The State of College Admissions--NACAC report

The Chronicle of Higher Ed summarizes the NACAC report on college admissions: 3 Key Findings About College Admissions
"Here are three sets of findings from NACAC’s annual "State of College Admission" report:

Yield Rates Are Sliding

Nationally, application surges continue for most colleges, with more than 70 percent reporting year-to-year increases in 10 of the last 15 years. For the fall 2013 admission cycle, 32 percent of freshmen submitted seven or more applications.

As applicant pools expand, uncertainty usually grows. Many colleges have seen their yield rate — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — decline sharply. In the fall 2013 admission cycle, the average institutional yield rate was 35.9 percent, down from an average of 39.5 percent in 2010, and 48.7 percent in 2002.

It’s long been said that enrollment goals are subject to the whims of teenagers. Yet Mr. Fuller, the association’s president, says many decisions about where to enroll now hinge on last-minute conversations students have with their parents about affordability. Sometimes that means students who had planned to attend four-year colleges end up enrolling at community colleges. "Those kinds of conversations," he says, "are definitely playing into yield numbers."

Transfer Students Are Crucial

Many colleges are located in regions where the number of high-school graduates has plateaued. That’s one reason some enrollment officials are deciding to make transfer students a bigger piece of their recruitment puzzle.

Forty-four percent of four-year institutions reported an increase in transfer applicants over the previous five years, and 37.6 percent reported an increase in transfer enrollments. At public institutions, two-thirds of transfer students were previously enrolled at community colleges.

"A lot of us are really seeing the value of these students and what they add to the campus," Mr. Fuller says. "They’ve got a proven history."

As for the future, 58 percent of four-year colleges anticipate that recruiting transfer students will become more important over the next three years. (Public institutions were more likely than private ones to rate the importance of such students highly.) And 80 percent of respondents said their college had admissions counselors who work exclusively with prospective transfer students.

Recruitment Has No Borders

College-bound students everywhere are on the move. Over the last 40 years, the report notes, the number of students enrolled in colleges outside their home countries increased to 4.5 million from 800,000. That number is projected to exceed seven million by 2025.

Meanwhile, more and more foreign-born students are earning diplomas at American high schools. "Recruiting international students," the report says, "is no longer reserved only for those professionals who travel internationally."

Rethinking school competition in Sweden

There are calls for reforming Sweden's system of competition and school choice among lightly-regulated private schools. The Guardian has the story: Sweden urged to rethink parents' choice over schools after education decline--OECD recommends comprehensive reform including revised school choice arrangements and more effective regulation

"Sweden has been urged to halt the steep decline in the international ranking of its schools by taking action to limit parents’ and pupils’ right to choose.

A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) recommends “a comprehensive education reform” to restore the Swedish system to its previous standards.

"Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s education directorate, was scathing about the country’s “disappointing” performance, saying he had once viewed Sweden as “the model for education”.

“It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul,” he said at a press conference in Stockholm. “Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing.”

"The call for “revised school choice arrangements” will have resonance in the UK, where the coalition government’s programme to launch free schools funded by public money was in part inspired by Sweden.

"Since the 1990s, Sweden has allowed privately run schools to compete with public schools for government funds. Critics on the left blame the voucher system for declining results, saying it has opened the door for schools more interested in making a profit than providing solid education. Conservatives say students have been given too much influence in the classroom, undermining the authority of teachers.

"The OECD report says: “Student performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) has declined dramatically, from near the OECD average in 2000 to significantly below average in 2012. No other country participating in Pisa saw a steeper decline than Sweden over that period.”

...

"The report blamed the system of school choice for the failure of almost half of children from immigrant backgrounds (48%) to make the grade in mathematics.

"Rather than recommending rolling back Sweden’s system of free choice and competition in schools, however, it suggests that the country “revise school choice arrangements to ensure quality with equity”.

"That would involve limiting the independence of free schools from local education authorities by bringing in new national guidelines to allow municipalities to “integrate independent schools in their planning, improvement and support strategies”.

"The report also recommends helping disadvantaged families make better school choices, so that their children, as well as those from middle-class families, apply to the country’s more popular, better performing schools.

"Finally, it suggests that municipalities restrict the ability of some parents to choose their children’s schools by introducing “controlled choice schemes that supplement parental choice to ensure a more diverse distribution of students in schools”.

2nd Covenant University – International Conference on African Development Issues – 2015

I'll speak tomorrow in Nigeria, about kidney exchange and the possibilities it might offer for mutual aid between Africa and the U.S. in battling kidney disease, at the 2nd Covenant University – International Conference on African Development Issues – 2015

"Covenant University, in her continued quest for significant local and global impact, established the International Conference of African Development Issues (ICADI) series. ICADI is aimed at creating a unique platform for making innovative contributions towards value enhancement and capacity development of the black man and indeed, the African continent from the Covenant University context.

