Eduardo Azevedo defends his Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 3

Eduardo Azevedo (in suit:) having just fended off his committee: from left, Eric Budish, Al Roth, Oliver Hart, Susan Athey, Andrei Shleifer

Eduardo chose the following three of his papers to constitute his dissertation:

A Supply and Demand Framework for Two-Sided Matching Markets (Job Market Paper #1)
with Jacob Leshno
extended abstract published in EC11

Strategyproofness in the Large as a Desideratum for Market Design (Job Market Paper #2)
with Eric Budish

Evolutionary Origins of the Endowment Effect - Evidence from Hunter-Gatherers (PDF available upon request)
with Coren Apicella, Nicholas Christakis, and James Fowler

I earlier blogged about two of those papers:

A supply and demand model for stable matchings, by Eduardo Azevedo and Jacob Leshno
and

Market design in a future of trusted smart markets: paper by Eduardo Azevedo and Eric Budish

Eduardo is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12)

As I write it isn't clear whether he'll be working next year in Philadelphia, NYC, or Chicago, which will depend on his fiance's jobmarket, which is still to be concluded.

Welcome to the club, Eduardo.
*********
Update: May 11--It's Wharton.

Boston kindergartens and preschool places

Boston is short of good public kindergarten places. This in turn creates a demand for preschool places, since preschool kids move up automatically to kindergarten in the same school, so even parents who wouldn't ordinarily send their kid to preschool may be tempted to do so since it gives them two chances at a good kindergarten.

Rise in kindergarten demand leaves many in city scrambling: Hundreds of students remain unassigned

"Demand for kindergarten seats in the Boston Public Schools for this fall has risen by more than 25 percent, an unanticipated increase that has left hundreds of students without an assigned school and has prompted officials to add more classrooms.

The enrollment boom surfaced in the past few months during the first round of registration for kindergarten classrooms that will serve students who will be 5 by Sept. 1. The School Department received 2,306 such applications, up from 1,823 during that same period last year.
...
"Predicting kindergarten enrollment in a city as large as Boston can be a tricky endeavor, school officials say. The transient nature of the city - with many young, middle-class families moving out and a number of immigrant families moving in - creates volatility in relying on birth rates.

"The city school system also faces immense competition for kindergarten students from dozens of private and parochial schools and a growing number of independently run public charter schools. City school officials often do not know until after the school year begins if all the kindergarten students offered a seat will show up
...
"The School Department is trying to respond to the rising demand by adding a kindergarten classroom at five schools: Umana Academy in East Boston, Harvard-Kent in Charlestown, Mission Hill in Jamaica Plain, and Haley Elementary and Sumner Elementary, both in Roslindale.

"Kindergarten is not the only grade experiencing a rise in applications. The city’s preschool program for 4-year-olds also has an increase, with 2,518 applications filed during the first registration cycle, compared with 2,070 during the same period last year. That has left 745 4-year-olds without preschool assignments, an increase of 513 from last year.

The city is not obligated under state law to make a seat available for all preschool students who apply, as it is with kindergarten.
...
"Margaret Day’s 4-year-old son is near the bottom of waiting lists at three schools for preschool, leaving little chance of admittance. Now, the Jamaica Plain mother is resigned to going through the lottery again next year for kindergarten, even though many seats will be snatched up as preschoolers move up. She said she does not understand how the School Department was “blindsided’’ about the enrollment increase, and is pushing for changes.

“We are going to be picking through the bones to get a good seat next year,’’ Day said. “The reason we went through the [preschool] lottery is because of the difficulty of getting into kindergarten.’’

Game theory in Operations Research

The venerable journal Operations Research has a new subject area, with distinguished area editors:

Games, Information, and Networks

David Gamarnik and Asu Ozdaglar, editors

Networks have become pervasive in every aspect of our lives and have emerged as a crucial tool for understanding the world we live in. The World Wide Web, which links us to and enables information flows with the rest of the world, is the most visible example. Physical networks play a similarly vital role in wireless communication, data transmission, and energy production and distribution. Equally central are social and economic networks that shape opinions, information flows, and transactions. A fundamental understanding of network behavior, including the nature of interconnections, issues of stability, and decision making place operations research methodology at the core of this emerging research program.

We invite high-quality submissions that advance the theory and application of operations research methods, including graph theory and optimization, economic analysis, game theory, and stochastic models, in the emerging field of network science. In addition to works contributing to the analysis of networks, we also encourage submissions using tools and concepts from network analysis in other application domains.

Associate Editors: Mung Chiang, Ayalvadi Ganesh, Ali Jadbabaie, Ramesh Johari, Andrea Montanari, Yannis Paschalidis, Devavrat Shah, Sanjay Shakkottai, and Adam Wierman

I'm hopeful that this may mark a return to a high level of interaction between game theorists and the operations research community. (Market design seems like an area that is ripe for this kind of interaction.)

Yuichiro Kamada defends his Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 2 (Offense 0)

Yuichiro (in suit:), with Tomasz Strzalecki and Al Roth (and Drew Fudenberg and Attila Ambrus via skype)

Yuichiro with the full defense team

Yuichiro had to choose three out of his many papers for his dissertation, which he called "Essays on Revision Games." Those papers all concern the difficult problem of analyzing incentives in non-stationary environments.

