School choice in Detroit?

The Detroit Free Press has a story on the current debate: Common enrollment: Lessons for Detroit

When preparing to move to Washington, D.C., in 2012, Erika and Lamont Harrell spent so much time applying to charter schools that it felt like a full-time job.

They filled out 24 applications — a dozen for each of their two sons — and juggled different school websites and deadlines.

That was before My School DC, a common enrollment and lottery system that has one application and the same deadline schedule for most of the city's publicly funded schools, including charters. A week-long task one year turned into 20 minutes the next.

"The process is just so much easier, and it's less stressful," said Erika Harrell, 33.

More than 200 miles away, in Newark, N.J., the first days of the school year in September were marked by student and parent protests of a similar reform effort called One Newark. Some parents complained that their children were matched to far-away schools that they didn't put on their list.

Common enrollment — in which a computer algorithm tries to match kids to their top-ranked schools — is one of the main reform ideas bubbling out of the discussions around reshaping public education in Detroit.

Changing how kids enroll won't improve academics — a significant issue in a city where more than 80% of ranked schools in Detroit Public Schools are in the bottom quarter statewide. But supporters say it would give all families an equal shot at seats in sought-after schools, bring order to what is now a chaotic enrollment process and stabilize school rosters earlier in the year. The data gleaned from it could inform decisions on which schools should close.

Common enrollment can be tough to sell to parents, at least initially.

The cities that have common enrollment — such as Denver, Newark, New Orleans and Washington — offer lessons for Detroit.

Officials there say they have had significant successes in getting kids matched with their top-choice schools.

But no system is perfect. In Denver, for example, researchers say common enrollment has been stable and successful, but lingering gaps remain in terms of participation by minority, special-ed and low-income students. They also said the city needs more seats in high-performing schools to meet demand.

Improving choice for all students

Common enrollment works best when all or most schools are involved, experts say. The systems have centralized management.

In Denver, where common enrollment launched in 2012, 100% of public schools participate, including charters.

Denver officials say they're happy with how it's working. In the system's first three years, between 76% and 89% of all students were matched with one of their choices, and between 64% and 72% got their first choice school, according to a recent study by the Seattle-based Center on Reinventing Public Education.

"Previously ... we had over 60 application processes and time lines, so only the savviest of parents were able to take advantage of school choice," said Roberta Walker, manager of choice and enrollment for Denver Public Schools.

The school district was an early supporter. A promise of transparency (the system is audited annually) and some pressure from foundations that fund charter schools helped bring charters on board, said Mike Kromrey, executive director of the community group Together Colorado.

Denver Public Schools runs the system, called SchoolChoice.

Getting everybody on board could be stickier in Detroit. The city has a decentralized education system with roughly 100 schools within Detroit Public Schools, 64 charter school districts (made up of 98 schools) and a 15-school reform district for the state's worst schools.

And with a dozen charter authorizers, Detroit has far more than the other cities. In Denver, for example, the public school district is the only charter authorizer.

The charter sector has exploded in Detroit in recent years, leading to fierce competition for students.

"It takes a great deal of trust across schools for everybody to commit to a centralized process," said Betheny Gross, senior analyst for the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

"A charter school is not naturally going to be inclined to hand over their enrollment process. ... Each child comes with a bundle of resources that funds their school."

In New Orleans, the common enrollment system called OneApp brought order and transparency to a chaotic process. But in a city where about 95% of students attend charters, some of the highest-performing schools have opted out.

"If every school isn't going to be in it, it doesn't resolve the problem that it was created to resolve. It doesn't give you access to every school," said Karran Harper Royal, a New Orleans resident and outspoken critic of OneApp.

Supporters say common enrollment has made it hard for schools to "cream" students — using back-door methods to selectively admit children or push others out. A principal couldn't specifically seek out students with good test scores, for example.

"In the absence of any meaningful regulation, this stuff can happen all the time," said Neil Dorosin, executive director of the New York-based Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice. The group helps build common enrollment systems.

In Newark, common enrollment was attacked by some families who complained siblings were split up. Mayor Ras Baraka publicly blasted what he called superintendent Cami Anderson's "secret" algorithm. Anderson has argued that, despite some initial bugs, the system has improved school access.

