The 2025 Golden Goose awards

 In these difficult times for science funding, the Golden Goose Award is a reminder of its benefits.

 Here's it's backstory. 

Here are the 2025 winners. 

“Nature has all the answers”

How a knack for nature’s oddities improved disease diagnostics & inspired scores of scientists

AWARDEE: Joseph G. Gall 

FEDERAL FUNDING AGENCIES: National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation 

 and

Cisplatin Breakthrough Redefines Testicular Cancer Treatment 

 AWARDEES: Barnett Rosenberg, Loretta VanCamp, Thomas Krigas 

FEDERAL FUNDING AGENCIES: National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation 

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 Here are all my posts on the Golden Goose.  (Two of the early awards were for market design:)

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2025, October 17-18, 2025, Cambridge, MA

 

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2025,  October 17-18, 2025, Cambridge, MA
ORGANIZERS Eric Budish, Michael Ostrovsky, and Parag A. Pathak 

Friday, October 17

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am

The Structure of the Social Organization

Canice Prendergast, University of Chicago

The Impact of Race-Blind and Test-Optional Admissions on Racial Diversity and Merit

Allen Sirolly, Columbia University

Hongyao Ma, Columbia University

Yash Kanoria, Columbia University

10:30 am

Break

11:00 am

When Speed is of Essence: Perishable Goods Auctions

Isa E. Hafalir, University of Technology Sydney

Onur Kesten, The University of Sydney

Katerina Sherstyuk, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Cong Tao, University of Technology Sydney

Dynamic Threats to Credible Auctions

Martino Banchio, Bocconi University

Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University

Frank Yang, Stanford University

12:30 pm

Lunch

2:00 pm

Centralizing Procurement: The Roles of Scale, Selection and Variety

Claudia Allende, Stanford University and NBER

Juan Pablo Atal, University of Pennsylvania and NBER

Rodrigo Carril, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

José Ignacio Cuesta, Stanford University and NBER

Andres Gonzalez-Lira, PUC-Chile

Missing Markets for Innovation: Evidence from New Uses for Existing Drugs

Eric Budish, University of Chicago and NBER

Maya M. Durvasula, Stanford University

Benjamin N. Roin, Independent Researcher

Heidi L. Williams, Dartmouth College and NBER

3:30 pm

Break

(30 minutes each)

4:00 pm

The Economics of Large Language Models: Token Allocation, Fine-Tuning and Optimal Pricing

Dirk Bergemann, Yale University

Alessandro Bonatti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alex Smolin, Toulouse School of Economics

Truthful Aggregation of LLMs with an Application to Online Advertising

Ermis Nikiforos Soumalias, University of Zurich

Michael J. Curry, Harvard University

Sven Seuken, University of Zurich

Auction Design for Artificial-Intelligence-Based Sponsored Search

Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland, College Park

5:30 pm

Adjourn

6:00 pm

Reception and Dinner - Royal Sonesta Hotel (Skyline Room)

Saturday, October 18

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am

The First-Price Principle of Maximizing Economic Objectives

Byeong-hyeon Jeong, University of Zurich

Marek Pycia, University of Zurich

Stable Matchings with Switching Costs

Boris Pittel, Ohio State University

Kirill Rudov, University of California, Berkeley

10:30 am

Break

11:00 am

The Importance of Being Earnest (in Search Markets)

Brendan Daley, University of Colorado, Boulder

Jacob Sagi, Kenan Flagler Business School, UNC Chapel Hill

Intermediaries in Bargaining: Evidence from Business-to-Business Used-Car Inventory Negotiations

Bradley Larsen, Washington University in St Louis and NBER

Carol Hengheng Lu, Amazon, Inc.

Anthony Lee Zhang, University of Chicago

12:30 pm

Adjourn

Stanford celebrates 100 years of GSB

 GSB at 100: A Century of Impact, by Michael McDowell  interviews leading faculty members including

"Susan Athey: The GSB has had so many impacts, but let me just pick one particular issue that’s close to my heart, which is that it’s been several times in its history, it’s really been on the frontier of important ideas. One of the big ideas in the group that I’m in was market design and the use of formal strategic thinking and game theory and information economics to understand real phenomena. And Bob Wilson, who’s one of the grandfathers of the group that I sit in, Economics, he worked with oil companies in 1960s and looked at their bidding data and then developed formal theories that helped understand what was going wrong in those markets and how to fix it. And then later, he advised one of my advisors, Paul Milgrom, and they shared the Nobel Prize for some of their work on market design.

