What do policy makers want from a market design? And what would be the consequences of giving it to them? Clayton Featherstone on rank efficiency.

A surprising variety of allocation mechanisms, such as those used for school choice, ask participants to rank-order the alternatives; i.e. to indicate their first choice, second, third, and so forth. Not surprisingly, one thing that policy makers want to know about any proposed mechanism is how many people will receive their first choice, second, third, and so on.

Clayton Featherstone is a market designer who already has an unusual amount of experience in designing and implementing choice mechanisms. (If you recently got an assignment from Teach for America, or were assigned to a country for your global immersion requirement at HBS, you've benefited from his work.) His job market paper is an investigation of the properties of "rank efficient" mechanisms, which are designed to produce outcomes whose distribution of ranks can't be stochastically dominated:
Rank Efficiency: Investigating a Widespread Ordinal Welfare Criterion 

 Here's the Abstract: "Many institutions that allocate scarce goods based on rank-order preferences gauge the success of their assignments by looking at rank distributions, that is, at how many participants get their first choice, how many get their second choice, and so on. For example, San Francisco Unified School District, Teach for America, and Harvard Business School all evaluate assignments in this way. Preferences over rank distributions capture the practical (but non-Paretian) intuition that hurting one agent to help ten might be desirable. Motivated by this, call an assignment rank efficient if its rank distribution cannot feasibly be stochastically dominated. Rank efficient mechanisms are simple linear programs that can be solved either by a computer or through a sequential improvement process where at each step, the policy-maker executes a potentially non-Pareto-improving trade cycle. Both methods are used in the field. Preference data from Featherstone and Roth (2011)'s study of a strategy-proof match shows that if agents were to truthfully reveal their preferences, a rank efficient mechanism could significantly outperform alternatives like random serial dictatorship and the probabilistic serial mechanism. Rank efficiency also dovetails nicely with previous literature: it is a refinement of ordinal efficiency (and hence of ex post efficiency). Although rank efficiency is theoretically incompatible with strategy-proofness, rank efficient mechanisms can admit a truth-telling equilibrium in low information environments. Finally, a competitive equilibrium mechanism like that of Hylland and Zeckhauser (1979) generates a straightforward generalization of rank efficiency and sheds light on how rank efficiency interfaces with fairness considerations."

Clayton’s paper also solves an empirical puzzle about those matching mechanisms that we see “in the wild”. The theory literature has paid a good deal of attention to ordinally efficient mechanisms, as first described by Bogomolnaia and Moulin, who showed that ordinal efficiency can be obtained through a class of “simultaneous eating” mechanisms. But, despite the appeal of ordinal efficiency, no one has ever reported that such mechanisms have been observed in use. Clayton shows that a class of linear programming mechanisms  and an equivalent class of incremental improvement mechanisms that we do observe in practice produce rank efficient outcomes. So, he shows, there are ordinally efficient mechanisms in use; just not those that were previously known to produce ordinally efficient outcomes before he showed that they produced rank efficient outcomes and that rank efficiency implies ordinal efficiency.

Clayton is an unusually experienced market designer whose field experience motivates novel theoretical insights. He's also a talented experimenter who studies market design issues in the lab. He's a Stanford Ph.D. who is finishing up a two-year postdoc with me at Harvard. His other papers are on his Stanford job market page; you could hire him this year.

Choosing schools (in NYC and SF)

I've written elswhere about the school choice process for public schools in San Francisco and for high schools in New York City. But, regardless of whether the process is a good one or not, the problem facing parents who have to decide how much they like each school can be a tough one, especially if there are a lot of schools.

Two articles help you feel the pain:

New Plan on School Selection, but Still Discontent discusses San Francisco, and
It’s a nightmare to apply for high schools in city discusses New York.

Some more background information here.

HT: Parag Pathak

Strategy-proofness and strategy sets: residency fraud in school choice

When we speak of strategy-proofness in the context of school choice, we are most often speaking about whether it is safe for parents to reveal their true preferences when asked to submit a rank ordering of possible school assignments. Of course, parents have other private information as well, and they may have incentives to misprepresent that also.

