I'll post market design related news and items about repugnant markets. See also my Stanford profile. I have a general-interest book on market design: Who Gets What--and Why The subtitle is "The new economics of matchmaking and market design."
"Barrett co-wrote a 1998 law review article in which she distinguished the dilemmas Catholic judges might face in following church teachings against capital punishment, as well as what she called a more “absolute” doctrine banning abortion and euthanasia, which “take away innocent life.” (updated link: http://pragerfan.com/articles/Catholic_Judges_Capital_Cases.pdf )
...
"Eight of the 50 states and D.C. have permitted physician-assisted suicide, by statute or referendum. (In one, Montana, the state Supreme Court decreed it as a matter of state law, and legislators have tried, unsuccessfully so far, to overturn that ruling.)
"The Dutch government announced plans this week to allow doctors to end the lives of terminally ill children who are under 13 years old, a decision that is bound toinflame the debate over physician-assisted death.
"The Netherlands already allows doctors to facilitate the deaths of people who are over 12 or less than a year old as long as parents have given their consent.
"In a letter to parliament on Tuesday, the Dutch health minister, Hugo de Jonge, proposed expanding the law to include children between the ages of 1 and 12 who are dying and suffering.
“In a small number of cases, palliative care isn’t sufficient,” Mr. de Jonge wrote. “Because of that, some children suffer unnecessarily without any hope of improvement.”
"Canada, parts of Australia and Colombia have also legalized physician-assisted death for adults in certain cases.
...
"Eight states and Washington, D.C., have laws that allow mentally competent adults with a terminal illness and six months or less to live to obtain prescription medication that will hasten their deaths, according to Death With Dignity, an Oregon-based nonprofit that supports such laws."
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The first link above is to this Gallup Poll report:
Here's an announcement from Harvey Mysel, the founder of the Living Kidney Donors Network, about information available for people in need of a kidney transplant.
Overcome
the myth that you need to ASK someone to donate
Explain
that it’s all about sharing YOUR STORY and the importance
of having advocates share it too.
Having
Your Donor Find YOU! consists of 9 videos, each under 3 minutes with Supporting
Resources that helps you develop the campaign that’s outlined in the videos.
The program will soon be available in Spanish.
The NBER market design conference is on Zoom this year, today through Saturday, starting each day at noon Eastern time (9am Pacific time). I'll be speaking today at 2:45 EST (11:45 PST), about a new proposal for global kidney exchange using chains that begin overseas and end in the U.S., and about the background and history to this proposal, which initially met with considerable opposition.
2:45 pm
Mohammad Akbarpour, Stanford University Afshin Nikzad, University of Southern California Michael A. Rees, University of Toledo Medical Center Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University and NBER Global Kidney Chains
Here's an announcement I received from Ned Brooks, the founder of NKDO, National Kidney Donation Organization (formerly Donor to Donor). If I understand correctly, the different talks and interviews will be available at the link after first streaming in conference style, starting at 9am Pacific time. It includes a video of Ned interviewing me.
I'll update this post as necessary.
"This Wednesday, October 21st, NKDO,
National Kidney Donation Organization (formerly Donor to Donor) will release
the virtual National Kidney Donor Advocate Conference. This event is designed
to give volunteer living donor advocates the information they need to be more
effective advocates for living donation. Transplant industry experts across the
country will be presenting to you and delivering invaluable advice about their
area of expertise.
The conference will stream on our YouTube channel beginning at 12:00 noon
Eastern this Wednesday. The conference will be in segments and accessed through
the “playlist”, either streaming as one event or accessed at different points
in the conference. The link is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsoS-yavRQCVl7bwcjT2iCA ,
which will go live at noon Eastern on Wednesday.
- Have you ever wondered about the transplant surgeons who do the surgery? What
they are thinking and what they would like you to know? Dr. Joshua Mezrich,
transplant surgeon at UWMadison and author of “When Death Becomes Life: Notes
from a Transplant Surgeon” talks about his experience with organ donors and
recipients.
- Are you a living donor or a transplant recipient, or expecting to be one? Do
you remember the experience of being evaluated at the transplant center and
listening to all the information, and maybe feeling a little overwhelmed?