"As a sequel to the success of the first International Conference on African Development Issues (ICADI) that was held in 2014, we are again motivated to organize the second edition of ICADI between 11 – 13 May 2015 at the African Leadership Development Centre, Covenant University, Ota. The University has secured the commitment of a Nobel Laureate, Prof. Alvin Roth as the Keynote Speaker. Al Roth is a Professor of Operations Research from Stanford University, USA, who has done a lot of groundbreaking research in the areas of game theory and market design with specific applications to healthcare. The conference has also enlisted other notable experts as guest speakers. The conference will feature keynote addresses, panel/roundtable discussions, research and industry track papers as well as presentations, workshops and exhibitions.

   Dates: May 11 – 13, 2015

     Theme: Biotechnology, ICT, Materials and Renewable Energy: Potential Catalyst for African Development

    Sub themes:
Biotechnology and sustainable development in Africa
ICT and developing the knowledge economy in Africa
Climate change and renewable energy solutions for African Development
Material science and engineering for African development
Policy frameworks for technology-oriented development paradigms in Africa
 
 Target Audience: Professionals and executives of agro-allied, pharmaceutical, health, chemical industries, ICT providers, engineering firms, research institutes, governmental agencies, policy makers, investors, researchers, academic institutions etc."

Harvard Magazine celebrates Sendhil Mullainathan

The Science of Scarcity

 “To put it bluntly,” says Mullainathan, “if I made you poor tomorrow, you’d probably start behaving in many of the same ways we associate with poor people.” And just like many poor people, he adds, you’d likely get stuck in the scarcity trap.

Kidneys in British Columbia: a recommendation for presumed consent, and against compensation for donors

Kidney Transplant Summit recommends presumed consent legislation to increase organ donation in BC.

"BURNABY, BC, May 6, 2015 /CNW/ - The Jury at the first-ever BC Kidney Transplant Consensus Summit hosted by The Kidney Foundation has recommended that British Columbia adopt presumed consent legislation, with the appropriate safeguards in place, to increase the number of kidney transplants in this province.

The Jury, chaired by the Hon. Wally Oppal QC, also considered but rejected the idea of offering financial incentives to organ donors. Living organ donors are currently reimbursed for expenses incurred in donating an organ, but not for the kidney itself. "As a society, we do not condone the sale of organs," said Oppal."


HT: Sangram Kadam

Everything for Sale? The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts, at Johns Hopkins, May 7

I'm in Baltimore for the next few days...

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School present
The 2015 Robert H. Levi Leadership Symposium
and Carey Symposium in Markets and Ethics

	Everything for Sale?The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts
	Thursday, May 7, 2015 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
	Reception to follow
	Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Alumni Auditorium 525 N. Wolfe Street Baltimore, MD 21205
	Welcome: Ruth Faden Andreas C. Dracopoulos, Director and Philip Franklin Wagley, Professor Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics Bernard T. Ferrari Professor and Dean Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Introduction: Mario Macis Assistant Professor of Economics and Management Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Panelists include: Professor James Childress Professor Michele Goodwin Professor Alvin Roth Professor Debra Satz Moderator: Jeffrey Kahn Robert Henry Levi and Ryda Hecht Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics

Data, big and small

Alex Peysakhovich and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz write in the NYT about  How Not to Drown in Numbers, about how you can't always interpret data in a dataset just by looking at the dataset in isolation...

"So what can big data do to help us make big decisions? One of us, Alex, is a data scientist at Facebook. The other, Seth, is a former data scientist at Google. There is a special sauce necessary to making big data work: surveys and the judgment of humans — two seemingly old-fashioned approaches that we will call small data."

Google buys Timeful from Yoav Shoham and Dan Ariely

Here's Timeful.  Here's Dan. Here's Yoav: This Stanford professor just sold his second startup to Google in less than 5 years.

Here's the Google announcement: Time is on your side—welcoming Timeful to Google
"Today we’re excited to announce that Timeful, Inc. is joining the Google family to help make getting things done in your life even easier. 

The Timeful team has built an impressive system that helps you organize your life by understanding your schedule, habits and needs. You can tell Timeful you want to exercise three times a week or that you need to call the bank by next Tuesday, and their system will make sure you get it done based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities. We’re excited about all the ways Timeful’s technology can be applied across products like Inbox, Calendar and beyond, so we can do more of the work for you and let you focus on being creative, having fun and spending time with the people you care about."

Ray Fisman to Boston University

Boston University celebrates their newest senior hire (but the sub-headline in the BU Today story makes you wonder what they think their other economists do:
Economist Raymond Fisman to Join BU Faculty--Known for connecting theory to the real world

"BU’s newest economics professor has garnered a lot of attention for parking tickets. Not tickets Raymond Fisman received himself, but those in his much-cited 2006 study showing that UN diplomats from countries with a reputation for corruption, as well as anti-American sentiment, get more parking tickets than diplomats from countries that are considered less corrupt, like Sweden."

