Simons Institute program in Online and Matching-based market design, Fall 2019

Programs

Fall 2019

Online and Matching-Based Market Design

Aug. 21 – Oct. 4, 2019

Economists have developed a deep and rich theory for understanding the evolution and operation of markets, as well as a bounty of empirical methodologies and practical solutions pertaining to particular settings. Computer scientists have developed the powerful "algorithmic way of thinking," which has become a key enabler of the sciences in this century, just as mathematics was in the last. Sophisticated algorithms, such as the stable matching algorithm, maximum matching algorithms, and algorithms for budgeted auctions, have been applied to centralized labor markets, auctions, financial exchanges, the allocation of public goods, etc. However, in the past, this progress proceeded with limited direct interaction between economists and computer scientists.

In recent years, a vibrant IT ecosystem together with the en-masse relocation of our most important activities to online platforms has given birth to enormously influential and innovative online market structures, including online retail markets, ad auctions, short-term housing markets such as AirBnB, online labor markets such as Uber and Upwork, markets for virtual currencies such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, and markets for online dating such as OK Cupid and Match.com. These new applications require a truly interdisciplinary approach to market design. New algorithms include the specification of information available to consumers and feedback across time in dynamic mechanisms, in addition to the rules governing the aggregation of users’ responses. These new components suggest a new strategic environment, where fairness, transparency, and welfare are clear objectives.

As these markets occupy a rapidly increasing fraction of our economy, the time is ripe for bringing together market-design scholars from economics and computer science under the same roof for an extended period of time to address these challenges. This six-week long program has been designed to accomplish precisely that. 

Click here to subscribe to our announcements email list for this program.

Organizers: Vijay Vazirani (UC Irvine; chair), Itai Ashlagi (Stanford), Federico Echenique (Caltech), Nicole Immorlica(MSR, NE), Aranyak Mehta (Google, Mountain View), Leeat Yariv (Princeton and Caltech)

Workshops

Matching and Objectives

Sep. 5 – Sep. 6, 2019

Platform Markets

Sep. 17 – Sep. 18, 2019

Information Design and Data Science

Oct. 1 – Oct. 2, 2019

Those interested in participating in this program should send email to the organizers at this address.

Are uterus transplants repugnant? And to whom? And why? (in the Irish Times)

Here's an article in the Irish Times on uterus transplants , that makes clear the view that the views of those not directly involved should play a large  and perhaps decisive role in public discussions of transactions that some may find repugnant. The author indicates that among his concerns is that the parentage of the baby might be in doubt (i.e. that a child conceived from the eggs and sperm of his genetic parents and carried to birth by his pregnant genetic mother might have to be regarded as the child of the donor of the uterus...). I wonder if even the author thinks this is a serious reason to ban uterus transplants; rather, I get the sense that he is throwing his net widely in the hope that different objections might resonate with different parts of his audience. Maybe his goal is simply to be controversial. [Just to be clear, I am not disagreeing that child welfare is an important concern when evaluating issues related to reproduction and childbirth...but this concern strikes me as particularly far-fetched.]

Are uterus transplants ethically acceptable?
Several infertile women worldwide have given birth with wombs received from either living or dead donors   by George Winter

"In September 2014, the first live birth following UTx was reported from Sweden by Prof Mats Brännström and colleagues. The recipient had Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser (MRKH) syndrome – she was born without a viable womb – and the donor was a 61-year-old friend. Since then, there have been at least 12 successful births worldwide following UTx.

"Recently, it was revealed that the first baby had been born following a womb transplant from a deceased donor. Ten previous attempts had been made in different countries to deliver a live baby following a uterus or womb transplant from a deceased donor, but this – performed by surgeons in Brazil – was the first with a successful outcome.

...

"The UTx procedure begins with in-vitro fertilisation, using the recipient’s egg and her partner’s sperm; the subsequent embryo is frozen; a uterus – from a living or dead donor – is transplanted; the embryo is thawed and implanted; and following pregnancy and delivery by Caesarean section, a hysterectomy is performed, obviating the need for lifelong immunosuppressive therapy."

