NBER market design conference, October 28-29, 2011

NATIONAL BUREAU OF ECONOMIC RESEARCH, Market Design Working Group Meeting, Susan Athey and Parag Pathak Organizers, October 28-29, 2011.

PROGRAM Friday, October 28 8:15 am Shuttles leave Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER 8:30 am Continental Breakfast 8:55 am Welcome and Opening Remarks 9:00 am Matching with Contracts Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College Tobias Switzer, US Air Force Matching with (Branch-of-Choice) Contracts at United States Military Academy John Hatfield, Stanford University Scott Duke Kominers, University of ChicagoMultilateral Matching  10:30 am Break 10:45 am Strategy-Proofness and Efficiency in Complex Design Problems Eduardo Azevedo, Harvard University Eric Budish, University of Chicago Strategyproofness in the Large as a Desideratum for Market Design Clayton Featherstone, Harvard University A Rank-Based Refinement of Ordinal Efficiency and a New (but Familiar) Class of Ordinal Assignment Mechanisms 12:15 pm Lunch 1:15 pm Information and Price Discovery Haoxiang Zhu, Stanford University Do Dark Pools Harm Price Discovery? Mark Satterthwaite, Northwestern University Steven Williams, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Konstantinos Zachariadis, London School of Economics Price Discovery Steven Tadelis, UC, Berkeley and eBay Research Labs Florian Zettelmeyer, Northwestern University and NBER Information Disclosure as a Matching Mechanism: Theory and Evidence from a Field Experiment  3:30 pm Break 3:45 pm Kidney Exchange Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College Utku Unver, Boston College Altruistically Unbalanced Kidney Exchange Itai Ashlagi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology David Gamarnik, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Alvin Roth, Harvard University and NBER The Need for (long) Chains in Kidney Exchange 5:15 pm Adjourn 5:20 pm Shuttles leave NBER for Royal Sonesta Hotel 6:00 pm Dinner Bambara Restaurant25 Edwin H. Land Blvd., Cambridge (across the street from the Royal Sonesta Hotel) Saturday, October 29 8:15 am Shuttles leave Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER 8:30 am Continental Breakfast 9:00 am Online Markets Susan Athey, Harvard University and NBER Ittai Abraham, Microsoft Research Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Research Michael Grubb, Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyPeaches, Lemons, and Cookies: Designing Auction Markets with Dispersed Information  Liran Einav, Stanford University and NBER Theresa Kuchler, Stanford University Jonathan Levin, Stanford University and NBER Neel Sundaresan, eBay Research LabsLearning from Seller Experiments in Online Markets  10:30 am Break 10:45 am User Interfaces and User Generated Content Arpita Ghosh, Yahoo! Research Preston McAfee, Yahoo! ResearchIncentivizing High-Quality User-Generated Content  Sven Seuken, University of Zurich David Parkes, Harvard University Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research Kamal Jain, eBay Research Labs Mary Czerwinski, Microsoft Research Desney Tan, Microsoft ResearchMarket User Interface Design  12:15 pm Lunch 1:15 pm School Choice and Student Assignment Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University John Hatfield, Stanford University Yusuke Narita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Promoting School Competition Through School Choice: A Market Design Approach Yan Chen, University of Michigan Onur Kesten, Carnegie Mellon University From Boston to Shanghai to Deferred Acceptance: Theory and Experiments on A Family of School Choice Mechanisms 2:45 pm Adjourn ================== Format:  Authors should plan to speak for about 30-35 minutes.

Harvard celebrates first kidney transplant

In connection with Harvard's 375th anniversary, the Gazette is taking note of some key events:  A transplant makes history--Joseph Murray’s 1954 kidney operation ushered in a new medical era

"“If you’re going to worry about what people say, you’re never going to make any progress,” Murray said during a recent interview at his home in Wellesley Hills, Mass."
...
"After the operation, Murray’s work on transplantation continued. Despite his success with the Herricks, the problem of rejection generally still presented a high hurdle.
In the years that followed, Murray used first X-rays and then drugs to suppress the immune system and keep the body from rejecting the grafted tissue, but there were few successes. Through those dark years, he and his colleagues pressed on, inspired by the dying patients who volunteered for surgery in hopes that, even if they didn’t make it, enough could be learned that success would come one day.
“We were trying. In spite of several failures, we felt we were getting close,” Murray said. “It’s difficult to translate the optimism of the Brigham staff and hospital. The administration really backed us.”
Finally, in 1962, in collaboration with scientists from the drug company Burroughs-Wellcome, Murray tried a drug, Imuran, on 23-year-old Mel Doucette, who had received a kidney from an unrelated cadaver donor. The success of that operation and the anti-rejection drug cleared the final hurdle to widespread organ transplantation between unrelated donors, and set the stage for the many refinements and breakthroughs by others in the years to come."

