this to real data from Boston elementary school choice 2012 and find that we can increase cohesion by 79% for K1 and 37% for K2 new families. Greater cohesion gain is possible (tripling cohesion for K1 and doubling for K2) if we apply lottery-correlation on top of reducing the choice menu (to what was eventually adopted by Boston after the 2012-2013 school choice reform). This has minimal impact on racial or socio-economic diversity.

Sex trafficking from Nepal to India

This story from the NY Times reports on sex trafficking in which at least some women are kidnapped and involuntarily sold to brothels: Women, Bought and Sold in Nepal.

"Although reliable data on the scope of the issue is difficult to gather, Unicef reports that as many as 7,000 women and girls are trafficked out of Nepal to India every year, and around 200,000 are now working in Indian brothels."
***********

Market designers spend a lot of our time trying to make failed markets succeed, but this kind of thing is a reminder that many markets succeed so well that even making them illegal isn't sufficient to make them fail. I don't know enough about this particular market, but in general we might spend some time thinking on how to make illegal markets fail...

NBER Market Design conference at Stanford, Oct 25 (and 26)

Below is the announcement, from Susan Athey and Parag Pathak. Although the conference is at Stanford, I won't be able to attend because it conflicts with the ESA meetings at which I was already scheduled to speak. But come if you can, Stanford is lovely in the Fall.

From: Susan Athey and Parag Pathak

To: NBER Market Design Working Group

The National Bureau of Economic Research workshop on Market Design is a forum to discuss new academic research related to the design of market institutions, broadly defined. The next meeting will be held in Stanford, California on Friday, October 25, 2013.

We welcome new and interesting research, and are happy to see papers from a variety of fields. Participants in the past meeting covered a range of topics and methodological approaches.  Last year's program can be viewed at: http://conference.nber.org/confer/2012/MDf12/program.html

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

There is no requirement to be an NBER-affiliated researcher to participate.  Younger researchers are especially encouraged to submit papers.  If you are interested in presenting a paper this year, please upload a PDF version by September 2, 2013 to this link:

http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf13

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

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

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

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

******************
Updated: it will be a two day conference, Oct 25-26 (so it exactly overlaps with the ESA meetings:(
Here is the program

Double blind reviewing

"Double blind reviewing" is the practice in some academic journals of not only concealing the reviewers' identities from the authors, but of also concealing the authors' identities from the reviewers. The idea is that papers should be evaluated "on their own merits," without information about the authors. The controversies that arise have to do with whether there is valuable information in knowing who the authors are.  For a number of years the American Economic Review tried to have double blind reviewing (that was somewhat undermined by the growing ease of finding papers on the internet), but they abandoned this practice a few years ago.

I was reminded of this by the story of J.K. Rowling's (of Harry Potter fame) venture into publishing a story under a pseudonym, later revealed...

‘Cuckoo’s Calling’ Reveals Long Odds for New Authors

"“The Cuckoo’s Calling” became the publishing sensation of the summer when word leaked that its first-time author, Robert Galbraith, was none other than J. K. Rowling, the mega-best-selling creator of Harry Potter.

"Mystery solved? Maybe not. It’s no surprise that “The Cuckoo’s Calling,” a detective story set in a London populated by supermodels and rock stars, shot to the top of best-seller lists once the identity of the author was revealed. But if the book is as good as critics are now saying it is, why didn’t it sell more copies before, especially since the rise of online publishing has supposedly made it easier than ever for first-time authors?"

Fading repugnance watch: Marijuana and same sex marriage

Two stories in yesterday's NY Times were about repugnant transactions that are in the process of becoming less repugnant:

U.S. Says It Won’t Sue to Undo State Marijuana Laws
"The Obama administration on Thursday said it would not sue to undo laws legalizing marijuana in 20 states, although it will monitor operations in those states to make sure they do not run afoul of several enforcement priorities."