Living Donor Coordinator Marian Charlton and Patient Coordinator Janet Hiller
are two of the most respected voices in transplant, and they will tell you what
they want you to know to better understand the process. Anyone who goes through
this experience or has a loved one in transplant will want to see these
segments.
- Living kidney donors deserve all protections available, from reimbursement
for out-of-pocket costs and lost wages to medical coverage for medical issues
that may arise months or years after donation. Garet Hil, founder and CEO of
the National Kidney Registry, talks about the suite of protections available to
living donors through Donor Shield.
- Are you a kidney patient in need of a donor? Harvey Mysel, a two-time
kidney recipient and founder and CEO of the Living Kidney Donor Network, talks
about how to have your kidney donor find you.
- All kidney patients will benefit by watching nephrologist Dr. David Serur
talk about kidney disease and what every kidney patient and advocate needs to
know to be properly informed about how to deal with renal disease.
- Non-directed, or altruistic, donors are a rare breed, though we are trying to
change that. No one knows the brain of the non-directed donor better than
Professor Abigail Marsh, who has been studying non-directed donors for years.
If you want to better understand why someone will happily donate a kidney to a
stranger, this presentation will help answer that question. Prof. Marsh
is the author of “The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists,
Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between.”
- If you listen to podcasts, you are probably familiar with “Freakonomics”
and its creator, Stephen Dubner. It was the Freakonomics interview with Prof.
Roth that set Donor to Donor and NKDO into motion, and our interview with Mr.
Dubner will interest anyone who understands “the power of the pod”.
- Jim Gleason is a heart transplant recipient and the president of TRIO,
Transplant Recipients International Organization. Mr. Gleason is a motivational
speaker who asks the question, “Are you a cookie monster?”
Date: October 21, 2020 Time: 7:00am-8:00am Place: Webinar
Rishwain Visiting Speaker: Alvin E. Roth, PhD
Al Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor Emeritus of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard University. He shared the 2012 Nobel memorial prize in Economics. His research interests are in game theory, experimental economics, and market design. In the 1990’s he directed the redesign of the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) and currently is a member of the Board of Directors. He has been involved in the design and organization of kidney exchange, which helps incompatible patient-donor pairs find life-saving compatible kidneys for transplantation. He is on the Advisory Board of the National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC). His work on kidney transplantation led him to become interested in repugnant transactions, and more generally how markets, and bans on markets, gain or fail to gain social support.
The University of California, San Francisco School of Medicine is accredited by the Accreditation Council for Continuing Medical Education (ACCME) to provide continuing medical education for physicians. CME Course MGR21045
UCSF designates this live activity for a maximum of 43 AMA PRA Category 1 Credits™. Physicians should claim only the credit commensurate with the extent of their participation in the activity.
*The above credit is inclusive of credit for all Fiscal Year 2020-2021 Department of Surgery Grand Rounds.
Disclosure declaration – No one in a position to control the content of this activity has a relationship with an ACCME-defined commercial interest. Planners Wen Shen, MD, Julie Ann Sosa, MD, MA, Lygia Stewart, MD, and Ryutaro Hirose, MD, have stated that they have no relationships to disclose. Speaker Roth has stated that he has no relevant relationships to disclose.
This activity is supported by the Department of Surgery’s Howard Naffziger Endowment Fund.
Some people like to say things that other people think they shouldn't say. In the age of the internet, politeness can be (somewhat) automated, by banning certain words. But of course, words have contexts. Here's a funny story from the Guardian:
"Participants in a virtual paleontology session found themselves caught between a rock and a hard place last week, when a profanity filter prevented them from using certain words – such as bone, pubic, stream and, er, beaver – during an online conference.
"The US-based Society of Vertebrate Paleontology (SVP) held its annual meeting virtually this year due to the pandemic, but soon found its audience stifled when they tried to use particular words.
"Convey Services, which was was handling the conference, used a “naughty-word filter,” for the conference, outlawing a pre-selected list of words.
"“Words like ‘bone’, ‘pubic’, and ‘stream’ are frankly ridiculous to ban in a field where we regularly find pubic bones in streams,” said Brigid Christison, a master’s student in biology attending the event
...