...

"The “Ethical Considerations” section of the Womb Transplant UK website implies that any societal misgivings on the acceptability of UTx will be ignored: “Ultimately, the decision to go forward will depend on the judgment of the researchers, the participating institution, and most importantly, the patient to whom the transplant will be offered.”

"Hardly an unbiased trio.

"What ethical dilemmas might arise?

"If a transplanted uterus were to jeopardise a recipient’s life, it could be removed; but what if it contains a viable foetus? And there is debate over living versus deceased donation, with Spanish and Japanese teams favouring the Swedish “live” model, and French, Belgian and UK researchers preferring deceased donors. Writing in the journal Bioethics, Dr Nicola Williams cites the view of the International Federation of Gynaecology and Obstetrics that “the retrieval of a uterus from a living donor necessitates a relatively major surgery with its own risk of complications [and] constitutes reason enough to deem the procedure ethically inappropriate”.

"Also, how much would a child be entitled to know about the donor from whose uterus he or she issued, and – irrespective of whether the donor had been dead or alive – would the infant be the child of the donor or the recipient?"

***********

George Winter, the author of the piece, apparently writes often on ethical issues in medicine (although the above is the first article I had read by him). See e.g.  his recent related articles on The ethical considerations of face transplants and 
The brave new world of wombless gestation--Artificial womb technology poses many ethical questions – we need to debate them
(that article is about experimental technology about lamb embryos brought to term "in a plastic “biobag” – literally, a womb with a view ..."  I was relieved to note that, in considering the implications for humans, the author didn't raise the question above about the parentage--or in this case perhaps the humanity--of the baby (so maybe he was just kidding.)

**********

And see my related post from yesterday:
Friday, December 14, 2018  Successful birth in Brazil to a woman who received a uterus transplanted from a deceased donor

Successful birth in Brazil to a woman who received a uterus transplanted from a deceased donor

The Lancet reports the first known case of a live birth to a woman born without a uterus who received a transplanted uterus from a deceased donor.

Livebirth after uterus transplantation from a deceased donor in a recipient with uterine infertility

December 04, 2018 DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)31766-5

Background

Uterus transplantation from live donors became a reality to treat infertility following a successful Swedish 2014 series, inspiring uterus transplantation centres and programmes worldwide. However, no case of livebirth via deceased donor uterus has, to our knowledge, been successfully achieved, raising doubts about its feasibility and viability, including whether the womb remains viable after prolonged ischaemia.

Methods

In September, 2016, a 32-year-old woman with congenital uterine absence (Mayer-Rokitansky-Küster-Hauser [MRKH] syndrome) underwent uterine transplantation in Hospital das Clínicas, University of São Paulo, Brazil, from a donor who died of subarachnoid haemorrhage. The donor was 45 years old and had three previous vaginal deliveries. The recipient had one in-vitro fertilisation cycle 4 months before transplant, which yielded eight cryopreserved blastocysts.

Findings

The recipient showed satisfactory postoperative recovery and was discharged after 8 days' observation in hospital. 

...

The female baby weighed 2550 g at birth, appropriate for gestational age, with Apgar scores of 9 at 1 min, 10 at 5 min, and 10 at 10 min, and along with the mother remains healthy and developing normally 7 months post partum. The uterus was removed in the same surgical procedure as the livebirth and immunosuppressive therapy was suspended.

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

In Brazil (where commercial surrogacy is apparently illegal, and legal surrogates must be family members of the intended mother), the urge to have one's own baby is nevertheless strong. 

See earlier post:

Wednesday, January 15, 2014

Womb transplants in Sweden (where surrogacy is illegal)

Kidney exchange looks imminent in Sweden

Dagens Medicin (Today's Medicine) has the story:

Nytt koncept ska ge fler en ny njure
Snart startar ett nytt utbytesprogram av njurar som sträcker sig över hela Sverige. 
(GT: New concept will give more a new kidney
Soon a new kidney replacement program will start all over Sweden.)

