Crossing borders in search of health, welfare, safety (video)

Here's the video of a short (20 minute) talk I gave at the U Chicago's Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group conference on Market Design Perspectives on Inequality: Crossing borders in search of health, welfare, and safety . (My slides, which are hard to see in the video, are here.)

I speak mostly about Global kidney exchange, and then briefly about surrogacy and refugee resettlement.

Sohn Conference, San Francisco, Oct 5

I'll be speaking about market design to investment managers at a charitable conference today: Sohn San Francisco, October 5, 2016, Hyatt Regency San Francisco, 5 Embarcadero Center

"The Excellence in Investing for Children’s Causes Foundation (EICCF) supports underserved Bay Area students in 9th-12th grade to improve graduation rates and college acceptances. Inspired by the Sohn Conference Foundation and with their support, the EICCF created Sohn Conference San Francisco... Like the Sohn Conference New York, EICCF’s annual Sohn Conference San Francisco is an annual investment conference in which top money managers, academics, and celebrities offer insights and ideas for charity. We hope you’ll join us for another day of great discussions in support of a great cause.
Learn about the organizations we are benefiting this year. Click Here."

Here's the conference schedule.

Why might machine learning be unfair?

Hear Aaron Roth speak on this at Penn Law School, starting around minute 7:30 (you can control the video from under where the slides appear, and you can also speed it up--1.5x is still quite intelligible):

What is Machine Learning? And Why Might it be Unfair? at the Optimizing Government Workshop

Here's a slide I liked from minute 35, about why a simple classifier rule might be a better judge of a majority population than of a minority population, simply because there are a lot more data points for the majority. (+'s are people who paid back their loans, -'s did not, the trick is to predict who will pay based on observables, in this case number of credit cards and SAT scores. The orange population is in fact more credit worthy, but has overall lower SAT scores. If you can only use one classifier, the best one is the blue line: and it denies credit to all the orange folks. If you could take group membership into account and use two lines, you could also distinguish the credit worthy oranges...)

Unraveling of college sports recruiting--continued

Inside Higher Ed has the story:
Too Young to Commit?
Urging colleges to change a recruiting culture that targets middle schoolers, Ivy League announces proposals for curbing early recruitment of athletes.

"The Ivy League will announce today a series of proposals aimed at curbing early recruiting in college sports, urging other National Collegiate Athletic Association members to “change the culture of recruiting that forces prospective student-athletes to commit earlier and earlier.”

The proposed Division I rule changes, which would potentially be voted on at the NCAA’s annual meeting in January, would prohibit verbal offers from coaches to potential recruits until Sept. 1 of the student’s junior year of high school. The legislation would also prohibit players initiating or receiving phone calls with and from college coaches, and ban any recruiting conversations at camps or clinics until that date.

"Current NCAA Division I rules differ among sports, but they largely already prohibit players from receiving phone calls from a coach, going on official campus visits or getting an offer before their junior or senior year. Prospective athletes are allowed to initiate phone calls with coaches, however, and are allowed to visit campuses and meet with coaches prior to their junior year, as long as the trip is an unofficial visit not paid for by the institution.

...

"Harris pointed to increasing transfer rates in intercollegiate athletics as evidence athletes are making recruitment decisions too early. According to the NCAA, one-third of college athletes transfer to another program.

“There’s a lot of talk about there being a transfer problem,” Harris said. “Well, I would say a lot of the problem with transfers is the fact that we have individuals making decisions too soon that are too rushed.”

Early recruiting is especially prevalent in sports like women’s soccer and lacrosse, where some players are being recruited as early as middle school. An analysis by the New York Times and the National Collegiate Scouting Association in 2014 found that 36 percent of women’s lacrosse players who use the consulting firm to commit to colleges are doing so early, as are 24 percent of women’s soccer players.

The athletes cannot sign binding letters of intent at such an early age, but middle school students are increasingly announcing verbal commitments to specific institutions after receiving unofficial scholarship offers from coaches."

Kidney exchange chains (a survey, including possibly the longest chain to date)

Here's a survey on non-simultaneous kidney exchange chains: Are Transplant Chains the Answer to Our Kidney Deficit? by Melissa Laracy

On long chains:
"Currently, the longest living kidney donor chain is the University of Alabama at Birmingham Kidney Chain. Started in December 2013, it has since grown to include 112 individuals, yielding a total of 56 kidney transplants as of December 2015."

