Monday, July 10, 2017

Economics and computer science of a radio spectrum reallocation in the PNAS

A PNAS article on the recent incentive auction, by its design team.

Economics and computer science of a radio spectrum reallocation
Kevin Leyton-Brown, Paul Milgrom, and Ilya Segal
Early Edition > doi: 10.1073/pnas.1701997114

Abstract
The recent “incentive auction” of the US Federal Communications Commission was the first auction to reallocate radio frequencies between two different kinds of uses: from broadcast television to wireless Internet access. The design challenge was not just to choose market rules to govern a fixed set of potential trades but also, to determine the broadcasters’ property rights, the goods to be exchanged, the quantities to be traded, the computational procedures, and even some of the performance objectives. An essential and unusual challenge was to make the auction simple enough for human participants while still ensuring that the computations would be tractable and capable of delivering nearly efficient outcomes.

Conflict of interest statement: P.M. led the team of consultants on behalf of Auctionomics, which was responsible for advising the Federal Communications Commission on the design of the incentive auction. K.L.-B. and I.S. were the two other members of the Auctionomics consulting team.

Sunday, July 9, 2017

Bob Slonim of Australia

Here's an announcement from down under, where Bob Slonim will be heading the Australian Federal government's Behavioural Economics Team.

"The Behavioural Economics Team of the Australian Government will soon be led by an American professor from an Australian university, replacing its current chief, who is an Australian professor at a university in the United States.

Harvard professor Michael Hiscox ... didn’t give up his position when he came home to Australia to set up and run the Prime Minister’s nudge unit in 2016, and now he is going back to his post in Boston for six months.

He will be replaced by University of Sydney economics professor Robert Slonim, a pioneer of experimental economics who came to Sydney from the US in 2008.

Robert Slonim

Slonim was the keynote speaker at a behavioural economics workshop hosted by BETA last November. He co-edits the Journal of the Economic Science Association and sits on the editorial advisory board of the Journal of Risk and Uncertainty."

Saturday, July 8, 2017

Kidney exchange job opportunity in Australia

If you're a transplant professional following this blog from Australia, maybe this could be of interest:

Australian Kidney Exchange (AKX) Coordinator

"Australian Kidney Exchange (AKX) Coordinator

The Royal Melbourne Hospital - City Campus, Parkville

Full Time Fixed Term

Full time, 3 year fixed term contract

Join an award winning health service

Opportunity to manage a national program

An exciting and unique opportunity is available at the Royal Melbourne Hospital for a Program Coordinator to manage the Australian Paired Kidney Exchange program (AKX) in conjunction with the recently appointed AKX Clinical Director.

The role is supported by the Organ and Tissue Authority (OTA) and the Transplant Society of Australia and New Zealand (TSANZ) and will be based at the Royal Melbourne Hospital in Parkville. We are seeking a Registered Nurse from the Renal Transplant sector with exceptional clinical, communication and organisational skills. The applicant shall have a demonstrated high level of experience with the AKX program and the capability to work across a broad range of jurisdictions and organisations"

Friday, July 7, 2017

NAS report on The Value of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences to National Priorities

As Congress continues to debate funding for science, here's a new report from the National Academies of Science: The Value of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences to National Priorities: A Report for the National Science Foundation

Two paragraphs on the uses of game theory and market design caught my eye (you should be able to make them biglier by clicking on them...) :

*********

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

Update: here's the NSF news release on the NAS report:
New report concludes social, behavioral and economic sciences help advance national health, prosperity and defense
National Academies releases 'The Value of Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences to National Priorities'

"The full report mentions specific examples of NSF-supported SBE research that has advanced welfare, prosperity and security, including the creation of kidney exchange programs, improved cybersecurity and improved counterterrorism efforts.

"Like all sciences, the SBE sciences bring a rigorous, methodological approach to pursuing knowledge," the report states, noting that SBE scientists have contributed new methods of data collection and analysis now used by governments, researchers and business.

