A union for college football players?

Here's the story from ESPN a little while ago:

For the first time in the history of college sports, athletes are asking to be represented by a labor union, taking formal steps on Tuesday to begin the process of being recognized as employees.

More from ESPN.com

Lester Munson writes that the Northwestern football players' attempt at unionization is likely to fail, but the impact could still be far-reaching. Story

Ramogi Huma, president of the National College Players Association, filed a petition in Chicago on behalf of football players at Northwestern University, submitting the form at the regional office of the National Labor Relations Board.

Backed by the United Steelworkers union, Huma also filed union cards signed by an undisclosed number of Northwestern players with the NLRB -- the federal statutory body that recognizes groups that seek collective bargaining rights.
*********************

And here's the CBS coverage: Road ahead for college football players union isn't an easy one

The obstacles members of the Northwestern University Wildcats football team face on the road to forming a union are formidable.

First,  there are a myriad of legal questions that need to be answered, such as is there an employer/employee relationship that exists between the players and the Evanston, Ill. school that meets the criteria set by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).

Northwestern, not surprisingly, argues that such a relationship doesn't exist. Whether the players can make such a claim against the NCAA, which seems to be the focus of their wrath and also is opposed to their efforts, also is unclear. The players, though, do have the backing of the NFL Players Association, the union that represents their counterparts in the pros.

"Most of the grievances cited by the players concern the NCAA as a monopolistic cartel that wields unbalanced and unreasonable labor market power against the players in terms of compensation and scholarship limitations among other issues," writes Vanderbilt University Economist John Vrooman, a former college football player who studies the economics of sports, in an email. "The issue here is that the NCAA is clearly a cartel but it is not necessarily the employer."

The other obstacle facing the players affiliated with the National College Football Players Association is a practical one. Since members of the team graduate, creating a cohesive bargaining unit will be difficult if have to frequently recruit new members. That's one of the reasons why efforts to unionize teaching assistants on college campuses have faltered.
**************
Here's a report from the first days of hearings:

March 3, 2014

Are College Athletes Employees? Former Labor-Board Chairman Says Yes

Here's an earlier, related post:

College football is big business (who knew?)

Timothy Taylor discusses the debate on whether selling a kidney should be legal

At his blog Conversable Economist, Timothy Taylor gives a nice summary of the arguments in the recent debate in the Journal of Medical Ethics that I posted about here.

Selling a Kidney?

He concludes:
"My sketch here cannot do justice to all of the arguments involved, but I will add two points. First, at present, the main source of kidney donations is people who die unexpectedly, with a few voluntary donors. In the meantime, thousands of Americans die every year awaiting a kidney transplant. I can easily imagine that a substantial group of healthy people might not be willing to donate a kidney for free, but would be willing to do so for substantial compensation, and encouraging transplants from healthy donors could save thousands of lives. Second, it troubles me that we often expect the donors of kidneys and blood to act out of sheer altruism, but we have no such expectation of any of the other participants in an organ transplant, like the health care providers or the hospital. "

Today is match day (for medical residents)

Here's the press release: U.S. Medical Students Learn 2014 National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) Main Residency Match Day Results in Ceremonies Today

"In the 2014 NRMP Main Residency Match results released today, more than 16,000 U.S. medical school seniors are among the 25,687 applicants who successfully matched to first-year residency positions. Students receive Match results today at their medical school Match Day ceremonies.

Washington, D.C. (PRWEB) March 20, 2014

Embargoed for release until 1:00 PM EDT, March 21, 2014

The National Resident Matching Program®(NRMP®) 2014 Main Residency Match® results released today show that 16,399 U.S. allopathic medical school seniors have matched to first-year residency positions. U.S. seniors around the country will celebrate these results at Match Day ceremonies being held today. Match Day is an annual rite of passage for U.S. medical school students and other applicants, a day when they learn at which U.S. residency programs they will train for the next three to seven years.

This year, the Match offered 29,761 first- and second-year positions, 500 more than in 2013 and an all-time high. More than half of the additional positions were in the primary care specialties of Internal Medicine and Family Medicine. According to NRMP Executive Director Mona M. Signer, the 2014 numbers continue a steady trend of position growth. In the past five years alone weve seen an increase of more than 4,000 positions, and more than half of those are in Internal Medicine and Family Medicine, Signer said.

