Here's an inside joke, for market design coffee (and candy) fans, particularly for regulars at our market design coffees at Stanford.
Here's a clue:
| D4 | Market Structure, Pricing, and Design | |
| D40 | General | |
| D41 | Perfect Competition | |
| D42 | Monopoly | |
| D43 | Oligopoly and Other Forms of Market Imperfection | |
| D44 | Auctions | |
| D45 | Rationing • Licensing | |
| D46 | Value Theory | |
| D47 | Market Design | |
| D49 | Other | |
HT: Carmen Wang
Apply now to join a semester of interdisciplinary workshops on market and mechanism design, from the point of view of mathematicians, computer scientists, and economists.
Mathematicsand Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, August 21, 2023 to December 20, 2023
Apply
here by December 1, 2022: https://www.msri.org/web/msri/scientific/member-application
In
recent years, economists and computer scientists have collaborated with
mathematicians, operations research experts, and practitioners to improve the
design and operations of real-world marketplaces. Such work relies on robust
feedback between theory and practice, inspiring new mathematics closely linked
– and directly applicable – to market and mechanism design questions. This
cross-disciplinary program seeks to expand the domains in which existing market
design solutions can be applied; address foundational questions regarding our
ways of developing and evaluating mechanisms; and build useful analytic
frameworks for applying theory to practical marketplace design.
Michal
Feldman (Tel-Aviv University); Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft Research); Scott
Kominers (Harvard Business School); Shengwu Li (Harvard University); Paul
Milgrom (Stanford University); Alvin Roth (Stanford University); Tim
Roughgarden (Columbia University); Eva Tardos (Cornell University)
Acknowledged
as the premier center for collaborative mathematical research, MSRI
organizes and hosts semester-length programs that become the leading edge in
that field of study. Mathematicians worldwide come to the Institute to engage
in the research of classical fundamental mathematics, modern applied
mathematics, statistics, computer science and other mathematical sciences.
**********
This could be a nice way to spend a semester--apply now (MSRI loves company:)
22 candidates for the 2022-23 Economics Job Market, from B to Z.
Stanford, Department of Economics Job Market Candidates
Available November 2022 for positions in Summer/Fall 2023
Placement Officers: Pete Klenow 650-725-2620 klenow@stanford.edu and Liran Einav 650-723-3704 leinav@stanford.edu
Trevor Bakker
Aniket Baksy
Lukas Bolte
Yue Cao
Daniele Caratelli
Alex Chan
Fulya Ersoy
Tony Fan
Robin Han
Brian Higgins
Tingyan Jia
Matteo Leombroni
Gina Li
Negar Matoorian Pour
Agathe Pernoud
Beatriz Pousada
Maxwell Rong
Rachel Schuh
Martin Souchier
Reka Zempleni
Adam Zhang
Sally Zhang
Here's a paper that investigates two alternatives to limiting congestion in college admissions: one is to limit applications, and the other is to add a small cost for each additional application. (This is a current topic of discussion in a number of other applications, including matching of new doctors to residencies.)
Application Costs and Congestion in Matching Markets by YingHua He and Thierry Magnac, The Economic Journal, https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/ueac038 (online early)
Abstract: "A matching market often requires recruiting agents, or ‘programmes’, to costly screen ‘applicants’, and congestion increases with the number of applicants to be screened. We investigate the role of application costs: higher costs reduce congestion by discouraging applicants from applying to certain programmes; however, they may harm match quality. In a multiple-elicitation experiment conducted in a real-life matching market, we implement variants of the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance mechanism with different application costs. Our experimental and structural estimates show that a (low) application cost effectively reduces congestion without harming match quality."
"Our empirical strategy is novel. It begins with a multiple-elicitation field experiment that enables us to directly evaluate the effects of application costs. The experiment involves the real-life matching of 129 applicants to the seven master’s programmes at the Toulouse School of Economics (TSE), and was conducted in May 2013 for admission in the 2013–4 academic year. The experimental market designs are three variants of the Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance (DA) mechanism encountered in practice: the traditional DA mechanism, under which applicants can apply to all programmes without any cost; the DA mechanism with truncation (DA-T), under which applicants can apply to no more than four programmes (hence, DA-T-4); and the DA mechanism with cost (DA-C), under which applicants must write a motivation letter for each additional application beyond the first three applications. Under each mechanism, every applicant is required to submit a rank-ordered list of programmes (ROL). As applicants are informed that one of the mechanisms will be implemented, they have incentives to behave optimally under each mechanism.