Raymond Fisman will bring an eclectic approach as the first Slater Family Professor in Behavioral Economics. Photo by Leslye Smith

Kidney exchange in the NY Times Magazine

Kidney exchange and public relations sometimes go hand in hand, which isn't a bad thing at all, since the more people who know about kidney exchange, the more transplants will be possible. A modest 6-transplant non-directed donor chain in California has attracted a nice story in this week's NY Times Magazine: The Great American Kidney Swap by By Malia Wollan.

Here's some of what the NY Times article has to say:

"A law-abiding American in need of a kidney has two options. The first is to wait on the national list for an organ donor to die in (or near) a hospital. The second is to find a person willing to donate a kidney to you. More than half the time, such donor-and-recipient pairs are incompatible, because of differences in blood type or the presence, in the donor’s blood, of proteins that might trigger the recipient’s immune system to reject the new kidney. The genius of the computer algorithms driving the kidney chains is that they find the best medical matches — thus increasing the odds of a successful transplant — by decoupling donors from their intended recipients. In the United States, half a dozen of these software programs allow for a kind of barter market for kidneys. This summer, doctors will most likely complete the last two operations in a record-breaking 70-person chain that involved flying donated kidneys on commercial airlines to several hospitals across the country.
...
"Economists call an arrangement like this a matching market. “It is not fundamental to economic theory to assume people are selfish,” Alvin E. Roth, an economist who teaches at Stanford University, told me. Roth won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2012 for his work using game theory to design matching markets, which pair unmatched things in mutually beneficial ways — students with public schools and doctors with hospitals. In such markets, money does not decide who gets what. Instead, these transactions are more akin to elaborate courtships.

"The classic example of a matching market is the college-admissions process. Every year, tens of thousands of students apply to Harvard University. But just because a student wants a spot in the freshman class and can afford tuition does not mean he gets in. Harvard must also want him to attend. In the case of kidney exchange, this matchmaking happens at a microcellular level. White blood cells contain genetic markers, proteins that help our immune systems distinguish between our bodies and foreign invaders. The more closely a transplant recipient’s genetic markers match a donor’s, the more likely the body is to adopt that foreign kidney as its own rather than attacking it."
*********

The average chain length for nondirected donor chains in the U.S. has lately been around 5, The latest longest chain accomplished 34 transplants (so it involved 68 people, donors and recipients).It's possible that that the number of transplants in the chain in this story was limited by the particular, proprietary commercial software that was used. One of the interesting things about kidney exchange is that most of the software is provided for free by the researchers who develop it, and is described in the open scientific literature. The  software used by the UNOS kidney paired donation pilot program is designed by Tuomas Sandholm and his colleagues at CMU, and Itai Ashlagi (at MIT until next year, when he comes to Stanford) and his colleagues have software that is very widely used by kidney exchange networks and large transplant centers, and the latest version of this software was described in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

You can download kidney exchange software from Itai's web page: here I've copied his instructions:

Kidney exchange source code. Instructions for how to compile can be found here. An older version in c# can be found here (for both cycles and chains), which also generates patient-donor pairs as well as compatibility matrices. The software finds an allocation that maximizes the number of transplants using cycles and chains each of a different bounded length. CPLEX is needed to use.

Bay Area Behavioral & Experimental Economics Workshop today in Santa Cruz

Here's the program: 2015 Bay Area Behavioral and Experimental Economics Workshop (BABEEW5) Program  May 2nd 2015, UCSC LEEPS Lab, Baskin Plaza.

Interviews in the TSEconomist,

In their March 2015 issue, The TSEconomist, a magazine published by students at the Toulouse School of Economics, interviews Ken Arrow, me, and Josh Lerner, after asking each of us to pose for a picture with a copy of the magazine:

• Nobel Corner: Interview with Kenneth Arrow
• Interview with Alvin Roth
• Interview with Josh Lerner

EduAction conference in Israel

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, and me, yesterday.

I just returned from the EduAction conference in Israel, where I got to talk to the Jerusalem mayor, Nir Barkat about school choice, and to hear about the school choice program he implemented when he became mayor.

Matching dogs to animal shelters, by air and by land

Volunteer Pilots Fly Shelter Dogs to New Homes to Save Them From Euthanasia
"One of the biggest issues for animal shelters nation-wide is that some regions are overflowing with adoptable dogs while others never have enough. Wings Of Rescue, an extraordinary volunteer organization run by dedicated pilots, flies dogs from shelters overflowing with animals to those that can find them new homes. Often, the dogs they transport would have been euthanized hours later if it weren’t for these pilots.
The organization has saved over 12,000 dogs since 2009, when it was formed. Flights cost roughly $80 per dog, and you can donate to their cause on their website."

Rescue Waggin’ 
"Location is everything: Some cities have too many homeless dogs and puppies; others have waiting adopters.

"So every day, the PetSmart Charities® Rescue Waggin’ program picks up selected dogs and puppies from partner shelters in areas where there are more dogs and puppies than can be placed through adoption. Then we transport them to places where they get adopted, often within days.