I.R.S. to Recognize All Gay Marriages, Regardless of State
"All legally married same-sex couples will be recognized for federal tax purposes, regardless of whether the state where they live recognizes the marriage, the Treasury Department and the Internal Revenue Service said Thursday."

Wagaroo update: designing a mechanism to identify responsible sources for pet dogs

In February, Christine Exley, a graduate student in economics at Stanford, introduced us to Wagaroo, a new market for pets, here. Since then, she has developed an interesting new mechanism to screen out puppy mills from her Owner Rehoming Program. Her Owner Rehoming Program is also serving as a substitute for animal shelters for some dogs.   As Wagaroo expands she and her colleagues hope this will help drive down the animal shelter population. (You can hear her in the last link below, a video...)  

She writes:

"Wagaroo makes it easy for people to find dogs from ethical sources.  We only post dogs from the shelters, rescues, responsible breeders, and families needing to rehome their dogs.  Dogs are adopted from the last group via our Owner Rehoming Program, which involves owners who need to find new loving homes for their dogs due to a variety of reasons, such as a death in the family, financial challenges, or having to move.  By using our Owner Rehoming Program, these owners keep their dogs until they find a new family for their dog – that is, they keep their dogs out of animal shelters.

"When we were developing our Owner Rehoming Program, we wanted to develop a system that keeps out puppy mills, places that cruelly mass-produce puppies in horrid conditions.   To do so, we thought of a mechanism that aligns incentives.  To illustrate, lets assume Alice wants to adopt a dog from Bob through our Owner Rehoming Program.   To finalize the adoption, Wagaroo asks Alice to pay a $100 adoption fee to Wagaroo, 50% of which is donated to a local animal shelter.  

"How does this keep out puppy mills?   First, Bob does not receive any money for his dog, so he clearly is not a puppy mill trying to make money by selling dogs.  Since Alice does not want a dog from a puppy mill, we can rely on her to not pay Bob.   Second, Bob wants to avoid problems that can arise when giving away dogs for free, such as them being used in dog fights or other cruel ways.   Because of this, we can rely on Bob making sure Alice pays the adoption fee to Wagaroo. This aligns incentives well, and the system is working wonderfully so far!

"If you would like to support our cause, please join in our crowdfunding campaign on indiegogo. You may also learn more about the economics behind Wagaroo in this video!"

Tourism pricing at the Jaipur observatory

Here's the price list...

And well worth it, to see a sculpture garden of assorted sundials of varying sophistication:

Why it's hard to reimburse non-directed kidney donors for their travel costs

A letter to the editor of the American Journal of Transplantation:

To the Editor:

We are responding to the Melcher et al. [1] article, which recommends that the National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC) pay for travel and lodging for nondirected donors (NDDs). We commend the work done by this group of stakeholders and believe the publishing of their findings is vital to improving the process of kidney paired donation. We do, however, need to clarify one point in their many important recommendations.

The article recommends “The National Living Donor Assistance Center should provide travel and lodging expenses to the NDD.” It is important to note that there are limits to the NLDAC program that were put in place by the U.S. Congress. NLDAC cannot pay for the travel and lodging expenses for all NDDs. The Organ Donation Recovery and Improvement Act (ODRIA) [2] established the legislative parameters for NLDAC. ODRIA states that individuals may not receive compensation from the grant if these expenses can reasonably be paid by a State or Federal program, an insurance company or the recipient of the organ. ODRIA requires means testing of the recipient's household income.

In practice, this means a recipient must be identified before an application can be filed with NLDAC. Because NDDs do not have a recipient identified before their evaluation trip to transplant center, NLDAC cannot reimburse those expenses. However, after a recipient is identified, a NLDAC application may then be filed. It should be noted that NLDAC received 42 applications between 2008 and 2012 for NDD, of which 32 were approved, providing NDDs with reimbursement of travel expenses through NLDAC.

