Innovator in Residence organ donation initiative at HHS (job posting)

The Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) is looking to hire an Innovator in Residence to help increase organ donation. Here is the job posting: Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)
INNOVATOR IN RESIDENCE (IIR)

"A rapidly growing public health startup, ORGANIZE, is seeking to hire a forward-thinking, entrepreneurial individual to serve a two-year appointment of Innovator In Residence (IIR) at the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). The IIR will play an instrumental role in evaluating ongoing efforts to increase organ donation and transplantation and will work closely with HHS staff, including staff in the Health Resources and Services Administration’s (HRSA) Division of Transplantation and the broader organ donation and transplantation community, to identify gaps between these efforts and opportunities for better coordination. The IIR will work with stakeholders to develop an implementation strategy toward improvements in the organ donation system, including new technology, access to data necessary to evaluate the effectiveness of Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs), best practices and systemic improvements to increase organ donor conversion rates and empower OPOs to operate most efficiently.

"This will include studying a broad range of potential focus areas, which the IIR will identify in consultation with HHS and the organ donation and transplantation community, including existing models of federal financial reimbursement of OPOs and transplant centers for organ recovery and transplantation, harmonizing the forces acting on OPOs and their various partners (e.g. transplant centers), and creating opportunities for OPOs to operate most flexibly and effectively. The research will be guided by a panel of experts including HHS staff and thought leaders in the OPO industry. The position is located in Washington D.C., although frequent travel is possible.

"The IIR will work onsite at HHS with the HHS Chief Technology Officer and staff from other HHS operating divisions for exposure to a wide range of policy, stakeholder engagement, and technical expertise. The IIR will work with donor hospitals, transplant centers, OPOs, and other relevant stakeholders toward identifying innovative approaches for increasing the number of organ transplants performed annually and streamlining OPO operations. The IIR will bring experience and expertise in data science, policy, social enterprise, and project management.
...

"Application Requirements

Send a one page letter describing your interest in and qualifications for the position, including a CV and three references to iir@organize.org.

This position will remain open until a candidate is selected.

Available to US citizens or eligible naturalized US citizens.

Organize IIR Advisory Team

Al Roth,

Winner of 2012 Nobel

Prize in Economics,

Professor at Stanford

Judd Kessler,

Behavioral Economist,

Professor at Wharton

Stan Freck,

Senior Director, Microsoft

U.S. Public Sector Office

of Civic Innovation

Simon Sinek,

Speaker and

Best-selling Author"

Eva Tardos honored as ICIAM lecturer

Here's the story from Cornell, celebrating Eva Tardos, with a nice view of how market design looks from a computer science perspective:

Computer scientist Eva Tardos honored as ICIAM lecturer

"The International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) has selected Éva Tardos, Cornell’s Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science and senior associate dean of the Faculty of Computing and Information Science, to deliver the Olga Taussky-Todd Lecture at the international meeting of applied and industrial mathematicians in Beijing, Aug. 10-14, 2015. It is the most important international event in applied and industrial mathematics, held once every four years.

"This honor is conferred on a “woman who has made outstanding contributions in applied mathematics and/or scientific computation.”

"The lecture is named in memory of Olga Taussky-Todd, whose scientific legacy is in theoretical and applied mathematics, and whose work exemplifies the qualities to be recognized. Lecturers are selected by a committee established by the ICIAM president, with advice from the Association for Women in Mathematics and European Women in Mathematics. Tardos was chosen for her numerous and deep contributions to the fields of combinatorial optimization, discrete algorithms and algorithmic game theory, and her ability to convey the basic ideas and inspire others to pursue them.

"Tardos joined the Cornell faculty in 1989 and became chair of the Department of Computer Science in 2006. Her recent work concerns algorithmic game theory applied to networks. She is most known for her work on network-flow algorithms; approximation algorithms; and quantifying the efficiency of selfish routing, an emerging area of designing systems for “selfish users” who all seek the best possible outcome for themselves, as in competing for bandwidth on the Internet. Her work shows that in many cases the selfish solutions do reasonably well, which diminishes the need for central coordination. In a recent paper, “Network formation in the presence of contagious risk,” she studied the cascade effects of failures, especially relevant after the 2008 economic crisis.