"Some discovered bias in the algorithm, too. Jack Tseng, a vertebrate paleontologist from the University of Berkley pointed out that the filter had banned the common surname Wang but not Johnson – even though both are frequently used as slang words to describe a man’s genitals."
"Wang" is banned but not "Johnson" (both used as slangs). This western-centric filter erasing the surname of 90+ million Chinese but not <2 million people of European descent is unexpectedly on brand for 2020, ! My PhD advisor is X. **** by the way. "
"It is of concern that the US$70 billion infant formula industry has been actively exploiting concerns about COVID-19 to increase sales, in violation of the WHO International Code of Marketing of Breast-milk Substitutes (the Code)1 and national law in many countries.
"Globally, infants who are not exclusively breastfed are 14 times more likely to die than infants who are exclusively breastfed.2 Lockdown measures have diminished household income, and the UN World Food Programme estimates that by the end of 2020, 265 million people may be facing food insecurity,3, 4 making breastfeeding even more important. Public bodies that are independent of industry influence, including WHO5, 6 and the Royal College of Paediatrics and Child Health,7 have unanimously asserted that no evidence exists to suggest breastfeeding increases the risk of infants contracting COVID-19, and that skin-to-skin contact remains essential for newborn health and maternal health.
"By contrast, large manufacturers of breastmilk substitutes have inappropriately positioned themselves as sources of public health expertise, and suggested various unnecessary hygiene measures, the use of expressed breastmilk, and the separation of mothers from their babies. Such recommendations undermine breastfeeding and thus increase the risk of infant death. Baby Milk Action and the International Baby Food Action Network8 have documented numerous infringements of both the Code and laws associated with COVID-19."
by David Broockman, Joshua Kallay, Alexander Guerrero, Mark Budolfson, Nir Eyal, Nicholas P. Jewell , Monica Magalhaes, Jasjeet S. Sekhony
Abstract: A vaccine for COVID-19 is urgently needed. Several vaccine trial designs may significantly accelerate vaccine testing and approval, but also increase risks to human subjects. Concerns about whether the public would see such designs as ethically acceptable represent an important roadblock to their implementation, and the World Health Organization has called for consulting the public regarding them. Here we present results from a pre-registered cross-national survey (n = 5,920) of individuals in Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, New Zealand, South Africa, Singapore, the United Kingdom, and the United States. The survey asked respondents whether they would prefer scientists to conduct traditional trials or one of two accelerated designs: a challenge trial or a trial integrating a Phase II safety and immunogenicity trial into a larger Phase III efficacy trial. We find broad majorities prefer for scientists to conduct challenge trials (75%, 95% CI: 73-76%) and integrated trials (63%, 95% CI: 61-65%) over standard trials. Even as respondents acknowledged the risks, they perceived both accelerated trials as similarly ethical to standard trial designs, and large majorities characterized them as "probably" or "definitely ethical" (72%, 95% CI: 70-73% for challenge trials; 77%, 95% CI 75-78% for integrated trials). This high support is consistent across every geography and demographic subgroup we examined, including people of diverging political orientations and vulnerable populations such as the elderly, essential workers, and racial and ethnic minorities. These findings bolster the case for these accelerated designs and can help assuage concerns that they would undermine public trust in vaccines.
It turns out that frequent flier programs get a lot of their income from credit cards that reward purchases with miles. So they are one of airlines' big profit centers, that hasn't suffered so much from the slowdown in air travel.
"Even as the coronavirus pandemic has sapped the ability and desire to travel, miles programs are a winner for the airlines. In the first half of 2020, Delta’s passenger revenue fell 60 percent, but the cash the airline got from American Express’s purchases of miles for its customers fell less than 5 percent. ...
"United puts a different but no less illuminating set of words and numbers to our mile lust. It goes into granular detail in its pitch about its ability to “nimbly” control its mile redemption costs on “peak days.” That explains why it’s so hard to use your miles to get a great deal during school vacations, Mardi Gras or other occasions."