Multi-Agent Search with Deadline (joint with Nozomu Muto), December 31, 2011.(An earlier version of this paper referred to in the new version is here)

Revision Games (joint with Michihiro Kandori), December 31, 2011

Asynchronicity and Coordination in Common and Opposing Interest Games (joint with Riccardo Calcagno, Stefano Lovo, and Takuo Sugaya), March 2012, Revise and Resubmit, Theoretical Economics. (This paper is a result of a merger between two independent papers: Preopening and Equilibrium Selection by Calcagno and Lovo, and Asynchronous Revision Games with Deadline: Unique Equilibrium in Coordination Games by Kamada and Sugaya)

I earlier blogged about another of his papers, on the design of the market for new Japanese doctors:

Matching Japanese Doctors: problems with the current mechanisms, and suggestions for improvement by Yuichiro Kamada and Fuhito Kojima

Yuichiro is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12)

 He will be going next year to a postdoc at Yale, after which he'll take up a position at Berkeley-Haas.

Two more defenses are coming up this week.

 Welcome to the club, Yuichiro.

Katie Baldiga defends her Ph.D. dissertation

Defense 1 (Offense 0)

Katie Baldiga and her committee of admirers: Iris Bohnet, Al Roth, Jerry Green (and Drew Fudenberg via skype)
(Alternative caption: Katie B. got her Ph.D.)

The three papers in Katie's dissertation are so wide ranging that she characterizes them together as "Essays in Microeconomics." (I blogged about her experimental paper here.)

A Failure of Representative Democracy (Job Market Paper 1) 
In this paper, we study representative democracy, one of the most popular classes of collective decision-making mechanisms, and contrast it with direct democracy. In a direct democracy, individuals have the opportunity to vote over the alternatives in every choice problem the population faces. In a representative democracy, the population commits to a candidate ex ante who will then make choices on its behalf. While direct democracy is normatively appealing, representative democracy is the far more common institution because of its practical advantages. The key question, then, is whether representative democracy succeeds in implementing the choices that the group would make under direct democracy. We find that, in general, it does not. We analyze the theoretical setting in which the two methods are most likely to lead to the same choices, minimizing potential sources of distortion. We model a population as a distribution of voters with strict preferences over a finite set of alternatives and a candidate as an ordering of those alternatives that serves as a binding, contingent plan of action. We focus on the case where the direct democracy choices of the population are consistent with an ordering of the alternatives. We show that even in this case, where the normative recommendation of direct democracy is clear, representative democracy may not elect the candidate with this ordering.

Gender Differences in Willingness to Guess and the Implications for Test Scores (Job Market Paper 2) 
Multiple-choice tests play a large role in determining academic and professional outcomes. Performance on these tests hinges not only on a test-taker's knowledge of the material but also on his willingness to guess when unsure about the answer. In this paper, we present the results of an experiment that explores whether women skip more questions than men. The experimental test consists of practice questions from the World History and U.S. History SAT II subject tests; we vary the size of the penalty imposed for a wrong answer and the salience of the evaluative nature of the task. We find that when no penalty is assessed for a wrong answer, all test-takers answer every question. But, when there is a small penalty for wrong answers and the task is explicitly framed as an SAT, women answer significantly fewer questions than men. We see no differences in knowledge of the material or confidence in these test-takers, and differences in risk preferences fail to explain all of the observed gap. Because the gender gap exists only when the task is framed as an SAT, we argue that differences in competitive attitudes may drive the gender differences we observe. Finally, we show that, conditional on their knowledge of the material, test-takers who skip questions do significantly worse on our experimental test, putting women and more risk averse test-takers at a disadvantage.

Assent-Maximizing Social Choice with Jerry R. Green, forthcoming in Social Choice and Welfare
We take a decision theoretic approach to the classic social choice problem, using data on the frequency of choice problems to compute social choice functions. We define a family of social choice rules that depend on the population's preferences and on the probability distribution over the sets of feasible alternatives that the society will face. Our methods generalize the well-known Kemeny Rule. In the Kemeny Rule it is known a priori that the subset of feasible alternatives will be a pair. We define a distinct social choice function for each distribution over the feasible subsets. Our rules can be interpreted as distance minimization -- selecting the order closest to the population's preferences, using a metric on the orders that reflects the distribution over the possible feasible sets. The distance is the probability that two orders will disagree about the optimal choice from a randomly selected available set. We provide an algorithmic method to compute these metrics in the case where the probability of a given feasible set is a function only of its cardinality.

Katie is one of the group of job market candidates I blogged about here: Five Harvard candidates for the Economics job market this year (2011-12).

She and her significant other LC solved the two-body problem this year (!), and will be together at The Ohio State University, which is now more than ever a hotbed of experimental economics.

Three more defenses are coming up this week.

Welcome to the club, Katie.

How to evaluate school choice: Daily Telegraph

The Daily Telegraph has an article about school choice in Britain that uses what strikes me as a tricky standard to declare that something is rotten in Britain:

Children 'forced to accept unpopular secondary schools': Almost 75,000 children have been rejected from their preferred secondary school amid a desperate scramble for the most sought-after places, official figures show.

The article goes on to say
"More than one-in-seven pupils across England are being forced to accept second, third or fourth-choice schools this September, it emerged.
...
"According to figures, some schools in parts of London received as many as nine applications for every place.

