Friday, February 11, 2011

Experiments in Industrial Organization

Hans-Theo Normann and Bradley Ruffle have edited a special issue of the International Journal of Industrial Organization on Experiments in Industrial Organization


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Introduction to the special issue on experiments in industrial organization  
Pages 1-3
Hans-Theo Normann, Bradley Ruffle

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An experimental study of exclusive contracts  Original Research Article
Pages 4-13
Angela M. Smith
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Buyer confusion and market prices  Original Research Article
Pages 14-22
Kenan Kalaycı, Jan Potters

Research highlights

Buyer confusion and market prices ► Sellers make it hard for buyers to assess the quality of their goods ► As a result buyers are confused about the relative quality of different goods ► This allows sellers to increase their prices.
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Information value and externalities in reputation building  Original Research Article
Pages 23-33
Gary E. Bolton, Axel Ockenfels, Felix Ebeling
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Auctions with toeholds: An experimental study of company takeovers  Original Research Article
Pages 34-45
Sotiris Georganas, Rosemarie Nagel
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An experimental test of automatic mitigation of wholesale electricity prices  Original Research Article
Pages 46-53
Daniel L. Shawhan, Kent D. Messer, William D. Schulze, Richard E. Schuler
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Auctions with resale when private values are uncertain: Evidence from the lab and field  Original Research Article
Pages 54-64
Andreas Lange, John A. List, Michael K. Price
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Is there a U-shaped relation between competition and investment?  Original Research Article
Pages 65-73
Dario Sacco, Armin Schmutzler
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An experiment on spatial competition with endogenous pricing  Original Research Article
Pages 74-83
Iván Barreda-Tarrazona, Aurora García-Gallego, Nikolaos Georgantzís, Joaquín Andaluz-Funcia, Agustín Gil-Sanz
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Fighting collusion in auctions: An experimental investigation  Original Research Article
Pages 84-96
Audrey Hu, Theo Offerman, Sander Onderstal
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Can real-effort investments inhibit the convergence of experimental markets?  Original Research Article
Pages 97-103
Timothy N. Cason, Lata Gangadharan, Nikos Nikiforakis
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Group identity in markets  Original Research Article
Pages 104-115
Sherry Xin Li, Kutsal Dogan, Ernan Haruvy
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Rent seeking in groups  Original Research Article
Pages 116-125
T.K. Ahn, R. Mark Isaac, Timothy C. Salmon
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Cartel formation and pricing: The effect of managerial decision-making rules  Original Research Article
Pages 126-133
Joris Gillet, Arthur Schram, Joep Sonnemans
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Price dynamics and collusion under short-run price commitments  Original Research Article
Pages 134-153
Kasper Leufkens, Ronald Peeters
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Thursday, February 10, 2011

Experimental conference and summer school at Barcelona in June

There will be lots to learn...

2nd LeeX International Conference on Theoretical and Experimental Macroeconomics, June 10-11, 2011at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Keynote speakers are:Jean-Robert Tyran, University of Wiena, and Jordi Gali, CREI UPF. The conference organizers are: John Duffy, University of Pittsburgh Frank Heinemann, Technical University of Berlin, Rosemarie Nagel , Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Deadline Friday, April 1, 2011.

Summer school: Fourth Barcelona LeeX Experimental Summer School in Macroeconomics, June 6-9 2011 at Universitat Pompeu Fabra. The summer school  organizers are: John Duffy, University of Pittsburgh Frank Heinemann, Technical University of Berlin, Rosemarie Nagel , Universitat Pompeu Fabra. Deadline 18 April 2011. 
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Wednesday, February 9, 2011

Wake Forest coach donates a kidney to player

The story is here, it was published yesterday, and I saw it only after yesterday's blog post of organ donation stories.

"When a coach says he would do anything for his players, it sounds like a cliché.

"Then there is Wake Forest baseball coach Tom Walter.

"On Monday, Walter donated one of his healthy kidneys to Kevin Jordan, a Wake Forest freshman outfielder talented enough to be drafted in the 19th round by the New York Yankees last year but sick enough to wonder if he would ever play again.

"Surviving became Jordan's challenge.

"Today, Walter and Jordan are recuperating together at Emory University in Atlanta, each with one healthy kidney and baseball in their futures.

"I wanted to help this young man," Walter, 42, said on a conference call last week. "When we recruit our guys, we talk about family and making sacrifices for one another. It's something we take very seriously."

"When no one in Jordan's family could give him what he needed, the baseball coach - for whom Jordan has never played a game - did."