"In fact, the Rescue Waggin' program has helped save the lives of more than 70,000 dogs and puppies since we started it in 2004."



HT: Nicole Immorlica and Christine Exley

The difficulties of deceased donation by the terminally ill

Two transplant surgeons, Joshua Mezrich and Joseph Scalea at the University of Wisconsin, write in The Atlantic about a terminally ill patient who wished to be an organ donor.

As They Lay Dying--Two doctors say it’s far too hard for terminal patients to donate their organs.

"Two major obstacles have prevented us from helping W.B. The first concerns his desire to donate a kidney while he is still alive. In his weakened state, will he tolerate the anesthesia and surgery? Or will they hasten his death? If he survives the surgery, will he ever leave the hospital?

"As doctors, we have sworn to do no harm. And yet, every Wednesday and Thursday morning, we remove kidneys from living donors. These patients are not getting any medical benefit from donating one of their kidneys—to the contrary, they are accepting a small risk of complications, including hypertension and a slightly increased likelihood that their remaining kidney will fail. But they do experience a very real, if intangible, benefit: the experience of saving someone’s life.

"In evaluating W.B.’s request, we had to weigh carefully not only the risk to him—which W.B. clearly understood—but also the risk that a donor death after surgery would pose to our hospital. Transplant-surgery programs in the United States are scrutinized by an alphabet soup of federal and nongovernmental entities. Centers with worse-than-expected transplant outcomes can be placed on probation or shut down. A single bad outcome involving a living donor can lead to an investigation. While there are good reasons for this monitoring, it can cause surgeons to avoid complicated cases and innovation. If we were to remove one of W.B.’s kidneys, and he died one, two, or even six months after surgery, his death would be a very public black mark on our program.
...
"From the earliest days of transplantation, surgeons subscribed to an informal ethical norm known as the “dead-donor rule,” holding that organ procurement should not cause a donor’s death. In practice, this meant waiting until patients were by all measures completely dead—no heartbeat, no blood pressure, no respiration—to remove any vital organs. Unfortunately, few organs were still transplantable by this point, and those that were transplanted tended to have poor outcomes by today’s standards.

As the field burgeoned, doctors could see the potential to save ever more lives—if only more organs could be found. In 1968, in an effort to address the shortage of transplantable organs (as well as the delivery of futile care to people in irreversible comas), an ad hoc committee at Harvard Medical School suggested that patients with no identifiable brain function could be designated as “brain-dead,” thereby making them candidates for organ donation. The definition the committee came up with informed the Uniform Determination of Death Act, a model state law drafted in 1980 and subsequently enacted by most states, which holds that brain-dead patients are legally dead. Under the new state laws, doctors could remove organs from patients whose hearts were still beating without violating the dead-donor rule.

Although the dead-donor rule is ostensibly a fine standard, it doesn’t address the situation of most people who are terminally ill. Nor do the laws regarding brain death. Today, terminally ill patients’ best—in many cases, only—chance of passing on their organs is via a wrenching process known as donation after circulatory death, or DCD, whereby a patient’s doctor withdraws all life support while an organ-recovery team stands by. For organs to be successfully transplanted this way, however, the donor typically needs to die within an hour or two of being taken off life support—otherwise, decreased blood flow leaves the organs unsuitable for transplantation. Even when DCD organ donors do die in the allotted time, we tend to recover fewer organs from them than from brain-dead donors, whose bodies aren’t subjected to this drawn-out process.

Over the course of a single week while we were writing this article, three potential DCD donors at our transplant center had life support removed with the intention of donating their vital organs, but failed to die quickly enough.
...
"When the term brain death was introduced half a century ago, it was meant to provide an objective legal definition for a group of patients whom we might otherwise describe as “unrecoverable.” Of course, we also recognize as “unrecoverable” many patients who do not meet the standard for brain death. Those who have suffered devastating strokes or heart attacks, or who have sustained major head trauma, may not be brain-dead even though they have brain injuries that render them unable to survive without life support.

"A more useful ethical standard could involve the idea of “imminent death.” Once a person with a terminal disease reaches a point when only extraordinary measures will delay death; when use (or continued use) of these measures is incompatible with what he considers a reasonable quality of life; and when he therefore decides to stop aggressive care, knowing that this will, in relatively short order, mean the end of his life, we might say that death is “imminent.” If medical guidelines could be revised to let people facing imminent death donate vital organs under general anesthesia, we could provide patients and families a middle ground—a way of avoiding futile medical care, while also honoring life by preventing the deaths of other critically ill people. Moreover, healthy people could incorporate this imminent-death standard into advance directives for their end-of-life care. They could determine the conditions under which they would want care withdrawn, and whether they were willing to have it withdrawn in an operating room, under anesthesia, with subsequent removal of their organs."
************

HT: Frank McCormick

Jerusalem Conference on Education and Economics, April 29

I'm on my way to Israel, to participate in a conference on Education and Economics.

