Summer School for Computational and Experimental Economics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, June 12-19, 2022

 Here's the announcement (more at the links):

Summer School for Computational and Experimental Economics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain, June 12-19, 2022

Graduate students and young faculty interested in computational and experimental economics are invited to attend this intensive 7-day summer school (which will include the two-day Workshop on Computational and Experimental Economics on June 13-14, 2022).

The summer school will be held from June 12 to June 19 at Beslab of Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain. The summer school includes the two-day Workshop on Computational and Experimental Economics on June 13-14, 2022.

The deadline for applications is April 15, 2022.

Organizers

• Herbert Dawid (Bielefeld University)
• John Ledyard (Caltech)
• Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA-UPF, and BSE)
• Yaroslav Rosokha  (Purdue University)

Guest lecturer

• John Duffy (University of Californina, Irvine)

Conference on Economic Design, University of Padova, 9-11 June 2022

 Conference on Economic Design, University of Padova,    9-11 June 2022

Paper Submission Deadline: 15 March 2022

"The 12th Conference on Economic Design will be held  in person at the Departement of Economics and Management  of the  University of Padova in Italy on 9-11 June 2022. The conference  welcomes paper submissions from many different fields such as economics, political science, computer science and operation research. Subjects include but are not limited to auctions, matching, voting, social choice,  coalition formation, price formation, contest, fair division, contract, bargaining, negotiation, market design implementation, market design experiments, public goods experiments, behavioural mechanism design, health policy, robust mechanism design, matching in dynamic environments, etc. 

Keynote speakers: Oliver Tercieux, Vasiliki Skreta, Scott Duke Kominers.

K

Kidney transplant controversies on World Kidney Day

 Yesterday, March 10 was World Kidney Day, whose theme was "Kidney health for all."

I couldn't help noticing that reports in honor of WKD reflect some of the considerable controversy that exists about kidney transplants.

Here are two with opposite points of view on increasing access to kidney transplants, with special attention to kidney exchange.

First, from Abu Dhabi:

World Kidney Day: SEHA Kidney Care leads the way in ensuring kidney health for all

"A key area that SKC is spearheading is investing in opportunities to increase transplant activities, for patients locally and further afield.  SEHA’s recent collaborations with international organizations and the Department of Health – Abu Dhabi have ensured that it is prepared for an influx in transplant volumes, with an increased deceased donor activity from 3 donors in 2017 to 39 donors in 2021, and more opportunities for live donation with the start of a paired kidney exchange program in partnership with Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation. Through these partnerships, kidney transplants, often resulting in enhanced quality of life, are now a viable option for many patients here in the UAE. SEHA’s Transplant Program has performed more than 52 pediatric kidney transplants and almost 393 transplants in total since its inception.

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

And here, from the Pakistani newspaper Dawn, is an editorial that bemoans the prevalence of black market kidney transplants in Pakistan, and worries that increasing access to  kidney exchange will only increase the black market (as opposed to giving patients a safe and legal alternative to the black market). This is an opinion that seems to underlie the policies of a number of international transplant organizations.

Swap Transplants

"IRONICALLY, the Punjab government’s recent step in the effort to stop organ trafficking may well end up providing a shot in the arm to the illegal transplant racket. At a meeting chaired by the Punjab health minister, the provincial government has given its approval to a swap transplant plan which expands the living donor pool beyond immediate family members.

...

"Organ swap transplants, or paired exchanges, work by matching a recipient-donor pair that is medically incompatible, with another pair in a similar predicament. An organ ‘swap’ can then take place between the two pairs. However, these are only the bare bones of the procedure. It must be carried out according to strict ethical and clinical guidelines if it is not to open the floodgates for illegal transplants. Among these is the requirement that each recipient-donor pair must meet the eligibility criteria laid out in the law.

...

