Death in California isn't the same anymore

The NY Times has the story: Who May Die? California Patients and Doctors Wrestle With Assisted Suicide

"On Thursday, California became the fourth state in the country to put in effect a law allowing assisted suicide for the terminally ill, what has come to be known as aid in dying. Lawmakers here approved the legislation last year, after Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old schoolteacher who had brain cancer, received international attention for her decision to move to Oregon, where terminally ill patients have been allowed to take drugs to die since 1997.

Oregon was the first state to pass an assisted suicide law, and was followed by Washington and Vermont. Under a Montana court ruling, doctors cannot be prosecuted for helping terminally ill patients die, as long as the patient makes a written request. With the California law, 16 percent of the country’s population has a legal option for terminally ill patients to determine the moment of their death, up from 4 percent.

In the states with assisted suicide laws, the number of people who request and take medication to hasten dying has steadily increased. In Oregon, for example, 16 people ended their lives under the law in 1998, and by 2015, that number had grown to 132.

The California legislation is strict, intended to ensure that patients have thought through the decision and are making it voluntarily. Patients must make multiple requests for the medication and have a prognosis of less than six months to live.

Many hospitals have not yet released policies for dealing with the law. And no doctor, health system or pharmacy will be required to comply with a patient’s request. Doctors who object to the practice are not even required to refer patients who request the medication to another physician.

Roman Catholic and other religious health systems have said they will not participate. “We are crossing a line — from being a society that cares for those who are aging and sick to a society that kills those whose suffering we can no longer tolerate,” José H. Gomez, the Catholic archbishop of Los Angeles, said in a statement Wednesday."

Wife swapping: it's hard to make binding contracts for repugnant transactions

Yannai Gonczarowski writes:

"A week ago, the following question was asked on a popular Israeli web forum that discusses legal questions: The author says that he and his wife agreed with their neighbor and his wife that they will exchange partners for a day: the neighbor will be with the author's wife for one day, and after the neighbor's wife returns from her current trip abroad, she will be with the author for a day. As you can already imagine, the author writes that the first part happened, but when the neighbor's wife returned from abroad, the neighbor and his wife denied any such agreement and ignored the author's messages. The author says that he has text messages on his phone to prove the agreement and that he spent a considerable amount of money on beverages for the intended day with the neighbor's wife, and asks the readers of the web forum whether he has a cause for legal action against the neighbor and his wife for violating the agreement.

A link to the question on the web forum (the actual Hebrew text is somewhat more colorful/offensive): http://www.lawforums.co.il/SingleMessage.aspx?MessageID=1186029

Indeed, in repugnant markets (at least ones in which an altruist donor beginning a "chain" is unlikely...) simultaneity is key."

On Patients Who Purchase Organ Transplants Abroad--Many or few?

An article in the American Journal of Transplantation:

On Patients Who Purchase Organ Transplants Abroad
by F. Ambagtsheer,*, J. de Jong,W. M. Bramer and W. Weimar

The international transplant community portrays organ trade as a growing and serious crime involving large numbers of traveling patients who purchase organs. We present a systematic review about the published number of patients who purchased organs. With this information, we discuss whether the scientific literature reflects a substantial practice of organ purchase. Between 2000 and 2015, 86 studies were published. Seventy-six of these presented patients who traveled and 42 stated that the transplants were commercial. Only 11 studies reported that patients paid, and eight described to what or whom patients paid. In total, during a period of 42 years, 6002 patients have been reported to travel for transplantation. Of these, only 1238 were reported to have paid for their transplants. An additional unknown number of patients paid for their transplants in their native countries. We conclude that the scientific literature does not reflect a large number of patients buying organs. Organ purchases were more often assumed than determined. A reporting code for transplant professionals to report organ trafficking networks is a potential strategy to collect and quantify cases.
++++++++

Update: here's the published version...
Volume 16, Issue 10, October 2016, Pages 2800–2815

College admissions--and censorship--in China (during the approach to the Gaokao college entrance exam)

David Yang writes:

Just want to share a post I saw on China’s social media today. 