"The exchange program has shown good results in other countries, so expectations are high, says Per Lindnér, Senior Assistant and Operations Manager at Transplant Center at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg.

"He is one of the initiators of the first Swedish renal exchange program. It can easily be described as a database matching system that couples potential donors and recipients within renal donation.
...
"Today, all of the country's centers for kidney transplants participate, that is, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Karolinska University Hospital, Academic Hospital and Skåne University Hospital.

- Even hospitals in Norway and Denmark want to connect. But the idea is to start nationally and expand over time, "says Per Lindnér.
...
"The idea of ​​a national exchange program was born three years ago when Per Lindnér visited a seminar with Tommy Andersson, professor of discreet mathematics at Lund University.

Tommy Andersson talked about the mathematical background of an American renal exchange program created by Alvin Roth, former winner of Sveriges Riksbank's award in economics, to Alfred Nobel's memory.

When Per Lindnér wanted to introduce the same concept in Sweden, Tommy Andersson contributed with his knowledge, which forms the basis for the program."

MD4SG Colloquium: (Market Design for Social Good): tomorrow (updated with a video)

I'll be speaking in the MD4SG Colloquium Series, online, tomorrow, Thursday, December 13th, 12-1:30 PM EST. 

Date: Thursday, December 13th, 12:00-1:30 PM EST
Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ku-ZRSB82SU. 

Market design is more complicated than mechanism design. And so is achieving good social outcomes.

Marketplaces are often small parts of large markets, and so potential marketplace participants may have large strategy sets, that include actions taken outside of the marketplace. And markets require social support, so the behavior of people who do not intend to participate in the market may nevertheless be important for market design. This talk will illustrate these points with some examples, drawing on experience from the design of school choice systems and kidney exchange clearinghouses.

*********

Update: here it is

The (private equity) market for dermatologists

Dermatology is a lucrative part of medicine, and private equity firms are buying medical practices, which has led to an unusual quarrel in the Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology, involving corporate interests.

The NY Times has the story:
Why Private Equity Is Furious Over a Paper in a Dermatology Journal

"Early this month, a respected medical journal published a research paper on its website that analyzed the effects of a business trend roiling the field of dermatology: the rapid entrance of private equity firms into the specialty by buying and running practices around the country.

"Eight days later, after an outcry from private equity executives and dermatologists associated with private equity firms, the editor of the publication removed the paper from the site.
...
"Dermatologists account for one percent of physicians in the United States, but 15 percent of recent private equity acquisitions of medical practices have involved dermatology practices. Other specialties that have attracted private equity investment include orthopedics, radiology, cardiology, urgent care, anesthesiology and ophthalmology.
...
"This week a lawyer for Advanced Dermatology and Cosmetic Surgery, which is backed by private equity and is the largest dermatology practice in the United States, called the general counsel at the University of Florida, where two of the authors are employed, demanding specific changes to the paper."

Self regulation of black markets on the dark web?

Here's an interesting story from the Guardian, about some dark-web black markets in the U.K. banning fentanyl, as too deadly and (hence) too likely to attract vigorous police attention:

Dark web dealers voluntarily ban deadly fentanyl
Suppliers, fearing police crackdown, decide opioid is too high-risk to trade

"Major dark web drug suppliers have started to voluntarily ban the synthetic opioid fentanyl because it is too dangerous, the National Crime Agency has said.

"They are “delisting” the high-strength painkiller, effectively classifying it alongside mass-casualty firearms and explosives as commodities that are considered too high-risk to trade.
...
"Vince O’Brien, one of the NCA’s leads on drugs, told the Observer that dark web marketplace operators appeared to have made a commercial decision, because selling a drug that could lead to fatalities was more likely to prompt attention from police.

