Should post-interview communications between residency programs and applicants be strictly regulated?

Here's an article saying that direct communications between residency programs and candidates can't be fixed, and so should be banned...

Lars J. Grimm, Carolyn S. Avery, and Charles M. Maxfield (2016) Residency Postinterview Communications: More Harm Than Good?. Journal of Graduate Medical Education: February 2016, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 7-9.

 ...

A Proposal to Reduce Misrepresentation

The prevalence of potentially misleading language in postinterview communications is troubling. Deliberate misrepresentation flouts expectations for ethics and professionalism in physician training. The residency application process is competitive for both applicants and residency programs, and both desire to maximize their chances for success. While this is no excuse for violating policies or misrepresenting the truth, when there is a pervasive belief that everyone is engaged in the same process, it feels like less of an egregious offense.

The simplest solution to stopping abusive postinterview communication practices is for the NRMP to ban all communications.¹⁰ This approach would be highly effective at leveling the playing field, and in our survey, was supported by 45.5% (122 of 268) of program directors. A simple abstention system would remove any ambiguity from the process and eliminate the temptation for abuse and mistrust. Unfortunately, this approach would also prevent appropriate forms of communications that help both sides make more informed decisions and provide reassurance when possible. Since applicants and residency programs will be matched for 1 to 7 years, it is important to make sure that all questions and doubts are addressed up front before a binding commitment is made.

A more realistic middle-ground option would limit postinterview communications to objective questions about training programs (box). Toward this goal, the Alliance for Academic Internal Medicine recommends that programs “should discourage routine thank you notes or e-mails from interviewed applicants,” and that questions should be directed “only to individuals on the program's approved contacts list.”¹⁷ By setting clear universal expectations about the types of permissible communications on interview day, residency programs could reduce the flow of misleading information in both directions. If additional oversight is needed, (ie, programs with a history of NRMP violations), all postinterview communications could be forced to pass through a messaging service on the NRMP website.⁹ Furthermore, if all communications are logged for potential future review, then individuals would be inclined to behave in a more ethical fashion.

box Recommendations

• Set clear expectations for applicants on interview day about appropriate forms of postinterview communications
• Limit postinterview communications to objective information
• Provide a point person to handle all postinterview communications
• Consider logging all postinterview communications to safeguard ethical standards
• Initiate dialogue on a national level within specialties to create specialty-specific consensus guidelines

Since medical students usually go through the application process once, the onus is on the residency programs to lay out clear expectations for appropriate behavior. An approach that designates a single individual within the residency program to handle all postinterview communications is likely the most practical. We also suggest that the approach should allow each specialty to set its own communication guidelines, as the number of applicants, size of residency programs, duration of training, and competitiveness are unique to each specialty. Our survey shows that each specialty differs in the type, frequency, and influence of postinterview communications. By allowing each specialty to set its own policies, this also allows programs to feel more engaged in the process, and thus more likely to follow the guidelines.

We encourage residency program directors in all specialties to talk with their colleagues and propose sensible regulations for postinterview communications to reduce the widely prevalent misrepresentation and unethical behavior that has come to be synonymous with the residency application process.

Congratulations to the winners of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE)

Here's the announcement from the NSF:

President Obama honors early career scientists with top White House award

Twenty-one researchers nominated by the National Science Foundation receive awards for innovation, outreach in scientific community

and here's the list (one of which has "economics" in the citation...):

February 18, 2016

President Barack Obama today named 106 researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE), granting them the U.S. government's highest award for scientists and engineers in the early stages of their independent research careers. The National Science Foundation (NSF) nominated 21 of the awardees.

PECASE recognizes scientists and engineers who show exceptional potential for leadership at the frontiers of scientific knowledge. Winners demonstrate the ability to broadly advance fundamental research and help the United States maintain its position as a leading producer of scientists and engineers.