This week is China’s college entrance exam (Gaokao), and a high-profile social media account featured your book and the matching algorithm in a post about the college admission system in China. See picture #1: the title of the post reads “One algorithm that solves the challenges of college admission”, and you can see the cover of your book below. The abstract reads: “Rarely is economics this useful and pragmatic — a classic algorithm can potentially lead China’s college admission system out of trouble, solving the lose-lose situation currently faced by students and universities.”

And when you click on the article, you see Picture #2, which is a signal that the article has been censored and content deleted. College admission system in China has been fiercely debated and it is become quite a sensitive topic!

Transplantation interviews Dr Lloyd Ratner

It's gated, but here's a link.
Lloyd E. Ratner, MD, MPH: Professor of Surgery and Director of Renal & Pancreatic Transplantation at Columbia University, and Treasurer of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons

Some interesting bits:

"

Transplantation: Together with a team at Johns Hopkins, you have been the first to perform laparoscopic donor nephrectomies. Would you mind sharing aspects of your personal journey leading to this surgical success with us?

LR: When first introduced in 1995, laparoscopic live donor nephrectomy was a novel, radical, and controversial concept. However, there was an antecedent history of about 10 years, which I witnessed. When I was a general surgery resident at Long Island Jewish Hospital, the Chairman of Urology and pioneer of endourology, Dr. Arthur Smith, was the first person to propose a minimally invasive nephrectomy for disease. Smith’s idea was to place a percutaneous nephrostomy tube into the kidney and allow a tract to form. Then, when the tract was sufficiently fibrosed, he proposed that a Resect-o-scope (like that used for TURPs or TURBTs) be passed through the tract and the kidney be resected from the inside out. Jerry Weinberg, a GU resident who worked with Smith eventually published the first experimental series of minimally invasive nephrectomies in a large animal model. In that series, Weinberg and Smith thrombosed the renal vessels radiologically, then fragmented the kidney with ultrasound, and finally removed the fragments laparoscopically.

During my transplant fellowship at Washington University, Ralph Clayman, with the assistance of his fellow Lou Kavoussi, performed the first laparoscopic nephrectomy for disease. In that first case, Clayman had the renal vessels thrombosed by interventional radiology followed by a laparoscopic nephrectomy. This initial case took approximately 12 hours. However, within 1 year, Clayman had reduced the operating time to approximately 4 hours, no longer requiring radiologic thrombosis of the renal vessels.

As part of a faculty position that I took subsequently at Johns Hopkins University, I directed a satellite renal transplant program at Bayview Medical Center (formerly Baltimore City Hospital). Together with Lou Kavoussi, the newly recruited Chief of Urology, we decided to perform laparoscopic live donor nephrectomies. Our goal was to remove logistical and financial disincentives to living kidney donation by reducing pain, length of stay, and recovery while improving cosmesis. In the mean time, Clayman’s group demonstrated in a large animal model that laparoscopically procured kidneys could be successfully transplanted. Finally, after identifying the right patients, Kavoussi and I performed the first laparoscopic donor nephrectomy in February 1995. The donor went home on postoperative day 1 and was back to work as a welder within 2 weeks. The recipient was discharged after an uneventful hospitalization with a creatinine of 0.8 mg/dL. From there, dissemination and adoption of the laparoscopic donor nephrectomy operation was largely patient driven.

Back to Top

Transplantation: Donor nephrectomies were discussed controversially in the 1990s. Can you share early challenges of outcomes and responses of the public, health professionals, and patients with us?