See also "Celebrating the nation's longest kidney chain" at UAB

The Econometrics of Matching Models by Pierre-André Chiappori and Bernard Salanié in the JEL

The Econometrics of Matching Models
Pierre-André Chiappori and Bernard Salanié
Journal of Economic Literature 2016, 54(3), 832–861

Abstract: Many questions in economics can be fruitfully analyzed in the framework of matching models. Until recently, empirical work has lagged far behind theory in this area. This review reports on recent developments that have considerably expanded the range of matching models that can be taken to the data. A leading theme is that in such two-sided markets, knowing the observable characteristics of partners alone is not enough to credibly identify the relevant parameters. A combination of richer data and robust, theory-driven restrictions is required. We illustrate this on leading applications.

Here is the opening paragraph:
"In October 2012, the Nobel prize was attributed to Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley
for their work on matching. Both the seminal Gale and Shapley (1962) paper and most of Roth’s work were concerned with allocation mechanisms when prices or other transfers cannot be used—what we will call nontransferable utility (NTU) in this survey. Gale and Shapley used college admissions, marriage, and roommate assignments as examples; Roth’s fundamental work in market design has led to major improvements in the National Resident Matching Program (Roth and Peranson 1999) and to the creation of a mechanism for kidney exchange (Roth, Sönmez, and Ünver 2004). While these are important economic applications, matching problems are much more pervasive. Market and nonmarket mechanisms such as auctions match agents with goods and buyers with sellers; agents match to each other in production teams, and production tasks are matched with workers; and in international trade, countries are matched with goods or varieties. Yet while the basic theory of matching was in place forty years ago, only recently has there been an explosion of empirical work in this area. Several developments have concurred to bring it to the attention of applied researchers."

A von Neumann medal in the shape of a saddle point

It's a little hard to see, but the medal forms a saddle point: the intersection of the two lines is a maximum in the horizontal direction and a minimum in the vertical direction...  It had been a long time since I thought of equilibrium that way, but it is from von Neumann's first game theory paper, on two person zero sum games and the minimax theorem.

It is from my trip to Hungary in early September. You can read about it in Hungarian...

Nobel-díjas közgazdász, Alvin E. Roth kapta idén a Neumann János-díjat

Piaci megoldással osztaná el a migránsokat a Nobel-díjas közgazdász


Nobel-díjas közgazdász oldhatja meg a menekültproblémát

Hungarian radio: (interview in Hungarian voice-over)
A pénz sem old meg mindent - így látja a Nobel-díjas, InfoRádió / Czwick Dávid

Isten teremtette a búzát. És az árutőzsdét? (a newspaper interview in Hungarian)

Google translate: God created the wheat. And the commodities market?

It looks like paying donors of bone marrow/ blood stem cells will remain illegal...

The long story of whether some forms of blood stem cell (marrow) donation may be compensated seems to be coming to an end, back where it began.  Here's the new HHS/HRSA regulation, saying that whether as marrow or in the blood stream, these are considered organs under the National Organ Transplant Act, so no valuable consideration can be given...

View EO 12866 Meetings

Printer-Friendly Version     Download RIN Data in XML

---

HHS/HRSA

RIN: 0906-AB02

Publication ID: Spring 2016

Title: Definition of Human Organ Under Section 301 of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984
Abstract:This final rule clarifies that peripheral blood stem cells are included in the definition of bone marrow under section 301 of the National Organ Transplantation Act of 1984, as amended and codified in 42 U.S.C. 274e.
Agency: Department of Health and Human Services(HHS)	Priority: Info./Admin./Other
RIN Status: Previously published in the Unified Agenda	Agenda Stage of Rulemaking: Final Rule Stage
Major: No	Unfunded Mandates: No
CFR Citation: Not Yet Determined     (To search for a specific CFR, visit the Code of Federal Regulations.)
Legal Authority: Pub. L. 109-129    Stem Cell Therapeutic and Research Act of 2005, as amended in 2010 by Pub. L. 111-264

Legal Deadline:  None

Timetable: Action Date FR Cite NPRM  10/02/2013  78 FR 60810    NPRM Comment Period End  12/02/2013  Final Rule  11/00/2016