"Thus, while paired exchanges are an accepted method of addressing donor-recipient incompatibility, the level of oversight mechanisms needed to prevent abuse are daunting — even more so in an unequal society riddled with corruption. The first paired kidney exchange in Pakistan was performed in 2015 at the Sindh Institute of Urology and Transplantation in Karachi; only seven more have taken place since then — all at SIUT — partly because of the extreme diligence that the process calls for. The troubling fact is that most illegal transplants take place in Punjab; some were found to have been carried out surreptitiously in KP and Azad Kashmir by doctors from Punjab. The situation in recent years had improved considerably after several organ trafficking gangs were busted, again mostly in Punjab. Does the province have a system in place to ensure that unethical individuals do not use the organ swap programme as a cover for illegal transplants?"

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

And here's a recent BBC video, "Kidneys for Sale?" on the controversy about compensation for donors. I just saw it yesterday (HT David Klinowski) but was produced earlier this year. A number of people are interviewed, and Sally Satel makes the point that increasing access to legal, safe kidney transplants is a way of competing with and reducing the prevalence of black markets.

David Bennet Sr., who lived for two months with a transplanted pig heart, RIP

 Xenotransplants from pigs are probably here to stay, but are also not quite here yet, and may not be for some time.

Yesterday's NY Times has the story:

Patient in Groundbreaking Heart Transplant Dies. David Bennett Sr. had received a heart from a genetically modified pig, a procedure that may yet offer hope to millions of Americans needing transplants.  By Roni Caryn Rabin, March 9, 2022

"The first person to have his failing heart replaced with that of a genetically altered pig in a groundbreaking operation died Tuesday afternoon at the University of Maryland Medical Center, two months after the transplant surgery.

...

"Mr. Bennett’s transplant was initially deemed successful. It is still considered a significant step forward, because the pig’s heart was not immediately rejected and continued to function for well over a month, passing a critical milestone for transplant patients.

**********

The Times story also made mention of the complicated discussion about organ donation, in this case having to do with the recipient's checkered history, as discussed in this earlier story from the Washington Post:

The ethics of a second chance: Pig heart transplant recipient stabbed a man seven times years ago By Lizzie Johnson and William Wan, January 13, 2022

**********

And while we're thinking of ethical objections, don't forget the pig, or the gene manipulation involved in raising a suitable pig. Here's a rundown from the BBC:

Three ethical issues around pig heart transplants By Jack Hunter, 11 January, 2022

Singapore court rules that only Parliament can approve gay sex

 The NY Times has the story, about a colonial era Singapore law that isn't presently leading to prosecutions, but remains on the books:

Singapore’s Latest Ruling on Gay Sex Is ‘Cold Comfort,’ Activists Say. Plaintiffs had hoped the Court of Appeal would overturn the colonial-era law. Instead, the top court said it was not “an architect of social policy” and that any change was up to Parliament.  By Richard C. Paddock

"The Singapore Court of Appeal, the country’s top court, declined Monday to overturn a law criminalizing gay sex, ruling that three men who brought challenges did not have legal standing because the government has pledged not to enforce the colonial-era law.

"Gay rights advocates had sought to overturn the law, known as Section 377A, arguing that it stigmatizes gay men and promotes discrimination. The law, enacted in 1938 during British rule, does not apply to women."

School Choice by Atila Abdulkadiroglu & Tommy Andersson

Here's a big new survey on school choice theory and practice:

School Choice  by Atila Abdulkadiroglu & Tommy Andersson, NBER working paper 29822

DOI 10.3386/w29822 ISSUE DATE March 2022 (forthcoming in the Handbook of the Economics of Education vol. 6).

Abstract: School districts in the US and around the world are increasingly moving away from traditional neighborhood school assignment, in which pupils attend closest schools to their homes. Instead, they allow families to choose from schools within district boundaries. This creates a market with parental demand over publicly-supplied school seats. More frequently than ever, this market for school seats is cleared via market design solutions grounded in recent advances in matching and mechanism design theory. The literature on school choice is reviewed with emphasis placed on the trade-offs among policy objectives and best practices in the design of admissions processes. It is concluded with a brief discussion about how data generated by assignment algorithms can be used to answer contemporary empirical questions about school effectiveness and policy interventions.