LR: The first manuscript describing the initial case report and technical aspects of the operation was flat-out rejected. After a rebuttal, the manuscript was accepted without revisions. A large portion of the transplant community could not conceive how we could do this laparoscopic operation safely. When we presented our data, people angrily stood up and told us that we were “amoral and that we were going to kill people.” I had nightmares every night for 2 years. ... Transplantation: You have been a pioneer in paired kidney exchanges. How do you envision a further expansion? LR: I believe that kidney-paired donation has not yet reached its maximal potential. The most attention has been paid to optimizing allocation algorithms. However, logistical and financial issues remain important, under-addressed obstacles. These need to be dealt with before we can expect further expansion. Additionally, compatible pair participation in KPD is the most effective way to increase the desperately needed blood group O donors. However, this represents a major paradigm shift, where living donors are converted from a private resource to a shared or public resource. This will take years to gain widespread acceptance. Finally, I think that consideration should be given to using deceased donor organs to kick off living donor chains."

NBER Market Design meeting at Stanford, October 28-29 2016 (submission deadline August 1)

Here's the memo

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 at

Stanford University on October 28-29, 2016.

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/2015/MDf15/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, 2016 to this link:

http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf16

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 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 ostrovsky@stanford.edu a short nominating paragraph.

Please forward this announcement to any potentially interested

scholars.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Desensitization prior to kidney transplantation

From the American Journal of Transportation, some discussion of desensitizing patients to get around blood type barriers to kidney transplant:

Economic Impacts of ABO-Incompatible Live Donor Kidney Transplantation: A National Study of Medicare-Insured Recipients
Axelrod et al

ABO-Incompatible Kidney Transplants: Twice as Expensive, Half as Good
Held and McCormick

Keith Murnighan (1948-2016)

Max Bazerman just sent an email saying that Keith Murnighan passed away this morning. He was in hospice care, after a long brave fight, chronicled on his blog keithkickscancer.

I last saw him a little over a month ago, on April 28. Here's a picture of the two of us, taken in a happier time at Northwestern in May 2010.

He was an exceptional person, an important scholar of human behavior in organizations, and an old friend.  For now it will be easiest to say some things about his scholarship.

Here's Keith's Google Scholar page.
Keith had a voracious curiosity, and studied many things. One of his papers I like best is
The Dynamics of Intense Work Groups: A Study of British String Quartets
J. Keith Murnighan and Donald E. Conlon
Administrative Science Quarterly Vol. 36, No. 2 (Jun., 1991), pp. 165-186

That paper was in a journal (ASQ) that decorated its cover with photos and other artwork. Keith was a passionate photographer (he earned an MFA in photography at the U of Illinois when we were on the faculty there), and I know that at least several ASQ covers featured Keith's photos.

Keith's scholarly impact has kept growing: here's a graph of his citations over time from the Thompson-Reuters Web of Science

*********

I learned a lot from Keith. Here is a paragraph from the autobiography I was asked to write in connection with the Nobel Prize:

"My arrival at Illinois is memorable for two psychologists I met there in my first year. The first, in the first weeks after my arrival, was my colleague Keith Murnighan. We were both new assistant professors in 1974. He had just received his Ph.D. in social psychology from Purdue. One of our senior colleagues suggested we would enjoy talking to each other, and we did, so much so that we decided to do some experiments together, on the kinds of games I had studied in my dissertation. Experiments were newer to me than game theory was to him, but over the course of the next decade we taught each other how to do experiments that would say something useful about game theory. He and I remember our early interactions differently, but we both agree that our first papers took many drafts to converge. Eventually we wrote a dozen papers together, exploring various aspects of game theory including the game theoretic predictions made by theories such as Nash's (1950) "solution" to the problem of determining the outcome of two-person bargaining. (Game theory was young, and many things that today would be called models of behavior, or kinds of equilibrium, were optimistically called "solutions," following von Neumann and Morgenstern.) Keith and I, together with my graduate student Mike Malouf and our colleague Francoise Schoumaker, developed some experimental designs (such as binary lottery games, see Roth and Malouf, 1979, or probabilistically terminated repeated games, see Roth and Murnighan, 1978) that remain in use today. In 1978 I also took a semester leave at the Economics Department at Stanford, where I taught a course whose lecture notes became my first book, Axiomatic Models of Bargaining (Roth, 1978). Axiomatic theories of the kind initiated by Nash were beautiful, and I enjoyed pushing the theory forward, but their failure to account for the kinds of behavior we observed so clearly in experiments convinced me that these too were a dead end for economics.
*********