Regulatory Flexibility Analysis Required: No	Government Levels Affected: Undetermined
Small Entities Affected: No	Federalism: No
Included in the Regulatory Plan: No
RIN Data Printed in the FR: No
Agency Contact: Dr. James Bowman Medical Director, Division of Transplantation Department of Health and Human Services Health Resources and Services Administration 5600 Fishers Lane, Room 12C-06, Rockville, MD 20857 Phone:301 443-4861

HT: Kim Krawiec

Is vote swapping related to vote selling the way kidney exchange is related to kidney sales? (a blog post by Scott Aaronson on vote swapping)

Here's a blog post from Scot Aaronson's blog "Shtetl Optimized". He points out that although vote trading is illegal, vote swapping seems not to be. (Apparently it's the money that matters, as in kidney exchange versus kidney sales...)

Here are the critical paragraphs in that connection from his post:

"On August 6, 2007, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals finally ruled on a case, Porter v. Bowen, stemming from the California attorney general’s shutdown of voteswap2000.com.  Their ruling, which is worth reading in full, was unequivocal.

Vote-swapping, it said, is protected by the First Amendment, which state election laws can’t supersede.  It is fundamentally different from buying or selling votes."

Here's the whole post, together with some interesting updates added later.

The Ninth Circuit ruled that vote-swapping is legal. Let’s use it to stop Trump.

"Updates: Commenter JT informs me that there’s already a vote-swapping site available: MakeMineCount.org.  (I particularly like their motto: “Everybody wins.  Except Trump.”)  I still think there’s a need for more sites, particularly ones that would interface with Facebook, but this is a great beginning.  I’ve signed up for it myself.

Also, Toby Ord, a philosopher I know at Oxford, points me to a neat academic paper he wrote that analyzes vote-swapping as an example of “moral trade,” and that mentions the Porter v. Bowendecision holding vote-swapping to be legal in the US."

***********

Here are two passages from the Ninth Circuit opinion that I found particularly relevant.

The first says that operating vote swapping sites might be protected political speech:

"On the merits, we hold that Jones violated Appellants’ First Amendment rights. The websites’ vote-swapping mechanisms as well as the communication and vote swaps they enabled were constitutionally protected. Although California certainly has valid interests in preventing election fraud and corruption, and perhaps in avoiding the subversion of the Electoral College, these interests did not justify the complete disabling of the vote-swapping mechanisms."

The second addresses the issue of "corruption":

"Corruption. Beginning with the State’s anticorruption interest, we reiterate that we construe this interest to encompass only the prevention of illicit financial transactions such as the buying of votes or the contribution of large sums of money to legislators in exchange for political support. See WRTL, 127 S. Ct. at 2676 (Scalia, J., concurring in part and concurring in the judgment); NCPAC, 470 U.S. at 497; Buckley, 424 U.S. at 26-27. So defined, this interest was not advanced by the threatened prosecution of the owners of voteswap2000.com and votexchange2000.com. The websites did not encourage the trading of votes for money, or indeed for anything other than other votes. Votexchange2000.com actually included a notation that “It is illegal to pay someone to vote on your behalf, or even get paid to vote yourself. Stay away from the money. Just vote” (emphasis in original). And there is no evidence in the record, nor has the Secretary argued, that any website users ever misused the voteswapping mechanisms by offering or accepting money for their votes. "

HT: Nicole Immorlica

National Living Organ Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC)

I've recently joined the advisory board of the National Living Organ Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC), which gives certain forms of financial assistance--mostly travel assistance--to living organ donors.  I expect to learn more about what they do, and can do, in the months to come.

Here's a page outlining how to apply for travel assistance.