Scott Kominers speaks about Strategy-Proofness, Investment Efficiency and Marginal Returns -- video

Here's a video of a recent lecture by Scott Kominers: Strategy-Proofness, Investment Efficiency and Marginal Returns

"In this presentation, Scott Duke Kominers noted that mechanism design tends to examine only the market clearing stage. The field treats human capital as a fixed or predetermined input, rather than a dynamic range of possibilities. His own model uncovers a relationship between three variables: strategy-proofness, investment efficiency, and marginal rewards."

Repugnance watch: California foie gras ban struck down by judge

Here's the story: California foie gras ban struck down by judge, delighting chefs

"Menus across the Bay Area were being hastily rewritten Wednesday after a federal judge struck down California’s ban on foie gras, allowing restaurants to serve up the delicacy for the first time in two years.

"U.S. District Judge Stephen Wilson in Los Angeles ruled that the state prohibition on the sale of foie gras, a fatty liver dish made from force-fed ducks and geese, illegally encroached upon the regulatory domain of the federal government.

"California lawmakers passed the groundbreaking ban in 2004 amid concern that force-feeding poultry is inhumane. The law took effect eight years later, immediately putting a crimp in California’s dining scene, where the French-inspired fare is celebrated at many high-end restaurants for its rich, creamy flavor.
...
"Wednesday’s decision was based on the federal Poultry Products Inspections Act, which regulates the sale and distribution of birds and expressly prohibits states from imposing certain conditions on food. Wilson said California’s foie gras ban had done just that.
...
"The ban, which specifically outlawed force-feeding birds for the purpose of enlarging their livers and selling them, was challenged by poultry producer Hudson Valley Foie Gras of New York, Hot’s Restaurant Group in Southern California and the Canadian trade organization Association des Eleveurs de Canards et d’Oies du Quebec. The state attorney general’s office defended the prohibition.

"In Wednesday’s ruling, Wilson acknowledged that emotions ran high over the matter, writing that his 15-page opinion “touches upon a topic impacting gourmands’ stomachs and animal-rights activists’ hearts.”
...
"Strugar noted that, under Wednesday’s ruling, production of foie gras remains illegal in California"


HT: Kim Krawiec

Finding long chains in kidney exchange: new algorithms

Here's a new paper just published online before print, January 5, 2015, doi: 10.1073/pnas.1421853112, PNAS January 5, 2015.

It's about the algorithms we're presently using to find optimal cycles-and-chains solutions in the kinds of sparse kidney exchange graphs we're encountering in the several programs with which we work most closely.

Finding long chains in kidney exchange using the traveling salesman problem
by Ross Anderson, Itai Ashlagi,  David Gamarnik,  and Alvin E. Roth

Abstract: As of May 2014 there were more than 100,000 patients on the waiting list for a kidney transplant from a deceased donor. Although the preferred treatment is a kidney transplant, every year there are fewer donors than new patients, so the wait for a transplant continues to grow. To address this shortage, kidney paired donation (KPD) programs allow patients with living but biologically incompatible donors to exchange donors through cycles or chains initiated by altruistic (nondirected) donors, thereby increasing the supply of kidneys in the system. In many KPD programs a centralized algorithm determines which exchanges will take place to maximize the total number of transplants performed. This optimization problem has proven challenging both in theory, because it is NP-hard, and in practice, because the algorithms previously used were unable to optimally search over all long chains. We give two new algorithms that use integer programming to optimally solve this problem, one of which is inspired by the techniques used to solve the traveling salesman problem. These algorithms provide the tools needed to find optimal solutions in practice.
************

Update: now published,  PNAS | January 20, 2015 | vol. 112 | no. 3 | 663–668

Ethics and Market Design: Stanford, Jan 8 (update, note room change)

If you're on the Stanford campus tomorrow, you're invited to hear a panel discussion, with Anat Admati, Debra Satz and me on repugnance and, more generally, Ethics and Market Design

EVENT OVERVIEW

Markets depend on legal and institutional structures. These structures raise questions of ethics: are they fair? Do they generate harms?  If harms are unavoidable, do these structures fairly manage and distribute the risks of harm?This panel discussion brings together prominent  philosophers and economists to discuss the potentials and limits of designing markets with ethics in mind. Cases in point will be markets for donated organs and financial markets. 

This is an RSVP event. RSVP here.

SPEAKER

Anat Admati, George G.C. Parker Professor of Finance and Economics at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, author of The Bankers’ New Clothes: What’s Wrong with Banking and What to Do about It.