Newark officials have since added a feature that will allow families to move all of their children to the same school, Dorosin said.

Centralized authority

In cities with common enrollment, one authority oversees the systems.

Whereas the public school system runs common enrollment in Denver, in Washington, D.C., it falls under the deputy mayor for education. New Orleans' system is run by the state reform Recovery School District, with input from the local Orleans Parish School Board. The state-operated Newark Public Schools district handles enrollment there.

The applications that parents fill out are processed by a central clearinghouse.

In contrast, a Detroit parent who wants to sign up their kid for a DPS school today has to make an in-person visit. Three schools require an entrance exam, and one a performing arts audition. About two dozen DPS schools require an application.

The city's charter schools have their own applications, due dates and lotteries.

"There's no coordination now. A kid can get into Cass Tech High School and four different charters. The schools often don't know if they're actually going to get that kid" until well after the school year starts, Dorosin said. "It makes it difficult (for schools) to plan."

Districts don't get the full amount of state funding for students who enroll after the fall count day.

The nonprofit education group Excellent Schools Detroit is pushing for a new commission to oversee school openings and closings, transportation and enrollment across the city. The proposal comes as the Coalition for the Future of Detroit Schoolchildren is facing a March 31 deadline to come up with proposed school reforms.

...

Implementing full common enrollment in Detroit would likely require legislative changes, experts say. But lawmakers might balk.

"The expansion of school choice and putting parents in the driver's seat has been the general path the government has been on. If recommendations were to come ... that restricted choice and artificially managed or regulated choice, I would ... think that many in the Legislature" would have serious questions, said Gary Naeyaert, executive director of the Great Lakes Education Project, a charter lobbying group.

Naeyaert said he believes "managed and regulated choice is not free and full choice."

First kidney exchange chain in Mexico

I believe that this recent exchange chain in Guadalajara is also the first kidney exchange of any kind in Mexico: Hospital Civil logra primer trasplante renal secuencial del país

"El trasplante se logró gracias a un donador altruista espontáneo; involucrados se encuentran en buen estado de salud

GUADALAJARA, JALISCO (07/FEB/2015).- El Antiguo Hospital Civil de Guadalajara "Fray Antonio Alcalde" realizó dos trasplantes renales secuenciales "en dominó", primer caso en México, de que se tenga registro, informó el nosocomio en un comunicado."

Google translate says:
"The transplant was achieved thanks to a spontaneous altruistic donor; involved are in good health

GUADALAJARA, JALISCO (07 / FEB / 2015) .- The Old Civil Hospital of Guadalajara "Fray Antonio Alcalde" performed two sequential kidney transplants "in domino" first case in Mexico, that we have registered, the hospital said in a statement ."


HT: Alberto Yarza

School choice in Denver: how do schools communicate with parents?

The Denver Post reports on developments in the school choice system there, as parents and schools gain experience: Marketing, a need and benefit for Denver schools

"As the novelty wears off for a process that reformed the way Denver parents pick a school for their kids, school leaders are becoming more sophisticated in their marketing, trying to find students who are the right fit.

"The change comes even as participation is decreasing in the three-year-old SchoolChoice application process, which allows parents to fill out only one form to go to any district school. Options, meanwhile, increase each year, and by August, Denver Public Schools will have 200 schools, including 53 charters."
...
"According to data in a report published by A-Plus Denver, 73 percent of new kindergartner families picked a school through the district's SchoolChoice process in 2014, down from 80 percent in 2012.

"Eighth-graders picking a high school have the lowest participation of students in transition grades, with 55 percent filling out a form in 2014, down from 60 percent in 2012.

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

My understanding is that students not filling out a form are opting in to their local school.