"The awardees are outstanding scientists and engineers," said NSF Director France Córdova. "They are teacher-scholars who are developing new generations of outstanding scientists and engineers and ensuring this nation is a leading innovator. I applaud these recipients for their leadership, distinguished teaching and commitment to public outreach."

The NSF-nominated awardees come from universities around the country and excel in areas of science represented by NSF directorates: biology, computer and information science, education and human resources, engineering, geosciences, mathematics and physical sciences and social and behavioral sciences.

NSF vetted the research of its nominees through its rigorous peer review process. All of the NSF nominees have received five-year grants from the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program. CAREER awardees have proven themselves exemplary in integrating research and education. Selection is highly competitive: in 2012, NSF funded fewer than 20 percent of the 2,612 CAREER award applicants.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy within the Executive Office of the President coordinated the PECASE awards, which were established by President Clinton in 1996. Awardees are selected on the basis of two criteria: pursuit of innovative research at the frontiers of science and technology and a commitment to community service as demonstrated through scientific leadership, public education or community outreach.

This year's NSF recipients are:

Adam Abate, University of California, San Francisco

For his development of microfluidic approaches for creating single-cell bioreactors that may be applied to massively parallel approaches in single-cell genomics and transcriptomics and that can be implemented across a variety of disciplines including evolutionary biology, immunology, and cancer biology and for his outreach to underrepresented groups and veterans.

Marcel Agüeros, Columbia University

For his groundbreaking research in stellar astrophysics, and for his restless desire to ensure that minority students in sciences become tomorrow's leaders.

Arezoo Ardekani, University of Notre Dame

For research aimed to fundamentally understand, model and control bacterial biofilm formation through imaginative computations and elegant experiments, and for demonstrated commitment to increase underrepresented minority participation in STEM-related research.

Cullen Buie, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

For research to create highly sensitive systems that probe microbial physiology and thereby illustrate the coupling of cell phenotypes with virulence, and to train a new generation of underreprented minority scientists who become faculty.

Erin Carlson, Indiana University

For discovery of chemistry underlying a new approach to treat antibiotic-resistant infections, for leadership in the chemistry and women-chemists communities, and for developing new hands-on laboratory activities to engage K-12 students in natural product chemistry.

Antonius Dieker, Georgia Tech Research Corporation

For outstanding research on the stochastic behavior in engineered and physical systems; and for educational activities involving high school, undergraduate and graduate students.

Erika Edwards, Brown University

For innovative research leading to exciting breakthroughs in understanding the drivers of plant evolutionary innovation, and particularly the evolution of plant form and photosynthesis systems, and for engaging public outreach on plant biology.

Julia Grigsby, Boston College

For her work on the invariants of 3-manifolds, running advanced workshops, training graduate and undergraduate students, contributions to increasing participation of women in mathematical sciences and introducing talented middle-school girls to research mathematics.

Todd Gureckis, New York University

For his innovative work at the boundary of cognitive science, learning science and machine learning; for his work with museums to enhance the learning potential for children; and for creating an integrated, multidisciplinary curriculum for computational cognitive science for the workforce of the 21st century.

Tessa Hill, University of California, Davis

For her transdisciplinary research that places modern ocean acidification and ocean oxygenation into a long-term Earth-system context, and for training and outreach to K-12 teachers and students that offers them a better understanding of ocean science and climate change through inquiry-based learning.

Daniel Krashen, University of Georgia

For his work on local-to-global principles, organizing conferences and workshops, training graduate students and serving as a role model to underrepresented minorities in mathematics.

Daniel McCloskey, College of Staten Island, City University of New York

For research combining modeling, neurophysiology and systems biology/network science that will transform the field of social neuroscience by providing a comprehensive approach towards understanding the role of neuropetides in complex behavioral systems.

Rahul Mangharam, University of Pennsylvania

For inventing a new formal methodology to test and verify the correct operation of medical device software, saving lives and reducing care costs.

David Masiello, University of Washington

For his cutting-edge research in the emerging field of theoretical molecular nanophotonics, and for his comprehensive educational and outreach programs including an exemplary focus on enhancing the scientific communication abilities of young researchers.