"Mr Gibb said: “I want us to reach a position where it is parents choosing schools, not schools choosing parents."
************
And here's a similar article about younger kids: More children rejected from first-choice primary school

"Among councils that provided year-on-year figures, some 90 per cent reported an increase in applications in 2012 compared with 2011.
"In those areas, almost 14 per cent of four and five-year-olds failed to get into their first choice school
***********
Britain would not be alone in having a shortage of good schools, but the point I want to raise about these articles is that the statistics mentioned could instead indicate that Britain has a few remarkably good schools that are oversubscribed. That would be something quite different, but it would still mean that many students didn't get one of their top choices.

Matching Mechanisms, Market Design Seen as Tools to Address Inequality

A conference in Chicago, this past February, organized by Scott Kominers:
Here's the press release-- http://ineteconomics.org/research-programs/human-capital-and-economic-opportunity/press-release-2 --and here's the list of talks:

Program

Download schedule» (.pdf)

9–9:40 a.m.	"Consumption and Income Inequality in the U.S. Since the 1960s" Bruce D. Meyer (joint work with James X. Sullivan)
9:40–10:20 a.m.	"Dismantling the Legacy of Caste: Affirmative Action in Indian Higher Education" Dennis Epple (joint work with Surendrakumar Bagde and Lowell J. Taylor)
10:20–10:35 a.m.	Break
10:35–11:15 a.m.	"Promoting School Competition Through School Choice: A Market Design Approach" John William Hatfield (joint work with Fuhito Kojima and Yusuke Narita)
11:15–1:55 a.m.	"School Admissions Reform in Chicago and England: Comparing Mechanisms by Their Vulnerability to Manipulation" Tayfun Sonmez (joint work with Parag Pathak)
1–2 p.m.	Invited Address: "Matching with Evolving Human Capital" Lones Smith (joint work with Axel Anderson)
2:00–2:15 p.m.	Break
2:15–2:55 p.m.	"Effective Affirmative Action in School Choice" M. Bumin Yenmez (joint work with Isa E. Hafalir and Muhammed A. Yildirim)
2:55–3:35 p.m.	"Matching with Slot-Specific Priorities: Theory and Applications" Scott Duke Kominers (joint work with Tayfun Sonmez)
3:35–3:50 p.m.	Break
3:50–4:30 p.m.	"Do Parents Choose under the Boston Mechanism?" Caterina Calsamiglia (joint work with Maia Guell)
4:30–-5:10 p.m.	"Homophily and Transitivity in Dynamic Network Formation" Bryan Graham

Online labor markets

John Horton, who has an online labor blog, has compiled a great list of online labor markets. Here's what it looked like when I recently checked:

Resources

• "Enlisting a Global Work Force of Freelancers," New York Times, June 24th, 2009
• "The End of the Office...And the Future of Work," Boston Globe,  January 17th, 2009
• "The Future of Work," Thomas Malone, Harvard Business School Press, 2004

Major General / Programming Sites

• oDesk is a rapidly growing site that encourages buyers to offer work on hourly terms. The site provides very robust monitoring tools: workers download software that tracks the time that they spend working on projects. The software also logs workers' keystrokes and even periodically takes screenshots of their screens. Because this monitoring allows buyers to observe workers so closely. Workers are guaranteed payment for their hourly work. 
• Guru.com allows buyers to post jobs and solicit bids from workers. 
• Elance is probably the largest and most well-known general site. The main work categories are Web & Programming, Design & Multimedia, Writing & Translation, Administration Support, Sales & Marketing, Finance & Management, Engineering & Manufacturing and Legal. 
• rentAcoder.com focuses on computer programming. Programmers work on a strictly fixed-price basis. After a project is awarded to a bidder, the buyer places the agreed upon amount in an escrow account. Payment is not released until the buyer approves the work. If there are disputes, the company provides arbitrators.
• Freelancer.com 
• iFreelance is a general site with the same basic model as Guru, oDesk and Elance. Very little data is available without registering with the site.
• ScriptLance
• Solvate - TBD 
• Hypios - TBD

Software Testing

• uTest provides software testing using a pool of workers who are paid to find bugs. Buyers (software companies) seek testers with certain demographic characteristics, including software sophistication and the platforms used. uTest selects matches from its pool of registered testers. The testers report bugs and make suggestions and are paid for verified bugs and helpful reviews.

Design

• 99 Designs allows buyers to sponsor design contests, usually for logos or specialty events. The buyer states a price that they will pay for the winning design and a date when they will choose the winner. Workers then submit designs as small, thumbnail images which the entire community can view and vote on (these votes are not in any way binding). One interesting feature of this market is that it is one of the few real-life examples of non-political all-pay auctions. As of January 2009, the community had 25,100 registered designers who submitted 1,152,786 designs for 15,993 contests and received $3,465,314 in prizes.
• CreateMyTattoo.com is just like 99 Designs, but for tattoos.
• CrowdSPRING
• iStockPhoto is a royalty-free photo exchange that allows photographers to upload images and sell them to individual buyers. Over 50,000 photographers have contributed over 4 million photos.

Advice & Search

• BitWine provides a network of freelance advisors who charge clients a per-minute rate for consultations. Advisors are ostensible experts in some field, such as nutrition, travel, coaching, technology, etc. Consultations occur over the voice-over-IP (VoIP) technology Skype and payments are made through PayPal. BitWine takes a percentage of transactions fees.
• InnoCentive
• ChaCha

Advertising

• Prova

Micro-Tasks

• Amazon's Mechanical Turk is unique in allowing workers to perform simple, piece-rate tasks like captioning writing captions for photographs, extracting information from scanned documents and transcribing audio clips for money or store credit. Unlike other sites, workers may begin a task as soon as it is posted, and the buyer reserves the right to accept or reject work.
• LiveWork
• Short Task
• Clickworker

Patent Validation / Invalidation

• Article One Partners is a private firm that helps corporate clients invalidate patents. A network of "AOP Associates" who have registered with the site can earn up to $50,000 for providing evidence of patent-invalidating "prior art."
• Peer-to-Peer Patent Project also provides patent assessment, but it is not a true contest or market. The project is sponsored by the US Technology and Patent Office and NYU Law School and patent reviewers are not paid.