"It is the first known instance of these types of operators moving to effectively ban a drug.
...
"O’Brien said that the NCA is working with US law enforcement agencies to prevent the UK from having a similar fentanyl epidemic, though the number of people dependent on opioids in the UK compared to America means it has a much smaller market."

Gabriel Weintraub's class on online marketplaces at Stanford GSB (winter quarter)

Gabriel Weintraub writes:

I am sharing this information in case some of you are interested on this new half-quarter PhD course I will be teaching this coming Winter:

OIT 648: Empirics of Online Markets
In this course we cover current research on the empirics of platforms and online marketplaces. We will study diverse topics relevant to the design of these markets such as search and matching, review and reputation systems, demand estimation, and pricing. We will do so in the context of different application domains such as rentals, sharing, e-commerce, labor markets, and advertising. The course will be eclectic in terms of approaches, using reduced-form and structural econometrics, machine learning, and experimentation. The course will mostly consist of recent papers presented by the instructor, guests, and students. Some background knowledge required to understand current work will be provided as needed.

The course will meet on the following Mondays between 3:30 and 6:20PM: 

- Mon. Feb 4

- Mon. Feb. 11

- Mon. Feb. 25
- Mon, Mar 4
- Mon. Mar 11
- Fri. Mar. 15

School choice, an overview by the Center for American Progress

The Center for American Progress, a DC think tank, reviews school choice:
Expanding Access to High-Quality Schools
Implementing School Choice Algorithms

From the introduction:

"According to a 2017 analysis by the Brookings Institution, the proportion of large school districts that offered school choice doubled from 2000 through 2016.1 As a result, of the more than 50.1 million students nationwide who attended public schools over the 2015-16 school year, more than 2.8 million students attended public charter schools, and more than 2.6 million students attended magnet schools. Additional students attended other types of public schools of choice, such as those with specialty or thematic programs.
...
"A centralized system can simplify enrollment for both families and schools. Students apply through a single application, ranking a list of schools that they would like to attend and receiving a single offer to one of their preferred schools. However, system design matters when it comes to centralized enrollment. Depending on how a district assigns an offer for each student, some families can unfairly manipulate the system to make it more likely that their child secures a seat at a more in-demand, usually better-performing school.

To reduce this risk of strategic manipulation in centralized enrollment systems, Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, Alvin E. Roth and Tayfun Sönmez—economists with expertise in game theory and market design—proposed a solution. They designed two fair and efficient matching algorithms—or a set of rules and calculations—to ensure that, given the preferences of all other students and schools in the system, each student receives a single offer with his or her best possible school match. Specifically, the economists designed two matching algorithms suitable for centralized assignment: deferred acceptance (DA) and top trading cycles (TTC)."

Congratulations to Eva Tardos, winner of the 2019 IEEE John von Neumann Medal

Congratulations to Eva Tardos.  The Communications of the ACM has the news:
Tardos to Receive von Neumann Medal

"Tardos was cited "For contributions to the field of algorithms, including foundational new methods in optimization, approximation algorithms, and algorithmic game theory."
...
"She will receive the Medal next May at the IEEE Vision, Innovation, and Challenges Summit and Awards Ceremony in San Diego, CA."

Repugnance watch: pay toilets

Citylab reports:
Pay Toilets Are Illegal in Much of the U.S. They Shouldn't Be.
In the 1970s, many American cities and states banned pay toilets, but the vision of abundant free toilets for all never came to pass.
NOV 19, 2018, by Sophie House

"failures of sanitation are not confined to the developing world. In cities around the United States, groups from pregnant women to taxi drivers and people experiencing homelessness suffer from the lack of public restrooms. One solution common in European cities—the pay toilet, which charges a small fee for use—is largely absent from the American landscape, and in fact, is banned in many cities and states.
...
"In 1969, California Assemblywoman March Fong Eu smashed a porcelain toilet with an axe in front of the California state capitol, protesting the misogyny of restrooms that charged entrance fees for stalls but not urinals. She was not alone in her frustration. ...The grassroots organization CEPTIA—the Committee to End Pay Toilets in America—mobilized against pay toilets, putting out a quarterly newsletter (the Free Toilet Paper) and exchanging warring pamphlets with Nik-O-Lok, the leading pay-toilet manufacturer. The group won a citywide ordinance banning pay toilets in Chicago in 1973, followed by bans in Alaska, California, Florida, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, New Jersey, New York, Tennessee, and Wyoming.