The webpage, in Hebrew, is here: כנס ירושלים לחינוך וכלכלה, 29.4  (Jerusalem Conference on Education and Economics, April 29)

I will participate late in the day, in a conversation with the mayor of Jerusalem, followed by the President.

19:00: Nobel laureate in economics for 2012, Professor Alvin Roth , a conversation with the Mayor of Jerusalem, Nir Barkat , education and implementation of economic theories in the public sector.

19:30: Address by President Reuven (Ruby) Rivlin
************

I gather that this last session may be carried on Channel 2, although I expect that my conversation with the mayor will be conducted in English. (I also expect that it will focus on school choice.)
*****
Update: here's the coverage from the Jerusalem Post
Dovrat worries Education portfolio has become a booby prize

Sally Satel: more on compensating kidney donors

April 18 in The Pacific Standard: Sally Satel on The case for compensating kidney donors

"The current system is a qualified failure. For the past decade, transplant operations for all organs have hovered between 27,000 and 29,000 annually, and, in 2014, was the lowest it's been in 11 years.The European model of "presumed consent," wherein a person's organs are taken posthumously unless an individual has specifically forbidden their retrieval, is not a potent solution as less than one percent of deceased individuals are medically eligible to donate.

"Hence, there is a desperate organ shortage in the United States. The situation in other countries, especially poorer countries without good access to dialysis — a death sentence without immediate transplant — is even worse. As a result, the overseas black market is burgeoning. The World Health Organization estimates that 10 percent of all transplants are performed under shadowy, illicit conditions where the risks are high: Corrupt brokers deceive impoverished and illiterate donors about the nature of surgery, cheat them out of payment, and ignore their post-surgical needs. For the recipient, organ quality can be poor and post-operative management dicey. (The exception appears to be Iran, where organ sales are monitored by the government. There, potential donors exceed the number of needy patients.)
...
"Compensating organ donors is not a new idea. In 1983, Al Gore, who championed NOTA, explicitly suggested rewarding donors if altruistic volunteering did not keep up with demand. Moreover, NOTA's legislativehistory implies that the law's felony provision against "valuable consideration" in exchange for an organ was intended to prohibit brokered or direct cash sales between buyer and seller. It is silent regarding a system of in-kind, third-party compensation.

Here is a plan for donor benefits: A governmental entity, or a designated charity, would offer in-kind rewards, like a contribution to the donor's retirement fund, an income tax credit, or a tuition voucher worth roughly $50,000 in value. (This is the amount typically proposed by advocates of incentives.) To enhance deceased donation, a funeral benefit could be offered.

With a third party providing the reward, all recipients, not just the financially secure, will benefit. An imposed waiting period of at least six months would help limit impulsive live donation and, most important, any subsequent remorse. Prospective donors would be carefully screened for physical and emotional health, as is done for all donors currently. Their kidneys could be distributed, according to exiting allocation policies now in place for cadaver organs.

Donors would be guaranteed follow-up medical care for any complications, which is not ensured now. And the cost of the benefits could be underwritten by the enormous savings from dialysis.

Will rewarded donation attract only low-income prospective donors? Perhaps. One option is to require a minimum income for donors, but that strategy prevents all interested parties from participating. Better to start with the assumption that low-income people are capable of making decisions in their own interest. In the end, regardless of who ends up donating, a sound plan ensuring that donors are thoroughly informed, their health protected, and their sacrifice amply rewarded is an ethical one.

How to achieve this? We should start with pilot projects. The Department of Health and Human Services probably could initiate pilot trials, if motivated. The Center for Medicare and Medicaid Innovation has impressively broad authority. In theory, the Center could issue NOTA waivers to academic medical centers interested in administering a pilot program wherein living donors would be rewarded with five years of Medicare coverage.

States should also get involved. The late Pennsylvania Governor Robert P. Casey, who had received a heart and liver transplant a year earlier, signed a 1994 law that would enable a bereaved family of an organ donor to get a burial benefit of up to $3,000 paid by the state directly to the funeral home. State health officials ended up with cold feet, fearing that the law flouted NOTA, but some bold state should proceed with a funeral benefit and force the Department of Justice to action, spurring a vital national debate in the process.

Congressional action is another approach. Lawmakers could amend NOTA to permit pilot trials of incentives by clarifying the intent of the law as a restraint on cash exchange between buyer and seller with or without a broker. The need for a new approach to expanding the supply of donors should resonate with lawmakers on several levels. The first is public health (needless deaths), the second is fiscal (the enormous cost to Medicare — roughly seven percent of its budget is spent on dialysis and its complications), the third is human rights (the global black market); and the fourth is race (minorities are disproportionately disadvantaged by the organ shortage as they are less likely to be referred for transplant)."

