Who Gets What and Why, in England

Last Monday, I devoted a day to helping my English publisher sell my book. It has a a slightly different subtitle in England: Who Gets What - And Why: The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design

Here is a broadcast of BBC's Newsnight  13/07/2015  in which I briefly talk about the book starting at minute 39:.

And here is a slightly longer discussion, as part of The Monocle Weekly, from minute 27 to 40:50.

Internships may be unpaid, court rules, if they benefit intern more than employer, and serve an educational purpose

A class action lawsuit, seeking to make many unpaid internships legally repugnant, has been sent back to a lower court.  The NY Times has the story:

Employers Have Greater Leeway on Unpaid Internships, Court Rules (this is one of those cases in which the URL is more informative than the headline:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/03/business/unpaid-internships-allowed-if-they-serve-educational-purpose-court-rules.html? )

"Employers  have considerable leeway to use unpaid interns legally when the work serves an educational purpose, a federal appeals court ruled on Thursday, setting aside a lower court decision that the movie studio Fox Searchlight Pictures had improperly classified former workers as unpaid interns rather than employees.

The decision, which sends the case back to the lower court, could have broad ramifications for the way employers rely on unpaid labor. It erects large barriers to further class-action lawsuits by unpaid interns against companies where they had worked."
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Here's an op-ed regretting the decision: Interns, Victimized Yet Again, by Ross Perlin the author of “Intern Nation: How to Earn Nothing and Learn Little in the Brave New Economy.”

State by state variations in organ donation policy in the U.S. have little effect: JAMA Internal Medicine

The Effect of State Policies on Organ Donation and Transplantation in the United States  
Paula Chatterjee; Atheendar S. Venkataramani ; Anitha Vijayan ; Jason R. Wellen; Erika G. Martin

JAMA Intern Med. Published online June 01, 2015. doi:10.1001/jamainternmed.2015.2194


Abstract:
"Importance  Shortages in transplantable solid organs remain a critical public health challenge in the United States. During the past 2 decades, all states have implemented policies to increase organ supply, although their effectiveness is unknown.

Objective  To determine the effects on organ donation and transplantation rates of state policies to provide incentives for volunteer donation.

Design, Setting, and Participants  Using a quasi-experimental design and difference-in-differences regression analyses, we estimated the effect of policies in all 50 states and the District of Columbia on organ donors per capita and the number of transplantations from January 1, 1988, to December 31, 2010. Analyses were also stratified by type of donor (living vs deceased). Data were derived from the United Network for Organ Sharing. All data collection occurred between July 7 and September 27, 2013.

Exposures  Policies of interest were the presence of first-person consent laws, donor registries, dedicated revenue streams for donor recruitment activities, population education programs, paid leave for donation, and tax incentives. Information on states’ passage of various policies was obtained from primary legislative and legal sources.

Main Outcomes and Measures  The number of organ donors and transplantations per state, per year, during the study period.

Results  From 1988 to 2010, the number of states passing at least 1 donation-related policy increased from 7 (14%) to 50 (100%). First-person consent laws, donor registries, public education, paid leave, and tax incentives had no robust, significant association with either donation rates or number of transplants. The establishment of revenue policies, in which individuals contribute to a protected state fund for donation promotion activities, was associated with a 5.3% increase in the absolute number of transplants (95% CI, 0.57%-10.1%; P = .03). These associations were driven by a 4.9% increase in organ donations (95% CI, 0.97%-8.7%; P = .01) and an 8.0% increase in transplants (95% CI, 3.1%-12.9%; P = .001) from deceased donors as opposed to changes among living donors or transplants from living donors.


Conclusions and Relevance  Nearly all state-level policies to encourage organ donation have had no observable effect on the rate of organ donation and transplantation in the United States. The one exception was the establishment of revenue policies to promote organ donation, which may have led to small increases in organ donations and transplantations from deceased donors. New policy designs are needed to increase donation rates and curtail the widening gap between organ supply and demand."