In the decades since CEPTIA disbanded, however, pay-toilet bans have proven to be a Pyrrhic victory. The committee’s vision of free toilets for all never came to pass. Cities have persistently refused to construct public restrooms, and existing facilities have fallen into disrepair. Citing the difficulty of keeping bathrooms safe and clean, municipalities are often unwilling or unable to pay. ...

By contrast, in cities from Europe to India to Latin America, small entrance fees help to cover the costs of keeping facilities in good condition. Creating a similar revenue stream to defray operating costs would likely make pay toilets more attractive to U.S. municipalities. For example, fees could offset the costs of hiring restroom attendants—an excellent, but expensive, way to keep bathrooms safe. Pay toilets also redistribute the operating costs of restrooms. Free toilets are, of course, taxpayer-funded, while under pay-toilet schemes, tourists who use urban infrastructure also contribute to its functioning."

HT: Alex Tabarrok at MR

Would government compensation of kidney donors help or hurt the poor?

Here's an article in PLOS ONE that asks a question whose answer is often simply assumed by those who oppose compensation for kidney donors:

Would government compensation of living kidney donors exploit the poor? An empirical analysis
Philip J. Held  , Frank McCormick , Glenn M. Chertow, Thomas G. Peters, John P. Roberts
Published: November 28, 2018https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0205655

Abstract
"Government compensation of kidney donors would likely increase the supply of kidneys and prevent the premature deaths of tens of thousands of patients with kidney failure each year. The major argument against it is that it would exploit the poor who would be more likely to accept the offers of compensation. This overlooks the fact that many poor patients desperately need a kidney transplant and would greatly benefit from an increased supply of kidneys. The objective of this study is to empirically test the hypothesis that government compensation of kidney donors would exploit the poor. Exploitation is defined by economists and several noted ethicists as paying donors less than the fair market value of their kidney. Exploitation is expressed in monetary terms and compared with the economic benefit recipients receive from a transplant. Data are from the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients and the United States Renal Data System annual data reports. Educational attainment is used as a proxy for income. We estimate that if the government rewards living donors with a package of non-cash benefits worth $75,000 per kidney, donors would not be exploited. Much more important, this compensation would likely end the kidney shortage, enabling many more patients with kidney failure to obtain transplants and live longer and healthier lives. The value of kidney transplantation to a U.S. recipient is about $1,330,000, which is an order of magnitude greater than any purported exploitation of a living donor (zero to $75,000). Consequently, the aggregate net benefit to the poor alone from kidney transplantation would increase to about $12 billion per year from $1 billion per year currently. Most of the benefit would accrue to poor kidney recipients. But poor donors would receive the fair market value of their kidney, and hence would not be exploited. If the government wanted to ensure that donors also received a net benefit, it could easily do so by increasing the compensation above $75,000 per donor."

Feeding America: Podcast on HBS case study of Canice Prendergast and Feeding America

Here's an audio interview of Canice Prendergast and Scott Kominers (who wrote the HBS case study) about the work that Prendergast and colleagues did with a team from Feeding America, which manages a network of more than 200 food banks nationwide.

The podcast is here: Building a Nonprofit Marketplace to Feed America

Prendergast says at one point: "The dynamic of the group was wonderful. I think one of the amazing things about this committee was essentially the length of time we got to listen to each other. I think if it has turned out to be a success, the reason was largely because of the willingness not of the academics to listen to the practitioners, but actually the practitioners to listen to the academics. This was a long way removed from anything that they imagined they would do when we started."