"In essence, miles are sold to credit card companies who offer them as part of their reward programs to their customers. The revenues earned from selling the miles are much higher than the cost of any flight travel redeemed by passengers,
...
"In a June filing, United Airlines valued their MileagePlus loyalty program at $21.9 billion which is around double the total market capitalization of the company itself."
In my limited experience (but not just limited to my own experience) Nobel prizewinners are often asked about how they were notified of the fact that they won the prize, and by whom. Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson certainly have one of the best stories to answer that question, and millions of people have already viewed the video from the Milgroms' Nest doorbell camera, as Bob tried to arouse Paul and give him the news.
The Nest doorbell broadcast also to Paul's wife Eva, who was visiting family in Stockholm, and who was alerted at the same time he was. Here's the view from the Swedish press (including a video of the video playing on her laptop...):
"AS: We just spoke with Paul Milgrom and he said that he heard the news by you walking across the street and ringing his doorbell.
RW: Well that’s right because he had turned his phone off for the … to get a good night’s sleep, and so somebody had to wake him, and he lives across the street so I just walked over and knocked on the door. I roused him.
AS: I think … I think this must be a first in the history of the Nobel Prize.
RW: Yes, how many times does … first to have a knock on the door, which sounds like something from the 19th century, and secondly that in fact the two of us live only, what, 40 m apart."
*****************
It turns out that Bob Wilson went to Lincoln High School in Nebraska (and that you can never escape your high school):
"The Lincoln High School wall of distinguished alumni — the one with photos lining the school's main hallway — will need to make room for another photo.
"Robert Wilson, who graduated from Lincoln High in 1955, left for Harvard on a prestigious scholarship and ultimately landed at Stanford, won the Nobel Prize in economics Monday."
The day of the prize, the NY Times story by Jeanna Smialek got this fairly coherent quote from me before dawn:
“They haven’t just profoundly changed the way we understand auctions — they have changed how things are auctioned,” said Alvin E. Roth, a Nobel laureate himself who was one of Mr. Wilson’s doctoral students.
***********
Joshua Gans, one of Paul's students, republished the remarks he had made on the occasion of Paul's 65th birthday (long ago...)
"There are so many things one could say about Paul but it turned out that I said what I wanted to say back in 2013 at a conference in his honor to celebrate his 65th Birthday."
*************
Bob's longtime colleague (and my one time housemate when we were grad students) David Kreps has a lovely essay, which includes this quote from Hugo Sonnenschein:
"Great economists write great papers. But the greatest economists are those who found new schools of thought."
"impact on the discipline of economics, in my opinion, puts him in the company of giants such asKen ArrowandPaul Samuelson: Bob is, as much as anyone, the founder of the “School of Economic Theory as Engineering.” Both in his own work, but even more through his influence on his students and colleagues, Bob has brought economic theory to the real world, both as a mechanism for understanding “how things work” and then in the design of better institutions. The Nobel Prize announced today is for his and Paul’s work on the design of complex auctions, such as the spectrum auctions, which is a prime example of economic theory as engineering. But, in addition:
Bob himself has taken the theory of nonlinear pricing to practical applications in electricity markets.
His student, Nobel Laureate Al Roth, brought matching-markets theory to the design of assignment algorithms, assigning MDs to internships, and to kidney exchange “markets.”
His student, Nobel Laureate Bengt Holmstrom, brought incentive theory to practical considerations in the design of pay-for-performance systems (some in collaboration with Milgrom) and, more recently, to issues in financial institutions.
His student and co-Nobel Laureate Paul Milgrom, besides his work on auction design, and in collaboration with our colleague John Roberts, brought economic theory to bear on the design and management of complex organizations (which, for my money, is even more important than his pathbreaking work on auctions; Paul could have been given the Nobel for any of several different topics, and his work on “the modern corporation” happens to be my personal favorite).
And it continues: A third generation — students of Paul, Bengt, and Al, as well as others who have embraced this style of work and so became “adopted” members of Bob’s tribe — are building an intellectual edifice that mixes superb theory with real-world insight and applicability."