Finance

• LendingClub facilitates unsecured lending between individuals.
• Kiva
• Prosper.com is a for-profit peer-to-peer lending site similar to LendingClub. As of January 2009, the site claims 830,000 members and $178,000,000 of loans.

Enabling Techologies and Organizations

• BrainBench
• CrowdFlower/Dolores Labs 
• Payoneer
• PayPal
• txteagle
• Samasource
• Crowdsortium

Interested Third Parties

• Turk Opticon is a website and Firefox plug-in that allows Amazon Mechanical Turk workers to rate "Requestors" who post work on the site. The Firefox plug-in allows workers to view the ratings in real time before deciding whether or not to accept a task from the requestor.

College admissions committees and how they work

Inside Higher Ed has a story: How They Really Get In, based on surveys of selective colleges and universities conducted by by Rachel B. Rubin, a doctoral student in education at Harvard.

"Almost all of the colleges that provided information first do a winnowing of one of two sorts that yields the group that gets a more thorough review. The most common winnowing process (used by 76 percent of the colleges that answered Rubin) is some measure of academic merit. This may be based on grades, rigor of high school courses, test scores and so forth. While there is some difference in the relative weight given to various factors, there is a straightforward value on doing better than others in whatever formula the college uses.

"A minority of elite colleges and universities (21 percent) starts off on measures of "institutional fit." These colleges do the initial cut based on student essays, recommendations and specific questions of whether particular students will thrive at and contribute to the college in various ways. In an interview, Rubin said she believed that these colleges also valued academic merit, but that the vast majority of applicants had an appropriate level of academic merit, so that could be weighed later, while other parts of "creating a class" needed to dominate at the point of first cut.

"For those colleges that look at institutional fit first, the two most favored factors are underrepresented minority status and "exceptional talent" (which she said could mean many things: "lacrosse recruits, flautists, etc.").

...

"Rubin's paper says that whether the first cut is done through academics or fit, most colleges then report a more formal system in which two readers review the application portfolio, with a third reader or an entire team involved in difficult calls. At this stage, academic issues are discussed at institutions that started with "fit" issues, and "fit" is discussed at places that started with academics. "

Long college waiting lists are long shots...

In case you didn't know: Colleges' Tough Waiting Game: Schools Keep Hundreds of Applicants on Reserve Lists, but Very Few of Them Get In

"Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh admitted just six of 5,003 applicants invited onto its waitlist last year. At Cornell University, in Ithaca, N.Y., not one of 2,998 students offered a spot on last year's list was admitted. Princeton, which accepted 2,095 students for a record-low 7.86% admission rate this year, offered 1,472 applicants places on its waitlist. In the past six years, it has taken as few as zero from the list, or as many as 164.

"Many colleges are reluctant to disclose the number of students on their waitlists. Harvard, which admitted a record-low 5.9% of applicants this year, doesn't release the size of its list. A Harvard spokesman said it accepted 31 from the waitlist last year, and between 49 and 228 in the four years prior to that."

"Most schools know by May 1 who has accepted their initial offers of admission. They then turn to the waitlist to fill any remaining slots, a process that is supposed to wrap up by Aug. 1, a deadline set by the National Association for College Admission Counseling. On average, 45% of students offered spots on a waitlist accept, said the Princeton Review."

School Choice in New Orleans with top trading cycles

Something exciting is happening in New Orleans Recovery School District: a novel school choice algorithm is being tried out for the first time. And it's being rolled out with some pretty good communications to the community. Here's a story by Andrew Vanacore in The Times-Picayune yesterday: Centralized enrollment in Recovery School District gets first tryout

The newspaper story even comes with a graphic meant to convey an important piece of the top trading cycle algorithm:

"Somewhere inside the jumble of narrow beige corridors on Poland Avenue in the Upper 9th Ward, in the state-run Recovery School District's headquarters, someone will hit a button on a computer in the next few weeks, and presto: Almost all of the roughly 28,000 students in New Orleans who applied for a seat this fall at one of the district's 67 schools will be assigned a place. With that final keystroke, the school system will move for the first time from a frustrating, ad-hoc enrollment process handled at individual campuses to one centralized at district offices.


"Every child will get a spot. But because schools don't have an infinite number of seats and some schools will doubtless prove more popular than others, not every family will get their top pick. More than likely, some small percentage won't get any of the eight choices they ranked when they filled out their application earlier this year.

"So it's worth considering: Who will decide the fates of these 28,000 students? In a district unique for giving children the right to pick the school they attend, instead of the right to attend the school down the street, who decides what's fair?

"The short answer is nobody, or at least nobody with a pulse. As the technical experts working with the Recovery District explained to a group of community groups and reporters last week, a computer algorithm will go to work trying to match every student with a school that's as high on their list as possible. Students with siblings at a particular school will get a first shot at open seats at that school, followed by those living nearby. But much will hinge on a randomly assigned lottery number.