You can read the whole transcript by clicking on "Read More" at the bottom of the page linked above.

Arrow Lecture at Columbia (video): Market design (with discussion by Parag Pathak and Joe Stiglitz)

Here's a video of the lecture I gave on Columbia on November 8, in honor and in memory of Ken Arrow. My title was "Market Design in Large Worlds: The Example of Kidney Exchange."
My discussants were Parag Pathak and Joe Stiglitz, and you can see them too.
I used slides (and so did Parag), but they don't seem to have made it fully onstage in the video.  But the audio is good, and you can see how good looking we all are...



The theme of my talk is that one big lesson of market design is that participants have big strategy sets, and this has implications for, among other things, how marketplaces need to be adaptively maintained.  One of Parag's examples in his discussion is how more NYC schools have begun to screen students since more effective choice was introduced, and how this may sometimes work against the goals that increased choice was intended to achieve (so that the NYCDOE is working to reduce screening by schools...).

Match-Up 2019 conference in Switzerland, May 2019. Call for papers

Bettina Klaus points me towards this call for papers, for the latest in a series of conferences on matching. (I had the good fortune to attend the first and the fourth of these, in 2008 and 2017.)

MATCH-UP 2019: the Fifth International Workshop on Matching Under Preferences

May 26th-29th 2019
Congressi Stefano Franscini,
Monte Verità, Ascona, Switzerland
http://www.optimalmatching.com/MATCHUP2019/ (please subscribe to our mailing list there)
contact e-mail (Bettina Klaus): frontiers.marketdesign@gmail.com

(each participant will pay a fee covering direct costs of meals, coffee breaks, and an excursion, based on actual costs, of about 400 CHF)

MATCH-UP 2019 is the fifth workshop in the series of interdisciplinary and international workshops on matching under preferences.  The first in the series took place in Reykjavik in 2008, the second took place in
Budapest in 2012, the third in Glasgow in 2015, and the fourth in Boston in 2017.

Background:

Matching problems with preferences occur in widespread applications such as the assignment of school-leavers to universities, junior doctors to
hospitals, students to campus housing, children to schools, kidney
transplant patients to donors and so on. The common thread is that
individuals have preference lists over the possible outcomes and the task
is to find a matching of the participants that is in some sense optimal
with respect to these preferences.

The remit of this workshop is to explore matching problems with
preferences from the perspective of algorithms and complexity, discrete
mathematics, combinatorial optimization, game theory, mechanism design and economics, and thus a key objective is to bring together the research communities of the related areas.

List of topics:

The matching problems under consideration include, but are not limited to:
* two-sided matchings involving agents on both sides (e.g. college
  admissions, resident allocation, job markets, school choice, etc.)
* two-sided matchings involving agents and items (e.g. house allocation,
  course allocation, project allocation, assigning papers to reviewers,
  school choice, etc.)
* one-sided matchings (roommates problem, kidney exchanges, etc.)
* matching with payments (assignment game, etc.)

Invited speakers:
* Péter Biró, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
* Flip Klijn, Institute for Economic Analysis (IAE-CSIC), Barcelona, Spain
* Bahar Rastegari, University of Southampton, UK
* Ildi Schlotter, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary

MATCH-UP 2019 Submissions, Easychair Paper Submission link: https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=matchup2019

We call for original papers that have not previously been published in (or accepted to appear in) a conference proceedings or a journal. Papers can however be under review for a conference or journal elsewhere at the time of submission.
There is no page limit for submissions. The submission should contain within the first 12 pages a clear presentation of the merits of the paper, including a discussion of the paper's importance within the context of prior work and a description of the key technical and conceptual ideas used to achieve its main claims. Proofs that can enable the main mathematical claims of the paper to be verified must be provided. Material other than the first 12 pages will be read at the committee's discretion.
Only abstracts of accepted papers will appear in the workshop proceedings. This should allow the simultaneous or subsequent submission of contributed papers to other workshops, conferences or journals. If authors so choose, they may include a link to the full version of their paper (if published, e.g., on arXiv, REpeC, SSRN or on a personal web page) in the proceedings.