"And so, there’s many different takes on that, but one of my takes was that there was the connection to the world and the fact that the problem they were solving was coming out of a real problem leading to cutting edge theory that then created a field that didn’t exist. More recently, we were on the cutting edge of using machine learning for decision problems and what’s called causal inference, formally, and now Stanford is the best place in the world to do this kind of research. To go from zero in 2012 to best in the world with multiple amazing young scholars doing cutting edge research in 12 years is really stunning. And the GSB really supported us in that endeavor.

"So I think the GSB has been a really fabulous place for helping us stay grounded and really connected to real problems, but also allowing us to hire the kind of talent and giving us the space to do the pure research that doesn’t just solve today’s practical problems, but that actually builds the foundation for many people to solve applied problems."

All's fair in love and sports, from marathons to stone skipping

 It turns out that sports are just war by peaceful means. Incentives matter, and some people play to win.

First, the WSJ writes about qualifying for competitive marathons:

The War Over Downhill Running .  Tempers are flaring over mountain races that produce faster qualifying times for Boston and other marathons; ‘These people should burst into flames.’
By  Sharon Terlep

" a subset of long-distance races ... begin high in the mountains and pitch participants downhill. They’ve exploded, partly as a way for runners to notch quicker times that qualify them for the pinnacle of distance races, the Boston Marathon.

Critics call it a shortcut that edges better runners out of big events. Downhill enthusiasts have a message for them: Get over yourselves, and if you think it’s so easy, try it.

About 2,000 invitees to last year’s Boston Marathon made it in by running races that were at least 2,000 feet downhill.

Boston requires most runners to hit times that vary based on age. Because of the race’s popularity, there are thousands of runners who qualify and still don’t get to be among the 30,000 participants.

“To find out that there are people who will maybe bump me off the race who ran 6,000 feet downhill kind of pisses me off,” said Chrysostom, who finished the Myrtle Beach Marathon in under three hours and figures he’s on the cusp of getting into Boston. "

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And here's another shocker, from the BBC:

Cheating scandal rocks world stone skimming championships  by Benjamin Russell 

"The world stone skimming championships have been rocked by a cheating scandal, after several competitors were disqualified for tampering.

More than 2,200 people, from 27 countries, attended this year's event on the tiny island of Easdale off the west coast of Scotland.

Rules state that stones must come from naturally occurring island slate, however some were found to have been ground into a "suspiciously circular" shape to help them bounce on water.

Organiser Dr Kyle Mathews told BBC News that the offenders had "held their hands up" and apologised."

Recent good looking market design papers I hope to read (on auctions, unraveling, and interviews)

There was a time when I could reasonably hope to have read market design papers before they appeared in print, but now there are many fine papers that I'll never have a chance to read. (I'm sure that's just because the field is growing so much...)  I haven't given up, however...   Here are three that recently caught my eye.

Hu, Edwin, and Dermot Murphy. "Vestigial tails? Floor brokers at the close in modern electronic markets." Management Science (2025).

 Abstract: The closing auction is an increasingly important trade mechanism due to the rise of passive funds that require closing price execution. We study differences in auction mechanism design on NYSE and Nasdaq that may affect closing price efficiency. Unlike Nasdaq, NYSE allows late auction orders through its floor brokers, providing traders with more flexibility to mitigate or create large last-minute auction imbalances. Price changes in the closing auction are more likely to reverse on NYSE compared with Nasdaq, suggesting greater price inefficiency in NYSE closing auctions. Larger last-minute abnormal imbalances on NYSE, particularly in stocks where auction competition may be inhibited by relatively high floor broker auction fees, explain these stronger reversals. Evidence from the NYSE floor closure during the COVID-19 pandemic supports a causal interpretation. Our results highlight an important tradeoff between auction flexibility and price efficiency.