Although the total number of registrants increased in 2014, the number of U.S. seniors declined. Eighty-nine fewer seniors registered for the Match and 113 fewer submitted rank order lists of programs. Thats a surprise, said Signer. She added, The good news is that the number of U.S. seniors choosing primary care continued to increase modestly, with 3,167 seniors matching in Internal Medicine and 1,398 in Family Medicine. An additional 1,818 seniors matched in Pediatrics, 19 fewer than last year.

Match Rates for Applicant Groups
This years Match included 40,394 registrants, 59 more than last year; however, 85 fewer applicants submitted rank order lists of programs. With more positions and fewer applicants competing for them, match rates rose for all key applicant groups. The overall match rate to first-year positions was 75 percent, the highest since 2006. The match rate for U.S. seniors was 94.4 percent, 0.7 percentage points higher than last year. Of the applicants who matched, 54 percent of U.S. seniors and almost 50 percent of all other applicants matched to their first choice for training.

Prior-year graduates of U.S. allopathic medical schools, students and graduates of osteopathic (D.O. degree) schools, and students and graduates of international medical schools represent the other key applicant groups who submitted rank order lists of programs:

    1,662 previous graduates of U.S. allopathic medical schools, an increase of 175 over last year; their match rate of 48.0 percent rose 7.2 percentage points
    2,738 osteopathic students/graduates, an increase of 61 over last year; their match rate of 77.7 percent was 2.9 percentage points higher than last year
    5,133 U.S. citizen students/graduates of international medical schools, 38 more than last year; their match rate of 53.0 percent was an increase of 0.2 percentage points
    7,334 non-U.S. citizen students/graduates of international medical schools, 234 fewer than last year; their match rate of 49.5 percent was an increase of 2.5 percentage points
Primary Care Specialty Trends and Position Fill Rates

With the total number of positions reaching an all-time high, increases were noted in the number of primary care programs and positions offered in the Match:

    Internal Medicine programs offered 6,524 positions, 247 more than in 2013; 99.1 percent of positions filled, and 48.5 percent filled with U.S. seniors
    Family Medicine programs offered 3,109 positions, 72 more than in 2013; 95.8 percent of positions filled, and 45 percent filled with U.S. seniors
    Pediatrics programs offered 2,640 positions, 24 more than last year; 99.5 percent of positions filled, and almost 70 percent filled with U.S. seniors
The most competitive specialties were Neurological Surgery, Orthopedic Surgery, Otolaryngology, Plastic Surgery, and Radiation-Oncology, specialties that offered at least 50 positions in the Match and filled at least 90 percent with U.S. seniors.

Applicants who did not match to a residency position participate in the NRMP Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP). During SOAP, the NRMP makes available the locations of unfilled positions so that unmatched applicants can apply for them using the AAMC Electronic Residency Application Service® (ERAS). This year, 1,075 of the 1,181 unfilled positions were offered during SOAP.

Couples in the Match

The NRMP allows any two applicants to participate in the Match as a couple. Participants who enter the Match as a couple agree to have their rank order lists of preferred residency programs linked to each other so they can try to match to a pair of programs that suits their needs. This year, 925 couples participated in the Match and 843 of them matched to their residency program preferences.

Match Day Ceremonies

Match Day ceremonies begin at 12:00 p.m. EDT on Friday, March 21, at U.S medical schools. Contact your local medical school for details and photographs or videos from their Match Day ceremonies.

The NRMP Match
The Match uses a computerized mathematical algorithm to align the preferences of applicants with the preferences of residency program directors in order to fill training positions available at U.S. teaching hospitals. Research on the NRMP algorithm was a basis for awarding The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in 2012."

Insider trading 2.0? New York State Attorney General talks about high frequency trading and market design

New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman has been talking market design, in a lawman sort of way. Interestingly, he's interested in the proposal by Budish, Cramton and Shim for frequent batch auctions. (See previous posts here and here.)