Some paragraphs from the conclusions:

"Parental choice over public schools has become a major part of education reform around the world. In the US alone, the proportion of the largest 100 schools districts with parental choice over public schools doubled between 2000 and 2016 (Whitehurst, 2017). Currently, parents in Belgium, England, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Sweden, Wales, and Northern Ireland have the right to or must choose a public or a private school at the primary, lower and upper secondary levels for their children. In fact, for the upper secondary level, only six European countries (Denmark, Greece, France, Cyprus, Malta and Turkey) do not have any type of school choice program and, instead, assign students to schools based on their place of residence (European Commission, 2020). Consequently, the demand for rigorous solutions for student assignment has been growing. Each school-choice program comes with its own institutional and political constraints, which opens the door for further research. In fact, most of the theoretical literature on school choice is motivated by real-life problems identified in the field.

...

"This chapter has focused on student assignment in school choice by taking preferences and priorities as exogenous. An equally important question concerns the welfare consequences of school choice. In particular, the models in the literature ignore probably one of the most important aspects of school choice: access to a school is determined not only by the ability to list the school in the application form, but also by admissions policies, such as neighborhood priority, and by means for traveling to the school. This makes both preferences and priorities endogenous. While wealthy families can choose affluent neighborhoods with good schools before going through the formal choice process, low income families are shut out of such residential choice. The matching models of school choice regularly ignore housing markets, families’ endogenous housing decisions and their impact on welfare. Recent advances in this direction have been made by studying school choice with competitive housing markets and a continuum of students. For example, in a fairly general model, Grigoryan (2021) offers a convincing theoretical argument in favor of school choice by showing that low income families are better-off under deferred acceptance in comparison to solely residence-based school assignment even when applicants are granted neighborhood priorities in deferred acceptance. Much work is still to be done both theoretically and empirically on that frontier.

...

" data generated by assignment algorithms can be used to answer most pressing empirical questions on school effectiveness and policy interventions.29 Seats in a school choice program are rationed by admissions priorities, such as neighborhood priority for pupils living within a certain distance from school, lotteries, student rankings at the school which may be based on an entrance examination, academic records, interviews and other criteria. Such rationing creates quasi-experimental variation in school assignment at unprecedented levels that can be used for credible evaluation of individual schools and of school reform models, such as charters, small schools, and voucher programs. A recent literature focuses on research design with data from centralized admissions and develops econometric techniques."

Updated citation: Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Tommy Andersson, Chapter 3 - School choice, Editor(s): Eric A. Hanushek, Stephen Machin, Ludger Woessmann, Handbook of the Economics of Education, Elsevier, Volume 6, 2023, Pages 135-185,

Sex Work: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

Laughing through the tears about the plight of sex workers, and the complicated and often ridiculous legal environment. (He notes that there are no Hallmark cards with which a sex worker can thank her arresting officer.)

 

Kidneys on Kilimanjaro

 The Washington Post has the story

A group of organ donors is climbing Mount Kilimanjaro this week. They each have one kidney.  By Cathy Free

"“We thought, ‘How about if we use this climb to raise awareness and show everyone that you can still lead a healthy and active life if you donate a kidney?’ ” said McLaughlin, a former college soccer coach who lives in Seattle.

“It didn’t take long before we had 22 kidney donors signed up to make the trip,” he said.

"The group hopes the trek, which will begin Friday, will help dispel the notion that donors can’t live full lives with one kidney, said Kidney Donor Athletes founder Tracey Hulick, who donated a kidney to a stranger in May 2017.

...

"The group — which named its adventure the One Kidney Climb — hopes to reach Kilimanjaro’s 19,341-foot volcanic summit at sunrise on March 10, World Kidney Day."

Antibiotic discovery and development (from caves, to clinical trials to clinics)

 The development of antibiotics is in the hands of big pharmaceutical companies, which can manage and afford large scale clinical trials of new candidates.