######

Stable Matching with Interviews, by Itai Ashlagi, Jiale Chen, Mohammad Roghani, Amin Saberi

    Part of: Volume: 16th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2025)
    Series: Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)
    Conference: Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS)  

Abstract: "In several two-sided markets, including labor and dating, agents typically have limited information about their preferences prior to mutual interactions. This issue can result in matching frictions, as arising in the labor market for medical residencies, where high application rates are followed by a large number of interviews. Yet, the extensive literature on two-sided matching primarily focuses on models where agents know their preferences, leaving the interactions necessary for preference discovery largely overlooked. This paper studies this problem using an algorithmic approach, extending Gale-Shapley’s deferred acceptance to this context.
Two algorithms are proposed. The first is an adaptive algorithm that expands upon Gale-Shapley’s deferred acceptance by incorporating interviews between applicants and positions. Similar to deferred acceptance, one side sequentially proposes to the other. However, the order of proposals is carefully chosen to ensure an interim stable matching is found. Furthermore, with high probability, the number of interviews conducted by each applicant or position is limited to O(log² n).
In many seasonal markets, interactions occur more simultaneously, consisting of an initial interview phase followed by a clearing stage. We present a non-adaptive algorithm for generating a single stage set of in tiered random markets. The algorithm finds an interim stable matching in such markets while assigning no more than O(log³ n) interviews to each applicant or position."

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Deadlines and matching, by Garth Baughman, Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 228, September 2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2025.106065

Abstract: Deadlines and fixed end dates are pervasive in matching markets. Deadlines drive fundamental non-stationarity and complexity in behavior, generating significant departures from the steady-state equilibria usually studied in the search and matching literature. I consider a two-sided matching market with search frictions where vertically differentiated agents attempt to form bilateral matches before a deadline. I give novel proofs of existence and uniqueness of equilibria, and show that all equilibria exhibit an “anticipation effect” where less attractive agents become increasingly choosy over time, preferring to wait for the opportunity to match with attractive agents who, in turn, become less selective as the deadline approaches. When agents are patient, a sharp characterization is available: at any point in time, the market segments into a first class of matching agents and a second class of waiting agents. This points to a different interpretation of unraveling.

Who pays for (first) dates?

 There's matching, and then there's matching with sidepayments.  

For dating, some decisions were easier in the dinosaur age: in theory at least, only the man could propose a date, and he paid. But times have changed.

Here's an opinion piece in the WSJ:

How to Find Love When Dating Has Gotten So Expensive
Young adults, faced with economic anxiety, are re-evaluating the way they search for romantic partners
By  Cordilia James

"To some extent, traditional thinking about date etiquette hasn’t changed: According to the LendingTree survey, 32% of Gen Z believe that the man should pay for the first date in a heterosexual relationship, while 18% think the person who asks should pay. (Nearly 31% think the cost should be split.)

...

" Tiffany Aliche, founder of Budgetnista, a financial-education firm, ... says that since the asker sets the terms of the date, that person is responsible for picking an activity they can afford.
...
"Some of my friends disagree with that strategy. One female friend, for instance, told me that she expects the guy to pay to show that he’s comfortable being a provider, regardless of who proposes the date. One male friend told me he prefers to split the check or take turns paying to show mutual interest. Another female friend says she has noticed that more of her dates have asked her to split the bill lately—a sign, she says, of the new dating math."

Where snitches make pitches--Corporate hotlines for ethics violations

 The WSJ has this story on the business of corporate hotlines for whistleblowers to report potential ethics violations.

Sex Scandals. Accounting Fraud. It’s All Showing Up on the Corporate Hotline.
A tip left on such a hotline led to the ouster of the Nestlé CEO. For affairs or minor office annoyances, operators are standing by.
By  Lauren Weber, Margot Patrick,  and Chip Cutter

"It’s an industry operating under the premise that companies run better when workers can safely sound the alarm on everything from bad breath to bribery. The task is often farmed out to third parties with names like SpeakUp, Navex and EQS.

"SpeakUp, based in Amsterdam, helps operate Nestlé’s line. In 2024, it handled 3,218 calls and messages with allegations ranging from bullying and harassment to fraud and conflicts of interest at Nestlé and its suppliers. Nestlé says it substantiated 20% of them, and 119 people left their jobs as a result.

“Hotlines are magic,” said Raheela Anwar, president and CEO of Group 360 Consulting, a Chicago-based corporate advisory firm. “Because people are willing to tell the truth.”

