EU to set out proposals for overhaul of European asylum rules

The Guardian has the story:
EU to set out proposals for overhaul of European asylum rules
European commission will publish paper suggesting changes after migration crisis left current Dublin regulation unworkable

"EU authorities in Brussels will unveil long-awaited proposals to overhaul European asylum rules, following the arrival of more than 1.1 million refugees and migrants last year.

The rules, known as the Dublin regulation and dating back to the 1990s, require refugees to seek asylum in the first country they arrive in. 

This system has been under strain for years, and was finished off last August when the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said all Syrian refugees would be eligible to claim asylum in Germany.

A policy paper to be published by the European commission on Wednesday and seen by the Guardian states that the current crisis has exposed “significant structural weaknesses and shortcomings in the design and implementation of European asylum and migration policy”.

...

"The European commission will propose two options, which still have to be agreed by EU member states. The widely trailed option of scrapping the Dublin rules remains: under this proposal the EU would have a mandatory redistribution system for asylum seekers based on a country’s wealth and ability to absorb newcomers.

A second option would preserve the existing Dublin rules, but add a “corrective fairness mechanism” so refugees could be redistributed around the bloc in times of crisis to take the pressure off frontline arrival states.

The “corrective fairness mechanism” would be based on an existing scheme, where member states have agreed to resettle 160,000 Syrian refugees from Greece and Italy to other EU countries. But in the first six months of operation, barely 1,000 refugees have been resettled under the scheme, raising questions about its viability."

Using deceased donor kidneys to start living donor kidney exchange chains

In American kidney exchange, living non-directed kidney donors initiate chains that produce an average of five transplants.Deceased donor kidneys are also non-directed, but produce one transplant each.  Here's the abstract for a forthcoming paper in the American Journal of Transplantation (AJT), suggesting that it would be helpful to use some deceased donor kidneys to initiate nondirected donor chains:

Abstract: We propose that some deceased donor (DD) kidneys be allocated to initiate nonsimultaneous extended altruistic donor chains of living donor (LD) kidney transplants to address, in part, the huge disparity between patients on the DD kidney waitlist and available donors. The use of DD kidneys for this purpose would benefit waitlisted candidates in that most patients enrolled in kidney paired donation (KPD) systems are also waitlisted for a DD kidney transplant, and receiving a kidney through the mechanism of KPD will decrease pressure on the DD pool. In addition, a LD kidney usually provides survival potential equal or superior to that of DD kidneys. If KPD chains that are initiated by a DD can end in a donation of an LD kidney to a candidate on the DD waitlist, the quality of the kidney allocated to a 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.

Here's the link to the journal page

Utilization of Deceased Donor Kidneys to Initiate Living Donor Chains

1. M. L. Melcher¹, 
2. J. P. Roberts^2,*, 
3. A. B. Leichtman³, 
4. A. E. Roth⁴ and
5. M. A. Rees^5,6

Article first published online: 9 MAR 2016

DOI: 10.1111/ajt.13740

© Copyright 2016 The American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons

Issue

American Journal of Transplantation

Early View (Online Version of Record published before inclusion in an issue)

Kidney donors honored among Israeli heroes who saved lives

Here's a story from Israel, in which kidney donors are honored along with others who performed life-saving acts of heroism:

2016 Independence Day ceremony to honor terror victims, rescuers
14 honorees named to light torches, under banner of 'courageous citizens'; many saved lives during war, terror.

"Culture Minister Miri Regev (Likud) approved the fourteen honorees for the annual Yom Ha'atzmaut (Independence Day) torch-lighting ceremony on Wednesday - this year, with the theme of "courageous citizens."

"The uniqueness of courage is that it doesn't distinguish between religion, ethnicity, or gender," Regev stated.
...
[the honorees include...]

"Nili and Moish Levi, Modi'in residents in their fifties. Dr. Nili Levi is a speech therapist and a lecturer on ethics in academic institutions; and Moish Levy, a lawyer by profession, heads the Gvanim organization, which has spread religious education in Israel. The Levis, who have furthered joint religious-secular education in Israel, educate their three children according to those values. In 2015, the Levis decided to donate a kidney to patients "who need it most," sight unseen; the act brought to light the importance of organ donation in Israel."