The National Academies will host a public discussion Wednesday, July 19, from 9 a.m.-12:30 p.m. EDT at its headquarters at 2101 Constitution Ave. NW, Washington, D.C."

Thursday, July 6, 2017

Supporting science during the budget process: an op-ed in the St. Louis Post Dispatch

Here's an op-ed that ran this week in the St. Louis Post Dispatch:

Federally funded research helps connect transplant patients with donors
By Al Roth and Stuart Sweet

"To the nearly 5,000 people in our region and millions of Americans around the country suffering from kidney disease and waiting for a donor, federally funded research into obscure-sounding economic theory may turn out to be just what the doctor ordered.

As the president of the United Network for Organ Sharing Board of Directors and a Nobel Prize-winning economic researcher who did that work, we have seen first-hand how scientific research, even in seemingly unrelated fields, has the power to connect those suffering with disease with vital cures. And yet, the budget proposed by the current administration proposes to dramatically scale back on research, rather than double down on investments in potentially life-saving research.
...
"Thanks to research funded by the Navy and the National Science Foundation, spanning multiple decades, we’ve developed a system in which kidneys can be exchanged among pairs of donors and recipients who aren’t compatible with each other. How? We pair them, or in some cases, chain them together across multiple donor-recipient pairs, so that each patient gets a compatible kidney from another patient’s donor.

"This approach has saved thousands of lives and hundreds of millions of dollars. Recipients enjoy better quality of life, and every transplant saves the government more than a quarter of a million dollars in health care costs that would have gone to prolonged dialysis treatment.

"Over the past six years, the United Network for Organ Sharing has been running a pilot program to help incompatible donors find compatible pairs for kidney paired donation. In its first five years, the pilot program helped 155 patients receive a healthy kidney despite experiencing the heartbreak of finding out that the person willing to give them the incredible gift of a kidney was not a match.

"Policymakers from both sides of the aisle and around the country have long supported robust investment in basic and applied research that makes success stories like these possible. They have seen that across every industry and sector, investments in research have impacted everything from manufacturing to agriculture and national security, and innovations like kidney paired donation that ensure more Americans can live long, healthy lives.

"We particularly applaud Sen. Roy Blunt’s work as chairman of the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health, and Human Services to increase research funding, especially for the NIH, and with his colleagues throughout the Congress to protect investments in research and development overall. We urge them to reassert that federal funding for science is an important investment in our nation’s future.

Dr. Stuart Sweet is a professor of pediatrics at Washington University, medical director of the pediatric lung transplant program at St. Louis Children’s Hospital and president of the United Network for Organ Sharing Board of Directors.

Alvin E. Roth is a professor of economics at Stanford University, shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics, and is the author of “Who Gets What and Why.”

Wednesday, July 5, 2017

Eduardo Azevedo on "Market failure in kidney exchange" at Penn today

If I were at Penn today I'd attend this seminar by Eduardo Azevedo:

Wed, July 5, 12:00pm – 1:30pm

Where	G65 JMHH
Calendar	AEW Seminars for Business Economics and Public Policy
Description	Eduardo Azevedo "Market Failure in Kidney Exchange" joint w/ Clayton Featherstone, Nikhil Agarwal, Itai Ashlagi, Omer Karaduman ABSTRACT: The market for kidney exchange was created to address the shortage of kidneys for transplantation. The participants in kidney exchange markets are patients who want to receive a kidney transplant, and have a willing but incompatible live donor. These patients register in kidney exchange platforms, where they perform donor swaps with other patients. This market has grown to about 800 transplants per year. We show that this market is fragmented. Transactions take place in dozens of platforms, which are mostly very small, as opposed to in a few large platforms. This fragmentation leads to a deadweight loss of at least 200 transplants per year, because the size of most existing platforms is far below the efficient scale necessary for efficiently matching patients. The fragmentation is due to classic market failures, and simple alternative mechanisms can considerably increase efficiency.