"At public companies, they’re also required. The post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley financial reforms passed in 2002 mandated that companies have a process for whistleblowers to report potential ethics violations. A 2019 European Union directive does the same. More than 90% of U.S. firms with at least 1,000 employees provide a hotline for workers, according to HR Acuity, a company that helps employers track internal investigations and includes employee hotlines among its offerings. "

The black market in stolen homing pigeons

 Below are some excerpts from a long interesting story in the Washington Post, about how a boom in pigeon racing in China led to a rash of pigeon thefts in Belgium, and how problems in identifying recovered pigeons can (probably) be expeditiously addressed.

the Pigeon Heist.  How million-dollar pigeons became the target of organized crime.  By Kevin Sieff

"Beginning in around 2019, wealthy Chinese industrialists started spending millions on Belgian pigeons. That year, a pigeon named Armando sold for $1.4 million at an auction outside Brussels. In 2020, another bird named New Kim sold for $1.9 million. Pigeon races in major Chinese cities became opulent symbols of China’s economic boom, with purses over $100 million — exceeding most of the world’s major sports.

...

" a rash of pigeon thefts ... swept through Belgium and the Netherlands in 2024 and 2025. Dozens of pigeon lofts were raided; hundreds of pigeons were taken. “A crisis,” said the Belgian pigeon fanciers’ association in an alert to its members. 

...

"By 2023, China’s Ministry of Public Security began prosecuting cases of illegal gambling on pigeons. Last September, Ding Tao, the director of the Tengzhou Pigeon Association in a city about 350 miles south of Beijing, admonished his fellow pigeon enthusiasts in a speech, published by the city’s sports bureau, for engaging in “illegal profit-making activities.” 

...

"The thefts across Belgium were often focused on a particular commodity, police said. One gang exclusively took racing bicycles. Another targeted construction cranes. One stole dozens of expensive trumpets.

"The investigators knew how Chinese demand had led to the skyrocketing value of pigeons. It seemed possible that European organized crime groups could target the birds with an intention to resell them on the black market in Asia, allowing them to skirt the Chinese government’s scrutiny.

,,,

"The rescued pigeons were transported in cages to a loft run by the Belgian pigeon association outside Brussels. Their identification rings had been cut off. The police planned DNA tests to confirm which birds were registered with which owners. Victims of the thefts were invited to see if they could identify their birds.

 ...

 "Many of the recovered birds have still not been matched to their owners, most likely because they were taken in thefts not recorded by the Belgian police.

"It is increasingly likely, investigators say, that there will be only one way to reunite the birds to their owners: They will open the cages and hope that the birds still remember how to fly home."

Kidney exchange in Operations Research (and elsewhere)

 Kidney exchange is an important medical innovation that has given rise to literatures not only in medicine but in economics, computer science and operations research. (That diversity of literatures is related to the interdisciplinary growth of market design.)

Here's a new survey of the OR literature on kidney exchange.

Mathijs Barkel, Rachael Colley, Maxence Delorme, David Manlove, William Pettersson, Operational research approaches and mathematical models for kidney exchange: A literature survey and empirical evaluation,  European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, ISSN 0377-2217, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2025.08.059.

Abstract: Kidney exchange is a transplant modality that has provided new opportunities for living kidney donation in many countries around the world since 1991. It has been extensively studied from an Operational Research (OR) perspective since 2004. This article provides a comprehensive literature survey on OR approaches to fundamental computational problems associated with kidney exchange over the last two decades. We also summarise the key integer linear programming (ILP) models for kidney exchange, showing how to model optimisation problems involving only cycles and chains separately. This allows new combined ILP models, not previously presented, to be obtained by amalgamating cycle and chain models. We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation involving all combined models from this paper in addition to bespoke software packages from the literature involving advanced techniques. This focuses primarily on computation times for 49 methods applied to 4320 problem instances of varying sizes that reflect the characteristics of real kidney exchange datasets, corresponding to over 200,000 algorithm executions. We have made our implementations of all cycle and chain models described in this paper, together with all instances used for the experiments, and a web application to visualise our experimental results, publicly available.
Keywords: Combinatorial Optimisation; OR in health services; Kidney paired donation; Cycle packing; Computational experiments
 

Congestion in the job market, AI version

 The Atlantic has this story on the job market, that contains a nice line...