Our own collaboration spanned thirty years:

1. Murnighan, J.K. and Roth, A.E.  "The Effects of Communication and Information Availability in an Experimental Study of a Three Person Game," Management Science, Vol. 23, August, 1977, 1336-1348. 
2. Roth, A.E. and Murnighan, J.K. "Equilibrium Behavior and Repeated Play of the Prisoners' Dilemma," Journal of Mathematical Psychology, Vol. 17, 1978, 189 198. 
3. Murnighan, J.K. and Roth, A.E. "Large Group Bargaining in a Characteristic Function Game, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 22, 1978, 299 317. 
4. Murnighan, J.K. and Roth, A.E. "The Effect of Group Size and Communication Availability on Coalition Bargaining in a Veto Game," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 1980, 92 103. 
5. Roth, A.E., Malouf, M., and Murnighan, J.K. "Sociological Versus Strategic Factors in Bargaining," Journal of Economic Behavior and Organization, Vol. 2, 1981, 153 177. 
6. Roth, A.E. and Murnighan, J.K. "The Role of Information in Bargaining: An Experimental Study," Econometrica, Vol. 50, 1982, 1123 1142. 
7. Murnighan, J.K. and Roth, A.E. "Expecting Continued Play in Prisoner's Dilemma Games: A Test of Three Models." Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 27, 1983, 279 300
8. Roth, A.E. and Murnighan, J.K. "Information and Aspirations in Two Person Bargaining", Aspiration Levels in Bargaining and Economic Decision Making, R. Tietz, ed., Springer, 1983. 
9. Murnighan, J.K., Roth, A.E., and Schoumaker, F.  "Risk Aversion and Bargaining: Some Preliminary Experimental Results,"  European Economic Review, 31, 1987, pp265-271.  
10. Murnighan, J.K., Roth, A.E., and Schoumaker, F.  "Risk Aversion in Bargaining: An Experimental Study,"  Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Vol. 1, 1988, 101-124.
11. Roth, A.E., Murnighan, J.K., and Schoumaker, F. "The Deadline Effect in Bargaining:  Some Experimental Evidence," American Economic Review, Vol. 78, 1988, 806-823.
12. Murnighan, J.Keith, and Alvin E. Roth, “Some of the Ancient History of Experimental Economics and Social Psychology: Reminiscences and Analysis of a Fruitful Collaboration,” Social Psychology and Economics, D. De Cremer, M. Zeelenberg, and J.K. Murnighan, editors,  Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.: Mahwah, NJ.  2006, 321-333.

I'll miss him.

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

Update, June 6: here's the Northwestern U. obit:
Organizational behavior scholar J. Keith Murnighan dies at 67
"A memorial service will be held on Sunday, June 12 at 5 p.m. at Alice Millar Chapel, 1870 Sheridan Road in Evanston"

Uber, surge pricing, and how much battery life is left in your phone (they know)

The Telegraph has the (scary) story, after chatting with Keith Chen: Uber knows customers with dying batteries are more likely to accept surge pricing

"The car-hailing service Uber can detect when a user’s smartphone is low on battery, and therefore willing to pay more to book a ride.

Uber, which has faced the ire of London’s tax drivers since launching in the capital in 2012, can tell when its app is preparing to go into power-saving mode, although the firm says it does not use this information to pump up the price.

Keith Chen, head of economic research at Uber, told NPR that users are willing to accept a “surge price” up to 9.9 times the normal rate, particularly if their phone is about to die.

“One of the strongest predictors of whether or not you’re going to be sensitive to surge… is how much battery you have left on your cellphone,” he said.