In France, children born to surrogates become legal, even while surrogacy does not

The NY Times has the story: France: Surrogate Children Win Legal Recognition

"France’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, on Friday granted legal recognition to surrogate children, in a major turnaround that will make their daily lives easier and could lead to greater acceptance of new forms of families. The court ruled that while surrogacy would remain banned in France, children born abroad through this practice would now be legally tied to their parents and would be granted birth certificates and immediate means to prove their French citizenship. Surrogacy procedures are used by heterosexual couples unable to conceive, gay couples, and single parents. Until now, surrogate children were deprived of any legal connection to their parents, or any civil status in France. These children could not get automatic ID cards or passports, or register for state health care or other services."

The market share of living languages

Some very interesting data graphics here (compare Chinese, in all its dialects, and English...first as native languages, and then as languages being learned around the world).
Proportional Pie Chart of the World’s Most Spoken Languages

Taiwan moves to criminalize transplant tourism to China

Taiwan Shuts Down Organ Transplant Tourism, By Jenny Li, Epoch Times |

"Taiwan’s Parliament has made amendments to its organ transplantation law that would have the effect of criminalizing the transplantation of organs from executed prisoners in China, part of a global trend to halt thetrafficking of human organs in China.

In a June 12 session in Taiwan’s Legislative Yuan, a number of important amendments to the Human Organ Transplant Ordinance were read and passed as law.

Under the updated legislation, patients who travel abroad to receive an organ acquired by illegal means can be sentenced up to five years in jail and face fines from $NT300,000 (about $9,700) up to $NT15,000,000 (about $484,000).

The new amendments place some of the responsibility of regulation on doctors and hospitals. Doctors must file a report for any patient who receives a transplant overseas and carries out follow-up treatment in the country. Both doctors and hospitals are subjected to fines of up to $NT150,000 (about $4,840) if they fail to submit reports. Medical institutions and staff will incur criminal charges for filing false reports."

Critique of the "Swedish model" for sex work laws

The New Republic published an interesting critique: The Problem With the "Swedish Model" for Sex Work Laws

"Sweden’s landmark 1999 sex work legislation—presented as decriminalizing the seller of sex while criminalizing the client—is aggressively marketed as a “progressive solution” to prostitution internationally. Versions of the “Swedish model” have been implemented in Norway, Iceland, and Canada, and last week a version was adopted in Northern Ireland. The intention, we’re told, is to “reduce demand” for paid sex: shrinking, then ultimately abolishing, the sex trade.

"It’s too bad that the reality of the law is not so simple, nor so uncomplicatedly progressive.
...
"For street-based sex workers, a potential client driving past will be nervous and keen to agree to terms speedily if his role is criminalized, and to keep his business the sex worker has far less time to make crucial assessments about whether he seems safe. Research into anti-client laws around Vancouver street-based sex work found that, “without the opportunity to screen clients or safely negotiate the terms of sexual services … sex workers face increased risks of violence, abuse, and HIV.” The Norwegian government writes about its own law: “Women in the street market report [having] a weaker bargaining position and more safety concerns now than before the law was introduced.”

"While sex workers are not prosecuted simply for selling sex under the Swedish model, various laws continue to be used against them in punitive ways. “Operation Homeless,” the memorably-named Norwegian police initiative, evicted people suspected of selling sex—a law aimed at “pimps,” but used against sex workers’ landlords.

"When the Norwegian Police were pursuing “Operation Homeless,” they used surveillance to find targets for eviction—but they also evicted sex workers who came to their attention in other ways. A group of sex working Nigerian women were evicted—and left homeless—after reporting that they had been the victims of rape, a situation that illuminates the comment by the Norwegian government that “the threshold for reporting a violent customer to the police also seems to be higher after the law. People in prostitution are afraid that such actions will come back to [haunt] them at later stages.” Sex workers—including people with EU residency—are aggressively deported, and their deportation orders include commentary like: “She has not maintained herself in an honest manner.” 

The Economist as Engineer at Exeter, July 14 and 15

Tomorrow is the conference for which I traveled to England, here's the announcement:

Economic Design: The Economist as an Engineer 14-15 July 2015

Al Roth, winner of the Nobel Prize 2012 in Economics, will receive an honourable doctorate from the University of Exeter. The Department of Economics with funding from the South West Doctoral Training Centre (SWDTC) and the University of Exeter Business School is proud to host a workshop in honour of Al Roth and his contribution to market design.