And here's a paper describing its history and experience:
Development of the National Living Donor Assistance Center: reducing financial disincentives to living organ donation, by
Patricia H. Warren, RN, CPTC, Kimberly A. Gifford, MBA, Barry A. Hong, PhD, Robert M. Merion, MD, and Akinlolu O. Ojo, MD, PhD, MBA

Abstract: Over the years, the transplant community has worked to advance the care of living organ donors; however, barriers remain, including the nonmedical expenses incurred by living donors. A new center, funded by a grant from the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA), was established to operate a nationwide system to remove these financial disincentives. The HRSA grant was awarded to an academic institution and the daily operations are managed by a transplant professional society. Expenses are reimbursed prospectively for financially needy living donors. Combining the legislative authority and economic resources of the federal government, the research experience of an academic institution, and the management know-how of a professional society has proven to be successful. To date, the center has received 3918 applications submitted by 199 different transplant centers and receives about 80 applications per month. On average, a donor spends $2767 for their travel expenses to the transplant center. Of the 3918 applications that have been submitted, 1941 of those applicants (50%) have completed their donor surgery.

The effects of Israel's new organ transplantation law on family consent for deceased donation

Deceased donor organs are a scarce resource with the property that how they are allocated may influence their scarcity, by influencing the decisions of potential donors and their families.  Recent changes in Israeli law give us a window on this...
Incentivizing Authorization for Deceased Organ Donation With Organ Allocation Priority: The First 5 Years
by A. Stoler, J. B. Kessler, T. Ashkenazi, A. E. Roth, J. Lavee

American Journal of Transplantation, Volume 16, Issue 9, September 2016
Pages 2639–2645

Abstract

The allocation system of donor organs for transplantation may affect their scarcity. In 2008, Israel's Parliament passed the Organ Transplantation Law, which grants priority on waiting lists for transplants to candidates who are first-degree relatives of deceased organ donors or who previously registered as organ donors themselves. Several public campaigns have advertised the existence of the law since November 2010. We evaluated the effect of the law using all deceased donation requests made in Israel during the period 1998–2015. We use logistic regression to compare the authorization rates of the donors’ next of kin in the periods before (1998–2010) and after (2011–2015) the public was made aware of the law. The authorization rate for donation in the period after awareness was substantially higher (55.1% vs. 45.0%, odds ratio [OR] 1.43, p = 0.0003) and reached an all-time high rate of 60.2% in 2015. This increase was mainly due to an increase in the authorization rate of next of kin of unregistered donors (51.1% vs. 42.2%). We also found that the likelihood of next-of-kin authorization for donation was approximately twice as high when the deceased relative was a registered donor rather than unregistered (89.4% vs. 44.6%, OR 14.27, p < 0.0001). We concluded that the priority law is associated with an increased authorization rate for organ donation.

Notes from China 2: Lanzhou

I spoke in Lanzhou on Thursday, in Gansu Province, as part of a festival promoting the revival of the Silk Road as a market for international trade. The sponsors were Time Weekly, Readers Group (a wide circulation, Readers Digest kind of publisher...www.duzhe.com), and the provincial government.

Here's an interview published in China Daily:

诺贝尔经济学奖得主埃尔文·罗斯：中国市场必须由中国经济学家设计
作者：孟肖 来源：时代周刊 2016-09-20

Google translate renders the headline this way: Nobel laureate Erwin Ross: Chinese market must be designed by a Chinese economist

Author: Meng Xiao Source: Times 2016-09-20 

Kwong Sunrise Photo--Al Roth 

The provincial museum is well worth a visit.

And the Yellow River has some beautiful bridges: I took these photos from a riverboat at night.

I recommend the Lanzhou beef noodles, which I had for lunch  The banquet food in Lanzhou is also easy for Americans--fish, lamb, beef and Yak were prominent. (Yak is a kosher animal, by the way...). And toasting goes on throughout, not just in wine but in 100 proof rice liquor...

And in case you were wondering how to spell Erwin Ross in Chinese, I think this is it:

Notes from China 1: Changsha

The first of two stops on my recent trip to China was in Changsha, in Hunan province.  I spoke about market design, following the publication of Who Gets What and Why in Chinese (the Chinese title was changed to The Sharing Economy, but the subtitle was still The New Economic of Matchmaking and Market Design).