***************
Did you know that Paul has a company? Here's the tribute on the Auctionomics website:
Two recent papers discuss different issues concerning drug delivery to those in need, where the obstacles may be individual reluctance to take the drug (antibiotics) or lack of social support for the drug program (for vaccines):
Isabelle Rao, Adir Shaham, Amir Yavneh, Dor Kahana, Itai Ashlagi, Margaret L. Brandeau & Dan Yamin, Health Care Management Science (2020), 05 October 2020
Abstract: Low adherence to prescribed medications causes substantial health and economic burden. We analyzed primary data from electronic medical records of 250,000 random patients from Israel’s Maccabi Healthcare services from 2007 to 2017 to predict whether a patient will purchase a prescribed antibiotic. We developed a decision model to evaluate whether an intervention to improve purchasing adherence is warranted for the patient, considering the cost of the intervention and the cost of non-adherence. The best performing prediction model achieved an average area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.684, with 82% accuracy in detecting individuals who had less than 50% chance of purchasing a prescribed drug. Using the decision model, an adherence intervention targeted to patients whose predicted purchasing probability is below a specified threshold can increase the number of prescriptions filled while generating significant savings compared to no intervention – on the order of 6.4% savings and 4.0% more prescriptions filled for our dataset. We conclude that analysis of large-scale patient data from electronic medical records can help predict the probability that a patient will purchase a prescribed antibiotic and can provide real-time predictions to physicians, who can then counsel the patient about medication importance. More broadly, in-depth analysis of patient-level data can help shape the next generation of personalized interventions.
Harald Schmidt, Parag Pathak, Tayfun Sönmez, and M Utku Ünver, BMJ 2020; 371 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.m3795 (Published 05 October 2020)
"When compared with previous pandemics covid-19 is unique, not only in its substantial economic impact but in exposing the consequences of historical and ongoing structural disadvantages among minority groups,123 particularly in the US. Minorities have experienced far higher rates of unemployment, infections, hospital admissions, and deaths.23456 So, as safe and effective vaccines become likely but in limited supply, should policy makers prioritize worse-off minorities in their allocation of stocks?
"Traditional allocation focuses on maximizing overall benefits, with less regard to how these benefits are distributed among different population groups. Giving more vaccines to disadvantaged groups who are expected to live less long would generally be deemed undesirable. However, the current debate around covid-19 vaccines indicates a profound reorientation in what worse-off population groups are owed."
Could this be the best Nobel pairing ever? (It's certainly a great one, and one of the best things to come out of 2020 so far...) Here's the announcement:
"The 2020 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel has been awarded to Paul R. Milgrom and Robert B. Wilson “for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats" https://www.nobelprize.org/
I've known Paul at least since 1978, when he attended a course I taught while on leave at Stanford, on Axiomatic Models of Bargaining. Bob advised both of our dissertations, although not at the same time.
Bob is a legendary advisor of grad students. Paul is now the third of Bob's students to win a Nobel. So Bob is well established as the patriarch of a Nobel dynasty.
Bob Wilson's Nobel dynasty (to date): Wilson (with Milgrom) 2020, and Bob's students Roth (with Shapley) 2012, Holmstrom (with Hart) 2016, and Milgrom (with Wilson) 2020
It looks like we should check back in 2024...
Here's another picture, from another celebration:
Bob Wilson being celebrated for the 2017 CME MSRI prize, by his students Al Roth, Paul Milgrom, and Bengt Holmstrom.
I've often blogged about both Milgrom and Wilson, separately and together.
Here's a paragraph I wrote about Bob's work in our (only) joint paper, in which we interviewed each other:
Alvin E. Roth and Robert B. Wilson Journal of Economic Perspectives—Volume 33, Number 3—Summer 2019—Pages 118–143
"Wilson (1977) introduced the model of common-value auctions (sometimes called the “mineral rights model”). The model and its equilibrium initiated a large body of theoretical, experimental, and applied work. One important insight from this model is that winning an auction contains “bad” news, since it implies in equilibrium that the winner’s estimate is the highest. In equilibrium, rational bidders fully account for this, but the paper raises the empirical question of the extent to which actual bidders are able to fully discount for the fact that, if they win the auction, they likely overestimated the value of winning. Thus, Wilson’s work initiated a new research program on the winner’s curse, involving systematic overbidding compared to equilibrium, sometimes involving losses to the winning bidder. The private-value model of Vickrey (1961) and the common-value model of Wilson (1977) together form the basis of much of modern auction theory and practice, since most auctions
have elements of both private and common value."