Shwetak Patel, University of Washington

For inventing low-cost, easy-to-deploy sensor systems that leverage existing infrastructures to enable users to track household energy consumption and make the buildings we live in more responsive to our needs.

Aaron Roth, University of Pennsylvania

For visionary research on protecting personal data via differential privacy, and outstanding outreach that fosters interaction between the many communities that study data privacy from theoretical computer science to economics.

Sayeef Salahuddin, University of California, Berkeley

For pioneering research on the foundations of nanostructures as new, low-power electronics with potential influence on energy efficient systems, and for impact on industry, education and mentoring future scientists.

Jakita Thomas, Spelman College

For her research on how African-American middle-school girls develop computational algorithmic thinking within the context of designing games, a research project that explores the challenges African-American girls face and their self-perceptions as problem-solvers while at the same time educating them in mathematics, programming and reasoning.

Joachim Walther, University of Georgia

For building research capacity in engineering education by defining quality in qualitative research methods and leading communities of practice in this research, germane to and commonly used in broadening participation efforts.

Kristen Wendell, University of Massachusetts Boston

For her outstanding research work on how to integrate a community-based engineering design model into pre-service science elementary school teachers focused on crosscutting concepts, disciplinary core ideas and scientific and engineering practices.

Benjamin Williams, University of California, Los Angeles

For a comprehensive vision to advance Terahertz quantum-cascade lasers and devices for communications, sensing and imaging, and for leadership in enhancing undergraduate and graduate student learning experiences.

Jean Tirole on the morality of markets: « La Moralité et le marché »

Jean Tirole, on the morality of markets:
La Moralité et le marché -- Pour une éthique du libéralisme (update: the pdf file has been removed, but here's the video... https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3nnmov_fondation-ethique-economie-conference-de-jean-tirole_news

As near as I can make out with my deteriorating high school French and the increasingly helpful Google Translate, Tirole argues that critics of markets (and of economists) like Michael Sandel are ignorant of decades of economic research...and that it is easier to condemn markets for kidneys if one ignores the deaths of patients with kidney disease...


see also this blog post by Prof  Alexandre Delaigue referring to Tirole's talk, and concentrating on compensation for kidney donors L'interdiction de vente de rein est-elle morale?

Bob Wilson wins the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management has been granted in this eighth edition to Robert B. Wilson for “pioneering contributions to the analysis of strategic interactions when economic agents have limited and different information about their environment.” In the view of the jury, “his research on auctions, electricity pricing, reputation and dynamic interactions under such informational circumstances was groundbreaking and pervades economic analysis to this day.” 

ROBERT WILSON

The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management has been granted in this eighth edition to Robert B. Wilson for “pioneering contributions to the analysis of strategic interactions when economic agents have limited and different information about their environment.” In the view of the jury, “his research on auctions, electricity pricing, reputation and dynamic interactions under such informational circumstances was groundbreaking and pervades economic analysis to this day.”

For example, one of the big questions in economics is how to convince market participants to cooperate in the presence of asymmetric information, i.e., when some have access to information that others lack. Robert Wilson has spent his career studying how economic interactions unfold in circumstances of informational inequality, and has come up with a solution – that agents aim towards a reputation which facilitates cooperation.

Wilson provides tools and strategies to build reputation under varying scenarios. In two of his best known papers, he explores environments requiring different types of reputation: whereas a monopolist tries to convey an image of toughness to defend its market position and fend off unwanted competition, in situations of multilateral conflict like the “repeated prisoners’ dilemma”, the goal is to pursue a reputation for “cooperative” behavior.

Until the 1960s, the standard wisdom was that market pricing corresponded to a cooperative model in which all players shared the same information. Wilson, however, was among the first to realize that perfect information could not be assumed, and the insights of noncooperative theory must be brought into play.