Differential privacy and the market for data, at the AAAS meeting tomorrow

If you are at the AAAS meetings in San Jose tomorrow, and interested in how the new data environment interacts with privacy concerns, you might want to check out this session::

Differential Privacy: Analyzing Sensitive Data and Implications

Saturday, 14 February 2015: 10:00 AM-11:30 AM

Room LL21C (San Jose Convention Center)

To realize the full potential of big data for societal benefit, we must also find solutions to the privacy problems raised by the collection, analysis, and sharing of vast amounts of data about people. As discussed in the 2014 AAAS Annual Meeting session "Re-Identification Risk of De-Identified Data Sets in the Era of Big Data," the traditional approach of anonymizing data by removing identifiers does not provide adequate privacy protection, since it is often possible to re-identify individuals using the seemingly innocuous data that remains in the dataset together with auxiliary information known to an attacker and/or present in publicly available datasets. Differential privacy offers the possibility of avoiding such vulnerabilities. It provides a mathematically rigorous formalization of the requirement that a datasharing or analysis system should not leak individual-specific information, regardless of what auxiliary information is available to an attacker. A rich body of work over the past decade has shown that a wide variety of common data analysis tasks are compatible with the strong protections of differential privacy, and a number of promising efforts are underway to bring these methods to practice. In addition, differential privacy has turned out to have powerful implications for questions outside of privacy, in areas such as economics and statistics. This symposium will discuss these facets of differential privacy.

Organizer:

Salil Vadhan, Harvard University 

Co-Organizer:

Cynthia Dwork, Microsoft Research, Silicon Valley 

Speakers:

Aaron Roth, University of Pennsylvania 
An Introduction to Differential Privacy

Sofya Raskhodnikova, Pennsylvania State University 
Differentially Private Analysis of Graphs and Social Networks

Moritz Hardt, IBM Almaden Research Center 
Guilt-Free Interactive Data Analysis

See more of: Information and Data Technology

Unraveling and exploding offers in the market for new private equity analysts

The unraveling in this market (which is also highly competitive in salaries) continues. That is, vigorous competition by the timing of (early, exploding) offers coexists with vigorous salary competition.  The NY Times Dealbook has the story.

Private Equity Firms in a Frenzied Race to Hire Young Investment Bankers
By WILLIAM ALDEN and SYDNEY EMBER  FEBRUARY 10, 2015

"Junior investment bankers who graduated from college only last year are being madly courted by private equity firms like Apollo Global Management, the Blackstone Group, Bain Capital and the Carlyle Group in a scramble that kicked off last weekend. 6.After back-to-back interviews, many are now fielding offers for jobs that won’t start until the summer of 2016.

"This process has become an annual rite by private equity firms, which raise money from investors (like pension funds) to buy entire companies. But it has grown more frenzied since the financial crisis, and it started this year weeks earlier than many in the industry had expected. Fearful of missing the best talent being developed at investment banks, the giants of private equity have turned Wall Street’s white-collar entry-level workers into a hot commodity.

“It’s as if these were star athletes,” said Adam Zoia, chief executive of the recruiting firm Glocap Search, who helps private equity firms hire young workers. “The irony is they are professionals six, seven months out of undergrad. It’s hard to imagine you can tell if someone’s a star or not.”
...
"Private equity’s recruiters, trying to secure the best workers for their clients, have helped accelerate the interview timeline, so that it is now the norm to interview workers about 18 months before their jobs will actually start. Some private equity executives say this means the candidates, who have barely encountered their first Wall Street deals, are performing more poorly in interviews.

Participants liken the situation to what is known in game theory as the “prisoner’s dilemma,” in which a lack of information causes private equity firms to act according to their own self-interest rather than find a solution that would be mutually beneficial to all parties. Last year, the process started in late February — weeks earlier than the cycle in 2013.

“There’s essentially always a handful of firms that are the catalysts, and that creates this huge domino effect across the industry,” said Morgan Halberg, a partner at the recruiting firm Dynamics Search Partners. “Every other firm essentially mobilizes and has to be reactive.”

"Many participants traced the beginning of this year’s process to a move by a midsize private equity firm in San Francisco. The firm, Golden Gate Capital, extended a handful of offers to young consulting firm employees on Thursday, according to people briefed on the matter who were not authorized to speak publicly.

"This alone was not enough for the rest of the industry to spring into action. Golden Gate, which has a close relationship with the consulting firm Bain & Company, was not drawing from the investment bank pool where the big private equity firms fish. What’s more, Golden Gate’s internal rationale was that it was responding to moves by other private equity firms to hire consultants. At first, rival private equity firms and their recruiters decided to stand down.