Here's a picture I took of the stage, before the talk began:

Here are links to some press coverage, including a visit to ResGreen corporation, a sponsor:

Full coverage

诺奖得主埃尔文-罗斯长沙谈共享经济：核心在于稳定匹配 星辰在线 - ‎Sep 20, 2016‎ 今日，诺贝尔经济学奖获得者埃尔文-罗斯(Alvin E. Roth)携最新的研究成果来到湖南长沙，走进了以绿之韵集团为代表的中国本土企业，与中国的商业巨鳄、学者专家共同探讨共享经济时代下的市场设计话题。 诺贝尔经济学奖得主埃尔文·罗斯：中国市场必须由中国经济学家设计 新浪网 - ‎Sep 19, 2016‎ 罗斯（Alvin E. Roth），罗斯因在博弈论、市场设计和实验经济学领域作出的显著贡献，而于2012年获得诺贝尔经济学奖，目前罗斯在哈佛商学院担任经济及工商管理学教授，他多次访问中国，对目前中国经济的 ... 诺奖得主罗斯走进绿之韵谈共享经济：核心在于稳定匹配 湖南在线 - ‎Sep 21, 2016‎ 埃尔文·罗斯(Alvin E。 Roth)考察湖南企业绿之韵公司. 罗斯此行携最新的研究成果，走进了以绿之韵集团为代表的中国本土企业，与中国的商业巨鳄、学者专家共同探讨共享经济时代下的市场设计话题。出席本 ... 诺贝尔经济学奖得主罗斯考察浏阳经开区企业 红网 - ‎Sep 20, 2016‎ 红网综合讯据浏阳经开区消息9月20日上午，诺贝尔经济学奖获得者埃尔文•罗斯（Alvin E. Roth）一行来到浏阳经开区绿之韵集团考察。浏阳经开区党工委副书记、管委会主任郭力夫，绿之韵集团战略发展顾问、 ...

By the way, the food in Hunan is exotic, here's our lunch menu, which has some unusual items (translated for me by Ms Keny Chen):

Lunch Menu 午宴菜品
Cold Dishes｜冷菜
Chrysanthemum with special sauce 凉拌苦菊
Vinegar walnut kernel 醋泡核桃仁
Preserved duck egg mixed with pepper 擂辣椒皮蛋
Sauced radish peels 萝卜皮
Salty chicken feet 盐焗凤爪
Fennel with special sauce 凉拌茴香
Soup｜汤
海马人参乳鸽汤
Main Dishes｜热菜
Lobster and salmon sashimi 龙虾三文鱼双拼刺身
Roast suckling pig 鸿运烤乳猪
Roasted goose 烧鹅
Braised local tortoise with soy sauce 红烧土乌龟
Stir-fry snake with spicy sauce 香辣蛇
Lactarius deliciosus braised in brown sauce 黄焖寒菌＊
Steamed Leopard Coral Grouper 清蒸蓝东星斑
Steamed scallop with minced garlic and vermicelli 蒜蓉粉丝蒸扇贝
Sautéd razor shell 口味圣子王
Poached domestic chicken 清炖土鸡
Stir-fry snow pea and pleurotus nebrodensis (bailing mushroom) 荷兰豆炒白灵菇
Spiced beef 酱香肉
Steamed ribs with sticky rice and pumpkin 金瓜糯香骨
Stir-fry preserved taro stripe with dried paprika 干椒炒酸芋头丝
Stir-fry diced beef and capsicum 彩椒炒牛仔粒
Stir-fry shrimp with egg white 芙蓉百合
Stir-fry pickles with sliced conch 酸萝卜炒螺片
Stir-fry Chinese edible frog 爆炒田鸡
Stir-fry nostoc commune (agaric) 清炒地木耳
Stir-fry bitter melon with green pepper 清炒苦瓜
Stir-fry Chinese kale (Kai-lan) 清炒芥兰
Staples｜主食
Fried Glutinous Rice Balls with Sesame 大麻果
Potsticker 锅饺

Celebration of David Kreps

I was away and missed the academic festival to mark Dave Kreps' 65th birthday. But here's a nice account of it (after a non-sequitur first paragraph) by David Warsh at Economic Principals:
It Takes (an Invisible) College 

"A celebration last week of the sixty-fifth birthday of David Kreps, of Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, marked the scholarly contributions of one of the leading figures in the integration of game theory into economics.  "

School choice in England

Resettlement as a matching problem: Bazzi, Gaduh, Rothenberg, and Wong on Population Resettlement in Indonesia

There's a lot of discussion of how best to resettle refugees internationally, and of course we might be able to learn a lot about that by looking at the resettlement of internally displaced people, and other migrants.  Here's a recent AER paper that looks at the matching component and finds that it matters who goes where.