Multi-unit allocation workshop at Penn, Apr 26, 2015

WORKSHOP ON MULTIUNIT ALLOCATION , April 26

Time	Speaker/Presentation
9:30 - 10:30 am	Jacob Leshno (Columbia) A Supply and Demand Framework for Two-Sided Matching Markets
10:45 - 11:45 am	Bumin Yenmez (CMU Econ) Matching with Externalities
11:45 - 12:45 pm	Break
12:45 - 1:45 pm	Michael Richter (Yeshiva) Continuum Mechanism Design with Budget Constraints
2:00 - 3:00 pm	Gabriel Y. Weintraub (Columbia) Repeated Auctions with Budgets in Ad Exchanges: Approximations and Designs
3:15 - 4:15 pm	Haoxiang Zhu (MIT) Welfare and Optimal Trading Frequency in Dynamic Double Auctions
4:30 - 5:30 pm	Tadashi Hashimoto (Yeshiva) Equilibrium Selection and Inefficiency in Internet Advertising Auctions

Organizer: Mariann Ollar

Sponsored by the UPenn Market Design Working Group

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

A quick internet search for the marriage-market illustration yields this:

Caption	The Marriage Market in 1950. Anti-suffragette postcard.
Artist	English School (20th Century)
Artwork medium	colour lithograph
Copyright notice	© Look and Learn / Elgar Collection

Harvard celebrates Carmen Wang

One of the most interesting young market designers at Harvard these days is  Carmen Wang, a Ph.D. student in the Business Economics program. Here's an article about her work on blood donation registries, and her hope to combine market design with behavioral economics: The Real Price of Blood--How one GSAS student uses the tools of behavioral economics to increase blood donations

It begins this way:
"Love isn’t the only thing money can’t buy—blood is, too. And yet, though no money is exchanged, blood can find ways of getting to the people who need it, though not often in ways where demand and supply are aligned. In the days following the Boston Marathon bombing, people rushed to give blood in support of the victims, eager to donate one of the human body’s most precious resources to others, free of charge.

"While this altruistic impulse is certainly commendable, according to Carmen Wang, it is sometimes misguided. “In that instance, the American Red Cross had to issue an announcement thanking would-be donors and informing them that they already had an adequate supply of blood.” But at other times, for example when the flu or cold virus afflicts many regular donors, blood supply dips, and blood banks have trouble finding people willing to give."

Contagion, for good and ill

Frank Bruni had a recent NY Times column that reminded me of the chain of high school suicides:
"Between May 2009 and January 2010, five Palo Alto teenagers ended their lives by stepping in front of trains. And since October of last year, another three Palo Alto teenagers have killed themselves that way, prompting longer hours by more sentries along the tracks. The Palo Alto Weekly refers to the deaths as a “suicide contagion.”

Sometimes something similar happens with good acts, and I was reminded of that by this recent story from Israel (about a different kind of chain of kidney donations than I usually write about):

Chain Reaction of Good Will
"Avraham Shapira donated a kidney to a stranger and set off a series of altruistic gestures. A few months later his cousin, Yehuda Rabinovich, was inspired by Shapira and also donated a kidney to a stranger. From there the movement spread around the Shomron region. So far six people have donated kidneys to complete strangers."

American Society of Transplantation conference on Resolving the Organ Shortage

Here's an early announcement of a conference scheduled for February 2016, organized by the American Society of Transplantation, which reflects some of the intense discussion going on in the transplant community about how to alleviate the shortage of transplantable organs.

(As background, recall these three recent posts:

Friday, April 3, 2015

In defense of pilot studies for organ donor incentives

There's no consensus on incentives for kidney donation, but maybe there is on removing disincentives

Two major transplantation societies cautiously consider incentives for organ donation

The latest, longest kidney exchange chain, involving 68 people, 34 transplants

The National Kidney Registry has completed a new, long non-simultaneous nondirected donor chain, maybe the longest to date. Here are some stories, from the local press at some of the hospitals involved.

Kidney exchange in which Allegheny General Hospital participates enables 34 transplants
 "A Somerset County man and 33 other renal disease patients received new kidneys this year in an unprecedented national chain of organ transplants, Allegheny General Hospital announced Wednesday.
The North Side hospital is among 26 domestic transplant centers that participated in the exchange, run through March by the nonprofit National Kidney Registry. It is the largest multi-center paired kidney exchange so far in the United States, the registry said."

The final link: UW Hospital completes longest chain of kidney donations

"A Wisconsin woman received the final kidney transplant at the University of Wisconsin Hospital in March, completing the longest chain of kidney donations.

"UW Hospital is a member of the National Kidney Registry, an organization that works to match kidney donors with recipients for transplants. The registry organized the completed kidney chain, which started and ended at UW Hospital.
...
"Of the 68 people in the kidney chain, 34 donors and 34 recipients, five were connected through UW Hospital, Miller said."

D.C., Md., Va. hospitals participate in largest-ever multi-hospital kidney transplant chain
"With 34 donors and 34 recipients, Chain 357, nicknamed a “chain of love,” is the country's largest-ever multi-hospital kidney transplant chain. The National Kidney Registry worked with 26 hospitals across the country to make sure every link of the chain connected.
"Since Jan. 6, the chain has bounced across the country, including stops at MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute in Washington, D.C.; Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Md.; University of Virginia Hospital in Charlottesville, Va.; and two bouts at the University of Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, Md." 