If the recipient's household income is below the income threshold of 300% of the HHS Poverty Guidelines, NLDAC is allowed to reimburse those donor's expenses for the surgery and medical follow-up trips. If the recipient's income is above the income threshold, NLDAC may reimburse the donor's expenses if financial hardship is proven by the recipient. If the application is not approved, the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) [3] allows the recipient to reimburse the donor's expenses.

Lastly, we agree with the article's recommendation that payers should cover donor travel and lodging costs given that, by donating and traveling, the donor is enabling not only the recipient's transplant, but also those of other recipients.

This letter represents the views of the authors and does not necessarily represent the views of the grant funder.

A. O. Ojo1*, R. M. Merion2, D. H. Howard3 and P. H. Warren4
1Division of Nephrology, Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
2Division of Transplantation, Department of Surgery, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
3Department of Health Policy and Management, Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia
4National Living Donor Assistance Center, American Society of Transplant Surgeons, Arlington, Virginia
*Corresponding author: Akinlolu Ojo, aojo@med.umich.edu
 The letter is found under the heading
Response to “Dynamic Challenges Inhibiting Optimal Adoption of Kidney Paired Donation: Findings of a Consensus Conference” by Melcher et al.
American Journal of Transplantation, Volume 13, Issue 8, page 2228, August 2013

The multiple organ recipient who is also an organ donor...

...and a doctor, and a transplant activist.
Here's a remarkable story about Allison John, who needed so many organs that it was easiest to do the surgery if she also got a new heart, and so she became a heart donor at the same time as she became a heart transplant recipient: Daily Mirror Pride of Britain winner Allison John made history by becoming the first person in Britain to have a liver, heart, lung and kidney transplant 

Today she's healthy enough to have gone to medical school and become an organ donor activist...

A Mentor of Market Designers

Here's an interview with Eduardo Azevedo about being my student: I just came across it recently. I'm proud of him too.  The Mentor of Market Designers

Organ donation in Britain: will it follow Israel's lead?

The idea of encouraging people to register as organ donors by giving some priority to registered donors for receiving organs should they need them is still under discussion in Britain, motivated in part by the Israeli experience.  Here's a story from the Telegraph:
Registered organ donors could be given priority for transplants
"Patients who have agreed to donate organs could be given priority if they ever need a transplant, under proposals being considered by the NHS.
...
"In a report published today (THURS) NHS Blood and Transplant published a new plan to improve organ donations.
"The report floats one approach where patients already on the Organ Donor Register would be given higher priority for transplants should they need one.
"Professor James Neuberger, associate medical director at NHS Blood and Transplant, said: “They do this in Israel and it has encouraged donation.
“It was first introduced in Singapore. While they don’t exclude those who don’t donate, it gives priority to those who are on the donor register.
“Whether it is appropriate for the UK is up for debate and discussion.”
"Any move to prioritise patients on the donor register would require a decision by ministers and a change in organ allocation rules."
******************
The subject will be debated at the upcoming National Donation and Transplantation Congress, which is being held at the University of Warwick in early September.

Here's the announcement of the debate, with Jay Lavee, the Israeli heart transplant surgeon who has been at the heart of the change to priority in Israel speaking in favor (and presumably some of the others speaking against...)

The David Price Memorial Lecture / Debate: Should we have to give in order to receive? 

Chair:   James Neuberger

Speakers:  Jacob Lavee  – Israel

  Kevin Gunning -  Intensive Care Society

  Anthony Warrens – British Transplantation Society

  Penney Lewis – UK Donation Ethics Committee

*******************
Here is the UK Organ Donation and Transplantation site, and here are some links to the NHS Blood and Transplant Service documents on current proposals:

Taking Organ Transplantation to 2020
Here's the accompanying full report (pdf)

The table is from that report, summarizing the goals and current situation.

Here's an earlier post  of mine on this subject.

Here are other earlier posts following Jay Lavee's work

When assortative matching on age can interfere with matching

Here's an article addressed to the shidduchim crisis, that leaves some orthodox Jewish women without a husband. The article highlights a video made by young men who married happily after relaxing the customary insistence that the bride be younger than they.