I'm reminded of this by the fact that the San Francisco Unified School District has recently sent a letter to the address of record to each student regarding an Amnesty Period for Residency Fraud.
(It includes the line "This letter is directed to families that have committed residency fraud. Parents/Guardians who have never submitted false residency information to the District may disregard this letter.")

Peter Lorentzen interviews me about market design (podcast)

 Peter Lorentzen interviews me about market design, and my book Who Gets What and Why. (We have an interesting conversation on market design and my career, not closely related to the book...)

"In our interview, we range far beyond the examples from the book to discuss the implications of his work for the design of tech’s market-making “platform” businesses like Airbnb, Amazon, Lyft, or Uber, the challenges he faces when countries or people view some kinds of transactions as “repugnant” or morally unacceptable, and the reasons why San Francisco’s school district (unlike Boston’s or New York’s) chose not to implement the un-gameable school choice plan his team devised for them.

"Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics."

;

Market design experiments today in Philadelphia

Jan 03, 2014 10:15 am, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307 
Economic Science Association

Market Design Experiments (C9)

Presiding: JACOB GOEREE (University of Zurich)

From Boston to Chinese Parallel to Deferred Acceptance: Theory and Experiments on a Family of School Choice Mechanisms

YAN CHEN (University of Michigan)

ONUR KESTEN (Carnegie Mellon University)

[View Abstract]

Opt-In versus Mandated Choice for Deceased Organ Donation: An Experimental Study of Actual Organ Donation Decisions

ALVIN E. Roth (Stanford University)

JUDD KESSLER (University of Pennsylvania)

[View Abstract]

Ascending Prices and Package Bidding: Further Experimental Analysis

JOHN H. KAGEL (Ohio State University)

YUANCHUAN LIEN (Hong Kong University of Science & Technology)

PAUL MILGROM (Stanford University)

[View Abstract] [Download Preview]

Spectrum Auction Design: Simple Auctions for Complex Sales

MARTIN BICHLER (Technical University Munich)

JACOB K. GOEREE (University of Zurich)

STEFAN MAYER (Technical University Munich)

PASHA SHABALIN (Technical University Munich)

[View Abstract] [Download Preview]

Discussants:

SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS (University of Chicago)

ERIC GLEN WEYL (University of Chicago)

CARY DECK (University of Arkansas)

TOM WILKENING (University of Melbourne)

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

Later in the day there will be another experimental session sponsored by the ESA, and another tomorrow...:

Jan 03, 2014 2:30 pm, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307
Economic Science Association
Experiments in Economic Development
Presiding: PAULINE GROSJEAN (University of New South Wales)

Institutional Quality, Culture, and Norms of Cooperation: Evidence from a Behavioral Field Experiment
PAULINE GROSJEAN (University of New South Wales)
ALESSANDRA CASSAR (University of San Francisco)
GIOVANNA D'ADDA (University of Birmingham)

Trust and Social Collateral: Empirical Evidence
TANYA S. ROSENBLAT (Iowa State University)
DEAN KARLAN (Yale University)
MARKUS M. MOBIUS (Iowa State University, NBER and Microsoft Research)
ADAM SZEIDL (Central European University)

Health Providers and Patients in Kenya: An Evaluation of Motivations, Interactions and Reports on Sub-Par Behaviors
DANILA SERRA (Southern Methodist University)
ISAAC MBITI (Southern Methodist University)
 ********

Jan 04, 2014 8:00 am, Philadelphia Marriott, Meeting Room 307
Economic Science Association
Identifying Time Preferences from Lab and Field Data
Presiding: CHARLES SPRENGER (Stanford University)

A Perspective on Measuring Discounting and Present Bias
JAMES ANDREONI (University of California-San Diego)

Recent Developments in the Measurement of Time Preferences
GLENN W. HARRISON (Georgia State University)

Identifying Self Control in Field Data
SENDHIL MULLANAITHAN (Harvard University)
SUPREET KAUR (Columbia University)
MICHAEL KREMER (Harvard University)

Deferred rejection: longer college admission wait lists

College waiting lists are a bit of a misnomer--they aren't ordered lists, they are more like waiting pools from which candidates can be drawn if the yield from regular admissions falls short.