"But on Friday, an email circulated through the industry from a Boston-based private equity firm, Advent International, which said it would begin interviewing candidates from investment banks, people briefed on the matter said. The biggest firms knew they could not afford to wait. Recruiters contacted young bankers Friday night, instructing them to show up for interviews on Saturday and Sunday.

"That led to a weekend of sleepless nights and back-to-back interviews for the would-be hires. In a reflection of how early the cycle began, the Blackstone Group, which had started some interviews on Sunday, was in the middle of recruiting interns for this summer. Golden Gate, now feeling pressure from other firms, told at least one candidate to respond to a job offer by Sunday, shortening the deadline from this Wednesday.

"Many had expected this process to start in early March, or late February at the earliest. But by the beginning of this week, some of the biggest firms had already extended offers for the summer of 2016."

HT: Eric Budish

School Choice Index from Brookings

The Brown Center on Education Policy at Brookings has published
The 2014 Education Choice and Competition Index

Here is their list of school districts that are "leaders in choice"

The report says in part:

"The Recovery School District in New Orleans scores well on nearly all of the components of the ECCI. In particular, there is high availability of choice, with nearly 80% of schools being charters, a supply of affordable private schools, vouchers for private school attendance available from the state, and virtual education provided through Supplemental Course Academy/Course Choice. The school assignment process maximizes the match between parental preference and school assignment through an ideal computer matching algorithm. There is no default school assignment (everyone must choose), a common application for traditional public schools and charters, and information on school performance that includes test results for children attending private schools. Information on school performance is clearly presented with support for parents in understanding and navigating the choice process. Transportation expenses to schools of choice are covered through free public transportation tokens or yellow bus service.

"New York City (NYC) also repeats its position in second place overall and in first place among the 100 largest school districts.2 NYC scores particularly well with respect to its choice process, policies for closing unpopular schools, and information provision to parents and students.

"New Orleans, NYC, Denver, and new to our list of top performers this year, Newark, standout in their use of a centralized computer-based algorithm to assign public high school students to schools in such a way as to maximize the match between student preferences and school assignment, conditional on any admission requirements exercised by the school. Students apply once and receive one offer, assuming they can match with one of the schools they have listed among their choices. New Orleans, Denver, and Newark include charter schools in their single application process, whereas NYC does not."
***********


Although the report doesn't mention The Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC), this is quite a compliment to IIPSC, since, of those top-10 cities, New Orleans, Newark, Washington DC, and Denver are among the cities in which IIPSC has helped design Uniform Enrollment school choice systems. And New York and Boston are the school districts which initiated the market design contribution to school choice, and in which the IIPSC principals got our start, before IIPSC was formed.

"Safety and anonymity" in the design of the Silk Road drug market

Even illegal markets depend for their success on appropriate design. (And law enforcement may depend on disrupting it...) Bloomberg quotes some testimony from the trial of the alleged (and now convicted) “Dread Pirate Roberts” said to have run the black market site.

Silk Road Heroin Dealer Tells ‘Dread Pirate’ Jury of His Success

"(Bloomberg) -- A New York man who faces drug charges that could put him in prison for as long as 40 years told jurors in the trial of the alleged mastermind of the Silk Road online marketplace that the “safety and anonymity” of the website helped turn him from an addict into a successful heroin dealer."

The evidence was apparently overwhelming, and the conviction came quickly, see this account in The Economist: http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2015/02/silk-road-trial

"TIME is up for the Dread Pirate Roberts. Ross Ulbricht, the 30-year-old Texan physics graduate accused of setting up the first major drugs marketplace on the web, the Silk Road, has been found guilty of all seven drugs-trafficking charges in a Manhattan court room today. And so comes to a close one of the first great criminal cases in this new era of internet-enabled crime."

Mike Rees and reverse transplant tourism in the Toledo Blade

REVERSE-TRANSPLANT TOURISM: Kidney doctor pairs foreign, U.S. recipients
UTMC surgeon says program will save money in long run

Published: Sunday, 2/8/2015 

BY MARLENE HARRIS-TAYLOR
BLADE STAFF WRITER

image: http://www.toledoblade.com/image/2015/02/07/300x_b1_z/08n1rees-8.jpg

Dr. Michael A. Rees helped a man from the Philippines who could not afford a transplant get a new kidney from an American donor.
THE BLADE/JETTA FRASEREnlarge | Buy This Photo

Dr. Michael Rees, a University of Toledo Medical Center kidney transplant surgeon, has spent more than a decade developing ways to increase the number and quality of kidney transplants in the United States through a program he founded, the Alliance for Paired Donation.