Al Roth, Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University & Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University, winner of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for his work on market design.

Debra Satz, Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Ethics in Society, Professor of Philosophy and Political Science, author of Why Some Things Should Not Be for Sale: The Limits of Markets.

4:00PM ON THURSDAY, JANUARY 8, 2015 AT STANFORD LAW SCHOOL, CROWN QUADRANGLE, MANNING FACULTY LOUNGE (ROOM 270)

Sponsored by The McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society / ethicsinsociety@stanford.edu

***********
Update (with room change) from the organizers:
"Just a quick update on tomorrow's panel discussion: we've been overwhelmed with RSVPs (over 100), so we booked a larger room for the panel discussion (180 in the Law School - we'll put up signposts tomorrow), and we had to close the list for the dinner. "

Nikhil Agarwal, in Forbes

30 Under 30: The Entrepreneurs Making Healthcare Digital

"Then there are the big thinkers. MIT Assistant Prof. Nikhil Agarwal is using economics theory to understand how the medical match, which decides where doctors train, works."

Nikhil Agarwal, 28

Assistant professor, MIT

The match system that decides where doctors do their residencies can seem unfair. Worse: it seemed more prestigious hospitals paid less than they should. This MIT economist has created models showing that this is simply the result of having a limited number of positions at the programs that provide the best training. Next up: a study of the similar match system used in New York City high schools.

A position for a market designer in Zurich

Sven Seuken writes:

"the University of Zurich has just announced its search for a new "Professor in Organizational Economics". The position is open rank (full, associate or assistant professor) and available beginning in April 2015 or later. I thought that many junior as well as senior readers of your market design blog might be interested in this position, and thus I was wondering if you might be willing to link to this announcement on your blog: http://jobs.zeit.de/jobs/zurich_switzerland_professorship_in_organizational_economics_109027.html

Ramesh Johari's course on Platform and Marketplace Design, starts tomorrow

Take the class, or you can also scroll down and see the syllabus with links to the papers.

MS&E 336: Platform and Marketplace Design

Course time

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00-11:50 AM

Instructors

Ramesh Johari

Associate Professor

Management Science and Engineering

Electrical Engineering (by courtesy)

Huang Engineering Center, Room 311

E-mail: ramesh.johari@stanford.edu

Office hours: TBA, Huang 311

Additional office hours by appointment

Nick Arnosti (TA)

Management Science and Engineering

E-mail}: narnosti@stanford.edu

Office hours: TBA

Course website

The course website will be accessible through CourseWork.

Catalog course description

The last decade has witnessed a meteoric rise in the number of online markets and platforms competing with traditional mechanisms of trade. Examples of such markets include online marketplaces for goods, such as eBay; online dating markets; markets for shared resources, such as Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb; and online labor markets. We will review recent research that aims to both understand and design such markets. Emphasis on mathematical modeling and methodology, with a view towards preparing Ph.D. students for research in this area.

Detailed course description

Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the “right” partner. The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea of change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants.  Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants.  As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.

This course is intended to prepare students for research on online and platform markets.  The course was inspired by the following observation: in the last decade, a wide range of graduates with quantitative backgrounds have been put into positions where they are effectively designing markets every day.  Often this is a side effect of being thrust into a software engineering, product development, or regulatory role: for example, a new hire might be asked to change how users browse through search results on eBay or Airbnb.  As is immediately apparent to a market designer, small changes to that basic infrastructure---the search engine---can radically alter the behavior of the market itself.  The goal in the class is to prepare students to be able to think conceptually about these market design challenges.

With that motivation in mind, we have three main goals for the quarter:

1. Problems.  The first goal is to use the quarter to identify open research directions that have risen to the forefront with the rise of online platforms.  We live in an exciting time for market design, with great interest in the fundamentals, as well as a rich set of applications that motivate research directions, and provide data and testbeds for validation.  A key emphasis in this part of the class is to focus on “levers” that affect the information that market participants obtain about each other in a variety of ways.
2. Tools. The second goal is to ensure students have access to a basic set of tools with which to reason about such markets.  The course assumes students have already had prior exposure to game theory and economic modeling.  In this course, we will focus on a set of tools that have specifically proven helpful in studying platform markets, and the effects of design interventions on these markets.  A key emphasis is on large market models.
3. Applications.  Along the way, we hope to learn about how the research questions we identify and the tools we learn are relevant to specific marketplaces.  This will be through a mix of mathematical modeling, empirical research, as well as anecdotal evidence.