Where do you fall on the US income distribution? CBO report

The Congressional Budget Office issued a report today,  Trends in the Distribution of Household Income Between 1979 and 2007.  Growth for the top 1% has been disproportionately high.
It includes the following interesting table, among many others:

"In this analysis, CBO presents data on income and taxes for various subgroups of the population, such as the lowest 20 percent or the top 1 percent. In constructing those
subgroups, households are ranked by income that is adjusted for household size. Each subgroup of the population contains an equal number of people, but because households vary in size, subgroups generally contain unequal numbers of households."

Update: the NY Times has an interactive gadget that allows you to click on an iconic percentile and see some data...http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2011/10/30/nyregion/where-the-one-percent-fit-in-the-hierarchy-of-income.html

Horse meat in the U.S.

The NY Times reports on how the market has responded to the closing of U.S. slaughterhouses for horses (related to the repugnance felt by some to the eating of horse meat.):  Slaughter of Horses Goes On, Just Not in U.S.

"The closing of the country’s last meat processing plant that slaughtered horses for human consumption was hailed as a victory for equine welfare. But five years later just as many American horses are destined for dinner plates to satisfy the still robust appetites for their meat in Europe and Asia.

"Now they are carved into tartare de cheval or basashi sashimi in Mexico and Canada.

"That shift is one of the many unintended consequences of a de facto federal ban on horse slaughter, according to a recent federal government study. As the domestic market for unwanted horses shrinks, more are being neglected and abandoned, and roughly the same number — nearly 140,000 a year — are being killed after a sometimes grueling journey across the border.
...
"The study’s findings have been fiercely contested by animal welfare groups, which argue that most of the problems stem from the economic downturn and the high price of feed. The study also breathed new life into the long-smoldering battle over whether to allow the resumption of domestic horse slaughter or, alternatively, to prohibit the animals from being shipped abroad for their meat.

"In recent weeks lawmakers have pushed Congress to take action in both directions. The Government Accountability Office, which conducted the study, concluded that either option would be better than the status quo, but advocates on both sides, while hopeful, said a resolution did not appear imminent."

******
Here is the report by the Government Accountability Office,

HORSE WELFARE: Action Needed to Address Unintended Consequences from Cessation of Domestic Slaughter 

"GAO analysis shows that U.S. horses intended for slaughter are now traveling significantly greater distances to reach their final destination, where they are not covered by U.S. humane slaughter protections."

Tayfun Sonmez on matching officers to military branches

On Friday Tayfun Sonmez gave a stimulating presentation of his analysis of West Point's system for assigning graduating officers to military branches: Tayfun Sonmez and Tobias Switzer, Matching with (Branch-of-Choice) Contracts at United States Military Academy

In a second paper, he was more critical of the ROTC assignment system.

Dating as a two sided platform

From a new Wall Street dating website:

"Ladies pay $15/month membership fee and are allowed to browse and contact as many men as they desire. Gentlemen can browse as much as they want and are offered “Spark Packs” for $15 which allows them to contact 5 ladies of their choice. This way Ladies receive meaningful interactions from Gentlemen that are genuinely interested, while Gentlemen no longer need to spam dozens of profiles to get a response."

http://dealbreaker.com/2011/10/its-about-ambition-and-personality-not-cash/


HT Eduardo Azevedo

An Incentive System with Heart: Wharton celebrates Judd Kessler

That's the subheading of an article in which Wharton celebrates the work of Judd Kessler: How to Encourage People to Become Organ Donors: An Incentive System with Heart

"The decision to be an organ donor may seem easy for some: You sign an agreement that will let your heart, kidneys, liver, pancreas and other organs be used after your death in a way that helps the recipients lead fuller, healthier lives.
But for other people, the choice is harder. Some fear that a doctor may not work as hard to save them because he or she wants their organs for other patients, or that their organs might be removed prematurely (although there is no evidence to support either of these concerns). There may also be a psychological cost of having to think about your own death at a time when you are still relatively healthy. Other people may simply not want to bother with a program that doesn't directly benefit them.
It is against this backdrop that Wharton business and public policy professor Judd Kessler and Harvard economics professor Alvin Roth set out to see whether changes in the management of organ waiting lists could increase the number of donors."
...