The Job Market Is Hell.  Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.   By Annie Lowrey

“ What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market, contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market. People are swiping like crazy and getting nothing back.”

How to make a racehorse fast? (a new punchline...)

 The old punchline is "don't feed him."  The new punchline is "CRISPR."

Here's a news story from Nature:

First CRISPR horses spark controversy: what’s next for gene-edited animals?  Horses with genomic edits to make them run faster have been banned from polo, but a zoo of CRISPR-edited animals is gaining acceptance in agriculture.  By Katie Kavanagh 

"The horses are clones of the prize-winning steed Polo Pureza, but they have a tweak to myostatin — a gene involved in regulating muscle development — that is designed to quicken their pace. CRISPR was used in fetal fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) to generate embryos through cloning, and then the embryos were implanted into mares.

"The development of these five CRISPR-edited horses ten months ago, by the non-profit research organization Kheiron Biotech in Buenos Aires, is proving controversial among horse breeders in Argentina, where polo is extremely popular, Reuters reported on 30 August.

"Critics are concerned that the technology threatens people’s livelihoods and that it will compromise the tradition of using selective breeding to generate elite horses. The Argentine Polo Association has now banned the use of gene-edited horses in the sport, following the lead of similar organizations such as the International Federation for Equestrian Sports1, which banned the practice in 2019."

Politics and science disagree about drinking and climate change...

 It turns our that worries about drinking were just as woke about worries about climate change.

The NYT has the story on drinking, CBS on climate change:

Federal Report on Drinking Is Withdrawn
The upcoming U.S. Dietary Guidelines will instead be influenced by a competing study, favored by industry, which found that moderate alcohol consumption was healthy. 

"The Department of Health and Human Services has pulled back a government report warning of a link between cancer and drinking even small amounts of alcohol, according to the authors of the research.

Their report, the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, warned that even one drink a day raises the risk of liver cirrhosis, oral and esophageal cancer, and injuries. The scientists who wrote it were told that the final version would not be submitted to Congress, as had been planned." 

##########

Here's CBS's story on climate change:

More than 85 climate experts say Energy Department report on greenhouse gases is "full of errors"

"An international group of more than 85 climate experts on Tuesday published a 439-page review arguing that a report by the Trump administration's Energy Department fails to "adequately represent the current scientific understanding of climate change," and it "exhibits pervasive problems" by misrepresenting scientific literature and cherry-picking data.

"The Department of Energy's 151-page report, "A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate," was written by five authors who were hand-selected by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fossil fuel executive. It included a controversial conclusion that "carbon dioxide-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed," and it states that "aggressive mitigation strategies" to address greenhouse gas emissions "could be more harmful than beneficial" — a statement that supports the oil and gas industry."

######

That has sparked a lawsuit by the Environmental Defense Fund.

Matching Senators to committees: a(nother) party divide, by Ashutosh Thakur

 Here's an innovative paper by Ashutosh Thakur that does for legislative matching of senators to committees what the study of matching and market design has long been doing in economics, which is discovering and analyzing the underlying institutional mechanisms that make things happen.

Thakur, Ashutosh. "A matching theory perspective on legislative organization: assignment of committees." Political Science Research and Methods (2025): 1-25. 

Abstract: How legislatures allocate power and conduct business are central determinants of policy outcomes. Much of the literature on parties and the committee system in legislatures examines which members serve on which committees. What has received less attention are the mechanisms by which parties allocate members to committees. I show that parties in the US Senate use matching mechanisms, like those used in school choice and the medical residency match. Republicans and Democrats use two distinct matching mechanisms, such that canonical theories of parties cannot apply equally to them. The Republican mechanism is strategyproof, whereas the Democrat mechanism incentivizes politicians to manipulate their reported preferences. Leveraging matching theory, I make theoretical predictions; corroborating them with archival correspondence and committee requests/assignments data.

Reputations take a long time to build but can be quickly destroyed

 US support for science is one of the things that will be hard to make reliable again.

Here's a story from the Washington Post, about and including an interview with the mathematician Terence Tao.

 The world’s greatest mathematician avoided politics. Then Trump cut science funding.  Terence Tao, often called the “Mozart of Math,” is focused on fundraising after federal research funding to UCLA was suspended.  By Carolyn Y. Johnson

" What’s hardest to restore is the sense of predictability and stability.