Robert B. Wilson (Geneva, Nebraska, 1937) graduated in mathematics from the University of Harvard. He went on to complete a master’s degree at Harvard Business School (1961), where he also obtained his PhD with a thesis on sequential quadratic programming (1963).
In 1964 he joined the faculty at Stanford Business School, where he remains to this day. Wilson has applied his mathematical skills and game theory expertise to auction designs and competitive bidding strategies in the oil, communication, and power industries. His book Nonlinear Pricing is a referent in tariff design for public utilities from energy to transport.

Economic engineering

It was in the field known as economic engineering that Wilson put game-theoretic tools to use in improving market mechanisms, devoting most of his energies to public auctions. Among his projects in this area, we can cite the bidding for offshore oil leases along the California coast, as well as others to do with electrical power exchange and pricing.

He was accompanied in his work on auction design by one of his disciples, Paul Milgrom, winner of a BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in 2012 for his contributions in this and other domains.

In the mid-1990s, California telecom company Pacific Bell was preparing to bid in an auction called by the U.S. Federal Communications Commission. Wilson and Milgrom pointed out errors in the auction design that produced a worse outcome for both organizers and bidders and proposed an alternative method which the FCC agreed to try. Their innovation, known as the simultaneous multiple round auction (SMR), replaced the traditional sealed envelope with an open bidding format, in which each company could observe what the rest were offering, supplemented by rules to prevent monopoly pricing. The auction – of electromagnetic spectrum for what was then the new generation of cell phones and other wireless communication devices – raised the record sum of over seven billion dollars, and testified in the most practical way possible to the value of game theory in strategic decision-making.

Wilson, meantime, was exploring other kinds of economic interaction. And soon concluded that reputation was among the most powerful spurs to cooperation. “Reputation effects are most prominent in bargaining,” he remarked yesterday after hearing of the award. “For example, in labor negotiations when a firm incurs the costs of a strike in order to convince the union that the marginal productivity of labor is not higher than it actually is, it is sending out a credible signal that sustains its reputation.”

Still in the frame of game theory, Wilson, along with David Kreps, came up with the concept of sequential equilibrium, which describes the anticipated sequence of reactions of market participants on discovering that others have deviated from the original plan. “It provides each player with hypotheses about how others will act as events unfold,” he explains. This concept has given rise to a wide range of applications. In industrial organization, for instance, it has enabled more accurate modeling of price wars.

Wilson is still engaged in research at Stanford University. He is currently studying “repeated interactions between two parties who can benefit from sustained cooperation,” a situation, he notes, that may be short-lived, since “not every kind of incentive encourages cooperation on a lasting basis.” 

Author of over a hundred articles in international journals, he has consistently combined the construction of a robust theoretical framework with the search for practical solutions: “The value of theory is its usefulness in addressing practical problems, while, for the theorist, the problems encountered by practitioners provide a wealth of topics.”

This combination is a constant in his professional life, where he has alternated the presidency of the Econometric Society and associate editorship of journals like Economic Theory with advisory work for the United States Department of the Interior, the Electric Power Research Institute, the Federal Communications Commission, the Canadian Competition Bureau and sundry private corporations.

International jury

The jury in this category was chaired by Eric S. Maskin, Adams University Professor at Harvard University (United States) and 2007 Nobel Laureate in Economics, with Manuel Arellano, Professor of Econometrics in the Center for Monetary and Financial Studies (CEMFI) of Banco de España (Spain), acting as secretary. Remaining members were Pinelopi Koujianou Goldberg, William K. Lanman, Jr. Professor of Economics at Yale University (United States); Andreu Mas-Colell, Professor of Economics at Pompeu Fabra University (Spain) and 2009 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate in Economics; Jean Tirole, Chairman of the Foundation Jean-Jacques Laffont at Toulouse School of Economics (France), 2008 BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate in Economics and 2014 Nobel Prize in Economics; and Fabrizio Zilibotti, Chair of Macroeconomics and Political Economy in the Department of Economics at the University of Zurich (Switzerland).