How to bring different parties together in the best possible way is a key economic problem. Examples of situations where this problem arises include matching children with different schools, interns with internships, and kidneys or other organs with patients who require transplants. The two-day workshop will focus on applying economic theory to solutions for "real-world" problems.

Speakers

Name	Institution	Paper
Alvin Roth	Stanford University	"Who Gets What and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design" and "Kidney exchange"
Vincent Crawford	University of Oxford	Efficient Mechanisms for Level-k Bilateral Trading
Bradley Ruffle	Wilfrid Laurier University	Waiting to Cooperate? Cooperation in one-stage and two-stage games
Joana Pais	University of Lisbon	Affirmative action through minority reserves: An experimental study
Surajeet Chakravarty	University of Exeter	Communicating with an ignorant agent
Burak Can	Maastricht University	Comparing Orders, Rankings, Queues, Tournaments and Lists
Dorothea Kuebler	WZB Berlin	College Admissions with Entrance Exams: Centralized versus Decentralized
Luke Lindsay	University of Exeter	How to organise a conference: A market design approach
Dirk Engelmann	Humboldt University	Does a Buyer Benefit from Bad Reputation? Theory and Experiments on Auctions with Default
Elizabeth Baldwin	LSE	Understanding Preferences: "Demand Types", and the Existence of Equilibrium with Indivisibilities

As part of the workshop Al Roth will present a public talk, details below: 

Who Gets What and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market DesignTuesday 14^th July at 2pm – 3.30pm
Streatham Court A

Please register your attendance online – REGISTER HERE

Workshop programme

Download the programme here: Economic Design: The Economist as an Engineer - Workshop Programme

I speak at the Bristol Festival of Ideas: Monday July 13

Here's the announcement:

Alvin Roth

Who Gets What - And Why: The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design

Economics/

Mon 13 July 2015
18:15-19:15 

Wills Memorial Building
Fully Booked

 In many parts of life – jobs, housing, medical care, education, even a date on the internet – price is not the only determinant of who gets what. So how do the other processes that influence who gets which goods, jobs, university places and partners really work? In Who Gets What, Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth uncovers the global rules of how markets allocate, how matchmaking shapes lives, where markets exist that we may not even realise, and how everything about our biggest experiences – from getting accepted at university or living where we want – can be better understood and negotiated when one understands the design of those matching markets. The distribution of rewards is often unfair, but it’s seldom as random as it seems. Roth reveals just how much of our life takes place in marketplaces, and leads us to a new understanding of who gets what and why. He sheds new light on the politics of free markets and how many things that we choose in life also must choose us.

This event is part of the build-up to the annual Festival of Economics – an initiative of Festival of Ideas. The Festival of Economics takes place 12-14 November and will be launched in early September.

How to Book/

Book ticketTerms and Conditions

The event is fully booked and we have started a waiting list (follow booking link to add yourself). There are always empty seats due to no-shows, so you are welcome to come and queue for those on the night. We will admit as many as we can 5 minutes before the start.

Cheating in China on (American) college admissions

Inside Higher Ed has the story: In China, No Choice But to Cheat?

July 9, 2015 By

Elizabeth Redden

"EUGENE, Ore. -- Is the admission process broken for Chinese applicants to American colleges?

Variations of that question came up again and again during sessions on Wednesday at the Overseas Association for College Admission Counseling [OACAC] conference. Persistent concerns about standardized test fraud, doctored transcripts and fake admission letters -- and the role of agents in helping to "pollute" the application process (as one session description put it) -- are causing some to worry that Chinese students might think cheating is their only choice.

"We need to make it [the application process] safe for honest applicants," said Terry Crawford, the chief executive officer and co-founder of InitialView, a video interviewing company based in Beijing.