Press release: A.G. Schneiderman Calls For New Efforts To Eliminate Unfair Advantages Provided By Trading Venues To High-Frequency Traders

Schneiderman: "We Will Continue to Shine a Light on Unseemly Practices That Cater to High-Frequency Traders at the Expense of Other Investors, and Other Forms of Insider Trading 2.0"

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

Text of speech: Remarks on High-Frequency Trading & Insider Trading 2.0 

New York Law School Panel on “Insider Trading 2.0 – A New Initiative to Crack 

Down on Predatory Practices” 

"As your Attorney General, I am the top law enforcement officer for the State of 

New York, which gives me a unique role to play in the oversight of Wall Street. 

And I take that very, very seriously. I spent most of my career in private practice 

before becoming Attorney General, which is really a distinction among 

Attorneys General in New York State. And I represented big financial firms; I 

represented stock and commodities markets. 

"And I am a believer in our market system, and I am a believer that our market 

can only function with strong, clear regulations, and uniform and equitable 

enforcement of those regulations. 

"We have to ensure that our markets work for the entire investing public, not 

just for a small number. And the Martin Act, which I hope you’ve heard of, 

empowers my office, and our Investor Protection Bureau in particular, to  investigate pretty much any fraudulent or deceptive practice in financial 

dealings. 

"One of the fundamental principles that drives every part of our office is a very 

simple, very American notion of equal justice under law. There has to be one 

set of rules for everyone. 

...

"But, as I mentioned, our capital markets can only succeed if investors view them 

as fair and as fairly regulated. 

"So that’s why we’ve been focusing on cracking down on fundamentally unfair – 

and potentially illegal – situations that fall outside the parameters of traditional 

insider trading but give elite groups of traders access to market-moving 

information at the expense of the rest of the market. 

"This is what we call Insider Trading 2.0, and it’s one of the greatest threats to 

public confidence in the markets. 

...

"Currently, on our exchanges, securities are traded continuously, which means 

that orders are constantly accepted and matched with ties broken based on 

which orders arrived first. This system rewards high-frequency traders who 

continuously flood the market with orders – emphasizing speed over price. 

"The University of Chicago proposal – which I endorse – would, in effect, put a speed bump in place. Orders would be processed in batches after short 

intervals – potentially a second or less than a second in length – but that would ensure that the price would be the deciding factor in who obtains a trade, not who has the fastest supercomputer and early access to market-moving information. 

"This structural reform – sometimes called “frequent batch auctions” -- would help catch and cap the supercomputer arms race now underway. This is 

tremendously important, because even advocates of high-frequency trading 

have always recognized that the potential for destabilization of the markets 

from volatility is a problem. 

"If you had frequent batch auctions, there’s no point in trying to get faster than 

whatever the interval is. It would discourage the risk taking that can cause flash 

crashes because, in the quest for greater and greater speed, there is, in and of 

itself, a threat to market stability. It rewards those who are taking chances. It 

rewards those who try risky new ways to gain a few milliseconds of speed. And that’s something we could put an end to if this proposal were successfully 

carried out. "

 ***************

Bloomberg article:High-Speed Trading Faces New York Probe Into Fairness

"Attorney General Eric Schneiderman said today that he’s examining the sale of products and services that offer faster access to data and richer information on trades than what’s typically available to the public. Wall Street banks and rapid-fire trading firms pay thousands of dollars a month for these services from firms including Nasdaq OMX Group Inc. and IntercontinentalExchange Group Inc.’s New York Stock Exchange."

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

CNBC interview (video): http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000258750

..."frequent batch auctions, something that came out of the University of Chicago, not some enemy of free markets..."

Montreal conference on matching ( l’appariement), March 21-22

Here's the preliminary program...