****
And here are the BBVA laureates in other subjects.

Ph.D. admissions committees: a look under the hood at the graduate school matching market

Inside Higher Ed reviews "Inside Graduate Admissions." Here are the first few paragraphs of their review (and a link to the whole thing).

'Inside Graduate Admissions'

What goes on behind closed doors when professors decide who should get chance to earn a Ph.D.? Author of new book was allowed to watch. She saw elitism, a heavy focus on the GRE and some troubling conversations.

January 6, 2016

By

Scott Jaschik

Ph.D. programs are one of the few parts of higher education where admissions decisions are made without admissions professionals. Small groups of faculty members meet, department by department, to decide whom to admit. And their decisions effectively determine the future makeup of the faculty in higher education. Politicians, judges, journalists, parents and prospective students subject the admissions policies of undergraduate colleges and professional schools to considerable scrutiny, with much public debate over appropriate criteria. But the question of who gets into Ph.D. programs has by comparison escaped much discussion.

That may change with the publication ofInside Graduate Admissions: Merit, Diversity and Faculty Gatekeeping, out this month from Harvard University Press. Julie R. Posselt (right), the author and an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Michigan, obtained permission from 6 highly ranked departments at three research universities to watch their reviews of candidates, and she interviewed faculty members at four others. All the departments were ranked as among the top programs in their disciplines. To obtain this kind of access (not to mention institutional review board approval), Posselt had to offer complete anonymity. While her book identifies comments as coming from people in particularly disciplines, she reveals nothing about where the departments are, and she also hides most details about the applicants they reviewed.

To judge from the book, the faculty members she observed did not present her with a scripted and idealistic view of admissions. They were frank about things that they are unlikely to have shared in public.

For instance, those whose programs were not at the very top of the rankings frequently talked about not wanting to offer a spot to someone they believed would go to a higher-ranked program. They didn't want their department to be the graduate equivalent of what high school students applying to college term a safety school. In this sense many of these departments turned down superior candidates, some of whom might have enrolled.

******************
And here's a conversation with the author in the Chronicle of Higher Ed:
Inside the Graduate-Admissions Process
A study finds the pervasive misuse of test scores and too much homophily

Real estate symposium

I participate today in a conference on an unusual (for me) subject:

SPIRE AND THE REAL PROPERTY LAW SECTION HOST
THE FIFTH ANNUAL REAL SYMPOSIUM

---

Fifth Annual Real Estate and Law Symposium Tuesday, February 16, 2016 1 p.m. - 5:30 p.m. 555 Salvatierra Walk Paul Brest Hall (Law School) Stanford University Earn 2.5 hours of MCLE credit.  Keynote Speakers: Angela Kleiman, CFO and Executive Vice President, Essex Property Trust, Inc. Alvin Roth, Nobel Laureate, Economic Sciences; Professor of Economics, Stanford University Panel topics include: Space on Demand Risk and Resiliency in Financial and Real Estate Markets Early Bird Pricing: SPIRE/RPLS Members: $125 Non-Members: $175 Young Professionals:  $95

About the REAL Symposium Program Schedule and Speakers  Sponsors Essential Information About SPIRE About the Real Property Law SectionDirections

Stanford Professionals  In Real Estate (SPIRE) http://www.spirestanford.org

The Real Property Law Section of The State Bar of California

About the Real Estate and Law (REAL) Symposium

The 2016 REAL Symposium will cover several legal topics such as the legal implications of the evolving use and management real estate in the new sharing economy in the areas of land use, financing, enforcement of existing regulations, and the potential for litigation.  New financing products and trends in the real estate financing markets will be discussed as well as legal issues facing transactional and financing lawyers.In addition, the lead deal maker for the largest West Coast multi-family REIT will give an inside look at the largest merger in recent history and its implications on future transactions.