"There's a perception in China that the system is rigged, that if you pay enough money you're going to get the results that you want," Crawford said. He cited a recent China Newsweek article laying out the process and prices for cheating on the Test of English as a Foreign Language (TOEFL) as just one example of the type of story that feeds into this perception (the reporter received test answers during the exam via a small, wireless-enabled watch)."

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Interestingly, Initial View, the company that Terry Crawford and Gloria Chyou founded in China, was initially founded to address the problem of fraud in English language tests, by offering applicants the opportunity to make a video of an unscripted interview that they conduct, to be sent to colleges, who can then confirm the fluency of the speaker, and later verify that the student who enrolls is the one who took the interview.

NBER workshop on Market Design: call for papers (October 23-24, in Cambridge)

Mike Ostrovsky and Parag Pathak have announced the following call for papers:

From:  Michael Ostrovsky 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
Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 23-24, 2015.

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/2014/MDs14/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 August 1, 2015 to this link:
http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf15

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.

Maclean's review of Who Gets What and Why

In Canada, Maclean's Magazine reviews my new book:

Marketplaces are everywhere—even in online dating
Book review: A look at what makes good market design from game-theory pioneer Alvin E. Roth  by James Brenton, July 9, 2015

The last sentence of the review:
"This book is his way of sharing what he learned along the way, making it an intriguing field guide from a true pioneer."

What do employers learn from interviews? Can they be replaced?

The NY Times had a recent column covering the latest version of this old debate about the informativeness of interviews:

ROBO RECRUITING--Can an Algorithm Hire Better Than a Human?

"A new wave of start-ups — including Gild, Entelo, Textio,Doxa and GapJumpers — is trying various ways to automate hiring. They say that software can do the job more effectively and efficiently than people can. Many people are beginning to buy into the idea. Established headhunting firms like Korn Ferry are incorporating algorithms into their work, too.

"If they succeed, they say, hiring could become faster and less expensive, and their data could lead recruiters to more highly skilled people who are better matches for their companies. Another potential result: a more diverse workplace. The software relies on data to surface candidates from a wide variety of places and match their skills to the job requirements, free of human biases."

Greece and Iran: two very different deadlines

Deadlines are often an important element of economic design, from the design of auctions like eBay's, whose auctions have a well specified deadline after which no more bids are accepted, to negotiations in which e.g. the date at which a labor contract expires may be the deadline for calling a strike.. But the deadlines in the news for a financial bailout of Greece, and Greek banks, is very different from the (repeated) deadlines for nuclear negotiations with Iran.  In the case of Greece, banks will really fail soon without some help--the deadline is real. In the case of Iran, the deadlines are supposed to concentrate the minds of negotiators, but they have already been extended multiple times...

Iran Nuclear Talks Are Extended Once Again

Greece Given Until Sunday to Settle Debt Crisis or Face Disaster

Podcast: Russ Roberts interviews me on EconTalk, about Who Gets What and Why

 Matching Markets: EconTalk Episode with Alvin Roth--Hosted by Russ Roberts, a one-hour podcast/interview about my new book (which you can buy here:)

Tim Harford reviews Who Gets What and Why in the FT

Tim Harford's review in the Financial Times is here: In search of the perfect match

His closing paragraph:
"Economists such as Alvin Roth are like engineers or doctors. They cannot settle for understanding a system in theory; they must solve practical problems too. It’s a hopeful direction for economics — and an essential one, if economists aren’t to be left on the shelf themselves."

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You can also read the piece on Harford's blog, The Undercover Economist

Straw in the wind: Google's Waze is piloting a ridesharing marketplace in Israel

Ynet has the story:
Google's Waze to start carpooling pilot program in Israel
Mapping company launching RideWith, which will allow commuters to pay fellow drivers a small fee to share rides with the help of Waze's navigation system

"Google-owned online mapping company Waze is launching a carpooling pilot program in Israel where commuters pay fellow drivers a small fee for a ride to and from work.

"The new application, called RideWith, will use Waze's navigation system to learn the routes drivers most frequently take to work and match them up with people looking for a ride in the same direction.
...
""We're conducting a small, private beta test in the greater Tel Aviv area for a carpool concept, but we have nothing further to announce at this time," Waze told Reuters of its foray into the increasingly competitive field of ride-sharing.