Right after that, Bob and I talked about important influences on our work. Bob included this:
"I was deeply affected in the early 1990s by working with Paul Milgrom on design of the FCC spectrum auctions. I marveled at his insights and creativity in constructing rules for a “simultaneous ascending auction” that would have good prospects of yielding an approximately efficient outcome in an environment afflicted with strong complementarities, dispersed private information about market fundamentals, and substantial market power."
To which I replied:
" I was also much influenced by Paul when we developed and co-taught what may have been the first courses in market design, in 2000 and again in 2001 when he was on leave at Harvard and MIT."
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Here's an old snapshot:
Bob Wilson and Paul Milgrom in 2006
There's a rabbinical literature about the relationships between students and teachers. It often comes to mind when I think about how lucky I have been to have the students I've had. But today I'm reminded of my luck in having Bob Wilson as my teacher and friend, and Paul as my friend and colleague.
"Joshua ben Perahiah used to say: provide yourself a teacher and acquire yourself a friend. Judge everyone favorably." (Pirkei Avot, chapt 1 verse 6)
Here's how I recalled Bob as a teacher, in an autobiographical essay of a kind that they will each now be asked to write:
"Bob Wilson agreed to be my advisor and rescued me from having what looked to be a very short academic career after I failed one of my Ph.D. qualifying exams. He was on sabbatical that year, but met with me regularly once a week for an hour. In memory, our meetings followed a kind of script: I would spend a while explaining to him why I hadn’t made progress that week, and then he would spend a while telling me not to be discouraged. Then I would describe some roadblock to further progress, and he would, as we finished our meeting, recommend a paper for me to read. Because his recommendations had always been very much on target, I would go straight from his office to the library and start to read the paper. As I did, I would think, this time Bob made a mistake, this paper has nothing to do with my problem. But then, somewhere in the middle of the paper would be a lemma or remark that helped me get around that roadblock …"
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And here's a final picture from Stockholm in 2012, of me and Emilie and Paul and Eva, with Parag Pathak (one of Bob's academic grandchildren) in the background.
“for improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats”
...
“This year’s Laureates in Economic Sciences started out with fundamental theory and later used their results in practical applications, which have spread globally. Their discoveries are of great benefit to society,” says Peter Fredriksson, chair of the Prize Committee." Learn more in the popular information
"Every day, auctions distribute astronomical values between buyers and sellers. This year’s Laureates, Paul Milgrom and Robert Wilson, have improved auction theory and invented new auction formats, benefitting sellers, buyers and taxpayers around the world." Read the scientific background
Peter Coles and I started this blog in September 2008, to help alert students in our market design class at Harvard that market design was everywhere. Sometime recently I passed the 5000 posts mark. It turns out I like to blog about market design, broadly construed. And I'm still teaching market design.
The modal tag on my posts turns out to be repugnance, as I've been fascinated by trying to understand which kinds of transactions and markets get social support and which don't. Various design efforts that I've been involved in also have been the subject of multiple posts, with tags like residents and fellows, school choice, and kidney exchange.
Some of my favorite posts (from an incomplete series, whenever I manage to get a picture) commemorate dissertation defences. And under a variety of tags (such as market designers) I like to mark when students and colleagues are celebrated or win a prize. (I look forward to writing more of those.)
Less fun is the growing number of posts tagged RIP, in which I note the passing of people with whom I've intersected, mostly but not always in a market design connection.
In the first years of the blog I allowed comments, but after I got involved in kidney exchange, I had to regularly erase comments--typically sprinkled each night among old posts--that offered to buy kidneys, at unrealistically high prices, phishing for fools. So at some point I shut down comments, noted in this post: August 25, 2018 No comment(s)
Here are ten posts from the last five years that caught my eye as I scrolled through them before giving up on the clunky scrolling device:
Posts