"This, officials say, will give the greatest possible number of students as close to their top choice as possible in a way that's fair and transparent.

"For parents, there are some key ideas to keep in mind. The experts who developed the algorithm -- folks from Duke, Harvard and MIT -- say there is no way to game the system. If what you really want is a seat at KIPP Renaissance High School, you should not rank Sci Academy first, thinking that you're more likely to get your second choice. Ranking KIPP as your top choice gives you your best shot at getting in. 

"There's also no way to lose a seat that your child already has. If a second-grader at School A applies for a transfer to School B and doesn't win a spot, he will automatically remain where he is.

"For now, there's no way of telling which percentage of families will get their top choice, but a small number will almost certainly get none of the eight schools they ranked on their application. That's simply because they were unlucky in the assigning of lottery numbers, picked eight very popular schools or both.

"Until all of our schools are equally amazing, not every family is going to get everything they want," said Neil Dorosin, founder of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which helped develop the new process."

...

"Another important caveat: The 17 schools that are still overseen by the Orleans Parish School Board will not be included. "That's the missing link, " said Debra Vaughan, a researcher at the Cowen Institute. It means students who want to reach for a spot at one of the city's prestigious magnet schools still have to navigate two separate enrollment systems. The Recovery District and the School Board have been in talks but haven't reached an agreement on how to merge the systems."

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

Previous posts on New Orleans schools (most recent first):

New Orleans launches its new school choice process

School choice design in New Orleans Recovery School District

Centralized enrolment in New Orleans public schools

School choice in New Orleans

How to finance kidney exchange?

In kidney exchange (also called kidney paired donation), potential donors have to be evaluated without knowing what patient, if any, their kidney might go to. So...how should those donor evaluation costs be paid for, since they can't be billed to a particular patient's insurance? (This is particularly so for donors who don't proceed to transplant, e.g. because their costly CT scan reveals an anatomical abnormality: so that's a hard to recover cost.) Below, from Pub Med, is the abstract of a paper proposing a solution like the one reached for deceased donors. (The full paper is still under embargo as it hasn't appeared yet in the print version of the American Journal of Transplantation (but you can see the abstract for free here); I'll post a version when I can...)

Call to Develop a Standard Acquisition Charge Model for Kidney Paired Donation.

Rees MA, Schnitzler MA, Zavala EY, Cutler JA, Roth AE, Irwin FD, Crawford SW, Leichtman AB., Am J Transplant. 2012 Apr 9. doi: 10.1111/j.1600-6143.2012.04034.x. [Epub ahead of print],

Abstract

We propose a Medicare Demonstration Project to develop a standard acquisition charge for kidney paired donation. A new payment strategy is required because Medicare and commercial insurance companies may not directly pay living donor costs intended to lead to transplantation of a beneficiary of a different insurance provider. Until the 1970s, when organ procurement organizations were empowered to serve as financial intermediaries to pay the upfront recovery expenses for deceased donor kidneys before knowing the identity of the recipient, there existed similar limitations in the recovery and placement of deceased donor organs. Analogous to the recovery of deceased donor kidneys, kidney paired donation requires the evaluation of living donors before identifying their recipient. Tissue typing, crossmatching and transportation of living donors or their kidneys represent additional financial barriers. Finally, the administrative expenses of the organizations that identify and coordinate kidney paired donation transplantation require reimbursement akin to that necessary for organ procurement organizations. To expand access to kidney paired donation for more patients, we propose a model to reimburse paired donation expenses analogous to the proven strategy used for over 30 years to pay for deceased donor solid organ transplantation in America.
© Copyright 2012 The American Society of Transplantation and the American Society of Transplant Surgeons.

Attacks on the Defense of Marriage Act

The 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, designed to 'defend' marriage from those States that have legalized same sex marriage, is under renewed attacks in the courts. (The Obama administration has indicated that it does not believe the Act is constitutional, so it will not defend it's key provisions, but this doesn't mean that it will die an easy death...)

Mass. leads fight on right to marry
"Massachusetts will once again take center stage in the national debate over same-sex marriage as the state becomes the first to go before a United States appeals court to challenge a federal law that defines marriage as a union only of a man and a woman.

"The US Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston on Wednesday will hear two cases that challenge the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act: The first is a lawsuit brought by 17 local plaintiffs who say it deprives them of the federal benefits that other married couples receive.

"The second, brought by the state, alleges the Marriage Act forces Massachusetts to discriminate against gay couples when the state’s highest court has already declared their marriages constitutionally protected."
************

Noncitizens Sue Over U.S. Gay Marriage Ban
"Five legally married same-sex couples filed a lawsuit on Monday to challenge the 1996 law that bars the federal government from recognizing  same-sex marriages, arguing that its impact is particularly harsh on couples that include an American citizen and a foreigner.

"The lawsuit, filed in United States District Court for the Eastern District of New York, was brought by Immigration Equality, a gay rights legal organization that focuses on immigration issues. Same-sex marriage advocates said it was likely to become the most prominent suit seeking to overturn the law, known as the Defense of Marriage Act, based on its effect on gay or lesbian immigrants who want to gain legal residence through marriage to American citizens.

"Under immigration law, a citizen can apply for a foreign spouse to obtain legal permanent residency, with a document known as a green card. Since unlike many other visas, there are no limits on the number of green cards available to spouses of citizens, those applications are among the fastest and most straightforward procedures in the immigration system. "Under the marriage act, which is called DOMA, federal authorities do not recognize same-sex marriages, even from states that allow them. In recent years, as same-sex marriage became legal in several states, gay and lesbian couples have come forward to say they were facing a painful choice: either deportation for the immigrant or exile to life in a foreign country for the American. ...