"To evaluate the performance of a matching procedure, we focus on two dimensions of a matching outcome: the congestion and match quality. The former is measured by screening costs and approximated by the number of applicants to screen; the latter is measured by the welfare of both sides, the number of unmatched applicants, as well as the number of blocking pairs. A pair comprising applicant and programme blocks a matching if both would be better off by being matched together after leaving their current matches. The stability of a matching, defined as the absence of any blocking pair, is the key to the success of matching markets (Roth, 1991). Importantly, stability implies Pareto efficiency when both sides are endowed with strict preferences (Abdulkadiroğlu and Sönmez, 2013)."
Here's a review of liver exchange in the transplant literature, with some comparisons to kidney exchange.
Paired exchange Living donor Liver Transplantation: Indications, stumbling blocks, and future considerations by Dhiraj Agrawal, Subhash Gupta, and Sanjiv Saigal, Journal of Hepatology, In Press, Pre-proof https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jhep.2022.10.019
Abstract: "The last decade has seen Liver Paired exchange (LPE) as an increasingly used modality across the transplant community by which pairs of incompatible living Liver donors and their intended recipients swap Livers resulting in compatible transplants. The feasibility and benefit of LPE in providing excellent recipient outcomes and robust donor safety have been proven in uncomplicated swaps. Began initially as single-centre two-way or three-way exchanges, LPE has tremendous potential to grow into more complicated chains over days and over multiple centres. Also, LPE is associated with unique technical, logistical, ethical and legislative challenges. This review discusses the indications, potential types of LPE, unique solutions to stumbling blocks in performing LPE, and future considerations on how LPE can expand the living donor liver pool and the armamentarium of living donor liver transplantation (LDLT)".
"The published literature on LPE has nine reports (5 original articles and 4 case reports), including 74 LPEs from Asia and North America.1), 2), 3), 4), 5), 6), 7), 8), 9) LPE constitutes approximately 1.2 to 8.3 % of the total LDLTs performed at the individual centre1), 2), 3), 4), signifying a substantial potential of this form of LDLT to mitigate the liver allograft shortage."
...
While I'm away, the NBER Market Design meeting will convene at Stanford today and tomorrow. The first paper is presented by Alex Chan (who you could hire, he's on the market).
Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2022 November 4-5, 2022 (US Pacific Time) (more papers are linked at the above link and all presentations will be livestreamed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/nbervideos)
LOCATION Stanford University Graduate School of Business, Vidalakis Dining Hall, Schwab Residential Center, 680 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA and YouTube
ORGANIZERS Eric Budish, Jakub Kastl, and Marzena Rostek
NBER conferences are by invitation. All participants are expected to comply with the NBER's Conference Code of Conduct.
Friday, November 4
Session 1. Matching Markets
9:00 am
Regulation of Organ Transplantation and Procurement: A Market Design Lab Experiment by Alex Chan, Stanford University and Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University and NBER
Measuring the Welfare Gains from Cardinal-Preference Mechanisms in School Choice(slides) by Hulya Eraslan, Rice University and NBER by Jeremy T. Fox, Rice University and NBER, YingHua He, Rice University, Yakym Pirozhenko, Rice University
10:20 am Coffee Break
Session 2. Markets and Algorithms
11:00 am Market Opacity and Fragility by Giovanni Cespa, City University London, Xavier Vives, IESE Business School
Artificial Intelligence and Pricing: The Impact of Algorithm Design by John Asker, University of California, Los Angeles and NBER Chaim Fershtman, Tel Aviv University, Ariel Pakes, Harvard University and NBER
12:20 pm Lunch - Vidalakis Courtyard
Session 3: Young Scholars Session I: Financial Market Design
2:00 pm Intermediary Asset Pricing: Capital Constraints and Market Power(slides), Jason Allen, Bank of Canada, Milena Wittwer, Boston College
Endogenous Market Structure: Over-the-Counter versus Exchange Trading by Ji Hee Yoon, University College London
3:20 pm Coffee Break
Session 4: Young Scholars Session II: Market Design Theory
4:00 pm Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions, by Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Harvard University, Ori Heffetz, Cornell University and NBER, and Clayton Thomas, Princeton University
Matching and Prices by Ravi Jagadeesan, Stanford University, Alexander Teytelboym, University of Oxford
Saturday, November 5
Session 5. Non-Market Allocation Mechanisms
9:00 am Optimal Queue Design by Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University, Olivier Tercieux, Paris School of Economics
Fraud-proof Non-market Allocation Mechanisms by Eduardo Perez-Richet, Sciences Po, Vasiliki Skreta, UT Austin & UCL
10:20 am Coffee Break
Session 6. Environment and Transportation
11:00 am Pollution Permits: Efficiency by Design by Marek Pycia, University of Zurich, Kyle Woodward, University of North Carolina
Optimal Urban Transportation Policy: Evidence from Chicago(slides) by Milena Almagro, University of Chicago, Felipe Barbieri, University of Pennsylvania, Juan Camilo Castillo, University of Pennsylvania, Nathaniel G. Hickok, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tobias Salz, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
12:20 pm Lunch - Vidalakis Courtyard
Session 7. Auctions and Mechanism Design
This session: 25 minutes presenter, 5 minutes Q&A.