But antibiotics don't have to be discovered in the biochemistry lab. Nature is red in tooth and claw at the microscopic level as well as for larger living beings, and everyone out there has to fight off bacteria. So there are lots of natural anti-bacterial chemicals yet to be discovered (just as penicillin derives from a mold). And so spelunking naturalists have opportunities to find new micro-organisms with their own anti-microbial defenses. But then the particularly difficult economics of antibiotic development come into play.

Here's an old story about that from Popular Science:

Scientists are spelunking for cave gunk to fight superbugs. Deep in caverns around the world, bacteria are laboring to make antibiotics we can discover and use for ourselves. BY KATE BAGGALEY

“You start out with 10,000 candidate chemicals, and 12 years and a billion dollars later you might have one,” Lavoie says. “But you’ve got to have a place to start, so the more you find the better off you are.”

***********

Here's a recent article exploring some of Medicare's opportunities to provide advance market commitments to pharma companies developing antibiotics.

Gandhi N, Schulman KA. New Medicare Technology Add-On Payment Could Be Used As A Market Support Mechanism To Accelerate Antibiotic Innovation. Health Aff (Millwood). 2021 Dec;40(12):1926-1934. doi: 10.1377/hlthaff.2021.00062. PMID: 34871069.

Abstract: Despite growing antibiotic resistance, the clinical drug development pipeline for antibiotics has been sparse largely because of an unsustainable business model. We illustrate three models to accelerate antibiotic development, using Medicare new technology add-on payments as a market support mechanism. The first two models subsidize drug development for Medicare beneficiaries, and the third model applies a payment for every patient with a resistant infection to essentially create a funding pool. We found that the reimbursement required to sustain research and development would range from $637 to $121,365, depending on the payment model and the incidence of the resistant infection in question. With a $300 million public research subsidy, the payment for an antibiotic would drop to between $273 and $10,396 per course. Our market support model could increase the likelihood of attracting private investment for antibiotic development

"To make the economics of the antibiotic market even more challenging, intravenous antibiotics are reimbursed as part of a fixed Medicare Severity Diagnosis-Related Group (MS-DRG) payment under the inpatient prospective payment system of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). This model of a fixed payment per patient directly incentivizes hospitals to prescribe older, lower-cost antibiotics over more expensive novel therapies.9 This situation for antibiotic therapies is in stark contrast to the oncology market, where hospitals earn a margin above the list price of outpatient oncology drugs.10 The oncology model accelerates the adoption of novel products, which suggests that manufacturers do respond to financial incentives in the market.

...

"A market support mechanism that is receiving increasing attention is applying existing CMS authority for new technology add-on payments (NTAP) to hospital payment for novel antibiotics and antifungal therapies. Under the NTAP model, hospitals receive a separate payment for administration of designated therapies in addition to the underlying MS-DRG payment. This program was developed to support payment for expensive new medical devices and is intended to be time limited while CMS recalculates the underlying MS-DRG payment to include the cost of the new technology. This technology carve-out model has existed since at least 2001, but new eligibility criteria may make it easier for antibiotics to qualify for it.

...

"In this article we assess the opportunity to evolve the NTAP program into a true market support mechanism (NTAP-MS), assessing how different payment models that build on the NTAP-MS approach affect incentives for antibiotic development."

Penn celebrates Judd Kessler (with an endowed chair)

 Here's the announcement:

 Judd B. Kessler: Howard Marks Endowed Associate Professor

"Judd B. Kessler has been named the inaugural Howard Marks Associate Professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. The associate professorship, which has been funded by Howard S. Marks, W’67, is dedicated to Wharton faculty in the field of behavioral economics and behavioral investing.

"Dr. Kessler, a faculty member in Wharton’s business economics and public policy department, joined the school in 2011. His research uses a combination of laboratory and field experiments to answer questions in public economics, behavioral economics, and market design. Dr. Kessler investigates the economic and psychological forces that motivate individuals to contribute to the public good, with applications including organ donation, worker effort, and charitable giving. He was awarded the Vernon L. Smith Ascending Scholar Prize in 2021, and his research has appeared in journals including the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and Management Science.