The paper is here:
Kessler, Judd B. and Alvin E. Roth, '' Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate,'' American Economic Review, forthcoming.


Update: when the Financial Times covered the story (scroll down here) they gave Judd a new first name...

Tomorrow, Oct 22 I'll be teaching NYC math teachers about stable matching and NYC school choice

Stable Matching with Application to School Choice with Al Roth

If you are a NYC high school or middle school math teacher you can register at the link above to attend a class I'll give on October 22, sponsored by Math for America, on the topic

"Stable Matching with Applications to School Choice"

Abstract: "Matching" is the name economists give to the ways we get the many things we choose in life that also have to choose us, from spouses to jobs to places in NYC high schools. Some simple models of matching will be discussed, along with some powerful organizing ideas, like whether a particular matching is stable or unstable. The session will include a detailed description of the current system of matching students with NYC high schools.

When: 10/22/11 9:30 AM EDT
Duration: 6 Hours 
Location: 160 5TH Avenue, 9th floor, Entrance on 21st between 5th and 6th
New York, NY, 10010
Type: General Public and All MfA
Register here

Teach for America's recruiting at Harvard

The Crimson is full of admiration for TFA's successful recruiting at Harvard: apparently 18% of Harvard seniors applied for TFA positions teaching in troubled school districts.

Here are two recent stories:

TFA Shows the Way

The organization's corporate recruiting strategy is a smart move

TFA: A Corporate Approach

Why 18 percent of last year's graduating class applied to teach in America's worst schools.

Florida puts university salaries online

The State of Florida has posted its salary information, including state university salaries, online: Florida has a right to know.

(Other salary databases here.)

First Cambridge Area Economics and Computation Day (CAEC'11)

Susan Athey asks me to post the following announcement about a forthcoming conference on the economics of the internet:

First Cambridge Area Economics and Computation Day (CAEC'11) http://caec.seas.harvard.edu/

Call For Participation

Friday November 18, 2011

MIT, Cambridge, MA

Patil/Kiva, room 32-G449 Stata Center

A lot of research and business activity in the Cambridge/Boston area is engaged in economic and computational questions in regard to understanding and developing the economics of Internet activity. Examples of topics of interest include theoretical, modeling, algorithmic, and empirical work on electronic commerce, networked behavior, and social networks.

One of the main purposes of CAEC is to encourage collaboration between local researchers. Significant emphasis will be placed on a poster session and short talks. The overall structure of the day will involve four longer talks, this first year by each of the steering committee, with a short talks session and a poster session over lunch, along with brief poster announcements.

For short talks and posters, send an email to caec11@seas.harvard.edu by Friday, October 28 2011, including a brief description of your work, along with an indication of a preference for the work to be presented as a short talk or a poster, or be considered for both. We will select a small number of short talks and put together a poster session.

Decisions about the program will be made by Monday, October 31.

The suggested format for a short talk is (a) description of the problem, (b) statement of results, and (c) discussion of open research directions. There will be no time for setting up individual laptops for the short-talk session, instead we will have all presentations preloaded on a computer in the auditorium.

We expect that the event will be at no cost to participants.

We also invite interest from sponsors.

CAEC Steering committee

Susan Athey (Harvard Economics)

Costis Daskalakis (MIT EECS)

Andrew Lo (MIT Sloan)

David Parkes (Harvard SEAS)

Will marijuana use remain repugnant?

The Gallup poll reports Record-High 50% of Americans Favor Legalizing Marijuana Use

I speak about kidney exchange at Harvard Medical School

As the seminar announcement makes clear, part of the attraction (at least to third year students) is the free food:)

John Warren Surgical Society at Harvard Medical School
presents

Alvin E. Roth, Ph.D
 George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration in the Department of Economics 

at Harvard University and in the Harvard Business School.

for a discussion of

"Market Design, Kidney Exchange, and Repugnance"

 Monday, October 17th
 12:30 pm, TMEC 250

Food will be served.