Now Dr. Rees, who is also a professor of urology and pathology at the former Medical College of Ohio, is taking his expertise to focus on finding people in developing countries who don’t have the financial means for transplants, while increasing the number of kidneys available for U.S. patients.

Dr. Rees calls his new program reverse-transplant tourism.

A husband and wife from the Philippines, Jose and Kristine Mamaril, are the first participants to benefit from this innovative system that allowed Mr. Mamaril to receive a life-saving transplant in Toledo from an American donor in Georgia. His wife, who has a coveted blood type, reciprocated by donating a kidney to a man in Minnesota who previously would have had to wait years for a match.

According to the website Kidneylink, the average wait for people who need transplants and lack matching donors from their families varies between three and five years.

“In rich countries there’s not enough kidneys for people who have kidney failure, but there is plenty of money to pay for all the transplants. In poor countries, there’s lots of people that need kidney transplants and lots of available donors, but in poor countries they don’t have enough money,” Dr. Rees said.

This new program breaks down some of those barriers and helps bring people with the universal Type O blood into the U.S donor system, while helping someone from another country get access to free medical care.

One year of a kidney patient’s dialysis costs Medicare about $90,000, or nearly triple the $33,000 cost of a kidney transplant, Dr. Rees said. He argues his donor-matching system will ultimately save the federal government and private insurers money because it moves patients with kidney failure, also known as end-stage renal disease, off dialysis sooner.

“It is what health-care reform is all about. It increases access, so now poor people are getting access to transplantation. It reduces the cost of care and it improves the quality of care because a transplant’s a lot better than dialysis. The average person who gets a kidney transplant lives 10 years longer than if the same person had they remained on dialysis,” Dr. Rees said.

‘A miracle’

Mr. Mamaril, 31, had nearly given up hope of ever being able to afford a kidney transplant at home in San Pablo, in the Philippines’ Laguna province. He told his wife they could afford neither the transplant nor dialysis and tried to persuade her to give up on him and save their meager money to take care of their 8-year-old son.

The Mamarils are not poor by Philippine standards. Both college-educated, she is an accountant for Dunkin’ Donuts in Laguna while Mr. Mamaril had been operating a taxi business that transports passengers using motorcycles with trailers.

Everything changed for the family when he began to feel weak and dizzy in October, 2013 — a symptom of his kidneys failing. By the following January he started dialysis, but the couple had to borrow money from relatives to pay for it.

Mr. Mamaril, often speaking through an interpreter, said he worried constantly about how to pay for his expensive medical care. Dialysis or a transplant cost 10 times the family’s income, Dr. Rees said, and the Philippines has no public health system to help pay for transplants.

image: http://www.toledoblade.com/image/2015/02/07/300x_b1_z/08n1kidney-5.jpg

Jose Mamaril received a kidney from a donor in Georgia through the ‘reverse transplant tourism’ program. In return, his wife, Kristine, donated one of her kidneys, which did not match her husband, to a recipient in Minnesota.
THE BLADE/JETTA FRASEREnlarge | Buy This Photo

Mr. Mamaril sold his taxi, and he and his wife sold every piece of furniture in their home. His wife took her bank card to a pawn shop and agreed to have her future wages garnished to get money for his care. But it still wasn’t enough.

“They never gave up on me,” he said.

During one of his hospital visits Mr. Mamaril, who is Catholic, called out to God: “I’m going to go with you now.”

The only thing that kept him going was the thought that “my son needs me,” he said.

Then fate intervened.

Mr. Mamaril calls it a miracle. The doctor who had been treating him at the hospital in Manila, Dr. Siegfried Paloyo, had worked for a short time in the United States, where he met and befriended an associates of Dr. Rees. The mutual friend brought together the two kidney surgeons who were thousands of miles apart in different countries.

Finding right fit

Dr. Rees had developed the idea for his reverse-tourism transplant program, but he needed to find a developing country that had a medical structure in place to support ongoing care for kidney patients.