The WSJ has the story:
College Wait Lists Are Ballooning as Schools Struggle to Predict Enrollment
The chance of getting off the wait list has plummeted at many schools as the pool has expanded

"As hundreds of thousands of high-school seniors face a May 1 deadline to put down deposits at their college of choice, many still face uncertainty over where they will end up. Their futures are clouded by the schools’ use of wait lists to make sure they have the right number, and type, of students come fall.

"The University of Virginia increased the number of applicants invited onto wait lists by 68% between 2015 and 2017. At Lehigh University, that figure rose by 54%. And at Ohio State University, it more than tripled.
...
"[Carnegie Mellon University], with a target of 1,550 freshmen, offered wait-list spots to just over 5,000 applicants this year.

"“You can take stock and ‘fix’ or refine the class by gender, income, geography, major or other variables,” said Jon Reider, director of college counseling at San Francisco University High School. “A large waiting list gives you greater flexibility in filling these gaps.”

"This year, applications to Carnegie Mellon rose 19%. With more students accepting its offers of admission, it couldn’t risk over-enrolling. The school admitted 500 fewer students and expects to go to some of its wait lists to make sure each undergraduate program meets enrollment goals, and that there is a good mix of students, including enough aspiring English majors or kids from South Dakota. The school can also take into account the financial situations of wait-listed candidates."

Airbnb consider market design changes to reduce discrimination

The NY Times has the story:
Airbnb Adopts Rules in Effort to Fight Discrimination by Its Hosts

"Airbnb, based in San Francisco, said that it would institute a new nondiscrimination policy that goes beyond what is outlined in several anti-discrimination laws and that it would ask all users to agree to a “community commitment” starting on Nov. 1. The commitment asks people to work with others who use the service, “regardless of race, religion, national origin, disability, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation or age.”

In addition, the company plans to experiment with reducing the prominence of user photos, which have helped signal race and gender. Airbnb said it would also accelerate the use of instant bookings, which lets renters book places immediately without host approval."
**********

There is a strong market design subtext to this story: Peter Coles, Airbnb's (new) chief economist, used to work at Harvard Business School, where some of his former colleagues conducted an experiment that helped focus on the possible discrimination problem.
Here's the current version of that paper:

Racial Discrimination in the Sharing Economy:Evidence from a Field Experiment
 Benjamin Edelman, Michael Luca, and Dan Svirsky
 September 4, 2016

 Abstract
Online marketplaces increasingly choose to reduce the anonymity of buyers and sellers in order to facilitate trust. We demonstrate that this common market design choice results in an important unintended consequence: racial discrimination. In a field experiment on Airbnb, we find that requests from guests with distinctively African-American names are roughly 16% less likely to be accepted than identical guests with distinctively White names. The difference persists whether the host is African-American or White, male or female. The difference also persists whether the host shares the property with the guest or not, and whether the property is cheap or expensive. We validate our findings through observational data on hosts’ recent experiences with African-American guests, finding host behavior consistent with some, though not all, hosts discriminating. Finally, we find that discrimination is costly for hosts who indulge in it: hosts who reject  guests are able to find a replacement guest only 35% of the time. On the whole, our analysis suggests a need for caution: while information can facilitate transactions, it also facilitates discrimination.

SITE 2023 Conference Call For Papers

 There are 18 sessions at Stanford SITE this summer, something for everyone. (You can submit papers at the link.)  Regular readers of this blog may be particularly interested in Session 3: Market Design; Session 4: Dynamic Games, Contracts, and Markets; Session 5: Psychology and Economics; Session 6: Experimental Economics, all described below.