"A recent YouTube video produced by NASI, the North American Shidduch Initiative, suggests that young boys can and should marry older girls — even if the girl is four months his senior, or, God-forbid, one year and three months older (what a crisis!)."

Bollywood support for organ-donor registration in India

A Bollywood film and its cast promote deceased organ donation: Ship of Theseus carries message about organ donation

Read more: http://www.thenational.ae/arts-culture/film/ship-of-theseus-carries-message-about-organ-donation#ixzz2cfAO6go9
Follow us: @TheNationalUAE on Twitter | thenational.ae on Facebook

"The film Ship of Theseus, India’s latest art-house sensation, aims to make the audience leave the cinema quietly resolving to sign a pledge donating all their organs.

"In fact, the film’s cast, as well as the filmmaker Kiran Rao and her husband, the Bollywood actor Aamir Khan, attended a function in Mumbai last week to pledge their organs.

“We had discussed it before but after seeing Ship of Theseus, we realised that it was something we had to do – give the gift of life and use our bodies to change the life of not just one person but several,” said Rao.

"The central question of Ship of Theseus derives from a question posed by Plutarch: if you replace all the decayed planks of a ship, does it remain the original ship?"

HT: Seema Arora

Signaling that you're not a business traveller by committing to a mixed strategy

Airlines like to price-discriminate against business travellers and others whose trips are non-discretionary. So, how to identify the leisure travellers?

Travel site Getgoing.com offers substantial airfare discounts to those who agree to "Pick Two, Get One" and choose two destinations and let the site choose one of them.

Recruiting through social networks like LinkedIn

The Washington Post talks about how networking sites like LinkedIn are changing recruiting practices for the already employed: How LinkedIn has changed the way you might get your next job


"As LinkedIn has exploded — perhaps because it has exploded — there has been a major shift in the way employers find new workers. Gone are the days of “post and pray,” a recruiter’s adage for the practice of advertising a job opening and then idly hoping that good candidates swim up to the bait.

"Now the process of talent acquisition is something of a hunt.

“We’re really at a point now where all of your employees are vulnerable to being poached. Every single one,” said Josh Bersin, principal and founder of talent consulting firm Bersin by Deloitte.

"The change is happening rapidly: A 2013 study by the Society for Human Resource Management found that 77 percent of employers are using social networks to recruit, a sharp increase from the 56 percent who reported doing so in 2011. And among the recruiters using social tools, 94 percent said they are using LinkedIn.

"LinkedIn has also shaken up the job candidate experience for workers of all sorts. Satisfied employees in high-demand fields are frequently getting unexpected nibbles to gauge their interest in new opportunities. 
...
"And while LinkedIn has become recruiters’ primary hub for chasing passive talent, it’s not the only place they’re looking: Facebook, Twitter and niche sites such as GitHub have also become channels for identifying prospective job candidates.

...
"About 20,000 clients are using LinkedIn’s talent solutions products. These tools have fast become the company’s financial backbone: Of the $364 million in revenue that LinkedIn reported in the second quarter, $205 million came from this division..."


But success brings congestion:

"Jennifer Boulanger, director of talent acquisition at Arlington-based Opower, said she’s already seeing this happen in certain high-demand job categories.

“Most engineers, they get probably 10 to 15 LinkedIn mails every day,” Boulanger said. “So we actually got away from doing a lot of LinkedIn for engineers.”

"Still, she’s using LinkedIn Recruiter to fill a host of other positions. In fact, she has nearly 11,000 candidates in her applicant tracking system that were identified through this platform..."

Here's a competitor for a niche that may be particularly difficult to search:

"Kathleen Smith of ClearedJobs.net, a career site for people with government security clearances, said that hers is a niche in which many qualified candidates are not easily found on LinkedIn.

 “When you’re talking in the cleared community, people are not very comfortable sharing a lot of information,” Smith said, since they often work on classified projects and are accustomed to maintaining a certain level of privacy about themselves and their work.