“As a scholar and specialist in experimental economics and market design innovation, Judd embodies Wharton’s commitment to preparing the next generation of great business leaders with the tools to translate theory into practice and drive meaningful change,” said Wharton School Dean Erika James."

Matt Jackson wins the BBVA Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics

 The BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Award in Economics, Finance and Management has gone in this fourteenth edition to Matthew O. Jackson “for his pioneering work on illuminating the role of networks in economic and social life.”

2 March, 2022

"Jackson, a Professor of Economics at Stanford University, “recognized the importance of networks for economics over 25 years ago,” says the award citation, in a theoretical paper that showed “how to predict which networks will form depending on the costs and benefits of forming links, and how these networks differ from the optimal ones.” His work, it continues, “has inspired an enormous literature, both theoretical and empirical, in which networks play an essential role in helping us understand financial markets, economic development, and a host of other economic phenomena.”

"In 1996, Matthew Jackson and Asher Wolinsky published “A Strategic Model of Social and Economic Networks,” in the Journal of Economic Theory, a paper regarded today as the launch pad for all subsequent literature on the social network approach or theory in economic analysis. In it, the authors define a network as a set of agents (people, but also firms, institutions and markets) connected by links, and modelled the characteristics such networks must exhibit in order to be efficient, to the extent that their component agents are satisfied and the network remains stable.

“Most of our interactions a human beings are social,” explained the new laureate in an interview shortly after hearing of the award. “We depend on other people for information, connections, opportunities, and also for norms of behavior. So the networks we are embedded in become very important determinants of our behavior and outcomes. In that first paper we tried to build the most basic model we could imagine about how people form relationships, whether they be business contacts, friendships, alliances or of any other sort.”

Here's a 13 minute video that starts with an announcement of the prize (by Eric Maskin). An interview with Matt begins around minute 4.

Open letter of support for Ukraine from 163 Nobel Laureates

 Nobel Laureate Support for Ukraine

Nobel Letter    English  |  Ukrainian  |  Russian

Nobel signatories

Personal statement from the Dalai Lama
  

Personal statement from President Jimmy Carter

Personal statement from President Barack Obama

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

Nobel prizewinners are asked to sign many letters. This one was pretty easy, and garnered lots of support.  

Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field By Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth

 Mechanisms designed to elicit truthful reporting in the laboratory sometimes are cumbersome to administer and difficult to explain.  Here's a paper that finds that simple attempts to incentivize truthful reporting (including allowing other participants to hear each report, as well as small payments for reports that conform to community consensus) can help eliminate incentives to boost family and friends, when reports concern who could make most effective use of a cash grant.

Targeting High Ability Entrepreneurs Using Community Information: Mechanism Design in the Field By Reshmaan Hussam, Natalia Rigol, and Benjamin N. Roth   American Economic Review 2022, 112(3): 861–898   https://doi.org/10.1257/aer.20200751

Abstract: "Identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs in low-income countries remains a challenge due to a scarcity of verifiable information. With a cash grant experiment in India we demonstrate that community knowledge can help target high-growth microentrepreneurs; while the average marginal return to capital in our sample is 9.4 percent per month, microentrepreneurs reported in the top third of the community are estimated to have marginal returns to capital between 24 percent and 30 percent per month. Further we find evidence that community members distort their predictions when they can influence the distribution of resources. Finally, we demonstrate that simple mechanisms can realign incentives for truthful reporting."

"Not everyone has what it takes to be a successful entrepreneur. Numerous experimental studies of microentrepreneurs in the developing world find widely heterogeneous returns to cash and credit.1  Yet governments, lenders, and nongovernmental organizations often lack hard information with which to target resources to high-growth entrepreneurs.

...

"In this paper we argue that harnessing community information directly from a microentrepreneur’s peers may provide a viable approach to identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs.