Al Roth's research, teaching, and consulting interests are in game theory, experimental economics, and market design. The best known market he has designed (or, in this case, redesigned) is the National Resident Matching Program, which matches approximately twenty thousand doctors a year with their residency program at American hospitals. He has recently been involved in the reorganization of the market for Gastroenterology fellows, which started using a clearinghouse in 2006 for positions beginning in 2007. Other markets he has helped design include the high school matching system used in New York City to match approximately ninety thousand students to high schools each year, starting with students entering high school in the Fall of 2004; The matching system used in Boston Public Schools, adopted for students starting school in September 2006; And the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, for incompatible patient-donor pairs. He is the chair of the American Economic Association's Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, which has designed a number of recent changes in the market for new Ph.D. economists. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society, and has been a Guggenheim and Sloan fellow. He received his Ph.D at Stanford University, and came to Harvard from the University of Pittsburgh, where he was the Andrew Mellon Professor of Economics.

High Yield Information:  

First years:  Al Roth is awesome.  You get to ask him questions.  Also attendees will get early access to joining the HMS Transplant Pager Program where you will likely be able to observe the a paired kidney donation first hand.  
Second years: Relive great memories of last year while we talk about kidneys, residency, policy, and ethics.
Third Years: There will be free food.
Fourth Years: Al Roth designed the National Resident Matching Program. I'm sure he'd be happy to answer a reasonable number of questions.  

We look forward to seeing you there!

Kosovo organ trafficking case opens

Trial Opens for 7 Kosovars in Organ-Trafficking Case

" The suspects are accused of luring victims from Turkey and former Communist countries to Pristina to sell their kidneys with false promises of payments of up to €15,000, or nearly $20,000.

"The recipients, according to the indictment, paid between €80,000 and €100,000 for the organs."

This case seems to be different from but related to the much more disturbing accusations related to war crimes:

"The case has been connected with an inquiry by the Council of Europe released this January, which found that a criminal group of Kosovo Liberation Army fighters had executed Serbian and Albanian prisoners and sold their organs on the international black market. The report said that the so-called Drenica Group was led by Hashim Thaci, the current prime minister of Kosovo."

Earlier posts:

Two faces of kidney transplantation

Illegal markets for organ transplants: Kosovo trials

Online dating, later in life

Job markets have scrambles for late action, and it turns out that it's never too late for online dating either, the NY Times reports: Second Love at First Click

"If you think online dating is the domain of the young, maybe it’s time to check in with your mother. Now, people 55 and older are visiting American dating sites more than any other age group — up 39 percent in the last three years, according to the Internet tracking firm Experian Hitwise. The No. 2 group? Singles 45 to 54. According to IBISWorld, a market research firm, and the United States Census Bureau, about 37 percent of people 50 and older are unmarried. And the divorce rate among the 50-plus demographic is high. With so many older Americans unattached, living independently into their later years, and increasingly comfortable using the Internet, they, too, are logging on for love.

"And they may be better at finding it than their younger cohorts. Dating industry professionals say that singles in their 20s and 30s are typically focused on marriage and starting a family, while older singles (many of whom have been married before) have a more relaxed approach and are careful to pick companions who share their interests.

“Baby boomers have been one of the fastest-growing demographics for a lot of online dating companies,” said Caitlin Moldvay, an analyst for IBISWorld. The growth comes at the same time that some younger singles (18 to 34) are moving away from dating sites to social networking sites like Facebook as “a proxy for online dating,” said Bill Tancer, the general manager of global research for Experian Marketing Services.

"Greg Liberman, the president and chief executive of Spark Networks — which owns specialty dating sites including JDate, ChristianMingle, BlackSingles, SilverSingles — said that for the first eight months of this year, Spark had a 93 percent increase in new members 50 and older across all of its dating sites, compared with the same span of time last year. “We’re seeing significant growth,” Mr. Liberman said.

"He’s also observed that, while it’s been common for parents to buy dating site memberships for their adult children, now adult children have begun buying memberships for their widowed and divorced parents. Gone is the heyday of personal ads in The New York Review of Books."

Uniform notification date for postdoctoral positions in professional psychology

APPIC, the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers, runs a centralized match for (pre-doctoral) internships that uses the Roth-Peranson algorithm, which replaced the prior telephone market, which suffered from congestion.
As their name suggests, they also are involved with postdoctoral positions. The field of clinical neuropsychology also operates a postdoctoral match, but the other postdoctoral areas do not. Recently APPIC has taken steps to try to organize that market in a decentralized way.

In May of 2011 APPIC polled its member postdoctoral programs about whether they would prefer a system that operated with a uniform offer notification date versus a uniform acceptance date. Under a uniform acceptance date, programs could make offers whenever they liked, but all offers would be supposed to remain open until the designated acceptance date. Under the uniform notification date, all offers would be made at the same time, with applicants having a short time to reply.