SITE 2023 Conference Call For Papers

Session 1: Empirical Implementation of Theoretical Models of Strategic Interaction and Dynamic Behavior

Wednesday, July 12, 2023, 9:00am - Friday, July 14, 2023, 5:00pm

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The unifying theme of the papers for this session is a theoretical model of an economic interaction and an empirical implementation of this theoretical model using actual data.  This year will have a more concentrated focus on topics where the theoretical economic model must also respect both technology and legal institutions governing the economic environment as well as the optimizing behavior and strategic behavior of economic agents. For example, in the case of wholesale electricity markets with significant amounts intermittent renewables and storage devices that can either inject or withdraw electricity, simplified economic models that do not account for the physics of power flows, non-convexities dispatchable generation units operate (such as start-up costs, limited range of output levels, and limited rates of change in their output levels), and how forward financial markets can limit the impact of these non-convexities and intermittency risks are increasingly ill-suited for policy analysis or the assessment of market design changes. Recent experience with the simplified markets for both natural gas and electricity in Australia, Europe and the United States provide ample real-world evidence of the need for economic models that incorporate these factors for effective policy analysis and market design.  There is an increasing number of engineers that recognize strategic behavior by market participants that understand the physics of power systems and natural gas systems operation can create economically and environmentally harmful market outcomes.

The goal of this session is to encourage cross-field interaction between the increasing number of engineers with some knowledge of economic models of strategic behavior and economists that understand how to use data to estimate theory-based econometric models of strategic behavior in complex economic environments but do not understand how to incorporate into the empirical models the physical constraints and legal framework that are having a first-order impact on market participant behavior and market outcomes. There are many other examples where these same issues arise in modeling strategic behavior such as air travel and freight transportation where this same interaction between engineers and economist would be particularly fruitful.  The session welcomes these kinds of papers from both economists and engineers as well.

ORGANIZED BY: Christoph Graf, New York University, Frank Wolak, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION April 15, 2023

Session 2: International Macroeconomics and Finance

Monday, July 31, 2023, 9:00am - Tuesday, August 1, 2023, 5:00pm

This session is on international macroeconomics and finance, focusing on global capital allocations, the role of the dollar, the emergence of China, and tax havens. Both empirics and theory.

ORGANIZED BY: Antonio Coppola, Stanford University  Matteo Maggiori, Stanford University  Jesse Schreger, Columbia University  Chenzi Xu, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 1, 2023

Session 3: Market Design

August 3, 2023, 9:00am - Friday, August 4, 2023, 5:00pm

Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This session seeks to bring together researchers in economics, computer science, and operations research working on market design.  We’re aiming for a roughly even split between theory papers and empirical and experimental papers.  In addition to faculty members, we also invite graduate students on the job market to submit their paper for shorter graduate student talks.

ORGANIZED BY: Mohammad Akbarpour, Stanford University  Piotr Dworczak, Northwestern University  Ravi Jagadeesan, Stanford University  Shengwu Li, Harvard University  Ellen Muir, Harvard University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 1, 2023

Session 4: Dynamic Games, Contracts, and Markets

Monday, August 7, 2023, 9:00am - Wednesday, August 9, 2023, 5:00pm

This session is to bring together microeconomic theorists working on dynamic games and contracts with more applied theorists working in macro, finance, organizational economics, and other fields. There are two aims. First, this is a venue to discuss the latest questions and techniques facing researchers working in dynamic games and contracts. Second, to foster interdisciplinary discussion between scholars working on parallel topics in different disciplines and help raise awareness among theorists of the open questions in other fields.

ORGANIZED BY: Arjada Bardhi, Duke University  Simon Board, University of California Los Angeles  Erik Madsen, New York University  Joao Ramos, University of Southern California  Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University  Takuo Sugaya, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION  April 15, 2023

Session 5: Psychology and Economics

Tuesday, August 8, 2023, 9:00am - Wednesday, August 9, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, 366 Galvez Street, Stanford

This session brings together researchers working on issues at the intersection of psychology and economics. The segment will focus on evidence of and explanations for non-standard choice patterns, as well as the positive and normative implications of those patterns in a wide range of economic decision-making contexts, such as lifecycle consumption and savings, workplace productivity, health, and prosocial behavior. The presentations will frequently build upon insights from other disciplines, including psychology and sociology. Theoretical, empirical, and experimental studies will be included. 