Colloque CIREQ Montréal sur l’appariement

Programme préliminaire
 

---

VENDREDI, le 21 mars 2014
9:00 – 10:30	SESSION I – Président : Umut DUR (North Carolina State University) Peter Coles (ebay Research Labs), Yannai Gonczarowski (Hebrew University),Ran SHORRER (Harvard University) Strategic Behavior in Unbalanced Matching Markets Timo MENNLE (University of Zurich), Sven Seuken (University of Zurich) An Axiomatic Approach to Characterizing and Relaxing Strategyproofness of One-sided Matching Mechanisms Umut DUR (North Carolina State University), Onur Kesten (Carnegie Mellon University) Sequential versus Simultaneous Assignment Problems and Two Applications
10:30 – 11:00	Pause
11:00 – 12:30	SESSION II - Président : Utku UNVER (Boston College) Lars Ehlers (Université de Montréal, CIREQ), Alexander WESTKAMP (Maastricht University) Strategy-Proof Tie-Breaking David Cantala (El Colegio de México), Szilvia PAPAI (Concordia University, CIREQ) Reasonably and Securely Stable Matching Marek Pycia (UCLA), Utku UNVER (Boston College) Incentive Compatible Allocation and Exchange of Indivisible Resources
12:30 – 14:00	Lunch
14:00 – 16:00	SESSION III - Présidente : Bettina KLAUS (University of Lausanne) Shuhei Morimoto (Kobe University), Shigehiro SERIZAWA (Osaka University) Strategy-proofness and Efficiency with Non-quasi-linear Preferences : A Characterization of Minimum Price Walrasian Rule Jens GUDMUNDSSON, Helga Habis (Lund University) Assignment Games with Externalities Tomoya KAZUMURA, Shigehiro Serizawa (Osaka University) An Impossibility of Allocating Objects among Agents with Non-Quasi-Linear Preferences Bettina KLAUS (University of Lausanne), Jonathan Newton (University of Sydney) Stochastic Stability in Assignment Problems
16:00 – 16:30	Pause
16:30 – 17:45	KEYNOTE LECTURE : Tayfun SÖNMEZ (Boston College) Kidney Exchange : Past, Present, and Potential Future
19:00	Dîner de conférence (sur invitation seulement)Restaurant Laloux, 250, Pine Avenue East

SAMEDI, le 22 mars 2014
9:00 – 10:30	SESSION IV – Président : Jan Christoph SCHLEGEL (Université de Lausanne) Madhav RAGHAVAN (Indian Statistical Institute, New Delhi) Fair Assignment with Capacity Constraints Takashi AKAHOSHI (Waseda University) Singleton Core in Many-to-One Matching Problems Jan Christoph SCHLEGEL (Université de Lausanne) Contracts versus Salaries in Matching : A General Result
10:30 – 11:00	Pause
11:00 – 12:30	SESSION V – Président : Panos TOULIS (Harvard University) M. Bumin Yenmez (Carnegie Mellon University), Federico ECHENIQUE (California Institute of Technology) How to Control Controlled School Choice Péter Biró (Hungarian Academy of Sciences), Elena IÑARRA (University of the Basque Country), Elena Molis (University of Granada) Solutions Concepts for Unsolvable Roommate Problems David C. Parkes (SEAS, Harvard University), Panos TOULIS (Harvard University) A Random Graph Model of Multi-Hospital Kidney Exchanges
12:30 – 14:00	Lunch
14:00 – 16:00	SESSION VI – Président : Vikram MANJUNATH (Université de Montréal, CIREQ) * Chaque présentation de cette session sera de 20 minutes.   Ville KORPELA (Turku School of Economics) Nash Implementation of Stable Solutions in Many-to-One Matching Problems : The Case with No Complementarities Samson ALVA (University of Texas at San Antonio) Pairwise Stability and Complementarity in Many-to-One Matching Mustafa Oğuz Afacan (Sabanci University), Bertan TURHAN (Boston College) Assignment Maximization Lars EHLERS (Université de Montréal, CIREQ) TBA Alexander TEYTELBOYM (MIT) Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Networks with Bilateral Contracts Vikram MANJUNATH (Université de Montréal, CIREQ), Bertan Turhan (Boston College) When Two Should Be One but Aren’t : Milwaukee Public Schools and the Voucher System
16:00 – 16:30	Pause
16:30 – 18:00	SESSION VII – Président : Nizar ALLOUCH (Queen Mary University of London) Claudia HERRESTHAL (Oxford University) Mobility, Learning and School Choice Albin Erlanson (Lund University), Karol SZWAGRZAK (University of Southern Denmark) Strategy-proof Package Assignment Nizar ALLOUCH (Queen Mary University of London) The Cost of Segregation in Social Networks
18:00	Réception de clôtureColloque CIREQ Montréal sur l’appariement