“We absolutely don’t use that to push you a higher surge price, but it’s an interesting psychological fact of human behaviour.”
**********

Here's a paper by Chen and Sheldon: Dynamic Pricing in a Labor Market: Surge Pricing and Flexible Work on the Uber Platform

Kidney exchange in Australia--update

A report from The West Australian on a four-pair exchange includes some stats on kidney exchange in Australia:  Amazing kidney swap surgery saves four lives
Cathy O’Leary, Medical Editor - The West Australian on June 1, 2016

"Since the first kidney exchange in WA in 2007 involving two pairs of matched donor-recipients, more than 150 kidney transplants have taken place in the exchange program.

Every three months, a computer program searches the national database to look for combinations that will allow an exchange to occur.

Sir Charles Gairdner Hospital surgeon Bulang He, from the WA Liver and Kidney Surgical Transplant Service, said the biggest exchange had involved six pairs of donor recipients.

There was strict criteria for the donors and recipients to give the best possible success rates.

“It is more complicated the more pairs that are involved, and how many you use depends on the match results and what will give the best outcomes,” Dr He said.

Dr He said transplants were cost-effective because they could prevent years of dialysis.

For details on becoming a donor, visit donatelife.gov.au"

Matching in Practice (joint with Advances in Market Design) June 2 - June 3

11th workshop Matching in Practice (joint with Advances in Market Design)

June 2 - June 3 

Our next Matching in Practice workshop will take place in Paris at the Paris School of Economics on June 2 and 3. The first day will be a regular MiP workshop with Nicole Immorlica from Microsoft Research as keynote speaker and a policy round table on the allocation of social housing. The second day will be dedicated to Advances in Market Design. More information about registration to follow.

DAY ONE: XIth WORKSHOP “MATCHING IN PRACTICE”

09:00 – 10:00: Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft Research New England): TBA

Coffee Break

10:30 – 12:30: Contributed Sessions

Heinrich Nax (ETH Zurich) : Evolutionary dynamics and equitable core selection in assignment games

Britta Boyer (U Paderborn) : Matching Strategies of Heterogeneous Agents in a University Clearinghouse

Andre Veski (TU Tallinn) : Efficiency and fair access in kindergarten allocation policy design

Lunch

13:40 – 15 :00: Contributed Sessions

Rustam Hakimov (WZB Berlin) : Iterative Deferred Acceptance Mechanisms: Theory and

Experimental Evidence

Vincent Iehlé (U Paris Dauphine) : A centralized matching market with early matches

Coffee Break

15:30 – 17:30: Focus session on the assignment of social housing

Jacob Leshno (Columbia): TBA

Neil Thakral (Harvard): TBA

David Cantala (Colegio de Mexico): TBA

17:30 – 19:00: Round Table on the assignment of social housing in France and Europe

Jean-François Arènes (APUR, Paris), Nathalie Demeslay (Rennes métropole — TBC), Laurent Ghékière (Union Sociale de l’Habitat, Bruxelles), Cyrille Van Styvendael (Est-Metropole- Habitat, Villeurbanne)

Dinner

DAY TWO: WORKSHOP “ADVANCES IN MARKET DESIGN”
09:00 – 10:00: Itai Ashlagi (Stanford): “TBA”

Coffee Break

10:30 – 11:30: Yinghua He (Toulouse): “Information Acquisition and Provision in School Choice”

10:30 – 11:30: Irene Lo (Columbia): “A Continuum Model for the Top-trading Cycles Mechanism”

Lunch

14:00 – 15:00: Yusuke Narita (MIT): “Match or Mismatch: Learning and Inertia in School Choice”

15:00 – 16:00: Adam Kapor (Columbia):  “Heterogeneous Beliefs and School Choice”

Coffee Break

16:30 – 17:30: Nick Arnosti (Stanford):  “Centralized Clearinghouse Design: A Quantity-Quality Tradeoff”

Gazumping in England: repugnant and soon to be illegal?