Skill Transferability, Migration, and Development: Evidence from Population Resettlement in Indonesia
By Samuel Bazzi, Arya Gaduh, Alexander D. Rothenberg, and Maisy Wong

Abstract: We use a natural experiment in Indonesia to provide causal evidence
on the role of location-specific human capital and skill transferability in shaping the spatial distribution of productivity. From 1979–1988, the Transmigration Program relocated two million migrants from rural Java and Bali to new rural settlements in the Outer Islands. Villages assigned migrants from regions with more similar agroclimatic endowments exhibit higher rice productivity and nighttime light intensity one to two decades later. We find some evidence of migrants’ adaptation to agroclimatic change. Overall, our results suggest that
regional productivity differences may overstate the potential gains
from migration.  

Reputation in online marketplaces

Two recent NBER papers tell us about trust, quality, and reputation in online marketplaces.

BUYING REPUTATION AS A SIGNAL OF QUALITY:
EVIDENCE FROM AN ONLINE MARKETPLACE
Lingfang (Ivy) Li, Steven Tadelis, Xiaolan Zhou
Working Paper 22584, http://www.nber.org/papers/w22584

ABSTRACT: Reputation is critical to foster trust in online marketplaces, yet leaving feedback is a public good that can be under-provided unless buyers are rewarded for it. Signaling theory implies that only high quality sellers would reward buyers for truthful feedback. We explore this scope for signaling using Taobao's "reward-for-feedback" mechanism and find that items with rewards
generate sales that are nearly 30% higher and are sold by higher quality sellers. The market design implication is that marketplaces can benefit from allowing sellers to use rewards to build reputations and signal their high quality in the process.

**********

DESIGNING ONLINE MARKETPLACES:

TRUST AND REPUTATION MECHANISMS

Michael Luca

Working Paper 22616, http://www.nber.org/papers/w22616

ABSTRACT: Online marketplaces have proliferated over the past decade, creating new markets where none existed. By reducing transaction costs, online marketplaces facilitate transactions that otherwise would not have occurred and enable easier entry of small sellers. One central challenge faced by designers of online marketplaces is how to build enough trust to facilitate transactions between strangers. This paper provides an economist’s toolkit for designing online marketplaces, focusing on trust and reputation mechanisms.

Repugnance watch: Pokemon Go banned in Iran

Here's the BBC story, which also covers restrictions on the game elsewhere, for various reasons: Pokemon Go banned by Iranian authorities over 'security'

"The decision was taken by the High Council of Virtual Spaces, the official body overseeing online activity.
Iran follows a number of other countries in expressing its worries over security related to the game.
...
"Indonesia has banned police officers from playing the game while on duty, and a French player was arrested last month after straying on to a military base while trying to catch Pokemon.
A leading Saudi cleric said a fatwa (religious ruling) issued against an earlier Pokemon card game also applied to the new mixed-reality app.
The 16-year-old edict said the game contained "forbidden images" and violated an Islamic ban on gambling. But a fatwa's influence might not carry beyond that particular scholar's territory, and is not necessarily applicable to the whole country.
Earlier this week, authorities in New York state said they would ban some 3,000 registered sex offenders from playing Pokemon Go while they are on parole.
The ban is aimed at safeguarding the children who play the game."

Stable matching for university admissions in Vietnam?

Here's a proposal (in Vietnamese) to use a deferred acceptance algorithm to organize university admissions in Vietnam:

Kỳ thi THPT Quốc Gia 2016
Về việc áp dụng thuật toán DAA của Gale-Shapley trong xét tuyển – Đối Thoại Giáo Dục

Google translate renders the headline this way:
"National high school exams in 2016
On application of the algorithm of Gale-Shapley DAA in admissions - Dialogue Education"

Who Gets What and Why, in China

I'll be travelling to China today, to speak in Changsha and Lanzhou, as a guest of the Times Media Group, to talk about the Chinese edition of my book Who Gets What and Why.

Here's a news story...
诺奖得主来华：共享经济时代如何优化资源配置？
Nobel Laureate in China: how to optimize the sharing of economic resources?

Google translate has trouble with my name in Chinese:  here are some variants they produce:
Erwin · E · Ross (Alvin E. Roth)
Elvin Ross