I speak to Stanford alums in LA this evening: Market Design as Economic Engineering

Event Details

Register

Date/Time:

Wed, March 19, 2014
06:30PM - 09:00PM

Venue:

Skirball Cultural Center

Location:

2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles CA 90049
Map address

Registration Period:

01/29/2014-03/13/2014

Contact:

Kelly Lanter

klanter@stanford.edu

650-724-3549

Join us for an evening with Nobel Prize winner and Stanford Professor Alvin Roth at Skirball on Wednesday, March 19.

Professor Roth will be speaking on Market Design as Economic Engineering: Using Economics to Assign Doctors, Get Kids Into High School and Save Lives

Alvin Roth is a pioneer in game theory and experimental economics and in their application to the design of new economic institutions. His work on the theory of matching markets includes redesigning mechanisms for selecting medical residents; multistep kidney exchanges; and school choice in New York City, Boston, Denver and New Orleans. Professor Roth shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on market design. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and a member of the National Academy of Science. He has also been a Guggenheim and Sloan fellow.

Schedule of Events
6:30 -7:30 p.m.: Reception with cash bar
7:30 -9:30 p.m.: Presentation and Q&A

Registration will open on Tuesday, February 4. This event includes light hors d'oeuvres, non-alcoholic beverages and a cash bar.

In the event this event does't sell-out prior to registration closing on March 13, registrations will be available at the door for the increased cost of $30 general admission and $20 young alumni (undergrads '04-'13, grads '09-'13).

Event Activities

Professor Roth at Skirball 
Wednesday, March 19, 2014 @ 6:30 PM

Lacetera, Macis and Stith on removing financial barriers to bone marrow donation

Removing financial barriers to organ and bone marrow donation: The effect of leave and tax legislation in the US

Lacetera, Nicola ; Macis, Mario; Stith, Sarah S.

JOURNAL OF HEALTH ECONOMICS

Volume: 33, Jan 2014, 43-56

Many U.S. states have passed legislation providing leave to organ and bone marrow donors and/or tax benefits for live and deceased organ and bone marrow donations and to employers of donors. We exploit cross-state variation in the timing of such legislation to analyze its impact on organ donations by living and deceased persons, on measures of the quality of the transplants, and on the number of bone marrow donations. We find that these provisions do not have a significant impact on the quantity of organs donated. The leave laws, however, do have a positive impact on bone marrow donations, and the effect increases with the size of the population of beneficiaries and with the generosity of the legislative provisions. Our results suggest that this legislation works for moderately invasive procedures such as bone marrow donation, but these incentives may be too low for organ donation, which is riskier and more burdensome. 

I speak about market design in Santa Barbara tomorrow

If you're in town, and particularly if you're a Stanford alum, here's a chance to relive sitting in a lecture hall:)

Event Details

Register

Sorry, cannot attend

Date/Time:

Tue, March 18, 2014
05:00PM - 07:30PM

Venue:

Cabrillo Pavilion

Location:

1118 E. Cabrillo Boulevard, Santa Barbara, CA 93103 
Map address

Registration Period:

01/29/2014-03/18/2014

Contact:

Kim Bluitt, '92

1kimbluitt@gmail.com

Nobel Laureate and Stanford professor Alvin Roth applied market design to improve the residency matching process for doctors in the United States, the admissions process for New York City, Boston, Denver, and New Orleans public high schools, and the matching process for multistep kidney exchanges. Join fellow Stanford alumni and friends as Professor Roth shares how he brought together theory, evidence and design in an innovative fashion to turn his research into practical value.

Our schedule:
Reception from 5:00 p.m.-5:45 p.m.
Presentation and Q&A beginning at 5:45 p.m.