HT: Inbal Cohen

Living heart donation

Living kidney donation is common (healthy people have two kidneys and can remain healthy with one). Living heart donation is rare, but not unheard of: when I look at the OPTN data I see 40 heart transplants from living donors since 1988, 12 of them in 1990.  (By contrast there have been just under 65,000 heart transplants from deceased donors in that time.)

Here's a report on the latest, which explains what's going on.

After rare procedure, woman can hear her heart beat in another

"The first thing Linda Karr asked her doctor after her heart transplant surgery at Stanford Hospital was, “How is my heart donor doing?”

"That question is as exceptionally rare as the surgery that made it possible. On Feb. 1, as part of a “domino” procedure, Karr received the heart of Tammy Griffin, who received a new heart and lungs from a deceased donor.
...
"Organs available for transplant are in short supply. Heart-lung combinations are even more rare because a set of heart and lungs is usually split up so that the organs can benefit two people instead of just one. Domino transplantation of a heart-lung and heart does, however, benefit two people. A highly unusual procedure, it has only been performed at Stanford eight times before, last in 1994.

For Griffin, who has cystic fibrosis, receiving new lungs was critical. Her lung capacity had diminished so much that she was on oxygen full time, unable to do much at all. She had so little energy that she couldn’t get through a shower without sitting down to rest.

Her heart, however, was still functioning well. “Her heart was an innocent bystander pushed out of its normal position in the middle of the lungs as her right lung shrank and the left one expanded,” said Joseph Woo, MD, a cardiothoracic surgeon at Stanford Health Care who oversaw and coordinated the surgical teams that conducted the domino procedure. That displacement made a heart-lung transplant the only viable option for Griffin, said Woo, who is also professor and chair of cardiothoracic surgery at Stanford School of Medicine."

Who Gets What and Why, in Turkish: Kim Neyi Neden Alır?

The Turkish translation of Who Gets What and Why is now available:

Kim Neyi Neden Alır?

Here's what appears to be a pre-publication review.

And here's what appears to be an early review of the published book:

Eşleştirme Ekonomisi ve kim, neyi, neden alır?

Lloyd Shapley: an intellectual obituary

Here's the link to  my necessarily brief intellectual obituary of Lloyd Shapley, published in Vox EU yesterday:

Lloyd Shapley: A founding giant of game theory

Here are the first paragraphs...:

"Lloyd Shapley was one of the founding giants of game theory. He shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economicsfor his seminal work with the late David Gale on stable matching – situations in which there are no two agents who would prefer one another over their current counterparts. But he could have won a Nobel for any of a number of his papers that initiated whole literatures.

In addition to being one of the very first to formulate and study the core of a game, which was intimately related to his work on matching, he invented the Shapley value for evaluating games with side payments, which he and Martin Shubik showed could also be used in studying voting and political processes. He and John Milnor initiated the study of games with a continuum of players (‘oceanic games’), a subject that he later explored in depth with Robert Aumann; his paper on ‘stochastic games’ initiated the study of Markov decision processes as well as Markov games; and he contributed deep insights about learning in games and the structure of markets.

At a time when game theory was viewed as addressing two fairly distinct kinds of situations – cooperative games (in which models focus on what coalitions could accomplish if they agree) and non-cooperative games (which focus on individual players’ strategic choices) – Shapley made fundamental contributions to both."

...

and the last paragraph:

"No brief account can summarise Lloyd Shapley’s intellectual life and career, which was among the most fertile of the 20th century. He opened up vast areas to be explored by those who followed. To pick just an area in which I have worked, a few of his foundational ideas – the core, two-sided matching, and exchange in cycles of trade – have led to the study of matching markets, and to a thriving branch of practical market design, which is the engineering part of game theory."