Expanding non-directed kidney donation: the Renewal model

An article in the Forward talks about attempts to expand the successful organ donation program of Renewal beyond the Jewish community:
Can an Orthodox Charity Help Save Lives in This Man's Church?

"Although 90% of Renewal’s donors are ultra-Orthodox, about half their recipients are people like Sarna, who come from the broader Jewish community.

"The average wait time for a kidney through Renewal is six to nine months.

"Because many ultra-Orthodox rabbis believe that organ donation from dead bodies is against Jewish law, Renewal focuses solely on live donors. That puts Renewal’s donors in an extremely rare group of several hundred Americans who, each year, donate their kidney altruistically to a stranger.
...
"Researchers are studying Renewal’s model to see whether it can be replicated in other race- and faith-based communities. Meanwhile, one African-American transplant surgeon is setting up a group modeled on Renewal in a prominent Harlem church.

"Anthony Watkins, an assistant professor of surgery at Weill Cornell Medical College, has witnessed Renewal’s work firsthand, ever since he began his transplant fellowship six years ago. “I’ve always thought that what Renewal does is spectacular and fantastic and [that] maybe this could be duplicated in other communities,” he said.

"Watkins thinks that by using Renewal’s model — appealing to African Americans to help fellow African Americans — he can persuade people to donate in greater numbers. “I think once you establish a good rapport and knowledge and education… you can get altruistic donors to step forward,” Watkins said. But how many people are willing to donate a live organ to a stranger?
...
"Renewal facilitates an average of about 50 kidney transplants a year. About three-quarters of those transplants are ultra-Orthodox donors giving to a Jewish stranger.

"Ultra-Orthodox Jews account for just 0.2% of America’s population. Yet last year, by the Forward’s estimates, they accounted for up to 17% of the people who donated a kidney to strangers.

"Rees realized that if Renewal’s model of communally focused organ donation could be extrapolated to the general population, it could create tens of thousands of additional kidney donors. The waiting list could be reduced to zero. “That’s what Renewal has achieved,” Rees said, “and that is nothing short of amazing.”

"Rees contacted Duke University to see if researchers there could investigate whether Renewal’s model could be replicated in Christian communities.

"Last year, two Duke professors, David Toole and Kim Krawiec, put together an interdisciplinary team of faculty and students, including lawyers, physicians, sociologists and theologians, to examine new methods of increasing living kidney donation.
...
"Renewal leads donors and recipients through every stage of the transplant process. It is particularly important for kidney donors, who receive very little financial support from insurance companies and the state. Renewal covers lost wages, transportation and any necessary hotel costs. It also offers domestic support such as house cleaning, laundry services and catering. Reiner said that the average cost of a transplant, including the group’s administrative overhead, is about $20,000.
...
"The United Network for Organ Sharing, which tracks donations nationally, counts a kidney donation as “altruistic” only if the donor does not specify to whom the kidney is given. Last year it tracked 180 such altruistic donations.

"Because Renewal’s donors choose the recipient of their kidney — even though they have no personal relationship with them — UNOS categorizes them in a larger pool of 1,273 living donors who directed their kidney to a “non-relative.”

"Based on this method, Renewal’s donors account for about 2% or 3% of living donations to non-family members.

"But Duke University’s Toole says that it is unfair to compare Renewal’s donors to most other donors in this larger pool because most of those donors know the recipient of their kidney. Renewal’s donors give to strangers. “What makes the model so interesting,” Toole said, is that “it’s some in-between space” between directed donations and altruistic donations."
**************

See my earlier post on Renewal here.

Dynamic Games: 26th Jerusalem Summer School in Economic Theory (deadline April 27)

Theory and experiments in Jerusalem this summer...

26th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory

Dynamic Games

Event date: Jun 24 - Jul 3, 2015

Organizers:

Eric Maskin, Director (Harvard University)
Elchanan Ben-Porath, Codirector (The Hebrew University)
Drew Fudenberg (Harvard University)



In many economic, social, and political settings, participants interact strategically not just once but over time.


When raising its import tariffs today, for example, a country will try to anticipate the reactions of its trading partners tomorrow. And an oligopolistic firm can learn from its rivals’ past pricing behavior so as to gauge what prices they are likely to set now.


The Summer School will emphasize theoretical aspects of dynamic games, but will also include work on experiments.


List of speakers:
Robert Aumann (The Hebrew University)
Martin Cripps (University College London)
Guillaume Fréchette (New York University)
Drew Fudenberg (Harvard University)
Sergiu Hart (The Hebrew University)
Johannes Hörner (Yale University)
Navin Kartik (Columbia University)
George Mailath (University of Pennsylvania)
Eric Maskin (Harvard University)
Abraham Neyman (The Hebrew University)
Larry Samuelson (Yale University)
Alistair Wilson (University of Pittsburgh)

• Application Form

Deadline for applications: April 27

The Stable Marriage Problem and School Choice, at the American Mathematical Society--column by David Austin

The American Mathematical Society has a column by David Austin on The Stable Marriage Problem and School Choice 

He writes:
"This column will present the game-theoretic results contained in the original Gale-Shapley paper along with Roth's subsequent analysis. Pathak calls the deferred acceptance algorithm "one of the great ideas in economics," and Roth and Shapley were awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for this work...