"Our argument has three parts. First, we demonstrate that entrepreneurs in peri-urban Maharashtra have high quality information about one another along a variety of dimensions including marginal returns to capital. Their information is valuable for identifying high-growth microentrepreneurs even after controlling for a wide range of demographic and business characteristics. Second we demonstrate that entrepreneurs manipulate their reports to favor themselves, their friends, and their family when the distribution of resources is at stake. Finally we identify several simple techniques motivated by mechanism design that effectively realign incentives for accuracy.

...

"Our first main finding is that community members can identify high-return entrepreneurs. While the average marginal return to the grant was about 9.4 percent per month, our point estimates of the marginal returns to capital of entrepreneurs ranked in the top third range from 24 percent to 30 percent. Had we distributed our grants using community reports instead of random assignment, we would have roughly tripled the total return on our investment.

...

"Our second main finding is that strategic misreporting is a first-order concern when eliciting community information. By random assignment, half of respondents were told that their reports would be used only for research purposes (the “no stakes” treatment) and the other half were told that their reports would be used to allocate US$100 grants to members of their community (the “high stakes” treatment). The correlation between community reports and true outcomes is on average 27 percent to 35 percent lower when allocation of resources is at stake, which significantly lowers the value of peer elicitation.

...

"Our third main finding is that methods grounded in mechanism design theory can be used to design a peer-elicitation environment in which truth telling is incentive compatible. Monetary payments and public reporting do little to improve the accuracy of self-reports. But payments substantially increase the predictive power of reports that entrepreneurs make about other group members. We provide direct evidence that monetary payments reduce the likelihood that respondents favor their family members or their close friends. Finally, we find that public reporting increases the predictive accuracy of reports about others when there are no stakes, but has no effect in a high stakes setting. This nuanced finding may reflect a heterogeneous treatment effect, or a noisily estimated impact of observability on the quality of reports."

Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis

 The recently released report of the Stanford-Lancet Commission on the North American Opioid Crisis made recommendations in 7 domains:

Domain 1: The North American opioid crisis as a case study in multi-system regulatory failure

Domain 2: Opioids' dual nature as a benefit and a risk to health

Domain 3: Building integrated, well-supported, enduring systems for the care of substance use disorders

Domain 4: Maximizing the benefit and minimizing the adverse effects of criminal justice system involvement with people who are addicted to opioids

Domain 5: Creating healthy environments that can yield long-term declines in the incidence of addiction 

Domain 6: Stimulating innovation in the response to addiction

Domain 7: Preventing opioid crises beyond North America

 

2022 NSF/CEME Decentralization Conference on Mechanism Design, call for papers

 2022 NSF/CEME Decentralization Conference 

 The Scope of Mechanism Design:  From Bespoke Mechanisms to General Insights

 

Multiple Locations  + Virtual Conference April 22-23, 2022

 Stanford University  Columbia University, University of Michigan, Plus one additional location.

Mechanism design provides a mathematical framework for deriving the implications of information and incentive constraints given an environment and an objective function.  The framework has also proven useful for analyzing institutions at a variety of scales from free markets to organ markets. The NSF/CEME Decentralization Conference provides an opportunity for deep, technical  discussions on theoretical, technical and practical aspects of mechanisms.  

The 2022 Decentralization Conference invites papers that speak to the scope of mechanism design -- from bespoke mechanisms that allocate spectra, assign seats in schools, match donors to kidneys or people to jobs to more general investigations of how to apply the principles of mechanism design to build institutions to address the multiple objectives embedded in the UN Sustainable Development Goals, most notably environmental sustainability and inequality.  This last theme builds from the 2021 Conference which focused on mechanism design for vulnerable populations. 

Owing to COVID concerns and in an effort to balance travel concerns with the benefits of deeper conversations, the conference will experiment with a simultaneous, multiple location format that will be implemented as follows: we already have three sites across the country. Once we have agreed on a collection of papers, we will try to identify a fourth location near a collection of presenters.

 

The idea will be for speakers to either walk, drive, take trains, or fly to the nearest location.   The NBER/CEME will provide funds for meals and for speakers to travel to locations.  Interested scholars from host and neighboring cities will also be encouraged to attend in person.

 

Presentations will be both on Zoom and to one of the live local audiences.  Our goal will be to have four in person sites, though possibly more.  