"Even some of the basics can be difficult to discern, as workers are typically advised not to disclose in their profiles that they have a security clearance."

Ten kidney exchange transplants on World Kidney Day in Ahmedabad, India

Here's the link:

Clinical Studies

Ten kidney paired donation transplantation on World Kidney Day 2013: raising awareness and time to take action to increase donor pool

Posted online on August 12, 2013. (doi:10.3109/0886022X.2013.823997)

Vivek B. Kute¹, Aruna V. Vanikar², Pankaj R. Shah¹, Manoj R. Gumber¹, Himanshu V. Patel¹, Divyesh P. Engineer¹, Pranjal R. Modi³, S.J. Rizvi³, Veena R. Shah⁴, Manisha P. Modi⁴, Kamal V. Kanodia², and Hargovind L. Trivedi¹

¹Department of Nephrology and Clinical Transplantation,

²Department of Pathology, Laboratory Medicine, Transfusion Services and Immunohematology,

³Department of Urology and Transplantation, and

⁴Anesthesia and Critical Care, Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Center, Dr. HL Trivedi Institute of Transplantation Sciences (IKDRC-ITS),

Ahmedabad

, India

Address correspondence to

Dr. Vivek Kute

, Department of Nephrology and Clinical Transplantation, Institute of Kidney Diseases & Research Centre, Dr. HL Trivedi Institute of Transplantation Sciences (IKDRC- ITS), Civil Hospital Campus,

Ahmedabad 380016, Gujarat

, India. Tel.: +91 79 22687000; Fax: +91 79 2268 5454; E-mail: drvivekkute@rediffmail.com

Abstract

Background: Kidney paired donation (KPD) is feasible for any center that performs living related donor renal transplantation (LRDRTx). Lack of awareness, counseling and participation are important hurdles in KPD patients with incompatible donors. Materials and methods: This is an institutional review board approved study of 10 ESRD patients who consented to participate in the KPD transplantation at our center. All the surgeries were carried out on the same day at the same center on the occasion of World Kidney Day (WKD) (14 March 2013). All recipients had anatomic, functional and immunological similar donors. Results: KPD were performed to avoid blood group incompatibility (n = 8) or to avoid a positive crossmatch (n = 2). None of the patients experienced delayed graft function and surgical complications. At 3 month follow-up, median serum creatinine was 1 (range 0.6 to 1.25) mg/dL and two patients developed allograft biopsy-proven acute rejection and responded to antirejection therapy. Due to impact of our awareness activity, 20 more KPD patients are medically fit for transplantation and waiting for permission from the authorization committee before transplantation. Conclusion: This is a report of 10 simultaneous KPD transplantations in a single day in a single centre on WKD raising awareness of KPD. KPD is viable, legal and rapidly growing modality for facilitating LRDRTx for patients who are incompatible with their healthy, willing LRD.

Read More: http://informahealthcare.com/doi/abs/10.3109/0886022X.2013.823997

Farmers in India petition to be allowed to sell organs

I (would like to) assume that this story from India only concerns sale of live kidneys for transplantation, but it isn't completely clear to me, given the mention of suicides due to debt:

Allow us to sell our organs to repay our debts, farmers tell PM

"Unable to repay bank loans and to highlight their miserable plight, a group of farmers from Haryana have sought permission from Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to allow them to sell their vital organs.

"The farmers' group who held a rally at Kurukshetra on Monday under the aegis of Bharat Kisan Union (Tikait), held placards displaying a rate list of their organs.

"Later, 33 farmers handed over a letter to the Kurukshetra Tehsildar to be forwarded to the Prime Minister, BKU's state unit chief Gurnam Singh said on Tuesday.

"We are left with no other option, but to sell our vital organs. Over 20,000 farmers have ended their lives across the country due to debt burden. At least, selling our organs would enable us to repay the debt and live for a few years more and feed our families," he said."

HT: Sangram Kadam

*****************
We'll be traveling in India in the coming days, so at least some of my blog posts will be from inventory...