He gives a straightforward mathematical treatment of some of the main theoretical results, in context:

"Using ideas described in this column, economists Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, and Alvin Roth designed a clearinghouse for matching students with high schools, which was first implemented in 2004. This new computerized algorithm places all but about 3000 students each year and results in more students receiving offers from their first-choice schools. As a result, students now submit lists that reflect their true preferences, which provides school officials with public input into the determination of which schools to close or reform. For their part, schools have found that there is no longer an advantage to underrepresenting their capacity.

The key to this new algorithm is the notion of stability, first introduced in a 1962 paper by Gale and Shapley. We say that a matching of students to schools is stable if there is not a student and a school who would prefer to be matched with each other more than their current matches. Gale and Shapley introduced an algorithm, sometimes called deferred acceptance, which is guaranteed to produced a stable matching. Later, Roth showed that when the deferred acceptance algorithm is applied, a student can not gain admittance into a more preferred school by strategically misrepresenting his or her preferences."

- See more at: http://www.ams.org/samplings/feature-column/fc-2015-03#sthash.LoiUEphE.dpuf

Kidney exchange in Switzerland

Here's a paper reviewing kidney exchange around the world, from an Australian perspective (Paolo Ferrari has been one of the Australian pioneers), and advocating for a national kidney exchange program in Switzerland...

Kidney paired donation: a plea for a Swiss National Programme

Karine Hadayaa,b, Thomas Fehrc, Barbara Rüsic, Sylvie Ferrari-Lacrazd, Jean Villardd, Paolo Ferrarie,f

a Service of Nephrology. Geneva University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland
b Service of Transplantation, Geneva University Hospital, Geneva, Switzerland
c Service of Nephrology and Histocompatibility laboratory, Zurich University Hospital, Switzerland
d Transplant Immunology Unit and National Reference Laboratory for Histocompatibility (LNRH), Division of Immunology, Allergy and Laboratory Medicine, Geneva, Switzerland
e Department of Nephrology, Prince of Wales Hospital and Clincal School, University of New South Wales, Randwick, Sydney, Australia
f Organ and Tissue Authority, Australia

Summary

Growing incidence of end-stage renal disease, shortage of kidneys from deceased donors and a better outcome for recipients of kidneys from living donor have led many centres worldwide to favour living donor kidney transplantation programmes. Although criteria for living donation have greatly evolved in recent years with acceptance of related and unrelated donors, an immunological incompatibility, either due to ABO incompatibility and/or to positive cross-match, between a living donor and the intended recipient, could impede up to 40% of such procedures. To avoid refusal of willing and healthy living donors, a number of strategies have emerged to overcome immunological incompatibilities. Kidney paired donation is the safest way for such patients to undergo kidney transplantation. Implemented with success in many countries either as national or multiple regional independent programmes, it could include simple exchanges between any number of incompatible pairs, incorporate compatible pairs and non-directed donors (NDDs) to start a chain of compatible transplantations, lead to acceptance of ABO-incompatible matching, and integrate desensitising protocols. Incorporating all variations of kidney paired donation, the Australian programme has been able to facilitate kidney transplantation in 49% of registered incompatible pairs. This review is a plea for implementing a national kidney paired donation programme in Switzerland.

Swiss Med Wkly. 2015;145:w14083

Are firearms becoming a protected transaction on college campuses?

Inside Higher Ed has the story, on the clash when a transaction that some regard as repugnant is regarded as protected by others:  Momentum for Campus Carry

"At least 11 states are considering whether to allow concealed weapons on college campuses this year, the latest chapter in a now seemingly annual legislative debate between gun control advocates and gun rights supporters.

"Bills have been introduced, at least once, in almost half of the 50 states in the past few years. Despite slow success thus far -- just seven states have adopted versions of campus carry laws -- gun rights advocates have their eyes on two very large prizes this year: Florida and Texas.

"Right now, the odds are starting to stack up in their favor. The Texas bill has passed the Senate and is on its way to House. The version in Florida has passed through two Senate committees and is headed to the Judiciary Committee.
...
"Yet for all its familiarity, the idea of guns on campus is relatively novel. Campus carry was largely a nonissue a decade ago, when the University of Utah went to court to defend its autonomy and the related right to stay gun-free. A few years later, Oregon, Mississippi and Wisconsin began explicitly allowing guns on campus.

"In all, seven states have laws that allow concealed guns on campus, though the details vary on who can carry where. Twenty states still ban carrying a concealed weapon on a college campus, and 23 states leave the decision up to individual colleges."