Drivers will be limited to just two journeys a day and will not be able to earn a salary from RideWith, a source close to the company said, differentiating it from businesses such as Uber, where drivers can turn a profit.

Should RideWith be rolled out globally, this limitation could help it avoid the backlash Uber is facing in a number of countries that want to protect professional taxi drivers."
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Stay tuned...

New York City’s high school admissions process: an excerpt from Who Gets What and Why, in Chalkbeat

Chalkbeat has a brief excerpt from my new book, Who Gets What and Why:

Here's the link to what they have to say (or rather what they have me saying, in an excerpt from Chapter 9 "Back to School"):
Why New York City’s high school admissions process only works most of the time

Below are two paragraphs from the excerpt, concerning Neil Dorosin, who worked for the NYC Department of Education at the time, and is now the Johnny Appleseed of school choice as the director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC):

One reason that principals gained confidence was that DOE staffers did a good job communicating to them how the new system would work. Crucial in that effort was Neil Dorosin, the DOE’s director of high school operations. The task of informing everyone about the new algorithm fell to Neil and his colleagues in the Office of Enrollment Services. Among those he had to educate was his ultimate boss, Chancellor Joel Klein.

“One day I got called down to talk to him,” Neil recalls. “He was upset because he had a friend whose child didn’t get into their first-choice school. The friend had a cousin whose child had gotten into the school, and it was their last choice. I had to explain why the system had to function that way” (i.e., to make it safe to list true preferences).

The lectures of the The 26th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory "Dynamic Games" - 2015, are available on video

Videos of the lectures are available here:

The 26th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory "Dynamic Games" - 2015

The slides are available here

Journal of Human Trafficking, Issue 1, 2015, on kidneys

Issue 1 of the Journal of Human Trafficking contains this article by Alexander Capron and Frank Delmonico. I've highlighted in the abstract two points worth noting--the first involves some untested, but testable empirical claims about what would happen if countries in the first world allowed compensation for donors. (It would be nice to have some empirical evidence...)  The second point is that it is now agreed by everyone that financial disincentives for donating should be removed. (Let's get organized on that, shall we?)

Preventing Trafficking in Organs for Transplantation: An Important Facet of the Fight Against Human Trafficking

DOI:10.1080/23322705.2015.1011491

Alexander M. Caprona & Francis L. Delmonico

pages 56-64

Published online: 28 Apr 2015

Abstract

Most countries now have national legislation that outlaws both human trafficking and organ trafficking. However, international conventions and domestic laws alone have not been enough to stop the trade in organs. As of 2007, a conservative estimate was that 5% of the approximately 100,000 organs transplanted annually were derived from exploiting the poorest and most vulnerable people in society; anti-trafficking efforts have since reduced, though not eliminated, this practice. The Declaration of Istanbul (DoI) was created in 2008 to engage medical professional societies to collaborate with governments and others in combating organ sales, transplant tourism, and trafficking in human organs. In 2010, the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group (DICG) was formed to actively promote and to monitor the implementation of the DoI principles. The removal of prohibitions on organ purchases, which is now being promoted in some wealthy nations, is unlikely to shorten transplant waitlists (because organ sales crowd out voluntary, unpaid donation) and would be based on the false view that such sales do not exploit the sellers. To combat such exploitation, the DICG advocates for ratification and enforcement of the new “Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs,” as a complement the Palermo Protocol to the United Nations organized crime convention that prohibits human trafficking for organ removal. To increase ethical organ donation by living related donors, the DICG encourages countries to adopt means to cover donors’ financial costs, which now discourage donation. It also works with the World Health Organization to encourage ministries of health to develop deceased donation to its maximum potential toward the goal of achieving national self-sufficiency in organ transplantation so that patients do not need to travel to foreign destinations to undergo organ transplantation using kidneys and partial livers purchased from poor and vulnerable people. Success in combating human trafficking for organ removal and organ trafficking will be greatly enhanced through organizations like the DICG forging strong relationships with human rights organizations.