MATCH-UP 2019 Important dates:

• Paper submission deadline: 15 January 2019
• Notification: 22 February 2019
• Final version for proceedings: 15 March 2019
• Poster abstract submission deadline: 1 April 2019
• Workshop: Sunday 26 May (starting at 1400) to Wednesday 29 May (ending at 1830) with an excursion in the afternoon of Tuesday 28 May

MATCH-UP 2019 Organizing Committee:

• Péter Biró, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest, Hungary
• Tamás Fleiner,  Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary (CS Program Chair)
• Bettina Klaus, University of Lausanne, Switzerland (Chair)
• David Manlove, University of Glasgow, UK
• Marek Pycia, University of Zürich, Switzerland (ECON Program Chair)

MATCH-UP Steering Committee:

• Péter Biró, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
• Brian Dean, Clemson University, USA
• Bettina Klaus, University of Lausanne, Switzerland
• David Manlove, University of Glasgow, UK

Further information:

Web: http://www.optimalmatching.com/MATCHUP2019/

Why own your own (fashionable) clothes?

There's a rental market for fashionable women's clothes, Rent the Runway

The NY Times ran a feature story on it:
The Transformational Bliss of Borrowing Your Office Clothes
Rent the Runway’s Unlimited service saves working women something more valuable than money: their time.

"Though Rent the Runway was originally conceived as a solution for women who didn’t want to invest in party-wear they might use only once, Unlimited has become a strategic solution for professional women...

Vic Fuchs on desirable health insurance overhaul

In JAMA (gated:(.  Vic isn't optimistic about the political prospects of large scale reform of health insurance, but he has some thoughts about where we've gone wrong, and where we might try to go.

November 27, 2018
How to Make US Health Care More Equitable and Less Costly
Begin by Replacing Employment-Based Insurance
Victor R. Fuchs, PhD1
JAMA. 2018;320(20):2071-2072. doi:10.1001/jama.2018.16475

"With few exceptions, employment-based insurance is administered by health insurance companies. In consultation with employers, many of whom are self-insured, the insurance companies design benefit and premium schedules, negotiate reimbursement rates with hospitals and physicians, and approve or disapprove medical center, physician, and patient claims. There are only a few very large health insurance companies and many small ones, but none has been successful in restraining expenditures. The inability of large insurance companies to bargain more effectively with hospitals and physicians is a systemic problem.

"Most health care is delivered locally and, partly as a result of mergers and acquisitions, a predominant or premier hospital and affiliated physicians in a local market may have more bargaining power than even the largest insurance company. In some markets, a large insurance company is forced to pay more than twice the Medicare fee in part to retain a popular health care system on its plan.
...

"Box 1.

Characteristics of an Alternative Approach to Employment-Based Insurance

• Universal eligibility: Unlike employment-based insurance and many of the special government programs with sharply defined eligibility criteria, everyone would be insured for comprehensive health care, including hospital care, physician and other professional services, and prescription medications.
• Funding: This would come from a broad-based tax dedicated to health care.

...

Box 2.

Suggested Guidelines for an Alternative Approach to the Organization and Delivery of Medical Care

• Rely as much as possible on private-sector responsibilities and initiatives
• Limit the government’s role to broad decisions that do not require a large bureaucracy to implement
• Give consumers a choice of health care plans at annual enrollment. In contrast, giving insured patients a choice for individual hospitals and physicians leads to higher not lower expenditures. Choice should also include the right of individuals to buy more than the basic plan that would be paid for with their after-tax dollars.
• Provide for competition among health plans; this will be more valuable than competition among individual physicians.⁷ Competition should focus on service and quality of care.
• Develop reimbursement methods other than fee-for-service. Some economists maintain that risk-adjusted capitation payment to plans is the best way to achieve cost-effective care. Plans receiving capitation payment could offer productivity incentives to physicians if desirable."