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

Update: That obituary has been reprinted on the Lindau site, here, with this photo by Peter Badge from his ‘Nobel Portraits’ series.:

Medical marijuana in Israel

YNet has the story:
Medical marijuana takes off in Israel
"Even though Israel enforces a strict ban on recreational use of marijuana, Israeli doctors have prescribed it to more than 25,000 Israelis to alleviate their symptoms"

"Forbidden to export its cannabis plants, Israel is concentrating instead on marketing its agronomic, medical and technological expertise in the hope of becoming a world hub in the field. The prestigious Hebrew University of Jerusalem has just opened a cannabis research centre joining 19 other teams from local academic institutions.

"About 200 industry players gathered in Tel Aviv this month for Canna Tech, an international conference on the industry. Suited salespeople, some a little red-eyed despite a ban on consumption laid down by the organisers, exhibited products including electronic cannabis cigarettes, cannabis-based creams and ointments and a remedy for dry mouth.

"Some startups are focused on the plant's by-products, others on user accessories, but a few have bigger ideas. "Look at what has happened in the past two years, the speed at which legalisation of cannabis is advancing," said Saul Kaye, head of the first Israeli incubator for cannabis industry startups.

"We're not going to miss this opportunity, and seeing what the first investors are putting on the table, we feel that it is going to be very big." In January, US tobacco giant Philip Morris ploughed $20 million into Israeli company Syke, which produces precision inhalers for medical cannabis."

FCC incentive auction

USA Today covers the earliest stage of the FCC's incentive auction: FCC's complex incentive auction could net more than $30 billion

"The most sophisticated and complex spectrum auction ever conducted by the Federal Communications Commission is officially underway.

"When the entire process comes to an end more than three years from now, big wireless carriers that provide most of our smartphone access should have more bandwidth to delivery services to mobile-hungry consumers.

"TV broadcasters by Tuesday night must have made official their intentions to accept the FCC's opening price for the rights to the spectrum they currently use for digital TV broadcasts. Once the agency knows how much spectrum can be made available in this "reverse auction," then, in a few months, the FCC will open up the bidding in the "forward auction" in which companies such as AT&T and Verizon can bid on the reallocated spectrum in each of 400-plus localities."

Cherry blossom season in Tokyo

The cherry blossoms are out in force in Tokyo

Who Gets What and Why in Japanese―マッチメイキングとマーケットデザインの新しい経済学 単行本 –

The Japanese translation has come out, and I will be travelling to Japan this week to talk about market design. (Professor Yosuke Yasuda has described the lectures and discussions I'm involved in on April 5 and 6 here; Google Translate works well enough to give you the idea.)

Here's the link to the book in Japanese:

Who Gets What(フー・ゲッツ・ホワット) ―マッチメイキングとマーケットデザインの新しい経済学 単行本 – 

Presidential proclamation on organ donation

Presidential Proclamation -- National Donate Life Month, 2016

"My Administration has striven to support donors and recipients and to expand the availability of organs for transplant. In 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), building on efforts within the transplant community, launched a nationwide kidney exchange program to bring together pairs of kidney donors and recipients in an effort to increase the quality and quantity of kidney transplants. HHS has also made more financial support available to low-income living donors to help cover expenses like travel and lodging costs that are often incurred throughout the donation process. The Affordable Care Act offers greater security to living donors by prohibiting insurers from denying health coverage to someone with a preexisting condition –-donating an organ may have previously been considered a preexisting condition and prevented individuals from obtaining the care they deserved after selflessly giving an organ to someone in need.
...
"NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 2016 as National Donate Life Month. I call upon health care professionals, volunteers, educators, government agencies, faith-based and community groups, and private organizations to join forces to boost the number of organ, eye, and tissue donors throughout our Nation. "

*************
And here's the White House blog:
Saving Lives and Improving Health Care through Innovation in Organ Donations and Transplants
APRIL 1, 2016 AT 7:10 PM ET BY JEFFREY ZIENTS, THOMAS KALIL, DR. MARY WAKEFIELD

"Summary: The White House, in collaboration with HHS, announces a Summit to highlight initiatives to shorten the time to receive life-saving organs.
...