 Submissions will be accepted until Friday, March 12th, 2022.

 The Conference Program will be announced on March 25th.

 Given the short time window, full paper submissions  are preferred, but extended abstracts will also be considered.  If you are potentially interested in hosting, contact Scott Page at scottepage@gmail.com.

Colombia decriminalizes abortion

Sentiments about abortion seem to be shifting in opposite directions across the Americas. The NY Times has the story:

Colombia Decriminalizes Abortion, Bolstering Trend Across Region By Julie Turkewitz

"Having an abortion is no longer a crime under Colombian law, the country’s top court ruled on Monday, in a decision that paves the way for the procedure to become widely available across this historically conservative, Catholic country.

...

"Mexico’s Supreme Court decriminalized abortion in a similar decision in September and Argentina’s Congress legalized the procedure in late 2020. Colombia’s decision means that three of the four most populous countries in Latin America have now opened the door to more widespread access to abortion.

"It also comes as the United States has been moving in the opposite direction, with abortion restrictions multiplying across the country, and the U.S. Supreme Court considering a case that could overrule Roe v. Wade, the 1973 ruling that established a constitutional right to abortion"

Workshop in Experimental Economics at Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics (SITE), August 15 and 16, call for papers

 The Stanford Institute for Theoretical Economics: Workshop in Experimental Economics will be held in-person at Stanford University on August 15h and 16th.  

The workshop seeks to showcase recent contributions in experimental economics. We hope you will consider submitting your work, and encourage others with interesting work to do so as well.

The deadline for submission is May 1.  To submit a paper, please follow the instructions below the “Experimental Economics” at the following link: https://economics.stanford.edu/site/paper-submission.  If you run into any difficulty with the submission process, please feel free to instead email your paper directly to the SITE program coordinator, Sharyn (siteworkshop@stanford.edu).

SITE Experimental Economics Organizers

Christine Exley, Harvard Business School
Muriel Niederle, Stanford University
Kirby Nielsen, California Institute of Technology
Al Roth, Stanford University
Lise Vesterlund, University of Pittsburgh

Course on Matching, in Barcelona, by Péter Biró and David Manlove, April 27-28

If you are a Ph.D. student interested in matching, here's a two day course in Barcelona, by experts in the field.

V SEIO Course on Game Theory   

The University of Barcelona, the BEAT Research Institute, and the Game Theory and Assignment Markets Research Group are delighted to host the V SEIO Course on Game Theory on April 27 and 28, 2022.

The course is targeted at PhD students and early career researchers working in areas related to game theory. Besides covering a very active research topic, it is also an opportunity to meet with other researchers working in similar areas. 

The two-day course will cover algorithmic and game theoretic aspects of matching markets. Participants are welcome to present their game theory related research during a poster session.

The course will be delivered by Péter Biró (Head of  the Mechanism Design Group at KRTK) and David Manlove (Professor of Algorithms and Complexity at the University of Glasgow).

Registration deadline:  April 1, 2022  Registration is free, please fill in the on-line form to register.

Day 1 (April 27)

 09:00-09:30 Registration and welcome session

09:30-10:20 Stable Marriage and Hospitals / Residents problems: classical results

10:20-10:50 Coffee break

10:50-11:40 Decentralised matching markets, path-to-stability results

11:50-12:40 Hospitals / Residents problem: extensions (ties, couples, lower quotas)

12:40-14:10 Lunch

14:10-15:00 Hungarian university admissions: matching with contracts, choice functions, cutoff

stability

15:00-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-16:20 Housing markets: exchange of indivisible goods

16:30-17:20 Respecting improvement property for housing markets

Day 2 (April 28)

 09:00-09:50 House Allocation problem: Pareto optimal, popular and profile-based optimal matchings

10:00-10:50 School choice and constrained welfare-maximizing solutions

10:50-11:50 Coffee break and poster session

11:50-12:40 Stable roommate problems

12:40-14:10 Lunch

14:10-15:00 Matching with payments, auctions

15:00-15:30 Coffee break

15:30-16:20 Kidney Exchange

16:30-17:20 Generalized matching games, international kidney exchange

Cannabis and the law

 The WSJ has this update:

Push to Relax Marijuana Laws Hits Roadblocks. Biden administration has sidestepped the issue of decriminalizing cannabis despite bipartisan support.  By Alex Leary

"Facing a tough midterm election and divisions in Congress, the Biden administration is sidestepping the politically sensitive issue of loosening marijuana laws even as the idea has gained support of most Americans.