ORGANIZED BY: B. Douglas Bernheim, Stanford University  John Beshears, Harvard University  Vincent Crawford, University of Oxford & University of California San Diego  David Laibson, Harvard University  Ulrike Malmendier, University of California Berkeley

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION  May 8, 2023

Session 6: Experimental Economics

Thursday, August 10, 2023, 9:00am - Friday, August 11, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, 366 Galvez Street, S

This session will be dedicated to advances in experimental economics combining laboratory and field-experimental methodologies with theoretical and psychological insights on decision-making, strategic interaction and policy. We are inviting papers in lab experiments, field experiments and their combination that test theory, demonstrate the importance of psychological phenomena, and explore social and policy issues. In addition to senior faculty members, invited presenters will include junior faculty as well as graduate students.

ORGANIZED BY:  Christine Exley, Harvard University  Kirby Nielsen, California Institute of Technology  Muriel Niederle, Stanford University  Alvin Roth, Stanford University  Lise Vesterlund, University of Pittsburgh

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 8, 2023

Session 7: Political Economic Theory

Thursday, August 10, 2023, 9:00am - Friday, August 11, 2023, 5:00am

LOCATION: Stanford Graduate School of Business, M104,

This session will bring together researchers from political science and economics who apply economic theory to the study of politics. This includes work in the areas of voting theory, political bargaining, policy-making and implementation, lobbying and regulation, and the media and information environment in which politics takes place. The session will encourage productive dialogue between researchers in economic theory that have developed ideas and tools relevant to the study of politics, and those in political science who study questions and topics that can be addressed by economic theory.

ORGANIZED BY: Nina Bobkova, Rice University  Steven Callander, Stanford University Hülya Eraslan, Rice University  Dana Foarta, Stanford University  Federica Izzo, University of California San Diego

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 10, 2023

Session 8: Politically Feasible Environmental and Energy Policy

Monday, August 14, 2023, 9:00am - Tuesday, August 15, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: Landau Economics Building, 

This session will feature empirical papers evaluating environmental and energy (E&E) policy decisions by both governments and firms. The session will focus on papers that deliver useful and politically feasible insights on how to make E&E policy more efficient and equitable. We welcome papers studying topics such as the following:

Quantitative evaluations of past or potential future E&E policy changes, 

How to improve the public appeal of economically efficient E&E policies,

Evaluations of voluntary corporate actions such as net-zero commitments and ESG investing screens, and

Empirical evaluations of utility programs, such as energy efficiency, load management, and pricing reform.

One potential downstream impact of this session could be a concrete set of politically feasible suggestions for efficient and equitable E&E policy reforms for governments and firms.

In addition to standard paper presentations, we will leave time for structured conversations to encourage new interactions and collaborations.

ORGANIZED BY: Hunt Allcott, Stanford University  Meredith Fowlie, University of California Berkeley  Lawrence Goulder, Stanford University  Joe Shapiro, University of California Berkeley

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 15, 2023

Session 9: Climate Finance, Innovation, and Challenges for Policy

Wednesday, August 16, 2023, 9:00am - Thursday, August 17, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The session would bring together research on how to best finance companies that innovate on green technologies, the pricing of climate risks in financial markets, banks' exposures to climate risk and their regulation, the impact of monetary policy on climate change, and policies more broadly that help mitigate climate changes.

ORGANIZED BY:

Juliane Begenau, Stanford University    Stefano Giglio, Yale University  Lars Peter Hansen, University of Chicago  Monika Piazzesi, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 15, 2023

Session 10: Fiscal Sustainability

Monday, August 21, 2023, 9:00am - Tuesday, August 22, 2023, 5:00pm

As governments emerge from the pandemic, they are dealing with major challenges in regards to fiscal sustainability. We want to organize a session that focuses on topics at the intersection of monetary policy, fiscal policy and sustainability, and the valuation of government debt. What role do central banks play in creating fiscal space for governments? Is there a possibility of fiscal dominance going forward? How does this possibility affect asset prices and the creation of safe assets? Could the erosion of the U.S. fiscal position threaten its reserve currency role? 