Tuesday, July 4, 2017

California's End of Life Option Act: the first six months

Independence of a sort.
California's End of Life Option Act (aka medically assisted suicide; death with dignity, right to die) has now been in effect for six months, and the first report on its take-up has been issued. The LA Times has the story:
111 terminally ill patients took their own lives in first 6 months of California right-to-die law

"A total of 111 people in California took their own lives using lethal prescriptions during the first six months of a law that allows terminally ill people to request life-ending drugs from their doctors, according to data released Tuesday.

"A snapshot of the patients who took advantage of the law mirrors what’s been seen in Oregon, which was the first state to legalize the practice nearly two decades ago. Though California is far more diverse than Oregon, the majority of those who have died under aid-in-dying laws in both states were white, college-educated cancer patients older than 60.

"The End of Life Option Act made California the fifth state in the nation to allow patients with less than six months to live to request end-of-life drugs from their doctors.

"Physician-assisted deaths made up 6 out of every 10,000 deaths in California between June and December 2016, according to state data. That’s much lower than the 2016 rate in Oregon, where lethal prescriptions accounted for 37 per 10,000 deaths.

"But the findings have done little to calm the debate over whether allowing doctors to prescribe lethal medications is acceptable medical practice.
...
"California’s data show that 173 physicians wrote the 191 prescriptions statewide."

Monday, July 3, 2017

Cadavers and the teaching of anatomy

Hektoen International, A journal of medical humanities has several articles motivated by Rembrandt's painting of The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp

One of the articles is Rembrandt – The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp by Tan Chen. It says in part:

"Commissioned for display in the Guild Room, the painting offers a glimpse into important changes in the world of medicine. Gone are the days of public executions and dissection, and a much more subdued method has taken over. In the modern world executions are no longer public, and anatomy students no longer know the name of their corpse. Great care is taken to remain respectful of the deceased, and in doing so the hands and feet are covered so as to take away the intimacy many associate with these body parts. Today it is easy for a person to donate their body to science and allow anatomy students a real look into the human body, whereas before no choice was given.

The corpse in Rembrandt’s The Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp gives the painting a more macabre feeling. The body being dissected is that of Aris Klindt (an alias for Adriaan Adriaanszoon), an armed robber sentenced to death by hanging. A public dissection was only a yearly event, and all bodies being dissected were that of criminals."
***********

Our views about cadavers have changed, and continue to change. Here's a 2016 story from the NY Times:
New York State Bans Use of Unclaimed Dead as Cadavers Without Consent
By NINA BERNSTEINAUG. 19, 2016

"The law bans the use of unclaimed bodies as cadavers without written consent by a spouse or next of kin, or unless the deceased had registered as a body donor. It ends a 162-year-old system that has required city officials to appropriate unclaimed bodies on behalf of medical schools that teach anatomical dissection and mortuary schools that train embalmers."

*********

And here's the page for Stanford's Willed Body Donation Program

"Once you register to become a donor to the Willed (Whole) Body Program, Stanford’s Division of Clinical Anatomy will keep your name and contact information on file. Upon your death, a caregiver or family member must contact us right away. We take calls 24 hours/day, every day of the year. We will arrange for a funeral home to transport your body to Stanford Medical School, where it may be used to teach students about the structure of the human body and for furthering medical and scientific knowledge.

Once study of the body is complete, we will arrange for cremation. (The study period may range from one month to two years, but it is typically about a year in duration.) At the time of donation, your family will be asked whether they wish for the cremated remains to be returned or whether they would like us to arrange for interment. Our faculty, students, and staff are very grateful for the kindness our donors have extended, and bodies are treated with the greatest respect while in our care."

Sunday, July 2, 2017

The (criminal) repugnance of even child-free child pornography

Sex with children is so abhorrent that a lot of things that look like sex with children are also illegal. Here's a story from the Guardian that raises some interesting questions (although it is complicated by the fact that the defendant in question was convicted of several offenses. However the main one was importing a doll that looked like a child.