“The transplant infrastructure in the Philippines was well-developed and Don was an excellent doctor,” Dr. Rees said.

Dr. Rees asked Dr. Paloyo to find a couple who were struggling financially and whose kidney donor would have Type O blood, the universal-donor type that can be received by nearly anyone. He also preferred a kidney patient with Type A blood, because that person would match about 85 percent of the U.S. population.

Jose and Kristine Mamaril fit the description perfectly.

Dr. Rees raised $150,000 from private Toledo donors and invited the couple to come to UTMC to be his program’s first participants, but getting all the pieces in place for the exchange took several tries. After five different attempts to match Mr. Mamaril with an American donor, the couple finally arrived in Toledo on Dec. 3.

Mrs. Mamaril said there were several times during this harrowing ordeal that she thought, “This will never happen.”

Mr. Mamaril said his faith helped him get through the months of medical procedures, having his hopes dashed when donors didn’t match, and watching his family fall into abject poverty.

At 7:30 a.m. on Jan. 6, the three-way kidney exchange began. Mrs. Mamaril’s donor kidney was removed and sent to Minnesota. The kidney intended for Mr. Mamaril was removed from the man in Georgia and flown to Toledo.

By 4 p.m., Mr. Mamaril was in surgery receiving his new kidney. Sitting in a UTMC conference room two weeks later, he said he felt great.

“I’m so happy I get my new kidney. I still believe in God,“ he said.

Mr. Mamaril also had an opportunity to talk with his kidney donor via a video conference call between Toledo and Georgia.

“He said, ‘Thank you and I love you,’ ” Mrs. Mamaril said speaking for her husband.

Dr. Rees said he now has an even larger task ahead in trying to create a system where his reverse-transplant tourism program is sustainable.

He is working to convince private insurance companies this program will help more Americans get kidneys and save them money in the long term.

“The critical piece in all of this is I don’t yet have a commercial insurance industry who has agreed to give me $150,000 to do the next one. I have six commercial insurance companies who are interested, but this remains a simple act of charity until it becomes sustainable because the insurance industry recognized the value of the concept,” Dr. Rees said

Read more at http://www.toledoblade.com/Medical/2015/02/08/Kidney-doctor-pairs-foreign-U-S-recipients.html#sZwHDp26aqLsVF4F.99

An economist's perspective on transplantation--in Transplantation (the journal)

I have a paper in the latest issue of the journal Transplantation, discussing some approaches to current challenges facing transplantation.

I discuss ways to extend kidney exchange by initiating nondirected donor chains with some deceased donor organs, and by developing  international kidney exchange (along the lines of what Mike Rees calls  reverse transplant tourism). Reducing barriers to participation by transplant centers would also help (e.g removing financial barriers with some kind of standard acquisition fee) and removing barriers for enrolling easy to match pairs, including compatible pairs.  I also discuss ways to increase deceased donor registration, including priorities for donors, and providing other kinds of incentive for donation.

Roth, Alvin E., “Transplantation: One Economist’s Perspective,” Transplantation, February 2015, 99, 2, 261–264

(this link will only get you to the first page; )

Here are some relevant passages from the rest of the paper:

"Extending the reach of kidney exchange

"One way to make kidney exchange accessible to more patients would be to simplify participation. Developing a standard acquisition charge for living donor kidneys  would remove some barriers that arise e.g. from different costs of nephrectomies at hospitals that may need to ship each other kidneys. And matching algorithms could be adjusted to guarantee hospitals that they and their patients won’t lose transplants or sacrifice patient care if they enroll all pairs in exchange (and not just hard-to-match pairs).17 Enrolling easy-to-match pairs, including compatible pairs, can be organized to help those pairs find better matches, and also makes it much easier to find matches for hard-to-match pairs.9, ,  Incentives for transplant centers to enroll their non-directed donors are already being implemented (a chain typically is terminated with a patient on the waiting list of a center that enrolled a non-directed donor).

"Another way to accomplish more transplants through exchange would be to allow some non-directed donor chains to be initiated with deceased donor kidneys1 which, properly organized, could facilitate more transplants and shorten the wait for deceased donor kidneys for all patients.