The course will be taught using a mix of lecture format and seminar-style guided discussion. Much of what we will discuss is active research, so the reading material will be drawn from relevant papers in the literature; this material will be available from the course website. The focus will be on encouraging discussion of both open theoretical questions and modeling issues. This is particularly important since the course content draws from a range of disciplines (operations research, computer science, economics, etc.). The course should provide a unique forum for a lively exchange of ideas across these boundaries.

Evaluation

Your grade in the course will be based on two components.

1. Participation in lecture [ 40% of course grade ]. You will be expected to read papers and actively participate in lectures.  To help make sure this happens, for at least four of the weeks of the quarter, you will have to choose one paper that you need to read and prepare a “mini-review”.  The mini-review consists of answers to the following three questions, in 100 words or less each:
1. What is the paper about?
2. What are the strengths of the paper?
3. What are the weaknesses of the paper?

Each mini-review will be graded credit/no-credit, i.e., you will receive full credit for this

component if you satisfactorily complete each mini-review.

2. Course project [ 60% of course grade ]. A course project is the main evaluation component of the class.  The course project is meant to get you thinking actively about research problems in the market design problems represented by the course material.  The project will culminate in a presentation to your fellow students, and a written report (due by March 20, 2015).
   I will distribute more details on the project in the first week of lecture.

Course outline

Note: The content described on the course outline below will take up the first 14 lectures of the quarter.  (This is why each lecture is 110 minutes, instead of the usual 75 minutes.)  The remainder of the quarter will be used for guest speakers and discussion and presentation of course projects.

Part 1 (2 lectures): Introduction to platforms

We introduce platforms, and cover some of the relevant economics literature that defines and analyzes two-sided platforms.

Topics of interest:

1. What is a (two-sided) platform?
2. What is the objective of the platform operator,
   what information does she possess, and
   what tools does she have to acheive these objectives?
3. What are the objectives of platform participants,
   what information do they possess,
   and what actions are available to them?

Papers:

1. Rochet and Tirole (2003), Platform competition in two-sided markets
2. Rochet and Tirole (2006), Two-sided markets: A progress report
3. Armstrong (2006), Competition in two-sided markets
4. Caillaud and Jullien (2003), Chicken & egg: Competition among intermediation service providers
5. Parker and van Alstyne (2005), Two-sided network effects: A theory of information product design

Part 2 (2 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- pricing

We consider what the introductory papers might have missed, focusing on pricing strategies.  The emphasis is on operational details of platform behavior.

Topics of interest:

1. Pricing usage
1. Membership fees and subscriptions
2. Usage-based fee with flat fee per transaction/match
3. Usage-based fee with volume-based fee per transaction/match
2. Pricing visibility: paying for preferential access to the other side of the market
3. Pricing transaction risk: paying for reduced uncertainty of trade

Papers:

1. Gomes and Pavan, Many-to-Many Matching and Price Discrimination
2. Einav, Faronato, Levin, Sundaresan, Sales mechanisms in online markets: What happened to Internet auctions?
3. Celis, Lewis, Mobius, Nazerzadeh, Buy-it-Now or Take-a-Chance: Price Discrimination through Randomized Auctions

Part 3 (3 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- reputation and feedback

We study the role of reputation systems used by online platforms to help participants judge trading partners they have never met.

Topics of interest:

1. Examples of reputation and feedback systems
2. What incentives do particular systems provide to market participants?
3. How do we design systems that incentivize honest feedback?
4. How should the platform use the feedback system as a “lever” to improve market performance?

Papers:

1. Resnick, Kuwabara, Zeckhauser, Friedman (2000), Reputation systems
2. Cabral and Hortacsu (2010), The dynamics of seller reputation: Evidence from eBay
3. Dellarocas and Wood (2007), The Sound of Silence in Online Feedback: Estimating Trading Risks in the Presence of Reporting Bias
4. Bolton, Greiner, and Ockenfels (2013), Engineering Trust: Reciprocity in the Production of Reputation Information
5. Horton and Golden, Reputation Inflation in an Online Market
6. Fradkin, Grewal, Holtz, Pearson, Bias and Reciprocity in Online Reviews: Evidence from Field Experiments on Airbnb
7. Nosko and Tadelis, The Limits of Reputation in Platform Markets: An Empirical Analysis and Field Experiment

Part 4 (3 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- search

We discuss how the platform can mediate matches by directing the search effort of each side of the market.