1:30 pm Screening with Persuasion by Dirk Bergemann, Yale University, , Tibor Heumann, PUC Chile, Stephen Morris, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Auctions with Frictions by Stephan Lauermann, University of Bonn, Asher Wolinsky, Northwestern University
Pure-Strategy Equilibrium in the Generalized First-Price Auction, by Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University and NBER, Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University
I'm in Paris to speak tomorrow at a ceremony and conference in honor of Hervé Moulin.
Cérémonie de clôture de la chaire d’excellence internationale Blaise Bascal [Closing ceremony of the Blaise Bascal Chair of International Excellence]
Vendredi 4 novembre 2022, amphithéâtre Liard en Sorbonne – 14 h à 19 h 30 17 rue de la Sorbonne
Programme
13 h 30 – 14 h : Accueil du public au 17, rue de la Sorbonne – 75005 Paris
14 h – 14 h 05 : Ouverture de la cérémonie de clôture de la Chaire d’excellence internationale Blaise Bascal par Christine Neau-Leduc, présidente de l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
14 h 05 – 14 h 10 : Remerciements de Hervé Moulin, professeur à l’université de Glasgow
14 h 10 – 15 h : Can we define Fairness? par Hervé Moulin
15 h – 15 h 45 : Repugnant Transactions and Controversial Markets par Alvin Roth
15 h 45 – 16 h 45 : Pause
16 h 15 – 17 h : Democracy and the Pursuit of Randomness par Ariel Procaccia
17 h – 17 h 45 : Fair Social Choice par Marc Fleurbaey
17 h 45 – 17 h 55 : Discours de clôture par :
Un représentant de la Région Ile-de-France
Michel Grabisch, professeur à l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
Agnieszka Rusinowska, professeur à l’université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne
*********
The following day (Saturday) will be a conference on
Recent Advances in Fair Division November 5th, 2022, Université Paris I Panthéon-Sorbonne, Centre Panthéon, Salle 1
8:45-9:00 Welcome to participantso
9:00-9:45 :Haris Aziz, Best of Both Worlds Fairness
9:45-10:30 :Edith Elkind, Mind the Gap: Fair Division with Separation Constraints
10:30-11:00 Coffee
11:30-12:15 :Juan D Moreno Ternero, The Costs and Benefits of multilingualism
12:15-13:00 :Jean-Jacques Herings, An Axiomatization of the Pairwise Netting Proportional Rule in Financial Networks
13:00-14:00 Lunch
14:00-14:45 :Dominik Peters, Voting in Participatory Budgeting
14:45-15:30 :Rupert Freeman, )A New Fairness Criterion for Assignment Mechanisms
15:30-16:00 Coffee break
16:00-16:45 :Utku Unver, Balancing Affirmative Action with Other Societal Interests: a generalized theory on India’s reservation system
16:45-17:30 :Jean-Francois Laslier, Universalization and Altruism
Here's a paper that considers inter-district school choice, motivated by Tokyo day care centers. I think a similar problem arises in the EU in allocating foreign study opportunities for college students.