ORGANIZED BY: Francesco Bianchi, Johns Hopkins University  Arvind Krishnamurthy, Stanford University  Hanno Nico Lustig, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 22, 2023

Session 11: Financial Regulation

Monday, August 28, 2023, 9:00am - Wednesday, August 30, 2023, 12:00pm

LOCATION: Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This session discusses the latest advances in theoretical and empirical issues related to financial regulation, defined broadly. Topics will include, but will not be limited to, connections of regulation for intermediaries, households and policymakers in the US and outside the US. 

ORGANIZED BY:  Gregor Matvos, Northwestern University  Amit Seru, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 29, 2023

Session 12: IO of Healthcare and Credit Markets

Wednesday, August 30, 2023, 1:00pm - Thursday, August 31, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This session will bring together researchers working on the IO of healthcare and credit markets. These markets share similar features, including selection, market power, behavioral consumers, among others. We believe there are opportunities for fruitful interaction between researchers studying these environments. 

ORGANIZED BY: Jose Ignacio Cuesta, Stanford University  Liran Einav, Stanford University  Gaston Illanes, Northwestern University Pietro Tebaldi, Columbia University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 22, 2023

Session 13: The Macroeconomics of Uncertainty and Volatility

Wednesday, September 6, 2023, 9:00am - Friday, September 8, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: John A. and Cynthia Fry Gunn Building, 366 Galvez Street 

The session will cover recent work on the causes and effects of changes in volatility and uncertainty. This can cover everything from the COVID pandemic, Monetary, Fiscal shocks to Wars, and Regulatory changes. This session will focus on measuring changes in uncertainty, evaluating its mechanisms and impacts on firms, consumers, national or global economies, discussing policy responses and any other related topics. The mix of academics and policy makers across multiple institutions reflects this broad interest. Papers or presentation slides are required (abstracts only will not be accepted).

ORGANIZED BY:  Nicholas Bloom, Stanford University  Steven Davis, University of Chicago  Jesus Fernandez-Villaverde, University of Pennsylvania  Zheng Liu, Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco  Bo Sun, University of Virginia  Nancy R. Xu, Boston College

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION June 5, 2023

Session 14: New Frontiers in Asset Pricing

Wednesday, September 6, 2023, 9:00am - Friday, September 8, 2023, 5:00pm

This session is for asset pricing papers on the frontier of the discipline. Particular areas of focus are macrofinance, computation, machine learning, and climate finance. Possible topics include but are not limited to the following: asset pricing, investor heterogeneity, learning and ambiguity, new preference structures for pricing models, or using machine learning to understand the cross-section of returns. A particular area of interest is climate finance, where both climate change and the policy responses to climate change present new risks in asset pricing markets.  Topics of interest include asset pricing with heterogeneous agents and disaster risks, credit risk modeling for possibly stranded assets, the implications of integrated assessment models for financial risks, and methodological advances in solution methods for complex analyses of climate finance models. As the analysis of such models often requires the use of computational methods, we encourage submissions that develop and make use of new numerical techniques.

ORGANIZED BY: Kenneth Judd, Hoover Institution at Stanford University Walter Pohl, Norwegian School of Economics Karl Schmedders, IMD Lausanne Ole Wilms, University of Hamburg & Tilburg University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION June 5, 2023

Session 15: The Micro and Macro of Labor Markets

Thursday, September 7, 2023, 9:00am - Friday, September 8, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The idea of this session is to bring together labor economists and macroeconomists with interests in labor markets with two goals. The first goal is to be a venue to discuss the latest research about labor markets. The second goal is to promote intellectual exchange among scholars working on similar topics, but with different approaches. Specific topics will depend on the submissions. 

ORGANIZED BY: Gregor Jarosch, Duke University  Isaac Sorkin, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION May 15, 2023

Session 16: Frontiers of Macroeconomic Research

Monday, September 11, 2023, 9:00am - Wednesday, September 13, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

The goal of the session is to bring together researchers working in macroeconomics, broadly defined. The session will focus on both short-run macroeconomic fluctuations, as well as open questions in economic growth. We welcome submissions that are quantitative, theoretical or empirical in nature. We hope that the diverse research topics within macroeconomics covered in the session will foster engaging and productive discussion. 