"Kidney exchange in the developed world could also be extended to patient-donor pairs from countries in which treatment for ESRD is essentially unavailable for large parts of the population.  Such patient-donor pairs could, for example, be invited to come to the U.S. to participate in kidney exchange , financed by the American taxpayer from the savings that result from removing an American from dialysis through receiving a transplant, which are more than sufficient to finance the additional surgeries.  (The bureaucratic obstacles to such exchanges and financial arrangements will be formidable, but the potential to aid both domestic and foreign patients is substantial.)

How else to increase donation?

"There remain many avenues other than kidney exchange through which the shortage of transplantable organs might be reduced.

"In the U.S., the scope for recovering many more transplantable organs from deceased donors seems somewhat limited for most organs, given current technology and recovery rates. But there is suggestive evidence that more frequent opportunities to register as a deceased donor would increase registration, and that the manner in which registration is solicited can influence rates of family consent for donation.

"There is growing consensus that donors should not face financial disincentives from donating, ,  and recent evidence that the costs borne by living donors are substantial enough to reduce donation in recessions. ,  There is consequently great interest in exploring ways to remove disincentives or provide inducements for donation.

"Several novel features of recent Israeli legislation are worth study.  Deceased donation is encouraged by giving registered donors and next-of-kin of deceased donors some priority to receive deceased donor organs. Living kidney donors are also reimbursed 40 days wages, at their own wage rate, to offset the costs of donation. Initial indications are that the new Israeli law is increasing donation.

"The most contentious part of the discussion of how to increase donation concerns cash compensation to donors, particularly living kidney donors. With the prominent exception of Iran, which specifically permits cash payments for kidneys , there does not appear to be a legal market for the purchase and sale of organs for transplant anywhere else, although illegal black markets are widely reported, and occasionally prosecuted.

"However the critical shortage of transplantable organs around the world prompts continual discussion of whether to relax the ban on cash compensation. For example, the March 2014 issue of the Journal of Medical Ethics devoted five articles to the subject, all by philosophers. While this discussion is too important to be left only to philosophers, neither can it be confined to the ongoing debate among transplant professionals, given the public resources devoted to transplantation and the important implications transplantation has for health policy.

"The arguments, pro and con, will already be largely familiar to those who follow this debate.  I will simply try to add some context to the discussion by noting that the ban on organ sales is not unique: other kinds of markets have also been banned in the past, and presently, and laws have changed over time.

"Of course, banning markets does not always end them: black markets for narcotics make clear that outlawing markets is simpler than abolishing them. In the United States, the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages was illegal from 1920 to 1933, during which time black markets for alcohol thrived. Less familiarly, an 1824 editorial in The Lancet comments on the black market in which medical schools bought cadavers for dissection from grave robbers, known as “resurrection men,” because the only cadavers that could legally be dissected were from executed murderers.  (The Anatomy Act of 1832 expanded the sources of legal cadavers for dissection in Britain.)

"Let’s call a transaction repugnant if some people want to engage in it, and others, who aren’t materially affected, don’t think they should be allowed to .

"By this definition, sales of kidneys are widely repugnant, as are (or were) the sale of narcotics, alcohol, and cadavers. But note that the ban on kidney sales is different from these other bans, since there is, or was, general disapproval of narcotics, alcohol, and dissection. But there is no similar disapproval of kidney donation and transplantation; it is only sales that are repugnant.

"This turns out not to be too unusual: a transaction that is not otherwise repugnant sometimes becomes so when money is added to the mix. For example, charging interest on loans was largely banned in medieval Europe, although loans were permitted. (The relaxation of that ban has had profound effects on the modern economy.)  Note that repugnance doesn’t only change in one direction—some transactions that used not to be repugnant are widely banned today. Indentured servitude, for example, is no longer legal in the U.S., although it was once a common way of purchasing passage across the Atlantic.41

"Some transactions are banned in some places and not others, e.g. those concerning sale of blood and blood products, and reproductive goods and services such as sperm, eggs, and surrogacy. Legal markets in some places and not others give rise to “fertility tourism,” and many countries that ban payment for blood plasma import plasma products from the U.S., where such payments are legal.

"The repugnance to kidney sales involves concerns about the identity and welfare of potential sellers. The same concerns cause many proposals for allowing some forms of compensation to address the need to avoid exploiting the poor and vulnerable, as existing black markets for kidneys are widely seen to do.  The debate on how to proceed seems likely to focus on removing disincentives to donate and providing incentives that are not seen as leading to coercive or exploitative situations. The debate can be furthered by identifying specific sources of repugnance, and considering how inducements could be structured to avoid them. , ,

"In the meantime, kidney exchange has proved to be a way of bringing some of the benefits of exchange to transplantation without running into the barrier of repugnance. So it seems promising to consider ways of extending its reach, as discussed above."

Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA 2015)

Scott Kominers writes:

"Lirong Xia and I are co-organizing a new iteration of the Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA 2015).

Any chance you could share this call for papers with your students, and maybe blogvertize it?"

The Third Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications

August 8–9, 2015

Chicago, Illinois, United States

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The Third Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications (AMMA 2015) 

 

• AMMA 2015 will be held August 8-9, 2015 at the University of Chicago's Becker Friedman Institute and Booth School of Business.

AMMA focuses on the economic, algorithmic, technical, and practical issues that arise in developing and deploying market mechanisms. This includes, but is not limited to, theoretical and empirical examination of questions like:

• Is a market the right mechanism for the problem? What are the externalities involved? What are the issues with central planning?
• How should novel markets be organized? What is the "right" micro-structure for a given setting?
• What is the best way to provide incentives? Is (real) money necessary?
• How do markets function in artificial economies (cf. bank runs in Second Life and similar games)?
• What protocols maximize the social value of market intermediaries?
• Is there a need for new mechanisms for specific applications?

In addition to more traditional academic papers, we are especially interested in papers presenting experiences from the real world (case studies and new applications). Below are some potential areas, but the list is illustrative rather than exhaustive -- we welcome papers in all areas of market design. Sample areas include:

• Content delivery networks
• Resource allocation in networks and distributed computing
• Online auctions and exchanges
• Markets and incentives in crowdsourcing
• Entrepreneurial market design
• Prediction markets
• Airport landing slot allocation
• Road congestion pricing
• School choice matching
• Organ exchange
• Social networks

• Financial market design
• Combinatorial auctions and exchanges

Papers can be submitted via EasyChair, at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=amma2015.

Uber, surge pricing, and the Red Cross

Uber, faced with criticism that it raised prices in Sydney during an emergency, but wanting to keep drivers incentivized to be available when needed, has announced that in such cases it will charge high prices but donate its share to the Red Cross: PARTNERSHIP WITH AMERICAN RED CROSS TO SUPPORT CITIES AND CITIZENS DURING DISASTERS

"Uber is proud to announce a national partnership with the American Red Cross to help cities and citizens during disasters. The partnership took effect last week as this season’s first tropical storm, Arthur, developed.

Uber is partnering with the American Red Cross1 to help communities’ disaster relief efforts.

• During disasters and relevant states of emergency, Uber is committing to donate its commissions on surge trips to the American Red Cross.
• That means that for trips with elevated pricing, 20% of the total fare will be donated to the American Red Cross’ disaster relief efforts.
• Uber will also support ongoing community events like blood drives and donation drives with safe, affordable and reliable transportation options for American Red Cross’ volunteers and participating community members."

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 HT Carmen Wang

Differential Privacy: an appreciation of Cynthia Dwork

On Thursday I heard Cynthia Dwork talk about differential privacy in San Diego, and here is an appreciation of her at the CS blog called Godel's lost letter and P=NP by Dick Lipton and Ken  Regan:

Cynthia Dwork and a Brilliant Idea

Here's their introductory paragraph:
"This concept is brilliant. It is, in our opinions, one of the greatest definitions of this century. Okay the century is just fifteen years old, but it is a terrific notion. She deserves credit for seeing that this simple one would have such far reaching consequences and for following through on it. Her paper—still in the 12-page ICALP 2006 proceedings format—begins with three prose pages of motivation that are a breath of fresh air. The definition originated from work with Frank McSherry in a prior paper also with Kobbi Nissim and Adam Smith, and has grown to fill a book joint with Aaron Roth."