"But there is still more we can do. The vast majority of the organ waiting list is made up of people waiting for a kidney transplant. These Americans are hoping for a life-saving transplant that can add more years to their lives. In addition to the tremendous human cost, the kidney waiting list carries a huge cost to the public purse; Medicare pays more than $34 billion per year – more than the entire budget of the National Institutes of Health – to care for patients with end-stage kidney failure.

A recent transformative innovation called kidney paired donation (KPD), which pools living donors and recipients to increase the likelihood of matches, can improve this. In order to increase the number of potential transplants, the Department of Health and Human Services launched a nationwide KPD program in 2010 to build on this practice.

Alex Nichifor is celebrated in Romania

Here's an article in Business Magazin (in Romanian) celebrating Alex Nichifor:

Profesorul român de la Stanford care a colaborat cu doi laureaţi ai premiului Nobel pentru economie

Tomorrow at Stanford Hillel

I'll join Ken Arrow tomorrow, to help celebrate Stanford Hillel's 50th anniversary:

Community Open House: Something for Everyone

Saturday, April 2 @ 12:00 pm

	Learn about the economics of matchmaking with Professor Al Roth at 2:30 pm.

Following lunch at noon, long-time Hillel Director Rabbi Ari Cartun will be leading the community in Jewish learning. All levels of experience are welcome.

At 2:30 pm, we're excited to host esteemed faculty member Nobel Laureates for TED Talks at Hillel@Stanford. What do the Fiddler on the Roof classic, "Matchmaker," and economic theories have in common? Find out Saturday during a discussion on the economics of matchmaking with Al Roth. Join American economist, writer and political theorist Ken Arrow for his reflections on an academic life and the role of Judaism in it.

The Jewish Women's Theatre will lead a special performance entitled, "UNCUFFED" at 3:30 pm. JWT was co-founded by Stanford alumna Ronda Spinak, '80, "with the express purpose of developing stories written by Jewish women about their lives in America today," she said.

At 4:30 pm, former Hillel staff member Rabbi Mychal Copeland will discuss her book, Struggling in Good Faith, a multifaceted source book telling the story of reconciliation, celebration and struggle for LGBTQI inclusion across the American religious landscape. Rabbi Copeland was the rabbi at Hillel@Stanford for more than 10 years. She currently serves as Director of InterfaithFamily/Bay Area.

Click here for the full schedule and RSVP here for weekend events.

WHEN:

Saturday, April 2, 2016.
12:00 pm – 5:00 pm

WHERE:

Hillel-Ziff Center, Stanford, CA 94305 Map

Headlines that could have been published on April 1

You can't make this stuff up...

College Will No Longer Ask Students to Examine One Another's Vaginas 

Woman discovers 'boyfriend' of two years is woman when she removes blindfold during sex

No Turkish fabric to make anti-Turkish T-shirts, say Russian designers

Sanctions imposed after downing of military plane are hindering production of patriotic garments, reports The Moscow Times

Thai Man May Go to Prison for Insulting King’s Dog


Driving instructors 'may offer lessons in return for sex', Netherlands government confirms
The practice, known as 'ride for a ride', has been deemed 'legal but undesirable'

Mexico City officially changes its name to – Mexico City

Common enrollment system launches in Detroit, primarily for charter schools

A school choice system in Detroit is starting with charter schools.
The Detroit Free Press has the story:
Common enrollment system launches in Detroit today

"The nonprofit Excellent Schools Detroit is launching a common enrollment system today that is designed to make signing up for school easier and more equitable for Detroit families.

"Parents of children entering kindergarten or ninth grade in the fall will be able to use the new system during a 30-day window starting April 1. More than 40 schools are on board, most of them charters, as well as one private school

"Detroit Public Schools was part of the planning process but is not participating. Spokeswoman Michelle Zdrodowski said the district is in a state of transition and whether it joins is a decision that should be made by a school board once the district transitions from emergency management back to local control.
...
"Common enrollment has been a hot topic for years in conversations about education reform in Detroit.

"In fall 2014, the nonprofit Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice issued a report that said Detroit should launch a citywide enrollment system.

"The report highlighted the complexity of Detroit's public school market, with roughly 100 schools in DPS,  dozens of charter school districts (made up of about 100 schools) and 15 schools in the EAA, the state reform district. It said the system is hard for parents to navigate and fuels unhealthy competition among schools for students.