"More than half of U.S. states have legalized cannabis use for some purposes. Lawmakers have proposed decriminalizing marijuana, which would entail reduced penalties for users, and have pushed for giving the industry access to banking services. Those promoting changes include a diverse range of political figures, from former Republican House Speaker John Boehner to progressive Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D., N.Y.).

...

"More than two in three Americans support legalizing marijuana, according to a 2021 Gallup poll. That is up from a decade ago, when half of Americans were in favor, Gallup found.

...

"The House has previously passed legislation to decriminalize it and this month approved provisions to give cannabis companies access to the banking system, as marijuana lobbying has soared in what has become a multibillion-dollar industry.

"But with many Republicans and some Democrats opposed, odds of Senate passage are slim given filibuster rules requiring 60 votes."

California State Assembly bill would reimburse living donor expenses

 Here's some news about CA's newly proposed bill to reimburse living organ donor expenses.

American Kidney Fund Applauds Introduction of California Living Organ Donor Reimbursement Act. If passed, AB 2504 would be the first law of its kind in the nation

"The American Kidney Fund (AKF) strongly supports the introduction of the Living Organ Donor Reimbursement Act (AB 2504) in the California State Assembly. The Living Organ Donor Reimbursement Act is a groundbreaking piece of legislation that would provide direct reimbursements of up to $10,000 to living organ donors for expenses associated with organ donation not covered by insurance. The bill would be the first of its kind enacted in the nation and would greatly remove financial barriers that currently prevent potential living organ donors from making their lifesaving gift.

"AKF has been working closely with the bill’s sponsor, Assemblymember Ash Kalra (District 27), to craft this legislation and introduce it in the State Assembly. According to AKF’s Living Donor Protection Report Card, 20 states currently reimburse living donors through tax credits or deductions, which help to remove financial barriers but are not nearly as inclusive as direct reimbursements. If this bill is enacted, California would be the first state to provide direct reimbursements to donors after surgery through the establishment of a Living Organ Donor Reimbursement Program in the State Department of Health Care Services."

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And here's the proposed bill:

ASSEMBLY BILL NO. 2504  Introduced by Assembly Member Kalra, (Coauthors: Assembly Members Bennett, Cristina Garcia, and Mullin), February 17, 2022

"Existing law, the Michelle Maykin Memorial Donation Protection Act, requires an employer to grant an employee an unpaid leave of absence, as specified, for the purpose of organ donation.

"Existing law establishes the State Department of Health Care Services within the California Health and Human Services Agency. Existing law sets forth the department’s powers and duties relating to, among other things, public health, licensing and certification of certain health facilities, and the state Medi-Cal program.

"This bill, the Living Organ Donor Reimbursement Act, would establish the Living Organ Donor Reimbursement Program in the State Department of Health Care Services to reduce financial barriers for living organ donors. The bill would authorize living organ donors, as defined, to apply to the department for reimbursement of qualified donation expenses, as defined, that were not, or will not, otherwise be reimbursed, including travel and lodging expenses, lost wages, child care costs, and medication costs. The bill would limit the total reimbursement costs awarded to each living organ donor to $10,000 per organ donation. The bill would create the Living Organ Donor Reimbursement Fund within the State Treasury. The bill would authorize the Controller to accept donations to the fund from private entities, and would continuously appropriate these moneys for purposes of the program. The bill would require the Controller to allocate other moneys in the fund, upon appropriation by the Legislature, for purposes of the program. The bill would repeal the provisions of the bill on January 1, 2027."