My understanding is that the organization has decided to go ahead with a uniform notification date, which would however allow programs to make early offers if one of their non-complying competitors makes an early exploding offer to a candidate to whom they are planning to make an offer themselves. Here's an outline of the proposed rules. I worry that some of the same problems that afflicted the old telephone market for internships may quickly resurface...(and that this proposed organization of the market will not work as well as the reorganization of the market for gastroenterologists, which instead of dealing with reciprocal offers by employers, empowered applicants to change their minds on early acceptances...)

Uniform Notification Date with Option for Reciprocal Offer (UNDr)

March 14, 2012

UNDr Procedure

All APPIC non-neuropsychology postdoctoral programs (those that do not offer the specialty of clinical neuropsychology) will make offers to applicants only on the APPIC selected date for offers. Programs may make an exception if an applicant is made another earlier bone fide offer, which must follow the guidelines below. On March 14, 2012,  at Noon EST, the program will call their top candidate. Once an offer is made to an applicant, the applicant may proceed with one of the following actions: accept the offer, decline the offer, or hold the offer for four hours. If the position is held, it is considered to be frozen and cannot be offered to any other candidate during that time period. (At the four hour mark, the candidate must either accept or decline, otherwise the offer is no longer valid). Candidates may not hold more than one offer at a time. Once a candidate accepts an offer they should call the remaining programs that are lower on their  preference list and inform them that they no longer wish to be considered at those facilities. Postdoctoral Training Directors (or their designee) will contact all applicants by phone or e-mail on the day of the UND to inform them of the status of the position. After a site and an applicant come to an agreement, a formal offer letter will be mailed to the applicant who will then formally accept the offer in writing.

Reciprocal Offers Process
Candidates who have been made an offer from a non-APPIC site (whether clinical or research postdoc or job offer) requiring a decision prior to UND date may contact an APPIC site request a reciprocal offer. The candidate would indicate the name of the program making the competing offer and how long they have been allowed to hold their offer. Before making a reciprocal offer to the candidate, the APPIC site should call the candidate's Internship Training Director and verify the offer or ask the applicant for written verification of the competing offer (e.g., a faxed or scanned letter or a forwarded e-mail).

When an APPIC program makes a reciprocal offer, the candidate is expected to accept immediately. The acceptance is binding. If a program declines to make a reciprocal offer, only then is the candidate permitted to contact another site indicating it is (now) their #1 choice.

Application Deadlines
Application deadlines are permitted at any point prior to UND as determined by each program.

Notification of Applicants Who are No Longer Being Considered
APPIC programs should notify applicants at the point that they are out of consideration for the position for which they have applied.

UNDr Posting by APPIC Postdoctoral Members
By September 24, 2011, APPIC postdoctoral programs are expected to update their brochures, website, and directory information to explain their use of the UNDr process.

Programs who Wish to Make Offers after UND
Programs are permitted to make offers after UND if they are uncertain of funding at time of UND.

Clearinghouse
No clearinghouse will be set up during this initial year. Programs that do not fill positions on UND may fill their empty positions on any future date.
 

UNDr Frequently Asked Questions

Does the UNDr process apply to non-APPIC postdoctoral programs?
APPIC is currently marketing this process to non-APPIC postdoctoral programs as a mechanism of providing increased collaboration among all training programs. Many non-APPIC postdoctoral programs previously participated in an informal UND process. These programs in particular have all been contacted personally to request their continued participation as in years past. Any program who would like to participate is most welcome to do so and we strongly encourage every program to follow this procedure. We ask any non-APPIC program who wishes to participate to contact Dr. Lisa Kearney at Lisa.Kearney3@va.gov so that they can be kept informed of any updated processes as they occur.

Does APPIC plan to move forward to a formal match system for postdoctoral programs as it previously did with the internship?
There is no current plan to move forward to a formal match system. However, the APPIC Board will continue to survey members regarding their interest and commitment to a formal match system, and implement as voted on by the membership.

If I do not obtain funding for a new postdoctoral position until AFTER the UNDr date, may I proceed with filling the position after the UNDr date?
Yes! If you receive funding after the UNDr date, you may proceed with recruitment for the fall. This is also the same for new internship programs who receive funding after the Match date.

I have a Neuropsychology Postdoctoral program which does not participate in the formal neuropsychology match system. Must I participate in the UNDr process?
No, Neuropsychology Postdoctoral programs are not included in this process as they already have a process for organizing offers available to them through the APPCN match system.
 