"Families have been disappointed. Families have been hurt, and they don't feel a lot of trust in the different systems," said Maria Montoya, director of communications and strategic partnerships for Enroll Detroit. She was part of the team that helped design the common enrollment system in New Orleans, called OneApp, in 2012.

"The idea that their application will be fairly considered, and it's not a person (at a school) picking them out and saying, 'We don't need any more autistic kids,' it's really hard for them to believe."

"A committee that included officials from Excellent Schools Detroit, DPS, charter schools, the Education Achievement Authority, community groups and parents designed Enroll Detroit. It was built by the New York-based Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice and Acumen Solutions."

A proposal to give refugees legally recognized financial claims against the countries that persecuted them, by Joseph Bloger and Mitu Gulati

When I recently visited Duke Law School I had the pleasure of talking with Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati about their very innovative thoughts on resettling refugees, by giving them legally recognized financial claims against the countries that made them refugees, that could be pursued by their host countries.  Here's a link to their paper:

Competing for Refugees: A Market-Based Solution to a Humanitarian Crisis

Joseph Blocher 

Duke University - School of Law

G. Mitu Gulati 

Duke University School of Law
January 26, 2016

Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Forthcoming
Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2015-48 
Abstract:      

The unprecedented scale of the modern refugee crisis demands novel legal solutions. As a matter of national incentives, the goal must be to design mechanisms that discourage countries from creating refugees, and encourages other countries to welcome them. One way to achieve this would be to recognize that persecuted refugee groups have a financial claim against their countries of origin, and that this claim can be traded to host nations in exchange for acceptance. Modifications to the international apparatus would be necessary, but the basic legal elements of this proposal already exist. In short, international law can and should give refugees a legal asset, give host nations incentives to accept them, and give oppressive countries of origin the bill.

Whither Game Theory? by Fudenberg and Levine (we need to learn more about learning)

Whither Game Theory? Drew Fudenberg David K. Levine, January 31, 2016

Abstract: We examine the state of game theory. Many important questions have been answered, and
game theoretic methods are now central to much economic investigation. We suggest areas where
further advances are important, and argue that models of learning and of social preferences
provide promising routes for improving and widening game theory’s predictive power, while
preserving the sucesses of existing theory where it works well. We emphasize in particular the
need for better understanding of the speed with which learning takes place, and of the evolution
of social norms.

Who Gets What and Why? at Duke Law School (video: one hour including Q&A)

Here's a video of one of the talks I gave at Duke Law School last Wednesday, sponsored by The Duke Project on Law and Markets.



And here is a link to Kim Krawiec's blog post about this and my other talks at Duke on the same day: Our Day Of Market Design,

 It came with this picture:

And here is a link to some more pictures from Kim:
"Who Gets What And Why? Photos And Video

Our communications folk were out in full force for Al Roth’s lecture on Wednesday and have already posted some nice photos from the event and uploaded a video of the lecture to YouTube. "

Surprising consequences of minimum tick size in financial markets

Two papers on minimum tick sizes as elements of market design:

What Drives Price Dispersion and Market Fragmentation across U.S. Stock Exchanges?

Yong Chao 

University of Louisville - College of Business - Department of Economics

Chen Yao 

University of Warwick

Mao Ye 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
January 23, 2016
Abstract:      

We propose a theoretical model to explain two salient features of the U.S. stock exchange industry: (i) sizable dispersion and frequent changes in stock exchange fees; and (ii) the proliferation of stock exchanges offering identical transaction services, highlighting the role of discrete pricing. Exchange operators in the United States compete for order flow by setting “make” fees for limit orders (“makers”) and “take” fees for market orders (“takers”). When traders can quote continuous prices, the manner in which operators divide the total fee between makers and takers is irrelevant because traders can choose prices that perfectly counteract any fee division. If such is the case, order flow consolidates on the exchange with the lowest total fee. The one-cent minimum tick size imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 612(c) of Regulation National Market Systems for traders prevents perfect neutralization and eliminates mutually agreeable trades at price levels within a tick. These frictions (i) create both scope and incentive for an operator to establish multiple exchanges that differ in fee structure in order to engage in second-degree price discrimination; and (ii) lead to mixed-strategy equilibria with positive profits for competing operators, rather than to zero-fee, zero-profit Bertrand equilibrium. Policy proposals that require exchanges to charge one side only or to divide the total fee equally between the two sides would lead to zero make and take fees, but the welfare effects of these two proposals are mixed under tick size constraints.