Program Schedule and Speakers

Event	Time
Registration	12 noon - 1 p.m.
Welcoming Remarks	1 p.m. - 1:15 p.m.
Featured Panel 1: Space On Demand Tech innovations and the new sharing economy are changing how we work, travel and play. We are increasingly demanding accessible, fluid and fungible physical space. However, there are significant legal and financial ramifications to creating space on demand. This panel will discuss a variety of topics related to the sharing economy. Moderator: Curtis Smolar,  Partner, Browne George Ross LLP                                               Panelists: Scott Weiner, San Francisco Board of Supervisors Diana Rothschild, CEO & President, NextSpace Deborah Boyer, Executive VP & Director of Asset Management, The Swig Company Fourth panelist to be announced	1:15 p.m. - 2:20 p.m.
Keynote Speaker: Alvin Roth Nobel Laureate 2012, Economic Sciences; Professor of Economics, Stanford University Professor Roth has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design, and market matching, and is known for his emphasis on applying economic theory to “real-world” problems. Under the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design, he uses mathematical algorithms to assign people or things to stable matches. Professor Roth’s work, which spans decades, culminated in him being awarded a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science. Professor Roth is currently the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and he is the George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emeritus at Harvard University. Professor Roth received his bachelor’s degree from Columbia University and his master’s and doctorate from Stanford University.	2:20 p.m. - 2:55 p.m.
Break	3 p.m. - 3:20 p.m.
Keynote Speaker: Angela Kleiman Essex Property Trust, Chief Financial Officer and Executive Vice President Essex Property Trust, Inc. is a fully integrated REIT that acquires, develops, redevelops, and manages apartment communities located in highly desirable, supply-constrained markets.  Ms. Kleiman led the overall transaction management of Essex’s merger with BRE Properties at the end of last year, creating the largest West Coast multi-family REIT. Ms. Kleiman oversees the Private Equity, Capital Markets, Economic Research, Accounting, Financial Planning and Investor Relations departments. She joined Essex in 2009 to manage the company’s Private Equity Platform and grew it to $3 billion in gross assets. Prior to joining Essex, Ms. Kleiman served as Senior Equity Analyst and Vice President at Security Capital and as Vice President with J. P. Morgan Real Estate and Lodging Investment Banking Group. Ms. Kleiman received her Bachelor’s from Northwestern University and her MBA from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.	3:20 p.m. - 3:50 p.m.
Featured Panel 2:  Risk and Resiliency in Financial and Real Estate Markets The US economy has rebounded from the real estate and market crashes in 2007 and there continues to be abundant opportunity for real estate investors, developers and entrepreneurs.   At the same time real estate professionals are faced with new and not-so-new challenges in the rapidly changing real estate/financial industries and world economies.   This panel will discuss how real estate entrepreneurs, investors and financiers identify and manage opportunity and risk in the evolving economy. Moderator: Jeff Weber, Senior Managing Director, Eastdil Secured Panelists: Bill Hosler, COO, Catellus Mark Myers, Executive VP & Group Head of Commercial Real Estate, Wells Fargo Sam Hooker, Principal, Embarcadero Partners LLC

Dynamic matching when what you get now may determine your future priorities

Dynamic Matching Markets and the Deferred Acceptance Mechanism

John Kennes (jkennes@econ.au.dk), Daniel Monde and Norovsambuu Tumennasan (ntumennasan@econ.au.dk)
Additional contact information

Economics Working Papers from School of Economics and Management, University of Aarhus

Abstract: In many dynamic matching markets, priorities depend on previous allocations. In such environments, agents on the proposing side can manipulate the period-by-period deferred acceptance (DA) mechanism. We show that the fraction of agents with incentives to manipulate the DA mechanism approaches zero as the market size increases. In addition, we provide a novel al- gorithm to calculate the percentage of markets that can be manipulated. Based on randomly generated data, we find that the DA becomes approximately non-manipulable when the schools capacity reaches 20. Our theoretical and simulation results together justify the implementation of the period-by-period DA mechanism in dynamic markets.