Man who tried to import childlike sex doll to UK is jailed
Doll ordered by [the defendant] from Hong Kong was seized at airport, sparking one of first prosecutions of its kind in Britain

"[the defendant], 49, was sentenced at Chester crown court on Friday to two years and eight months behind bars after pleading guilty to importing an indecent object, two counts of making indecent images of children and one count of possessing indecent images of children.

"Border Force officers, acting under the direction of the fast parcel joint border intelligence unit, identified a parcel labelled as a mannequin, but which was found to contain an obscene childlike doll.
...
"During his interview, [the defendant] admitted buying the doll to use for sex and for his own sexual gratification.
...
DC Andy Kent, of Cheshire constabulary’s paedophile and cyber-investigation unit, said: “Knowing child sex dolls exist and are available for sex offenders to buy is sickening.
...
"“This conviction is the first of its kind for Cheshire. Cases like these are also very rare across the country. However, I want to make it clear that importing a child sex doll is a criminal offence.

“Dobson should serve as an example to those who think they can also commit this crime for their own selfish needs.”
...
"Importation of the lifelike dolls is a relatively new phenomenon and there is no offence of possession, only importing an obscene article."
**************

Update: here's a similar case from Canada
Canadian court to determine whether child sex doll constitutes child pornography
The court case was brought after a man ordered a doll from Japan four years ago

Saturday, July 1, 2017

Postcard from the Nobel museum--treadmill desk and artistic license

I just received a postcard from a friend who had visited the Nobel Museum in Stockholm. It is an artist's rendering of me on a treadmill desk.

I do have a treadmill desk in my office, and here's a photo (by Mohammad Kheirkhah) that might have inspired the postcard...

You can get a 360 degree view of my office by moving your mouse around this video http://www.mediatheque.lindau-nobel.org/nobellabs/29724/laboratory-of-alvin-roth

Friday, June 30, 2017

Insurance for organ donors in Ireland: is it compensation?

Frank McCormick points out this interesting story from Ireland:

If you're donating an organ, you can now get insurance cover
The new Royal London Ireland offering has come in for criticism...

"Royal London Ireland has announced that it will now offer a "financial cushion" for policyholders who donate a kidney, bone marrow or portion of a lung or liver to another family member.

The first-of-its-kind "organ donor cover" has been introduced as part of the insurance provider's Specified Serious Illness (SSI) cover.

Under the newly-revamped policy offering, Royal London will pay a €2,500 one-off lump sum to living donors.

In the wake of the news, concerns have been raised that it amounts to "cash for organs" and is unsavoury and unethical.

Mark Murphy, chief executive of the Irish Kidney Association, has said:

"We don't need insurance companies offering these things, we have a compensation scheme... It's not necessary, it's not needed. They shouldn't be doing it, on the basis that it's not needed."

Colette Houton, Royal London's underwriting and claims lead, commented:

"The supply of organ donations is an ongoing issue in this country, with an ever-increasing demand from those who are unfortunate enough to need organ transplantation.

"This shortage has led to more people receiving organs from living donors...

"It would be nice to think our pay-out could potentially help to offset the cost incurred as part of the admirable, altruistic acts that living donors are carrying out...

"Potential donors can face loss of earnings coupled with high medical bills and expenses and our goal is to alleviate these worries and concerns somewhat, by providing some financial aid to support them through surgery and recovery time.

"Living organ donation is an admirable, altruistic act and a lump sum can, at least, help to offset any costs the donor incurs following the operation and recovery involved."
*********

Here's a related press release from the Irish Brokers Association:
Royal London Launch Best-in-Class Serious Illness Cover

Thursday, June 29, 2017

EC17: the ACM conference on Economics and Computation

EC is now a long-running computer science conference (underway right now at MIT). I think the initials initially stood for Electronic Commerce, but developments in both Econ and CS have let to the initial-conserving new name, Economics and Computation.

The program is a striking demonstration of the growing intersection between Ec and CS...among the papers that catch my eye are some on fairness, pricing, matching markets, and market design generally.

Here's the program with links to abstracts: