Market Design conference at the NBER, Oct 23-24

I'll be elsewhere, but this looks like fun:

Market Design Working Group Meeting

Michael Ostrovsky and Parag Pathak, Organizers

October 23-24, 2015

NBER 2nd Floor Conference Room 1050 Massachusetts Avenue  Cambridge, MA

PROGRAM

PROGRAM

Participant List

Friday, October 23
8:00 AM	Shuttle leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 AM	Shuttle leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 AM	Continental Breakfast
9:00 AM	Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College Utku Unver, Boston College Ozgur Yilmaz, Koç University How (not) to Integrate Blood Subtyping Technology to Kidney Exchange Mehmet Ekmekci, Boston College M. Bumin Yenmez, Carnegie Mellon University Integrating Schools for Centralized Admissions
10:30 AM	Break
11:00 AM	Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Duke University Joshua Angrist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Yusuke Narita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Parag Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER Research Design meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation
	Shuchi Chawla, University of Wisconsin Jason Hartline, Northwestern University Denis Nekipelov, University of Virginia Mechanism Design for Data Science
12:30 PM	Lunch
2:00 PM	John Hatfield, University of Texas at Austin Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard University Alexandru Nichifor, University of St Andrews Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University and NBER Alexander Westkamp, University of Bonn Full Substitutability
	Thanh Nguyen, Purdue University Rakesh Vohra, University of Pennsylvania Near Feasible Stable Matchings with Complementarities
3:30 PM	Break
4:00 PM	Ali Hortaçsu, University of Chicago and NBER Jakub Kastl, Princeton University and NBER Allen Zhang, Department of the Treasury Bid Shading and Bidder Surplus in the U.S. Treasury Auction System Jonathan Levin, Stanford University and NBER Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University Are Dynamic Vickrey Auctions Practical? Properties of the Combinatorial Clock Auction
5:30 PM	Adjourn
5:30 PM	Shuttle leaves NBER for Royal Sonesta Hotel
6:30 PM	Dinner – Dante Restaurant at the Royal Sonesta Hotel
Saturday, October 24
8:00 AM	Shuttle leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 AM	Shuttle leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 AM	Continental Breakfast
9:00 AM	Nick Arnosti, Stanford University Marissa Beck, Stanford University Paul Milgrom, Stanford University Adverse Selection and Auction Design for Internet Display Advertising
	Daniela Saban, Stanford University Gabriel Weintraub, Columbia University Procurement Mechanisms for Differentiated Products
10:30 AM	Break
11:00 AM	Steven Lalley, University of Chicago Glen Weyl, Microsoft Corporation Quadratic Voting Canice Prendergast, University of Chicago The Allocation of Food to Food Banks
12:30 PM	Adjourn

Is it unethical to pay more than $10,000 for human egg donation? (An antitrust suit...)

The NY Times has the story: Egg Donors Challenge Pay Rates, Saying They Shortchange Women

"In a federal lawsuit, a group of women are challenging industry guidelines that say it is “inappropriate” to pay a woman more than $10,000 for her eggs. The women say the $10,000 limit amounts to illegal price-fixing, and point out that there is no price restriction on the sale of human sperm. A federal judge has certified the claim as a class action, which will most likely go to trial next year.
...
"While many other countries limit egg donation and the compensation that is allowed, egg donation is essentially unregulated in the United States. But in 2000, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine established the guidelines for how much women should be paid. They say that compensation over $5,000 requires “justification,” and that more than $10,000 is “beyond what is appropriate.” The amounts have never been adjusted.

The society argues that capping the price ensures that low-income young women are not drawn to donate by a huge payout without considering how it may affect their lives.

“If the compensation became too high, there is a concern that it might be incentive for donors to lie about their medical history,” said Tripp Monts, a lawyer representing the society. “And it could induce young women to donate without thinking too far down the road.”

“Coping with difficult decisions: An Experimental Economics perspective” in Dusseldorf

I'm arriving in Dusseldorf today, for a workshop marking the end of a years-long project originally organized by Reinhard Selten:

Closing workshop of the Academy Research Center

“Rationality in the Light of Experimental Economics”

Coping with difficult decisions: An Experimental Economics perspective

Part I: Mini-School on complex experiments

10:00 – 11:00    Introductory lecture on complex experiments

Sabine Pittnauer (Univ. Bonn): Procedural rationality in complex decision problems

11:00 – 12:00   Presentations by young researchers (Part I)

Sven Nolte (Finance Center Muenster): An Experimental Analysis of Annuity Aversion

David Schindler (Univ. Munich LMU): Risk, Time Pressure, & Selection Effects

Ori Plonsky (Technion): Reliance on small samples, the wavy recency effect and similarity-based learning

Annika Herr (Univ. Düsseldorf): Organ donation in the lab: Preferences and votes on the priority rule

12:00 – 12:30 Coffee Break

12:30 – 13:30     Presentations by young researchers (Part II)

Josue Ortega (Univ. Glasgow): Rational Inattention in Online Dating

Katharina Momsen (Univ. Mannheim): Buying Goods of Unknown Value - An Experiment

Efrat Aharonov (Technion): On the imitation of mistakes

Volker Benndorf (Univ. Düsseldorf): Voluntary Disclosure of Information and Unraveling