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

Why Trading Speed Matters: A Tale of Queue Rationing under Price Controls

Chen Yao 

University of Warwick

Mao Ye 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
September 16, 2015

Abstract:      

Queue rationing under price controls drives speed competition in liquidity provision. We find that a one-cent tick size generates higher revenues and longer queues of liquidity provision for lower-priced (larger relative tick size) securities. Speed allows high-frequency traders (HFTs) to establish time priority in the queue; non-HFTs are forced to demand liquidity despite increased liquidity provision revenue. Difference-in-differences tests using exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking the same index show that speed competition led by queuing does not affect transaction costs controlling relative tick size, but a larger relative tick size reduces liquidity and increases HFT liquidity provision.

**********

And here are links to video presentations by Mao Ye:

The high-frequency trading paper is on:

http://submit.utahwfc.org/2015_webcast/uwfc_2015_video_1.html

The exchange competition paper is on

http://submit.utahwfc.org/2016_webcast/uwfc_2016_video_5.html

A trading firm promises to restrain itself from early exploding offers

Self restraint doesn't always do the trick, but is worth a try: here's a post from the Jane Street blog.

Unraveling of the tech hiring market

Thu, 2016/03/17 - 3:20pm - David Powers | OCaml

Recruiting talented people has always been challenging.

In some years that meant competing with a hot new company that aggressively courted every fresh graduate with promises of stock options and IPO glory.  In other years there wasn’t a specific company so much as an entire rising industry looking for people (I’m looking at you cloud services, driverless cars, and peer-to-peer sharing).  Either way, we understood the yearly back and forth.  Our job was to explain to candidates how we stacked up, and more importantly, why a career at Jane Street might be the right choice for many of them.

But this year I got to learn a new name for a new challenge.  “Unraveling”.

I first encountered it in a book I was reading for fun: "Who Gets What, and Why", by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth.  He does a lovely job explaining the idea of a matching market.  In a matching market each person wants only one of each item, each item is unique, and each item can be given to at most one person at a time.  Jobs are a classic matching market, and just like any market, matching markets can work well, or poorly.

Unraveling is one of the primary things that makes a matching market fail.  When a market unravels  matches start to happen earlier and earlier, to the point where people no longer get a complete view of their options.  In the book Roth relates the story of a person who stepped off of a plane to find three voicemails on his phone.  The first offered him a job, the second urged him to respond soon, and the last rescinded the offer because he hadn't responded quickly enough.

We call them exploding offers, and this year they have gotten completely out of hand as companies race to the bottom in their efforts to recruit the next wave of interns and fresh graduates.

Colleges try to impose deadline limits explicitly to stop unraveling, and in the past these have largely been honored.  The cheating and fudging, such as it was, was kept to the fringes.  But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less) hard deadlines.  Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers for signing early.  Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for this one, next year will come with even earlier offers and worse conditions.

This unraveling has been the subject of a lot of discussion, both internally at Jane Street and with the various schools we recruit at, who see it - rightly - as bad for their students.  How can someone make a thoughtful decision about where they want to build a career without the time to interview at more than one or two places?  Unfortunately, most of this discussion is out of the public light, and so the unraveling continues.

We can't control the actions of others, but we also don’t have to follow the herd, so we'd like to be clear:

Jane Street is committed to making sure that you have the time and information you need to decide on an offer from us.  Our offer letters do have good-until dates as a matter of professional practice, but we try to work with every candidate to choose a date that works for them.  We are also happy to extend the date if something unexpected comes up, or, frankly, if someone just needs more time.

Choosing where to start your career is a big decision and we hope you have the time to make a good one.