ORGANIZED BY: Adrien Auclert, Stanford University Luigi Bocola, Stanford University  Kurt Mitman, Stockholm University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION June 12, 2023

Session 17: Labor Markets and Policies

Thursday, September 14, 2023, 9:00am - Saturday, September 16, 2023, 5:00pm

This session offers a forum for scholars interested in the use of general equilibrium models disciplined by micro data to carefully analyze important labor market issues and reforms to address them. The use of these models to conduct comprehensive quantitative analyses of policy reforms is still in its infancy. The goal of this session is to bring together a diverse group of scholars, both young and established, engaged in frontier research in this area. The session is organized around three themes, all of which have implications for the observed increase in wage and wealth inequality in the United States. The first theme is about the dynamic effects of increases in the minimum wage and of the taxation of wealth of the types now being discussed and implemented in the United States, in both the short and the long run. The second theme is about how the growth and diffusion of automation will lead to changes in the structure of wages, work, and employment in developed industrial economies. The third theme is about the effect on labor markets of the adoption of trade reforms that differentially expose some sectors of an economy to much more intense international competition.

ORGANIZED BY:  Erik Hurst, University of Chicago  Patrick Kehoe, Stanford University Elena Pastorino, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION June 30, 2023

Session 18: Gender

Friday, September 15, 2023, 9:00am - Saturday, September 16, 2023, 5:00pm

LOCATION: Landau Economics Building, 579 Jane Stanford Way, Stanford, CA 94305

This session will be dedicated to understanding how gender influences economic outcomes and decision-making. We invite submissions of papers whose main focus is on gender, regardless of field, to foster dialogue across fields. In addition to senior faculty members, invited presenters will include junior faculty as well as graduate students. 

ORGANIZED BY:

Alejandro Martinez-Marquina, University of Southern California  Muriel Niederle, Stanford University  Alessandra Voena, Stanford University

DEADLINE FOR PAPER SUBMISSION June 16, 2023

Learning and adaptation in the social sciences: NAS Sackler conference, January 10-11

Ido Erev and I will be presenting a paper  on learning and choice behavior at one of the Sackler Colloquia run by the National Academy of Sciences:

In the Light of Evolution VIII: Darwinian Thinking in the Social Sciences

Organized by Brian Skyrms, John C. Avise and Francisco J. Ayala

January 10-11, 2014 at the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center in Irvine, CA.

 Overview

Darwinian thinking is now having a major impact in social science, both in the consideration of the consequences of biological and cultural evolution on traditional questions, and in the use of quasi-Darwinian adaptive dynamics in evolutionary game theory. This Darwinian point of view is having a major impact on economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, and demography.

Agenda

I.  Evolution of Social Norms

Bargaining and Fairness, Kenneth Binmore, University College London
Cooperation, Natalia Komarova, University of California, Irvine
Friendship and Natural Selection, James H. Fowler, University of California, San Diego
Reputation and Punishment, Michihiro Kandori, University of Tokyo

II. Social Dynamics

The Replicator Equation and Other Game Dynamics, Ross Cressman, Wilfrid Laurier University
Payoff-Based Learning Dynamics, Alvin Roth, Harvard University
Strategic Learning Dynamics, David K. Levine, Washington University
Cultural Evolution, Marcus W. Feldman, Stanford University

Keynote Address:  Public Goods: Competition, Cooperation, and Spite, Simon A. Levin, Princeton University

III. Special Sciences

Evolutionary Demography, Kenneth W. Wachter, University of California, Berkeley
Folklore of the Elite and Biological Evolution, Barry O’Neill, University of California, Los Angeles
Economics, Ted Bergstrom, University of California, Santa Barbara
Psychology, Dale Purves, Duke-National University of Singapore Graduate Medical School

IV. Applications

Evolutionary Implementation in Mechanism Design, Éva Tardos, Cornell University
Some Dynamics of Signaling, Brian Skyrms, University of California, Irvine
The Rate of Innovation Diffusion in Social Networks, H. Peyton Young, Oxford University
Homophily, Culture, and Coordinating Behaviors, Matthew O. Jackson, Stanford University