When does a contract to sell a home become binding? That may be about to change in England. The Telegraph has the story.
Relief for home buyers as the Government may ban 'gazumping' 

"Gazumping could be banned by the Government, as it has emerged that officials have held private meetings with industry to discuss bringing forward the point at which house sales become legal, in line with Scotland.

"The radical move would prevent millions of British housing sales falling through as 18pc, or around 200,000 transactions collapse each year.

"A major reason is a plague of buyers outbidding others who have already put down an offer, a practice commonly known as "gazumping".

"It causes frustration and disappointment for buyers who think they have secured their dream home, only to find they lose it overnight to someone with more cash. It also routinely leaves frustrated would-be-buyers paying for bills for surveying and legal fees which can run into thousands of pounds, providing a further kick in the teeth.
...
"The meeting was used in part to discuss the idea of introducing to Britain the system which already exists in Scotland and in other countries in Europe, under which property sales are legally binding at the point where an offer is accepted by the buyer.

"At present deals made in Britain are only binding once the contracts have been exchanged, giving buyers with big deposits ample chance to "gazump".

While this Scottish-style system could make life much easier for buyers of British homes, experts predicted it would be very unpopular with sellers and could even put them off moving house. "

My Lucia Lecture at Villanova (video)

The market for Ph.D.'s, in the survey of earned doctorates

A report on the survey of earned doctorates is out, with data from 2014:
DOCTORATE RECIPIENTS FROM U.S. UNIVERSITIES
NATIONAL CENTER FOR SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING STATISTICS
DIRECTORATE FOR SOCIAL, BEHAVIORAL AND ECONOMIC SCIENCES

Immigration to the U.S. since 1820 (animated graphic)

Click on the link below for the animated graphic (which I couldn't figure out how to embed).
Two Centuries of U.S. Immigration (1 dot = 10,000 people)

School choice in NYC middle schools has some catching up to do

While highschools in NYC have a carefully designed school choice system, elementary and middle school choice is more chaotic. Lots of middle schools will only admit children who rank them first, but that is now changing in some Brooklyn schools.

Chalkbeat has the story: Some of Brooklyn’s most sought-after middle schools will no longer see how applicants rank them

"Parents and experts have long lobbied for that change because they say the current system forces families to fill out their applications strategically, while often penalizing those who list their true preferences. Because the top middle schools in District 15 — which includes Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, and Sunset Park — each receive hundreds of applications, they generally only consider students who rank them first or second.

“For years, families have felt as though their options were limited to two top schools on their applications,” District 15 Superintendent Anita Skop said in a letter to parents Wednesday announcing the change. They “have felt as though they need to be strategic, rather than honest in their ranking of choices.”

"The middle school admissions process varies across the city, but most districts currently use “blind ranking” systems that do not show schools where they were listed on a student’s application. The citywide high school admissions process also works that way.

"Beginning in fall 2017, District 15 will join the three-quarters of districts that do not show middle schools how applicants ranked them. (Seven of the city’s 32 school districts will continue to share the rankings with middle schools.)

"A process in which schools see who ranks who further entrenches already entrenched inequities,” said said Neil Dorosin, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, who helped design New York City’s high school admissions system. “That’s just fundamentally unfair and wrong.”

"M.S. 839, a new middle school in the district, uses a random admissions lottery. For that reason, some parents automatically rank the school third so that they can save their top slots for schools that consider ranking, said principal Michael Perlberg. He said some parents have received their first ranked choice but appealed that decision because they actually preferred M.S. 839.

"The policy change to blind rankings “is going to allow parents to sit down with their kids and do a ranking that’s really authentic,” Perlberg said. “We’re really excited about that.”

Proposed legislation offers incentives to living organ donors

The Pittsburgh Tribune Review has the story
Proposed legislation offers incentives to living organ donors in Pa.

"A Pennsylvania lawmaker plans to introduce legislation this week that would allow pilot programs to give non-cash rewards to people who donate a kidney or part of their liver.