"In February 2011, the Obama administration announced that it regarded the central provision of the marriage act as unconstitutionally discriminatory, and said officials would no longer defend it in the courts.

 "On Wednesday, the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in Boston will hear arguments in the first marriage act case to advance to the appeals level. That case contends that the act is unconstitutional because it denies federal benefits to same-sex couples married in Massachusetts, the first state to make same-sex marriage legal."

"Justice Department officials have said that they will not defend the core provision of the marriage act in that hearing, but will dispute other claims in the case. A conservative legal group appointed by the House of Representatives will argue in favor of the act."

Market design lecture today

If you're on the Harvard campus this afternoon, perhaps because you are an alum of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and are here for Alumni Day, you could hear me talk about market design at 1:15:

1:15-2:45 p.m.

Symposia I  Who Gets What: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design Alvin Roth George Gund Professor of Economics and Business Administration Emerson 205

Harvard admissions

Some statistics: Harvard Accepts Record Low of 5.9 Percent to the Class of 2016

"In total, including the 772 students admitted in December in the early action acceptance round, a total of 2,032 initial offers, more than 100 fewer than last year, were extended to applicants. The admit rate for those considered under regular decision, including the 2,838 early action candidates who were deferred to the original round, was 3.8 percent.
...
"Fitzsimmons said in a press release that the return of early action admissions, discontinued at Harvard in 2006 and revived for the Class of 2016, made it more difficult for the admissions office to predict the number of students who will ultimately matriculate. Thus, officers were conservative in the number of students they accepted.
...
"Harvard placed an unspecified number of students on the waitlist, and these students will receive notice of their status later in the spring. Fitzsimmons said that the office expects to admit more waitlisted students than usual this time around, since it was cautious in its initial offers."

Starting a new university

Inside Higher Ed has an article on the Minerva Project, named after the Roman goddess of wisdom, about an attempt to start a new, elite, for-profit university: An Elite University ... From Scratch?

Some of the ideas sound interesting:
"Minerva plans to define elite differently, he said. Its students -- roughly 200 in the first year, planned for 2014, and it hopes many more in later years -- will be selected through a rigorous two-step process based on academic credentials (grades, test scores, essays, etc.) at a first, statistical level and then -- for those who move on -- an interview process focused on testing an applicant's drive, analytical skills and goals.

"Factors that may help a student get admitted to Princeton or Williams -- athletic skill, alumni connections, money -- won't play any role at Minerva, Nelson said. And because the process won't factor in geography, either, he said he expected that the vast majority of its students will come from outside the United States. "We won't discriminate based on state or country of origin, and the idea that the majority of the smartest English-speaking kids live in the U.S. is absurd," he said. "We're going to have the most racially diverse student body of any elite institution."

"But the real test of its eliteness will come in its curriculum, which Nelson compared to "1950s University of Chicago." It aims to hire top professors to create their own online lectures and course materials, and students will also dig into that material in 25-student interactive seminars led by instructors (Ph.D.s who favor teaching over research, for instance, not grad students). While the formal curriculum will be delivered online, students who choose to will live in dorms in major cities around the world, where they will gain from the same kind of peer encounters that enhance the education at liberal arts and other residential colleges."

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That being said, it's a big task to found a new university, let alone an "elite" one.  As I wrote in an earlier post, Rankings of universities: vintages and coordination of expectations, regarding the rankings of American universities:
"the first place goes to the oldest American university, founded in 1636, and spots 2 and 3 go to universities established in 1746 (as the College of New Jersey), and 1701. Two universities that opened more than a century later, in 1861, and 1891 , are tied for 4th place. The two universities tied for 6th are of different vintages, 1891 and 1755, as are the three tied for 8th place, 1754, 1838, and 1892. The top dozen ranks are filled out by universities open for business since 1769, 1855, and 1856.

At number 17, Rice University, opened in 1912, seems to be the highest ranked university on the list to have begun in the 20th century."

Trafficking in Spain's legal prostitution market

A story of crime and human trafficking in Spain's legal market for prostitution, that is scary on many levels: In Spain, Women Enslaved by a Boom in Brothel Tourism

"La Jonquera used to be a quiet border town where truckers rested and the French came looking for a deal on hand-painted pottery and leather goods. But these days, prostitution is big business here, as it is elsewhere in Spain, where it is essentially legal.

"While the rest of Spain’s economy may be struggling, experts say that prostitution — almost all of it involving the ruthless trafficking of foreign women — is booming, exploding into public view in small towns and big cities. The police recently rescued a 19-year-old Romanian woman from traffickers who had tattooed on her wrist a bar code and the amount she still owed them: more than $2,500.
...
"Thirty years ago, virtually all the prostitutes in Spain were Spanish. Now, almost none are. Advocates and police officials say that most of the women are controlled by illegal networks — they are modern-day slaves.
...
"Deputy Inspector Xavier Cortés Camacho, the head of the regional antitrafficking unit in Barcelona, said the Nigerian groups moved women through northern Africa to Spain, and then controlled them by threatening to rape or kill their family members back home.
...
"Some of the women are sold into the business by their families, Mr. Cortés said. The police came across one case in which Colombian traffickers were paying one family $650 a month for their daughter. She managed to escape, he said. But when she contacted her family, they told her to go back or they would send her sister as a replacement."