"People who support all the positive aspects of America have to speak out and fight for them now. The things that you took for granted, there was bipartisan support to keep certain things in the U.S. running as they have been more or less for the past 70 years because the system worked. That’s not a safe assumption anymore."

Sorority rush (but now even more so)

 The Atlantic has a story about the contemporary unraveling of sorority rush at Southern colleges: now rush is preceded by rush training...

What It Costs to Be a Sorority Girl,  Parents hire coaches for all sorts of extracurriculars; why not to train their daughters to make friends? By Annie Joy Williams 

"It may sound insane to hire someone to train your teenage daughter to talk to other teenage girls, but sorority rush, especially in the South, is a major undertaking. Parents invest in lots of kids’ activities; private coaching is now a common feature of competitive athletics. And getting their kids into the right sorority, parents believe, might help them make the kinds of connections that can get them job interviews someday. ... There are unspoken rules, secret ranking systems, decades of traditions to study, and some hard and fast dos and don’ts, according to Alverson: “You don’t talk about bucks; you don’t talk about boys; you don’t talk about booze,” he told me. “A lot of people say don’t talk about the Bible, but I don’t buy in to that one.” If church is important to you, he said, it’s okay to say that; just remember that “Jesus is not going through rush.”

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Earlier:

Mongell, Susan, and Alvin E. Roth. "Sorority rush as a two-sided matching mechanism." The American Economic Review (1991): 441-464.

Psycho-social criteria for being accepted as a transplant candidate

 Not all decisions made in transplant centers are made on exclusively medical grounds.  Given the dire shortage of transplantable organs, other factors that predict transplant success are also examined.

The Harvard Gazette interviews Dr. Wei Zhang, a transplant hepatologist at Mass General Hospital.

Facing life-or-death call on who gets liver transplants
Surgeons, medical professionals apply risk calculus that gets even more complex for patients with drinking problems  by Anna Lamb

"Patients with decompensated liver disease, or what commonly has been referred to as end-stage liver disease, have drastically shortened life expectancies without transplantation. In one study, patients in this stage who developed complications lived only two years after diagnosis.

"But a transplant is not always a final solution. As many as 20 percent of all patients with a history of alcohol use disorder will relapse after surgery.

“If we know a patient is going to relapse after liver transplant, the evidence is that the chance of them developing recurrent cirrhosis in three years is about 50 percent and the chance of dying from the recurrent liver disease in five years is about 50 percent,” Zhang said. “We do a lot of interventions to prevent them from going back to drinking and improve their quality of life.”

...

“I also understand that if a patient receives an organ, it means that another patient is not able to receive the organ,” he said. “So when I think of that, I find a little bit of comfort.”

"In the last decade, the field of transplant hepatology has changed drastically. In the not-so-distant past, all patients coming into the hospital with a failing liver and any history of alcohol abuse were denied life-saving surgery.

“When I was doing my residency, most of those patients did not have any chance of being evaluated for liver transplantation,” Zhang said.

"Now, he added, there are still quite a few hurdles that patients need to clear to be approved for transplantation. But there’s hope — especially for those with strong support at home.

...

“Some of the factors that we look at is if a patient has insights, meaning, does the patient think that the liver disease is caused by alcohol?” Zhang said. “There are patients who, for various reasons — one of them is probably stigma — don’t acknowledge that the liver disease is caused by alcohol. The risk is that if they get a liver transplantation, and don’t think they need treatments, they may relapse.”

"The other piece of psychosocial criteria, Zhang said, is social support. This includes having strong family ties, stable housing, and the overall ability to seek support after surgery.

“Then those patients would be considered as good candidates with acceptable risk for post-liver-transplant relapse, and we can move on for a liver transplant evaluation,” Zhang said."

"Dark tourism" as a repugnant market in Germany

 NPR's Planet money has a story about tourists visiting the site of Hitler's bunker in Berlin, and about "dark tourism" more generally:

Hitler's bunker is now just a parking lot. But it's a 'dark tourism' attraction anyway By Greg Rosalsky 

"As Germany made intensive efforts to memorialize Nazi victims in the 1990s and 2000s, they also had to grapple with what to do about infamous sites associated with Nazi perpetrators, like the Führerbunker. Over the years, Germans have shown resistance to anything that gives any whiff of memorializing — or even depicting — Hitler and his henchmen.