13:30 – 15:00     Lunch research seminars

Group Prof. Ido Erev

Mira Fischer (Univ Köln): Investment in Learning and Beliefs about Knowledge and Talent: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Two Dimensions of Confidence

Stephan Germer (Univ. Hannover): tba

Claudia Möllers (Univ. Düsseldorf): tba

Anja Rey (Univ. Düsseldorf): Representing and Solving Hedonic Games with Ordinal Preferences and Thresholds

Rebecca Schmitt (TU Kaiserslautern): Bridging the Attitude-Preference-Gap: A Cognitive Approach To Preference Formation

Nadja Wolf (Univ. Hannover): Mental Accounting in Tax Evasion Decisions – An Experiment on Underreporting and Overdeducting

Group Prof. Uri Gneezy

Anna Brandt (Univ Bern):  Personality correlates of willingness to compete

Marianne Carson (Royal Veterinary College): Behavioural adaptations of poultry production stakeholders to disease outbreaks and different control policies in Bangladesh

Henning Cordes (Finance Center Muenster): Perceiving the Real Value: How Inflation Communication Affects the Attractiveness of Delayed Consumption

Judith Schneider (Finance Center Muenster): tba

Lisa Spantig (Univ. Munich LMU): High-Stakes Non-Monetary Decision under Risk

Valentin Wagner (Univ. Düsseldorf): Shying Away from Demanding Tasks? Experimental Evidence
on Gender Differences in Multiple-Choice Tests

15:00 – 16:00     Poster session

Part II: Plenary talks and panel discussion on coping with difficult decisions

16:00 – 16:15     Welcome address

16:15 – 17:00     Professor Uri Gneezy: Lying Costs and Incentives

17:00 – 17:45     Professor Ido Erev: On maximization, complexity, and the effect of economic incentives

17:45 – 18:15     Coffee break

18:15 – 19:00     Professor Alvin E. Roth: Repugnant transactions and forbidden markets

19:00 – 20:00     Panel discussion: “Coping with difficult decisions: What do we know about how difficult decisions are made and how they can be improved?”

                              Moderation by Professor Martin Weber

20:00                    Closing remarks and supper

A blizzard of short videos from UBS Nobel Perspectives--from a set of interviews conducted over two days at Stanford

UBS has commissioned a series of interviews about Nobel laureates. A film crew spent two days at Stanford interviewing me, my wife Emilie, and some of my students and colleagues (Mike Ostrovsky, Muriel Niederle, Sandro Ambuehl, Paul Milgrom), and they then conducted some interviews elsewhere also (of Tim Harford and Paul Donovan). You can see a collection of resulting videos at their site here:

How do we make matches that last? Alvin E. Roth, Nobel Laureate, 2012

The longest video is this one, 8 minutes, in which a number of people appear:




A less organized list of the collection of videos is below:

Alvin E. Roth meets his hero - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

▶ 1:35

www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUNIwT0i498

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

... Shapley is one of the giants of game theory - meeting him was an impressive moment for me.' Nobel-Prize ...

The rules of the market - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives ...

▶ 2:00

www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-jviWNBs1M

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

Markets don't operate in a vacuum, they need rules to function properly. Watch Nobel-Prize winner in ...

Alvin E. Roth finally gets a high school diploma - Nobel ...

▶ 2:40

www.youtube.com/watch?v=jviVUC4MkhU

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

Alvin E. Roth might be a Nobel Laureate, but he never graduated from high school. At least now he has an ...

Alvin E. Roth - his life and work - Nobel Perspectives ...

▶ 8:39

www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc7sPyQyZm0

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

'The magic of markets doesn't happen by magic', says Roth. In other words, for people to come together ...

Matching kidney donors with recipients - Alvin E. Roth ...

▶ 5:12

www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9OYmUnecfU

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

Alivin E. Roth had already come up with a way to match doctors with jobs in hospitals and children with places ...

Game theory - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

▶ 4:35

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drIMO_Ud6X8

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

Game theory is a kind of mathematics that lets us model the rules of the game. But what happens when people ...

Market design - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

▶ 3:37

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AEUAwa_fmg

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

... we make are situated in a big world. Nobel-Prize winner in Economic Science Alvin E. Roth talks market ...

Match-making - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

▶ 1:48

www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsIAtndNc5Q

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

God created the world in six days, but what has he been doing since then? He's been making matches. Watch ...

Experiments - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

▶ 4:22

www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LWn91wvjrY

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

... can economic theory be applied to help us solve problems in the British health service? Watch Nobel-Prize ...

Human interaction - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives ...

▶ 0:33

www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF9Ib0WlBaE

9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS

'People talk all the time, we transact, we compete. Market design is about understanding and facilitating that ...


Building bridges - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives ...
▶ 0:35
www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTSUjWq79zQ
9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
'We've learned to build bridges better, and that's also the case with markets' Watch Nobel Laureate Alvin ...


Paul Donovan on Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives ...
▶ 4:07
www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cK668w5HOs
9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
UBS Global Economist Paul Donovan explains the allure ofAlvin E. Roth's approach to game theory, and ...


Tim Harford on Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perpectives - YouTube
▶ 2:51
www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVFCGLYmyZE
9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
The Financial Times columnist and author of The Undercover Economist explains how Alvin E. Roth's ...