Note that there's even an unraveling aspect to the story: the young man was drafted by the Yankees as a high school student.

HT: Thayer Morrill
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Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Misc. organ donation stories

Here's a live donor kidney site run a bit in the style of a traditional matchmaker (שַׁדְּכָן‎) by an orthodox Jewish woman who donated a kidney: KidneyMatchmaker.com

But there remain religious objections to deceased donations in Israel, despite rulings in favor by senior rabbis, Haaretz reports: Despite donor card, soccer star Avi Cohen's family keeps hospital from taking organs after lobbying by rabbis
"The family of soccer star Avi Cohen has refused to donate his organs despite the fact that he signed a donor's card - something that has happened only once before in Israel's history.

"Cohen, 54, was declared brain dead Tuesday afternoon at Ichilov Hospital in Tel Aviv, where he had been in critical condition since suffering a motorcycle accident on December 20. The determination was made by a medical committee as required by law.

"Pursuant to Health Ministry regulations, Ichilov then asked his family for permission to use his organs. The family initially agreed, since he had signed the donor's card. But shortly before they were to sign the necessary forms, hospital staffers said, they were contacted by rabbis, some of whom even came to the hospital, and the rabbis dissuaded them.

"Though the Chief Rabbinate was involved in drafting the law on determining brain death that passed two years ago, some rabbis still do not recognize brain death, holding that death occurs only when the heart stops - at which point, most organs become useless.


"The hospital sources said that Sephardi Chief Rabbi Shlomo Amar personally called the family to urge them to approve the donation. But they ultimately sided instead with the rabbis who urged them to leave Cohen intact until his heart stopped, which happened yesterday morning.

"It was Amar - with approval from the Sephardi community's leading halakhic arbiter, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef - who issued the halakhic ruling that held brain death, rather than heart stoppage, to be the true moment of death, and enabled the brain death law to pass.

"Some 600,000 Israelis have signed donor's cards, but the cards have no legal force: When a signatory dies, family permission is still needed to donate organs. Still, the only previous case in which a signatory's family refused occurred over a decade ago."


A NY Times story deals with the question of why NY has relatively few organ donors
"For some, it’s a simple choice: when they die, they would like their organs to be used to save someone else’s life. But New York State doesn’t make it easy. People can sign up when they renew their drivers’ licenses, though that’s only once a decade, or they can go online and fill out an off-putting form, then print it out and walk it to a mailbox.
"A mailbox?
"The New York Organ Donor Network has decided it’s not even worth rolling out its new education campaign until the state makes it easier for people to sign up. People on the waiting list, meanwhile, keep dying. "

And it's not just in New York: Vatican Says Benedict No Longer an Organ Donor
"The Vatican says Pope Benedict XVI, who has long championed organ transplants, is no longer an organ donor.

"The pope's secretary Monsignor Georg Gaenswein addressed the issue in a letter to a German doctor who has been using the fact that Benedict possessed a donor card to recruit other donors.
"Vatican Radio, in a German language report this week, said Gaenswein wrote that while the former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger's organ card dates to the 1970s it was rendered void when he became pope."




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Monday, February 7, 2011

Through the looking glass of medical ethics: compatible pairs in kidney exchange

Some time ago my colleagues and I observed that there would be really large gains in terms of increased numbers of transplants from inviting compatible pairs into kidney exchange, largely because it would increase the supply of O donors.
(see Roth, Alvin E., Tayfun Sonmezand M.Utku Unver A Kidney Exchange Clearinghouse in New England American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings, 95,2, May, 2005, 376-380.

As with many discussions of organ transplantation, discussions of efficiency are interspersed with discussions of ethics, and almost no good deed goes unquestioned (recall the story of the kidney doc who donated a kidney to a patient*). The current issue of Transplantation has a comment that takes issue with some of the prior discussion of ethics.

Compatible-Incompatible Live Donor Kidney Exchanges, by David Steinberg,Transplantation, 91(3):257-260, February 15, 2011.

Abstract: "The participation of an immunologically compatible donor-intended recipient pair in a kidney exchange that is unnecessary for them can significantly increase the number of kidneys available for transplantation. Despite their utilitarian value transplant ethicists have condemned this type of organ exchange as morally inappropriate. An opposing analysis concludes that these exchanges are examples of moral excellence that should be encouraged."


*Doctor's unique donation prompts ethical concerns: A Chicago-area nephrologist's gift of a kidney to her patient raises the question of whether doctors should be living organ donors.
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