Unraveling: a brief review (and reply)

The peer review process, for all its flaws, normally eliminates the need to write the kind of wide-ranging reply that I have forthcoming in the Journal of Labor Economics.  Here's the abstract and introduction: the link to the full paper is below.

Abstract: In this reply I describe the unraveling of transaction dates in several markets, including the labor market for new lawyers hired by large law firms. This and other markets illustrate that unraveling can occur in markets with competitive prices, that it can result in substantial inefficiencies, and that marketplace institutions play a role in restoring efficiency. All of these contradict the conclusions of Priest (2010).

And here are the opening paragraphs of the paper:

"Priest’s (2010) paper, “Timing ‘Disturbances’ in Labor Market Contracting: Roth’s Findings and the Effects of Labor Market Monopsony” seeks to rebut what he describes as “The work of Alvin E. Roth and colleagues writing in what might be described as the Roth tradition” about “a curious set of phenomena in some labor and product markets.”

"Briefly, the “tradition” Priest addresses has studied the timing of transactions, and observed that some markets go through episodes in which they unravel in time, with transactions becoming earlier and more diffuse in time from year to year, and with offers often coming to have very short durations (“exploding” offers). This has often led to changes in marketplace institutions, including rules and regulations to introduce a uniform time for market transactions, and restore thickness. Frequently this involves facilitating a marketplace at a later as well as a more uniform time. (For overviews, see Roth and Xing 1994, and Niederle and Roth 2009.)"


Roth, Alvin E, "Marketplace institutions related to the timing of transactions, and reply to Priest (2010)" Journal of Labor Economics, forthcoming (maybe April 2012).

Another year of the judicial clerkship market: maybe the last one under the current system?

Another year, more bad behavior by judges hiring clerks: Judges Compete for Law Clerks on a Lawless Terrain. (Banning cell phones in courthouses is clearly cruel and unusual punishment for law students on the clerkship job market...)

"Based on rules that were intended to curtail shenanigans, judges hiring for the 2012 season were supposed to begin interviewing third-year law students no earlier than Thursday, Sept. 15 at 10 a.m. But somehow, at the federal courthouse in downtown Manhattan, most of the interviews — and job offers— had already concluded by 9:45 a.m.

"Indeed, hoping to leapfrog their peers, most judges actually began interviewing hours (if not days or months) earlier. Many made so-called exploding offers, forcing candidates to accept or decline a job offer on the spot (and it’s a “Godfather”-style offer: one they can’t really refuse). Some judges extended offers by phone, which is even more nerve-racking for students because cellphones are not allowed at many courthouses. At the Manhattan courthouse, anxious young applicants in stiff new shoes were darting in and out of the building all day, checking and rechecking their phones with the security guard, just so they could listen to their voice mail between interviews.


"They had, after all, heard the warning tale of an unlucky student from the year before, who didn’t answer the phone because he was on a flight to another interview. The story ends with two voice mails: the first offering a job, and the second revoking it."
*********

Here's a version of that latter story that emerged from interviews we summarized in our 2007 paper:
“I received the offer via voicemail while I was in flight to my second interview. The judge actually left three messages.
First, to make the offer.
Second, to tell me that I should respond soon.
Third, to rescind the offer.
It was a 35 minute flight.”

• Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, "The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" University of Chicago Law Review, 68, 3, Summer, 2001, 793-902.(online at SSRN)
• Avery, Christopher, Jolls, Christine, Posner, Richard A. and Roth, Alvin E., "The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" . University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486.

Will this be the last year that judges, law students, and law schools nominally adhere to the regime of post Labor Day dates?

Unraveling in soccer: Real Madrid signs 7-year old

Real Madrid signs 7-year-old

"Real Madrid has signed a 7-year-old soccer prodigy from Argentina who goes by the name Leo...

"Leonel Angel Coira signed with the Spanish club and will begin training Sept. 6, Madrid spokesman Juan Tapiador told The Associated Press on Monday.
...
"Madrid reportedly made the push to sign Coira because Spanish league rival Atletico Madrid was also pursuing the youngster."

HT: Larry DeBrock
*******************************

Unraveling of presidential primary dates, continued

Labor markets aren't the only things that unravel: the competition to be influential in selecting presidential candidates continues to do so: Iowa Republicans Eye Jan. 3 for Caucuses

"DES MOINES – Iowa Republicans are tentatively eyeing Jan. 3 as the date for the state’s caucuses, the first stop in the party’s battle to select a nominee to challenge President Obama.