A black market kidney sales dystopia in China

This is the kind of black market that keeps my surgeon colleague Frank Delmonico travelling around the world in an effort to firm up laws (and enforcement of laws) against kidney sales: Five Charged After Chinese Teen Sells Kidney to Buy iPhone

"Five people in southern China have been charged with intentional injury in the case of a Chinese teenager who sold a kidney so he could buy an iPhone and an iPad, the government-run Xinhua News Agency said on Friday.According to the Xinhua account, one of the defendants received about 220,000 yuan (about $35,000) to arrange the transplant. He paid Wang 22,000 yuan and split the rest with the surgeon, the three other defendants and other medical staff.
"The report did not say who received and paid for the kidney.

"China banned the trading of human organs in 2007, Xinhua said. Several other suspects involved in the case are still being investigated."
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See related recent posts:
Michael Sandel thinks more transactions should be repugnant
Organ transplants and prisoners in China, revisited

Organ transplants and prisoners in China, revisited

Once again, China Moves to Stop Transplants of Organs After Executions

"China said on Friday that within three to five years it planned to end the practice of transplanting organs from executed prisoners, a step that would address what for decades has been one of the country’s most criticized human rights issues.
...
"Mr. Huang did not acknowledge any ethical issues involved in taking organs from prisoners. Instead, he raised a medical issue, saying that the rates of fungal and bacterial infection in organs taken from executed inmates were often high, which he said explained why the long-term survival rates of organ transplant recipients in China were consistently below those of other countries.

"Nicholas Bequelin, a senior researcher in Hong Kong for Human Rights Watch, welcomed the policy announcement, which the rights group has campaigned for since 1994. But he noted that Mr. Huang, who turns 66 this year, is about to retire, along with most of the country’s top political leadership.

"That means the next generation of political leaders and Health Ministry officials will have to deal with the problem of how to obtain enough organ donations voluntarily to offset the country’s heavy dependence on prisoners.

“It’s not clear to me the government is going to have the political will to fulfill this promise,” Mr. Bequelin said."
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Here's an earlier post touching on this issue:
Tuesday, December 15, 2009, Kidney transplantation in China

Kidney donation, illegal immigration, finances

This story has it all, illness, compassion, bureaucracy, money, an illegal immigrant down on his luck and legal ones who have thrived... From Brother to Brother, a Kidney, and a Life

"Angel, the father of two American-born children, is an illegal immigrant. And a maze of conflicting health care and immigration policies meant that while the government would pay for a lifetime of dialysis, costing $75,000 yearly, it would not pay for a $100,000 transplant that would make dialysis unnecessary.*
...
"Angel’s quest for a transplant was chronicled in a Dec. 21 article in The New York Times about a paradox in health care rules. In New York, Medicaid, the federal-state health insurance program for the poor, covers the cost of dialysis, considering it an emergency measure, regardless of whether the patient is a legal resident of the United States. But while a transplant is far cheaper in the long run, that procedure is covered by Medicare, which does not extend to illegal immigrants.Mount Sinai, one of the world’s leading transplant centers, had originally set the price for the operation at $200,000 in advance, to cover any possible postoperative complications; it lowered that to $150,000, given the youth and health of the brothers, but barred further reductions as a slippery slope to unaffordable demands for uncompensated care.
...
"Mount Sinai, one of the world’s leading transplant centers, had originally set the price for the operation at $200,000 in advance, to cover any possible postoperative complications; it lowered that to $150,000, given the youth and health of the brothers, but barred further reductions as a slippery slope to unaffordable demands for uncompensated care. ... "

“It has nothing to do with legal or illegal,” said Dr. Kim-Schluger, whose mother escaped North Korea as a child and brought the family to the United States via South Korea, British Guyana and Jamaica. She went to Catholic school in New York, married a descendant of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and converted to Judaism. She said Angel was on her mind as she prepared Passover Seder.

“Yes, there are hundreds and hundreds of people like this,” she said. “But this is the one who knocked on our door.”
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*see previous post: We pay for dialysis but not for transplants...

Which came first, the dyed Easter chick or the dyed Easter egg

Here's a repugnant transaction I had never heard of, complete with laws passed and repealed...
Nobody Minds Dyeing the Egg, but the Chicken Is Another Story


"Cute as they are, they are not made of marshmallow.

"If only they were, nobody would have a problem with newborn chicks that are dyed in brilliant colors — neon, Fruity Pebbles, pastel, Crayola box — to serve as festive Easter gifts. The dye is either injected in the incubating egg or sprayed on the hatchling, and while poultry farmers say it is harmless, many people object, saying it turns live birds into holiday playthings that are quickly discarded.

"About half the states and a scattering of municipalities have laws against the practice, but in Florida last month, the Legislature passed a bill to overturn a 45-year-old ban on dyeing animals.
...
"The outcry from animal rights groups has been swift.

“Humane societies are overflowing with these animals after Easter every year,” said Don Anthony of the Animal Rights Foundation of Florida. “This law has protected thousands of animals from neglect and abuse, and it shouldn’t be lifted on the whim of one dog groomer who wants to dye poodles purple.”

"Dyed Easter chicks have been a seasonal staple in parts of the country for generations, though the practice has gone largely underground as society’s tastes have changed.
...
"Easter is on Sunday, and while dyed chicks may show up for sale in various places, they will still be illegal in Florida, since the change would not take effect until July 1. "



HT: Ran Shorrer

Michael Sandel thinks more transactions should be repugnant

The Atlantic publishes an essay adapted from his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets: What Isn’t for Sale?