How can you tell you're an economist? Valentine's day economics

How can you tell you're an economist?  Maybe if Valentine's Day makes you think of dating sites as congested matching markets.  Here are two views from The Economist about thickness and congestion in dating markets:
Optimising romance: To find true love, it helps to understand the economic principles underpinning the search

Valentine’s day economics--Would a dating app just for economists work?

A Valentine's day salute to Gale and Shapley and the deferred acceptance algorithm

The University of California celebrates David Gale and Lloyd Shapley with an article appropriate to Valentine's Day:

How a matchmaking algorithm saved lives
Long before dating sites, a pair of economists delved into the question of matchmaking, and hit upon a formula with applications far beyond romance.

The article has Jane Austen characters in the explanation of the deferred acceptance algorithm, and pictures, including these:

They also link to this animated, interactive Berkeley mathsite exhibit on the stable marriage problem. (It is part of a larger MathSite interactive mathematics exhibit supported by the David Gale Fund for Interactive Mathematics.)
*********************

Valentine's day reminds me of a post from a few years ago:

What has G-d been doing since the Creation? (Matchmaking, of course...))

Happy Valentine's day to all, from Philadelphia:)

Twitter followers for sale

I'm too verbose to be tempted by twitter, but if you need some twitter followers, one of the commenters on my blog turns out to sell them: you could buy 10,000 followers for 35 pounds sterling at his site...and 400,000 followers for 600 pounds.

Twitter Followers

£9.97–£599.97

Premium quality twitter followers delivered directly to your account within 24 hours of your purchase. We do not require your password or any other login details at any point during the process.

Federico Echenique and Juan Pereyra on unraveling of matching markets

 Strategic complementarities and unravelingin matching markets 
by Federico Echenique  and  Juan Sebastián Pereyra, Theoretical Economics 11 (2016), 1–39

 Abstract: We present a theoretical explanation of inefficient early matching in matching markets. Our explanation is based on strategic complementarities and strategic unraveling. We identify a negative externality imposed on the rest of the market by agents who make early offers. As a consequence, an agent may make an early offer because she is concerned that others are making early offers. Yet other agents make early offers because they are concerned that others worry about early offers, and so on and so forth. The end result is that any given agent is more likely to make an early offer than a late offer.

Using deceased donor kidneys to start some kidney exchange chains

It would save some lives... here's a link to the abstract of a forthcoming paper (more like an editorial, really).

Personal Viewpoint

You have full text access to this content

Utilization of Deceased Donor Kidneys to Initiate Living Donor Chains

1. Marc L. Melcher¹, 
2. John P. Roberts^2,*, 
3. Alan B. Leichtman³, 
4. Alvin E. Roth⁴ and
5. Michael A. Rees^5,6

DOI: 10.1111/ajt.13740

This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.

Issue

American Journal of Transplantation

Accepted Article (Accepted, unedited articles published online and citable. The final edited and typeset version of record will appear in future.)

Additional Information(Show All)

Author InformationPublication History

1. This article has been accepted for publication and undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the Version of Record. Please cite this article as doi: 10.1111/ajt.13740

 Abstract

 Get PDF (159K)

• Find it @ Stanford

Abstract

We propose that some deceased donor kidneys be allocated to initiate non-simultaneous extended altruistic donor chains of living donor kidney transplants to address in part the huge disparity between patients on the deceased donor kidney waitlist and available donors. The use of deceased donor kidneys for this purpose would benefit waitlisted candidates in that most patients enrolled in kidney paired donation systems are also waitlisted for a deceased donor kidney transplant and receiving a kidney through the mechanism of kidney paired donation will decrease pressure on the deceased donor pool. In addition, a living donor kidney usually provides survival potential equal or superior to that of deceased donor kidneys. If kidney paired donation chains that are initiated by a deceased donor can end in a donation of a living donor kidney to a candidate on the deceased donor waitlist, the quality of the kidney allocated to waitlisted patient is likely to be improved. We hypothesize that a pilot program would show a positive impact on patients of all ethnicities and blood types.