The proposal from U.S. Rep. Matt Cartwright, D-Moosic, includes potential rewards for donors such as health insurance, tax credits, contributions to the donor's favorite charity and tuition reimbursement.

Federal law prohibits buying or selling organs for transplantation, but Cartwright said his proposal aims to address a dire organ shortage while saving the government money.

He estimates that eliminating the nation's bloated organ wait list could save more than $5.5 billion per year in medical costs for people with end-stage renal disease.

Cartwright said it's “a national outrage that 22 people die every day waiting for a transplant.”

“The current system is not working, and the only way to find out what would make it work is to try something new,” Cartwright told the Tribune-Review. “I have support on both sides of the aisle because people understand we need to try something different.”

The congressman emphasized that his plan would not pay donors for their organs but simply provide an incentive to donate. To avoid corruption, an ethics control board would monitor the program, and the rewards would not be transferable to other people, he said.

The legislation also would call for donors to be reimbursed for time off work and travel and costs associated with the surgery, which can be prohibitive."

Matching refugees to towns in Britain: Tim Harford in the FT

In the Financial Times, Tim Harford writes about resettling refugees: The refugee crisis — match us if you can--‘However many refugees we decide to resettle, there’s no excuse for doing the process wastefully’

"By balancing competing demands, good matching mechanisms have alleviated real suffering in school systems and organ donation programmes. Now two young Oxford academics, Will Jones of the Refugee Studies Centre and Alexander Teytelboym of the Institute for New Economic Thinking, are trying to persuade governments to use matching mechanisms in the refugee crisis.

Most popular discussions of the crisis focus on how many refugees we in rich countries should accept. Yet other questions matter too. Once nations, or groups of countries, have decided to resettle a certain number of refugees from temporary camps, to which country should they go? Or within a country, to which area?

Different answers have been tried over the years, from randomly dispersing refugees to using the best guesses of officials, as they juggle the preferences of local communities with what they imagine the refugees might want.

In fact, this is a classic matching problem. Different areas have different capabilities. Some have housing but few school places; others have school places but few jobs; still others have an established community of refugees from a particular region. And refugee families have their own skills, needs and desires.

This is not so different a problem from allocating trainee doctors to teaching hospitals, or children to schools, or even kidneys to compatible recipients. In each case, we can get a better match through a matching mechanism. However many refugees we decide to resettle, there’s no excuse for doing the process wastefully.

There is no perfect mechanism for matching refugees to communities — there are too many variables at play — but there are some clear parameters: housing is a major constraint, as is the availability of medical care. Simple systems exist, or could be developed, that should make the process more efficient, stable and dignified."

Aumann Lecture (video): Economists as Engineers: Game Theory and Market Design

Here's a video of my Aumann Lecture last week in Israel--I took as my starting point Bob's 1985 paper "What is Game Theory Trying to Accomplish?"

A National Academy of Sciences report on kidney exchange, and market design

As part of their outreach to the general public, the National Academy of Sciences has initiated a series of  reports called A NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES SERIES ABOUT SCIENTIFIC DISCOVERY AND HUMAN BENEFIT: FROM RESEARCH TO REWARD

The first of these is about kidney exchange (mostly) and market design:
Matching Kidney Donors with Those Who Need Them—and Other Explorations in Economics by Nancy Shute

It has some nice graphics, and starts off this way:

"In the news, economists are often portrayed as number crunchers hidden away in universities. But they also journey out into the world, discovering problems and then charting a course to a solution. By applying economic theories to the shortage of kidneys, scientists have been able to save lives, cut medical costs, and reduce misery. Their innovations have spurred medical progress.

“Economics is about the real world,” said Alvin Roth, a Stanford University economist, when he won the Nobel Prize in 2012 for his work on matching markets, including the kidney donor matching problem."
**********
You can download a pdf version (without the nice graphics) here: Annotated version