He is glad that kidneys can't be bought and sold, and regrets many of the things that can be, because he worries that allowing too broad a scope to markets may undermine the moral fabric of society.

He doesn't mention (but I am reminded of)  sumptuary laws that used to enforce the moral fabric by preventing people from wearing clothes above their social station.
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Update: here's a review published in the April 20 WSJ:
In Economists We Trust: We are a society built on market-based solutions—but should everything have a price?

"Mr. Sandel is also pointing out another seemingly small but quite profound change in society. As recently as a generation ago, economists viewed their job as understanding prices, depressions, unemployment and inflation. It was dismal, but at least it was science. Somewhere along the way they expanded their portfolio to include the whole of human behavior.
...
"Proponents of market morality claim that it imposes no belief system, but that's just a smoke screen. Choosing to place utility maximization at the core of your belief system is no different from choosing any other guiding ideological precept. Every problem has an incentive-based solution; every tension can be resolved by seeking the maximally efficient outcome.

"This is a depressingly reductive view of the human experience. Men will die for God or country, kinship or land. No one ever picked up a rifle and got shot for optimal social utility. Economists cannot account for this basic fact of humanity. Yet they have assumed a role in society that for the past 4,000 years has been held by philosophers and theologians. They have made our lives freer and more efficient. And we are the poorer for it.

Unraveling of law internships in Israel

Haaretz reports:
Law students to apply for internships only from third year: Israel Bar Association's council approved the rules governing job offers for internships, though they still require the justice minister's approval.

"Law students will only be accepted for their internships during the third and next to last year of their studies from now on, the Israel Bar Association's council decided yesterday.
 ...
"In recent years, law students have started arranging a place for doing their articles as soon as they start their studies, said attorney Orrin Persky, the head of the Bar Association's committee on internships. He explained that this pressure emanated from both the students and the law firms and has created a market failure for finding such posts.
In addition, there are a large number of complaints about students canceling their internship positions, which they had agreed to a year or two earlier.
The new rules would require firms and all other bodies providing internships, such as the State Attorney's Office, to start interviewing no earlier than March 15 of the student's third year for the internship that will start in the following calendar year."


HT: Ran Shorrer

2-Tier Tuition at a community college?

The NY Times reports on what some are finding a repugnant transaction, and others see as the only way to avoid further cuts: 2-Year College, Squeezed, Sets 2-Tier Tuition

"SANTA MONICA, Calif. — For years now, administrators at the community college here have been inundated with woeful tales from students unable to register for the courses they need. Classes they want for essential job training or to fulfill requirements to transfer to four-year universities fill up within hours. ...

"Now, though, Santa Monica College is about to try something novel. This summer it will offer some courses for a higher price, so that students who are eager to get into a particular class can do so if they pay more. ...

"Since 2009, enrollment in California community colleges has fallen by 300,000 students, to 2.6 million, and many believe the difficulty of registering for classes is the most important deterrent.

"For generations, community colleges have been seen as a social equalizer, providing a relatively inexpensive education for poor students, immigrants and others without the skills, grades or money to attend a four-year institution.

"So the two-tiered tuition structure being proposed here is raising eyebrows, and fundamental questions, about the role and obligations of community colleges. Will the policy essentially block some of the people it is designed to benefit? Many students believe the new policy — if the state does not block its implementation, which it could yet do — will unfairly exclude the poorest students and create a kind of upper and lower class of students.

"A financial squeeze since the recession led first to a reduction of federal and then state financing for colleges and universities. Since 2008, California’s community college system has lost $809 million in state aid, including $564 million in the most recent budget, even as more students than ever before try to enroll.

"Currently, each community college class costs $36 per credit hour. Under Santa Monica’s plan, the more expensive courses would cost $180 per credit hour — just enough to cover the college’s costs, Dr. Tsang said.

"While the college is still ironing out the details, it expects to offer about 200 courses at the higher tuition price, in addition to hundreds of regularly priced courses. College officials say that nearly every class is filled to capacity and that they are asking departments to choose which courses have the highest demand so they can offer more of those — typically basic courses in English, writing, math and science.
...
"Janet Harclerode, an English instructor and president of the college’s Academic Senate, said that many professors viewed the new plan as having a “real ick factor,” but that few saw any real alternative. Many instructors have already accepted extra students in their classrooms, even allowing a few to sit on the floor when seats were scarce.

“We hope that this is just a stopgap measure, before taxpayers step up and the state really starts to reinvest in the colleges,” she said."
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In the wake of the initial announcement, Chancellor Asks Community College to Hold Off on Tuition Plan

"The chancellor of the California community college system has requested that Santa Monica College hold off on its plan to offer popular courses with higher tuition this summer, saying that the legality of the program is still in question. 

 "The request came a day after a student protest at the college ended with a campus police officer spraying dozens of people with pepper spray, several of whom suffered minor injuries. Many students and faculty members have criticized the plan saying it violates the long tradition of community colleges as havens for those without the means to afford four-year colleges.

 "The chancellor, Jack Scott, had already made it clear that he was wary of the community college’s plan to charge more for some popular classes and said it could violate state education codes. He has asked the state’s attorney general for an opinion, which he expects to receive in the next week."

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Update, April 19: Chancellor’s Office Says Santa Monica College’s 2-Tier Pricing Plan Is Illegal