House debates support for NSF, social science

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has the (gated) story: House GOP Allows Some Compromise in Bid to Focus NSF on Economic Value

"... in a sign of future compromise before the bill reaches the Democratic-controlled Senate, the Republican majority on the House Science Subcommittee on Research and Technology accepted nine separate Democratic amendments, including a partial retreat from plans to severely cut the NSF’s budget for social-science research.
...
"[Rep. Dan Lipinski of Illinois, the top Democrat on the subcommittee] listed economically valuable products of social-science research, including studies that help the police anticipate crime patterns and analyses that more efficiently match kidney donors and recipients. Reaching inside the NSF to set directorate-by-directorate budget limits—a practice that Congress already employs with the National Institutes of Health—"may open the door for partisan meddling from either side of the aisle," he said."

The IGM panel of economists speaks (in many voices) on paying for kidneys

The Initiative on Global Markets is an opinion poll of leading academic economists on a large variety of public policy questions, which they can answer on a range from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree," along with "uncertain" or "no opinion". They are also asked to assess their confidence in their answer A recent question was
Supplying Kidneys: A market that allows payment for human kidneys should be established on a trial basis to help extend the lives of patients with kidney disease.

Here's a histogram of replies

Some answers were accompanied by comments, and I include all of those below...

David Autor	MIT	No Opinion		Not enough info to answer. Not in favor of a kidney market that sells to highest bidder. Other ideas maybe. Question is not actionable.	Bio/Vote History
Abhijit Banerjee	MIT	Disagree	8	That would mean valuing people's lives by their incomes. We already do that but moving further in that direction seems wrong.	Bio/Vote H

Markus Brunnermeier

Princeton

Agree

6

It is important that the market is "well regulated" in order to avoid abuse and exploitation of the vulnerables.

Judith Chevalier

Yale

Strongly Agree

9

This certainly may have unintended consequences but it is hard to fault attempting to create more supply.

Darrell Duffie	Stanford	Agree	3	Under strong governance that mitigates exploitation, this market may save lives on mutually consenting terms.	Bio/Vote History
Aaron Edlin	Berkeley	Uncertain	7	Dangerous ground, but a well-regulated experiment could be beneficial. Payments to fill out donor cards might increase supply, for example	Bio/Vote History
Barry Eichengreen	Berkeley	Uncertain	1	A market with or without subsidies for low income patients?

Robert Hall	Stanford	Uncertain	9	Hard to know because we don't have much of an understanding of why people make organ gifts.	Bio/Vote History
Oliver Hart	Harvard	Agree	8	I'd like to see it but I'm not sure the public is ready. Also would insurance cover this? Would people be able to top up (presumably)?

Caroline Hoxby

Stanford

Uncertain

8

Would improve allocative efficiency but means- and health-conditioned vouchers would presumably have to be used to address ethical concerns.

Kenneth Judd

Stanford

Strongly Agree

10

There is no reason to block this voluntary exchange. There may be unique challenges in applying laws against fraud, but nothing too hard.

William Nordhaus

Yale

Agree

5

Perhaps experiments in different regimes better idea.

Larry Samuelson

Yale

Disagree

6

We need to rationalize our organ allocation mechanism, but a market is not the only way, and is not obviously the best way.

Richard Schmalensee

MIT

Uncertain

7

How to deal with donors who don't understand risks, increased incentives to steal & import, perceived inequities...? Not simple.

Carl Shapiro	Berkeley	Agree	8	Experiments seem valuable here, using health outcomes as our metric. Matching donors and recipients based in part on payment may be helpful.	Bio/Vote History
Robert Shimer	Chicago	Strongly Agree	7	The biggest impact would be to increase kidney supply, so few obvious losers from this policy	Bio/Vote History
Nancy Stokey	Chicago	Uncertain	1	It would surely save lives of those with kidney disease. It would probably have unintended consequences as well.	Bio/Vote History
Richard Thaler	Chicago	Uncertain	5	How should we incorporate the fact that nearly all non-economists hate this idea? Do we declare them wrong and proceed?	Bio/Vote History
Christopher Udry	Yale	Strongly Agree	1	As an economist, I strongly agree that there would be tremendous gains. But I'm uncertain of the appropriate bounds on market transactions. -see background information here -see background information here