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I've recently updated my game theory, experimental economics and market design page, and you can find some updated papers on kidney exchange at http://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/alroth.html#KidneyExchange , and on deceased organ donation at http://web.stanford.edu/~alroth/alroth.html#Otherorgan 

Public comments at the SEC about IEX's exchange application: a seminar on the politics of market design

There's an exciting (if confusing) practical seminar on market design going on on the SEC's webpage these days, where they are posting comments on IEX's application to become an exchange.

First, here are some background news stories:

Matt Levine at Bloomberg, in December: The 'Flash Boys' Exchange Is Still Controversial

Robin Wigglesworth at the FT, this month: ‘Flash Boys’ trading venue application triggers backlash
"The Investors’ Exchange, a trading venue made famous by Michael Lewis’ Flash Boys book on high-frequency trading, has applied for full stock market status. But the application has triggered a deluge of responses and fanned the debate about the very nature of the US equity markets...."

And here is the SEC's comment page, a sort of flash mob exchange about markets and market design.

Guide to the perplexed: I like Eric Budish's comment, here: #371 … http://www.sec.gov/comments/10-222/10222-371.pdf.

About how to go through the many other comments, Eric writes: 
"For pro-IEX letters, the best place to start is the detailed letters from IEX itself. The letter from Healthy Markets is also very good on details. The letters from Southeastern Asset Management (co-signed by many other asset managers) and from Norges Bank (Norway’s sovereign wealth fund) are a bit shorter but give a sense of how pro-IEX asset managers see the debate.

For negative letters, the letters from trading firms Citadel and Hudson River Trading are quite detailed. The letter from NYSE has the distinction of being both detailed and comparing IEX to the fraudulent frozen-yogurt shop on Seinfeld.

Also recommended is the letter from Goldman Sachs, which, like my letter, supports IEX’s application but mostly talks about deeper structural issues."


You can search the comments, e.g. for "IEX"  or "Goldman Sachs," etc. to find them... 

Military draft registration, now for women as well as men?

The recent discussions of draft registration for women have invited us to recall the discussions about conscription versus a volunteer army. This, from the Sunday NY Times:
Economists Against the Draft By BINYAMIN APPELBAUMFEB. 6, 2016

One argument that I hadn't recalled being made in just this way is that the wealthy manage to avoid drafts better than the poor, so that even a conscripted army tends to be manned (if that's still the right word) disproportionately by poorer people, but that at least the financial costs of a volunteer army fall on the taxpayers, while the financial costs of a conscripted army fall on the conscripts and their families.

The discussion about conscription versus a volunteer army brings up some issues that also arise in discussions about whether organ donors may be compensated.

A WSJ reporter prepares for Valentines Day by interviewing economists about dating sites

Here's a WSJ interview that mentions, among other things, Soo Lee and Muriel Niederle's experiment with virtual roses:

How Economists Would Fix Online Dating
A ‘thick’ market and cost-benefit analysis help avoid ‘romantic unemployment’

"One recent experiment in improving online dating sites through signaling mechanisms, conducted by economists Soohyung Lee and Muriel Niederle, gave members of a Korean dating site a limited number of virtual roses, meant to indicate special interest in a person, to include with their messages to potential matches. The result was that people were more likely to respond to those who sent them a rose..."

Mishaps while flying transplant organs

This news story stopped with the plane, and doesn't say what happened to the organ...
No one hurt when jet scheduled to pick up donor organ slides off runway in Wheeling

Repugnance for money: The Other Paris, by Luc Sante

Paris is romanticized as the opposite of NY, and poverty as freedom from money, in this review in The Guardian of The Other Paris by Luc Sante

"“My book is a kind of love letter to the city as it was and before it got overtaken by money. Money, for me, may not immediately kill people in the way terrorism does, but it does certainly change the fabric of daily life in much deeper and more insidious ways. The terrorist may be defeated in 50 or 20 or 10 years, but money is going to be much harder to defeat.”