The date is the consensus of party officials, who are frantically working to keep the first votes of the 2012 campaign from creeping into December. But the date is not locked down and could change depending on when the New Hampshire primary is held.

“I think for the long-term stability of maintaining our role as the first-in-the-nation caucus state, it’s important for us to start this process in 2012,” Matt Strawn, chairman of the Republican Party of Iowa, told reporters here Friday. “Actually for the voters, for the candidates and for the entire process, we all would be best served by starting this in January.”

"The Republican primary calendar has fallen into disorder. A plan to start the balloting in February has fallen apart, with Florida and other states rushing to move up the dates of their primary contests. The biggest remaining question is when the New Hampshire secretary of state, William M. Gardner, intends to schedule the contest there.

"He has not ruled out a December primary, given the leapfrogging by other states. If that were to take place – a possibility that most party officials still believe is unlikely – the Iowa caucuses could also be adjusted."
***********

I'll be talking about unraveling and exploding offers in class on Friday, so expect a lot of unraveling posts this week (if I were cleverer, I would have posted them last week...)

Leading indicator on economics job market, October 2011

John Siegfried writes:
"Here are data identifying the number of new jobs listed in the September and October JOE for recent years.

2007   1,171

2008   1,066

2009      924

2010   1,010

2011   1,025

The news could be better, but the  November and December JOEs are yet to come.

And it could certainly be worse. Consider the case of the academic market for historians: No More Plan B

"In 2009–10 the number of jobs posted with the AHA fell 29.4 per cent, from 806 to 569, while 989 PhDs were conferred. This is hardly the first time these two numbers have been far apart. In 1972, the first year for which accurate statistics exist, almost 1,200 new PhDs competed for just over 600 new teaching jobs. Except for two short periods in the late 1980s and the 2000s, the number of openings in history departments has consistently fallen short, sometimes by a very wide margin, of the number of doctorates awarded. As public contributions to higher education shrink, state budgets contract, and a lagging economy takes its toll on endowments and family incomes, there is little reason to expect the demand for tenure-track faculty to expand."

Wait-lists in college admissions

Inside Higher Ed reports:
 "at the annual meeting of the National Association for College Admission Counseling -- colleges' wait-list practices have become an issue of concern for many high school counselors. One session focused on the issue, and NACAC's Assembly voted for a formal study.

"The main concern among counselors was the lack of transparency surrounding how institutions manage their lists and why they operate them as they do. While most of the admissions process is governed by fairly clear rules laid out by the association, there are few rules governing the time between May 1 and August 1. Counselors said they have noticed a trend of more students are getting put on wait lists every year, and many said they hear horror stories about students being blind-sided with quick deadlines or inadequate aid offers months after they gave up hope of getting into their preferred institutions.
...
"Wait lists -- where institutions do not immediately deny a student admission but defer the decision until other students have either accepted or declined admission -- have become more prominent in recent years, admissions officials said. According to NACAC’s annual admissions trends survey, 39 percent of colleges responding to the survey reported using wait lists in 2009. Of those, 47 percent reported increases from the year before, and 51 percent reported increases in the number of students admitted off wait lists.
...
"The association's Statement of Principles of Good Practice lays out few rules regarding what institutions are allowed to do when forming a wait list or offering students acceptance off one. There are no rules or best practices governing the size of wait lists or how long students should be given to make a decision. Weede said the outcome of Talmage's proposal could be new recommendations.

"Talmage said he was motivated to bring forward the resolution after an incident involving one of the students he counseled. The student was placed on the wait list at his first-choice institution and told in May that the university would no longer accept anyone from the wait list. He accepted an offer from another institution only to get a call from his first choice at 9:30 a.m. one day in June, telling him he had until noon to make a decision.
...
""My sense is that the wait list is one of the least-studied -- and perhaps least-analyzed -- parts of the college-admissions process," Trout said in the opening remarks to his session Friday.
...
"Sometimes the stories involve institutions pumping up their yield numbers by placing a large number of students on wait lists and then only selecting students they know will enroll. Other times they revolve around need-blind institutions no longer ignoring need once they start pulling from the wait list.

"Still others involve students like Talmage's who are given very little time to make a decision, or students who are admitted off several wait lists in succession, losing enrollment deposits at each successive institution.
...
"For his session Friday, Trout asked four institutions -- the University of Notre Dame, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Grinnell College, and Texas Christian University -- to supply data about and discuss how they use wait lists.

"The number of students offered spots on wait lists ranged from 500 to almost 3,600, and the number offered admission ranged from 140 to 0.