...

"For years, the German government resisted even recognizing the location of the Führerbunker. Some found visitation of this site distasteful, and they feared any official recognition of it could help it become a kind of shrine for neo-Nazis.

"The Nobel Prize-winning economist Al Roth has developed a concept he calls "repugnant markets." This is when society has a distaste for particular kinds of market activity and may take actions to outlaw or discourage it. Examples he gives include prostitution, buying and selling human organs, ticket scalping, price gouging in the wake of disasters, and eating dog or horse meat. One might add dark tourism of politically sensitive places to Roth's list.

"Heyne says that, despite official reluctance to recognize the location of the Führerbunker and offer anything interesting for tourists to see there, tourists, with the help of guidebooks, came to the site anyways.

...

"And so, in 2006, the Berliner Unterwelten, with the approval of government authorities, erected the information plaque that still stands there today, the only official recognition that this site has historical significance. They chose to make the sign in both German and English. It shows a schematic of the Führerbunker (and a connected bunker known as the Vorbunker) and a timeline of key events at the site. It has a German title, "Mythos und Geschichtszeugnis Führerbunker," or, in English, roughly, the myth and historical record of the Führerbunker.

...

"Perhaps recognizing that many tourists were coming to the Führerbunker and getting disappointed there was nothing there, a Berlin history museum, in 2016, unveiled a full replica of Hitler's bunker that tourists can now go to. (This is kind of similar to other repugnant markets; despite efforts to discourage or even ban a market, demand often proves irrepressible and finds willing suppliers. Think of the failure of Prohibition)."

Rationing access to mud in the Thames

 There's a lot of mud in the Thames, but access to it is limited to when the tide is low (yes, the Thames has tides in the parts that are close enough to the North Sea, including London).  So treasure hunters known as mudlarks must have a permit from the Port of London Authority.

National Geographic has the story:

There’s a 10,000-person wait list to search for riches in London’s Thames
Mudlarking had long been a niche hobby. Then influencers discovered it. 

Twice a day, sections of the River Thames’s shores are exposed by the receding tide, allowing a growing number of mudlarks like Elaine Duigenan to hunt through the mud for treasure.
By Elizabeth Anne Brown

"For decades mudlarks have been granted permission to hunt along the Thames by the Port of London Authority (PLA), which issued permits for up to three years at a time to a small community of hobbyists. But during the pandemic that community grew dramatically, causing the PLA to upend their application process. They recently announced they are capping the total number of permits, each only valid for one year. To accommodate the surge in interest, the agency created a waiting list, which quickly increased to more than 10,000 people and was closed. Active permit holders could not join the list until their current permit was close to expiring, and many veteran mudlarks missed the window. They fear it might take years to get another permit."

 

Immigrants and the tech economy

 

 This picture, from a tech firm, speaks for itself.

 

The business of Sotheby's---the design of an auction house

 The New Yorker has a story about Sotheby's, focusing on its new owner, but with some interesting descriptions of the auction business.

How a Billionaire Owner Brought Turmoil and Trouble to Sotheby’s
Patrick Drahi made a fortune through debt-fuelled telecommunications companies. Now he’s bringing his methods to the art market.  By Sam Knight 

"A major auction house has many parts. “Sotheby’s is really three businesses, which had been run as one business,” a former employee who joined under Tad Smith told me. Since the late eighties, Sotheby’s has offered loans and other financial products, secured against art (in fact, anything that the auction house will sell) as collateral. When Drahi acquired the company, Sotheby’s Financial Services was lending around eight hundred million dollars a year.

"Next, there is everything under a million dollars in value: the wine, the jewelry, the furniture, the sneakers, the watercolors, the Hermès handbags. These are the collectibles—a nice watch, a decent painting, a rare manuscript, the family silver—that have kept the auction houses ticking for the better part of three centuries. The average price of a Sotheby’s lot is still around fifty thousand dollars.

"And then there is the top end. And the top end is where everything goes to hell. According to the consulting firm Arts Economics, less than half a per cent of works sell for more than a million dollars, and yet these lots make up more than half the total revenue of fine-art auctions. An even smaller fragment—sales of more than ten million dollars—contributes around a quarter."