Ekkyo Matching: How To Connect Separate
Matching Markets For Welfare Improvement
By Yuichiro Kamada And Fuhito Kojima
Abstract. "We consider a school-choice matching model that allows for inter-district transfer of students, with the “balancedness” constraint: each student and school belongs to a region, and a matching is said to be balanced if, for each region, the outflow of students from that region to other regions is equal to the inflow of students from the latter to the former. Using a directed bipartite graph defined on students and schools, we characterize the set of Pareto efficient matchings among those that are individually rational, balanced and fair. We also provide a polynomial-time algorithm to compute such matchings. The outcome of this algorithm weakly improves student welfare upon the one induced when each region independently organizes a standard matching mechanism"
" In Japan ... allocation of slots at accredited daycares are conducted by individual municipal governments and, with few exceptions, a child can only attend a daycare in the municipality of their residence. The City of Tokyo, for example, is divided into 23 small municipalities ... and each conducts a matching independently. Due to the small sizes of the regions, many families would find inter-district admissions—which is called the ekkyo admission ... to be a viable option. Moreover, as a large metropolitan area, many people cross a city boundary to commute, making it potentially more convenient to put their children to a daycare center close to their workplace"
As the Supreme Court starts to hear arguments about affirmative action in college admissions, at Harvard and the University of North Carolina, Roland Fryer, a Black professor of Economics at Harvard, shares some thoughts--including stories from his own experience--about how affirmative action might be reformed.
Affirmative action in college admissions doesn’t work — but it could, By Roland G. Fryer Jr., Washington Post.
"On Monday, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in an affirmative action case involving Harvard, where I am a professor. Many people who are concerned about racial representation at elite institutions fear that the justices will end the practice as we know it. But if they do, they could provide an opportunity to create a new, data-based system that would truly help level the playing field for disadvantaged kids.
"I was raised, in part, by my father, who was sentenced to eight years in prison when I was in my teens.
...
"But for my college professors’ willingness to look beyond my past performance — but for affirmative action — I would not have benefited from twice-weekly 7 a.m. meetings with the economics professor who showed me how science could be used to help people. Or the statistics professor who marveled at my stories of my favorite uncle — a wino with sophisticated strategies of betting on Greyhound races — and helped me use formal models to explain his behavior. Or a spot at the American Economic Association’s summer school for minority students.
"But affirmative action is very often not targeted at individuals who, because of disadvantage, are achieving below their potential. Seventy-one percent of Harvard’s Black and Hispanic students come from wealthy backgrounds. A tiny fraction attended underperforming public high schools. First- and second-generation African immigrants, despite constituting only about 10 percent of the U.S. Black population, make up about 41 percent of all Black students in the Ivy League, and Black immigrants are wealthier and better educated than many native-born Black Americans.
...
"The Supreme Court seems poised to strike down the explicit use of race in university admissions. My hope is that it will still leave room for data-driven approaches to affirmative action that ensure real meritocracy."
Kim Krawiec, a law professor who is among the most penetrating analysts of controversial markets and market practices, emails me about unraveling in the market for new law professors:
"prior to Covid, the AALS (American Association of Law Schools) ran a hiring process with a central meeting in Washington DC and nearly every law professor was hired through this process. During Covid, this of course stopped and has now been dropped (I think) permanently, so now schools are sort of making up their own schedules. Some schools are starting early and making exploding offers before other schools have even begun the process. The idea of exploding offers is not new — it happened before. Though some (mostly higher ranked schools) considered it bad form, other schools argued that they had to do it or would wind up hiring no one year after year as favored candidates accepted other jobs near the end of the season. But the physical meeting and control over the timing by the AALS at least posed a basic schedule. That now appears to be gone and people (both candidates and hiring committees) are up in arms. ... My guess (completely speculating) is that the interests of higher ranked and lower ranked schools are not aligned on this and that makes it harder to find a new equilibrium, but I don’t know."
*******
Law already 'enjoys' a number of unraveled markets, for law clerks, for associates (and summer associates) in law firms, and for articles in law reviews. So I have to admit the prospects for preventing wholesale unraveling of the law professor market looks bleak, unless law schools can start to think outside of the box, perhaps e.g. by preparing to give offers to students who have already accepted exploding offers, if necessary to start in the following academic year...
Maybe in that way the academic law community can start to come to some agreement on some time, midway between early and late, in which offers should be made and during which they should be left open.