"Institutions that use wait lists said they help control for disruptions in the student market that could hurt an institution's bottom line. “It’s a process of managing uncertainty in an uncertain field,” said Seth Allen, dean of admission and financial aid at Pomona College.

"Butler University provides a good example. The institution saw applications increase 41 percent this year -- likely due to the performance of its men's basketball team in the NCAA tournament, where it reached the finals for two consecutive years -- along with an increase in student quality, Weede said. The institution saw a significantly lower yield than it had in previous years, and ended up offering admission to 650 members of its 720-person wait-list.

"Other times only a small number of students are actually offered admission off a wait list. In 2011, the University of Notre Dame placed 1,905 students on its wait list -- 1,632 of whom chose to remain on the list – and only accepted seven students off the list. None of the 3,600 students offered a spot on the wait list at the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2010 received offers of admission.

Euroeconomistjobs.com, a site for jobs for economists in Europe

Euroeconomistjobs.com caught my eye with this ad:

Specialist: Industrial Economics, Organizational and Market Design

UCL - Université Catholique de Louvain

Leuven, Belgium

The successful candidate will carry out research in the field of Industrial economics, organizational and market design. He will be expected to develop high quality theoretical and/or applied research in industrial organization, incentive theory, organizational or market design, the economics of information and technology and game theory with applications. The research topics we are interested in include but are not limited to economics of networks, internet, communication medias, innovation and patents, two-sided markets, matching, the theory of the firm, not-for-profit organizations, and auctions.
The successful candidate will have teaching assignments in general economics and in the above-mentioned field within the various degree programmes organised by the Faculty. He will have to supervise master theses and PhD dissertations.
Tasks: The applicant will

• be responsible for teaching courses at all the study levels (i.e. undergraduate, graduate and postgraduate), as well as in programmes of continuing education;
• supervise the final diploma work (i.e. master thesis) of undergraduate students, as well as PhD theses;
• be involved in (and/or supervise, promote) research programmes;
• contribute to the international visibility of the University through teaching and research excellence;
• contribute to activities of the University with a societal impact in the fields of the economy, socio-cultural changes or cooperation with developing countries.

Qualifications: the applicant must have

• a PhD degree in economics, or equivalent qualifications;
• a significant scientific record proven by international publications;
• either studied abroad for an extensive period or had substantial experience outside UCL;
• experience in and aptitude for teaching at university level;
• the capacity to work within a team of teachers and to integrate research findings in their courses;
• creativity and must be open to pedagogic innovation and interdisciplinarity;
• the capacities required to undertake academic research at a high level and to advise, or lead, a research team ;
• a good knowledge of both spoken and written French. If this is not the case, the applicant should be willing to learn French within 2 years. Fluency in English and other languages is an additional advantage;
• the capacity to teach in French and in a second language.

For more details and to apply for this job click here

© EuroEconomistJobs.com, 2011
all rights reserved 

Mike Luca on Yelp

My colleague Mike Luca (whose work I wrote about here when he was still a grad student) has a paper on the influence of Yelp reviews on restaurant revenues.

It's recently been receiving some attention both locally at HBS working knowledge, and in the larger blogosphere: One-Star Bump On Yelp Leads To Big Revenue Boost, Study Finds

Here's the abstract of his paper:
"Do online consumer reviews affect restaurant demand?  I investigate this question using a novel dataset combining reviews from the website Yelp.com and restaurant data from the Washington State  Department of Revenue.   Because  Yelp prominently displays a restaurant's rounded average rating,  I can  identify the  causal  impact of Yelp ratings on demand with a  regression discontinuity framework that exploits Yelp‟s rounding thresholds.  I present three findings about the impact of consumer reviews on the restaurant industry: (1) a one-star increase in Yelp rating leads to a  5-9 percent increase in revenue, (2) this effect is driven by independent restaurants; ratings do not affect restaurants with chain affiliation, and (3) chain restaurants have declined in market share as Yelp penetration has increased. This suggests that  online  consumer reviews substitute for more traditional forms of reputation. I then test whether  consumers use these reviews  in a way that is consistent with standard  learning models.  I present  two additional findings: (4) consumers do not use all available information and are more responsive to quality changes that are more visible and (5) consumers respond more strongly when a rating contains more information.  Consumer response to a restaurant‟s average rating is affected by the number of reviews and whether the reviewers are certified as “elite” by Yelp, but is  unaffected by the size of the reviewers‟ Yelp friends network." "