Topics of interest:

1. How do market participants cope with the search frictions of finding trading partners?
2. What information should the platform share with market participants about potential matches?
3. What mechanisms can the platform provide to participants to improve the signals they send each other?

Papers:

1. Coles et al. (2010), The job market for new economists: A market design perspective
2. Lee, Niederle, Kim, Kim, Propose with a rose? Signaling in Internet dating markets
3. Halaburda and Piskorski, Competing by Restricting Choice: The Case of Search Platforms
4. Arnosti, Johari, and Kanoria, Managing Congestion in Dynamic Matching Markets
5. Tadelis and Zettelmeyer, Information Disclosure as a Matching Mechanism: Theory and Evidence From a Field Experiment
6. Horton and Johari, At What Quality and What Price? Inducing Separating Equilibria as a Market Design Problem

Part 5 (4 lectures): Modeling tools

In this part of the course we will cover some tools that have proven helpful in modeling and analyzing operational aspects of two-sided platforms.  We emphasize the use of large market models.

Topics of interest:

1. Large market models of static markets
1. Directed search and decentralized matching
2. Double auctions
2. Large market models of dynamic markets
1. Repeated (dynamic) auctions
2. Dynamic matching models

Papers of interest:

1. Rogerson, Shimer, Wright, Search-theoretic models of the labor market: A survey
2. Burdett, Shi, Wright (2001), Pricing and Matching with Frictions
3. Eeckhout and Kircher (2010), Sorting and decentralized price competition
4. Iyer, Johari, Sundararajan, Mean field equilibria of dynamic auctions with learning
5. Bodoh-Creed, Optimal Platform Fees for Large Dynamic Matching Markets
6. Besbes, Balseiro, Weintraub, Repeated Auctions with Budgets in Ad Exchanges: Approximations and Design
7. Duffie, Malamud, Manso, Information percolation with equilibrium search dynamics
8. Arnosti, Johari, and Kanoria, Managing Congestion in Dynamic Matching Markets

Blood donation, in China

Here's a paper on incentivizing blood donation, with data from China.

Solving Shortage in a Priceless Market: Insights from Blood Donation
by Tianshu Sun, Susan Feng Lu, and Ginger Zhe Jin
November 2014

Abstract:

Blood shortage is common in many countries but it cannot be solved by price adjustment given the WHO recommendation for 100% unpaid voluntary donation. In this paper, we evaluate two non-price methods that blood banks often use to address shortage. The first method is informing existing donors of the current shortage via mobile message and encouraging them to donate voluntarily. The second method is asking the patient’s family or friends to donate in a family replacement program. Using 472,342 individual donation records from a large Chinese blood bank, we show that both methods are effective in addressing blood shortage in the short run but the two methods target different audiences and therefore have different implications for total blood supply. 

In the conclusion, the authors note that shortage messages reach existing donors, while family replacement programs primarily draw in new donors.

"Overall, the back-of-envelope calculation suggests that shortage message can be used in places

where the donor population is large and the shortage is small. In comparison, FR could be more

useful when the donor population is small and the shortage is severe. In this sense, our data suggests a more optimistic picture for FR than the WHO recommendation. However, in a society with a low donation rate (which could be the reason for severe shortage to begin with), most FR donors will be no-history FR donors and the FR treatment may discourage voluntary donation in

the long run by generating either distrust or crowd-out. Although a broader introduction of FR

can bring more blood supply in the short run, it may exacerbate shortage problem in the long run.

Like the WHO, we reach a cautionary conclusion for the FR program but for a reason different

from quality concerns. "

Can high pay be coercive and repugnant?

Sandro Ambuehl* will be presenting this paper at the AEA meetngs today:

More Money, More Problems? Can High Pay be Coercive and Repugnant?
By SANDRO AMBUEHL, MURIEL NIEDERLE, AND ALVIN E. ROTH

"Sometimes two people would voluntarily agree to transact a good or service for compensation, but an unaffected third party would prefer to prevent this transaction. Paid kidney donation, surrogate motherhood, prostitution, and paid participation in medical trials are examples.  We use a vignette study to explore how respondents' assessments of such repugnant transactions change as we alter the seller's compensation. We then sketch a model of how people judge the morality of such transactions."


*You'll have to wait until next year to hire him.