Economic engineers as classical liberals

I received a book in the mail the other day called
Where Economics Went Wrong
Chicago's Abandonment of Classical Liberalism
by David Colander and Craig Freedman

If you just google the title without the subtitle, you find that there's an enormous body of opinion on where Economics went wrong.  But as the publisher states on the book's webpage (linked above) this book is about "How modern economics abandoned classical liberalism and lost its way."

My limited personal experience is that whenever my name appears in this kind of discussion, the authors disapprove of market design, or experiments, or both. So I was relieved to find myself missing from the first chapter, and surprised to find my work described instead in the final chapter, called "The Art and Craft of Economics: The Classical Liberal Attitude," which is organized around a brief set of profiles.

They write (p141) that they can't recommend any specific set of rules to become a good economist, "But what can be provided is a sketch of how we believe applied economics policy analysis should be done, or at least a rough version of that approach.  In this chapter we provide that guidance by sketching out the work of six economists whom we see as exemplifying the Classical Liberal method.  Our methodological suggestion to economists is to emulate them; consider their writings carefully and decide what aspect might apply legitimately to a variety of contexts."

and (p144): "The best way of conveying our conception of what is at least suggestive of a Classical Liberal stance is to present a handful of economists who, in our view, reflect this attitude. We have chosen six economists: Edward Leamer, Ariel Rubinstein, Alvin Roth, Paul Romer, Amartya Sen, and Dani Rodrik. ... We are not singling out any one of their specific practices as a model that should be followed assiduously. Instead, we are suggesting that they provide role models that might fruitfully be emulated by any cohort of young economists."

Avinatan Hassidim (and market design) and Katrina Ligett (and privacy) celebrated in Israel

"The Marker," the biggest economic newspaper in Israel, includes two researchers who will be familiar to many readers of this blog in their list of "40 under 40" .

Here's their writeup on Avinatan Hassidim, a computer scientist and market designer at Bar Ilan University:
אבינתן חסידים, 37
"Among other things, Hassidim led the development of an algorithm for embedding doctors in Israel in a residency internship in hospitals (instead of the lottery method) and in recruiting students for a master's degree in psychology for the study programs. Today he is working on developing a system for placing graduates of law studies in Israel in places of specialization."
***********

Here's his web page: Avinatan Hassidim
"My main research interests are auction theory, mechanism design, cake cutting, algorithmic game theory and approximation algorithms. My works have been used to devise the Israelli Medical Interns Lottery, the Israelli Psychology Match and to assign children to schools in various cities in Israel. "
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Earlier related posts:

Thursday, March 26, 2015

Redesigning the Israeli Medical Internship Match

Monday, July 14, 2014

Two new labor market matching mechanisms in Israel: for psychologists, and doctors

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And here's The Marker on computer scientist Katrina Ligett,
קתרינה ליגת,
who is singled out for her work on differential privacy (including how privacy can have counterintuitive consequences in equilibrium), among other things.


HT: Ran Shorrer
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Update: Itai Ashlagi points out to me that Ya'akov Babichenko of the Technion, who studies learning in games, is also on the list:

יעקב בביצ'נקו

Transplantation is one of the casualties of Venezuela's economic crisis

The Pulitzer Center reports:

The Waiting List: Organ Transplants in Venezuela

"The government-managed organ procurement system that facilitated organ donations for transplant patients stopped working in 2017, leaving thousands of patients with no option to receive a transplant.

"The country has seen the number of kidney transplants from deceased donors performed every year drop from a record of 240 in 2012,to only nine in 2017. Government funding for transplant activity has also been curtailed, making it harder for low-income patients to obtain a transplant. This procedure has now become a luxury only the wealthiest patients can afford. "