Here's an announcement in an email from the Economic Science Association (ESA):
"We are happy to announce the winners of the 2022 Exeter Prize for the best paper published in the previous calendar year in a peer-reviewed journal in the fields of Experimental Economics, Behavioural Economics and Decision Theory.
The winners are Sandro Ambuehl (University of Zurich), Douglas Bernheim (Stanford University), and Axel Ockenfels (University of Cologne) for their paper “What motivates paternalism? An experimental study”, published in The American Economic Review.
There is a growing interest in how “choice architects” design choices for others. This paper provides new insights about how and why people in the role of a choice architect limit the decisions of others. Ambuehl, Bernheim and Ockenfels use the tools of experimental economics to study how subjects help other subjects (“choosers”) to be more patient in tempting intertemporal choices (in which a small, immediate outcome is pitted against a large, delayed outcome). A key result is that choice architects do act to restrict the choice set of choosers to help them avoid temptation. A key strength the paper is offering insight into the motivations behind this decision. The paper proposes and tests two possible motivations: 1) A “mistakes-projective paternalism” in which the choice architect assumes others share his/her susceptibilities to temptations and uses choice sets to minimize temptations and 2) an “ideals-projective paternalism” in which the choice architect assumes others follow his/her values and limit the choice set to those valued outcomes. The results provide clear evidence for the latter motivation. The paper provides evidence about additional beliefs and motivations. Choice architects believe that they are improving the welfare of choosers and they underestimate how many people they are affecting with their restrictions. Finally, the behavior of choice architects in the laboratory predicts support for real-world paternalistic policies (regarding, for example, taxes on alcohol and tobacco) and the motivation to make choices harder is consistent with “ideals-projective paternalism.”
The winning paper was selected by the panel of Rick Larrick (Duke University), Muriel Niederle (Stanford University), and Tomasz Strzalecki (Harvard University)."
In Colorado, a new law ending anonymous sperm donation seeks to catch up with the technological developments involving genetic sequencing that have already made anonymity of sperm or egg donors fairly fragile. Here's an account in JAMA:
The End of Anonymous Sperm Donation in Colorado--A Step Forward to a New Fertility Future in the US? by I. Glenn Cohen, JD1; Eli Y. Adashi, MD, MS2; Seema Mohapatra, JD, MPH3 JAMA. Published online October 24, 2022. doi:10.1001/jama.2022.19471
"On May 31, 2022, Colorado became the first state to effectively ban anonymous gamete donation.1 Starting in 2025, fertility clinics in Colorado must collect identity and medical information from sperm and egg donors and may not match donors that do not agree to such disclosure (the statute uses the word “donor” though in many instances compensation is provided). The new law also requires that the clinics make a request that donors update their contact information and medical history at least once every 3 years. The law provides that a donor-conceived person aged 18 years or older shall be provided donor information upon request. The statute purports to also prohibit fertility clinics outside Colorado from providing gametes to Colorado residents (or individuals located in Colorado) if they do not abide by these rules. The statute also instructs clinics not to match a donor once it is known or reasonably should be known that “25 families have been established using a single donor in or outside of Colorado.”1
...
"Two states, Utah and Washington, have enacted statutes requiring the collecting and sharing of identifying information about a donor with donor-conceived children who request it after reaching the age of 18 years.3 However, both states also permit a donor to opt out, thereby limiting the utility of the laws. By contrast, the UK, Germany, Sweden, France, and many other countries have created mandatory registries that donor-conceived individuals can access when they turn 18 years of age, having an effect similar to the new Colorado law.3,4
"The new Colorado law highlights the gap between the law and reality of gamete donor anonymity in the US outside Colorado. Banks have promised donors anonymity in other US states and prior leaks of donor information from banks’ files have been exceedingly rare, if they ever happened at all; the banks have litigated to protect the identifying information provided by the donor.3 But in a practical sense, the promise of anonymity is now much less thoroughgoing.4 Direct-to-consumer genetic testing has become very common, and it has been estimated that 100 million people worldwide have taken a direct-to-consumer genetic test by 2021.4 Studies estimate that a genetic database covering only 2% of the population could match nearly anyone in that population.4 The combination of direct-to-consumer genetic testing, publicly available information, and social media suggest that many donor-conceived individuals will in fact be able to reidentify their gamete donor."
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