Black markets for kidney transplants

miscellaneous black market links I've been collecting, of different vintages:

Nancy Scheper-Hughes in the New Internationalist magazine, May 2014: Human traffic: exposing the brutal organ trade

Arabianbusiness.com reports, April 2014: 410 Saudis said to buy organs on black market
"As many as 410 Saudis have bought organs – mainly kidneys – from the black market for illegal transplantations over the past two years, Makkah daily reported.

Dr Faisal Shaheen, director of the Saudi Center for Organ Transplants, was quoted as saying: “A total of 220 Saudis bought organs for transplants from markets in Pakistan, China and Egypt in 2013 and 190 did the same in 2012 at their own personal expense.”

CNN, March 2014: Lebanese mayor arrested in Spain, accused of attempted organ trafficking
"A wealthy mayor from Lebanon has been arrested in Spain for allegedly offering to pay $55,000 to poor people to obtain liver tissue for his liver transplant, police and a government official announced Wednesday.
...
"The mayor's alleged accomplices recruited and later paid for nine poor people -- eight immigrants and a Spaniard -- to have specialized liver compatibility tests at a clinic in Valencia last summer, police say. The combined tests cost $16,000, which the mayor's aides allegedly paid. Some of the nine people also received small sums of money for taking part, police said.

Just one man, a Romanian immigrant, met the medical criteria for the liver tissue removal and, posing as a legitimate donor, he accompanied the Lebanese mayor last summer to a Barcelona clinic that specializes in liver transplants. But medical workers there, following strict protocols against human organ trafficking, prevented it."

(same story here from another source: http://www.thelocal.es/20140312/police-thwart-first-illegal-organ-sale-in-spain )


Frank Delmonico's 2011 slides: WHO Perspective on Self-sufficiency--Accountability on the National Level calling for countries to develop organ donation sufficient to cover their national needs for transplantation.

The Guardian, in Dec 2010 (with various Eastern Europe mentions): The doctor at the heart of Kosovo's organ scandal As Kosovo's prime minister denies links to organ trafficking, 'Doctor Vampire' is the subject of an international manhunt
"Azerbaijan's prosecutor-general's office said last month that an investigation prompted by information from Ukranian police found "citizens of various countries" had been brought into the country for illegal kidney transplants. Four Ukrainian doctors have been arrested in connection with the alleged racket. Azerbaijani press reported that Sonmez was "involved" in the ring, which also did operations in Ecuador. "

AzeriReport.com reports, August 2010, on Illegal Organ Transplant Mafia Exposed
"The group has been disclosed by the Trafficking Prevention Department of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs. The trans-national criminal group was involved in illegal transplantation of kidney and it included 12 members. Yurii Kucher, representative of the Ukrainian Ministry of Internal Affairs, said over three years the group has recruited online and transported Ukrainian, Russia, Moldavian, Belarus and Uzbek citizens to Azerbaijan and Ecuador.
...
The Azerbaijan law enforcement agencies are unavailable for comments. It has been established that the operations were performed in a private clinic inBaku. The lawyers claim if the donors sold their kidney voluntarily, this is not a crime and any accusations are groundless. Many people are ready to sell their internal organs to make money.  A few days prior to the arrests in Ukraine, Yeni Musavat, an Azeri newspaper, sent a journalist to an area in downtown Baku where the illegal organ donor recruiters gathered and formed a market. The Yeni Musavat journalist was offered to go to a hospital to negotiate terms for the kidney removal.  In the clinic, the journalist was asked to consider selling part of his liver."


Yosuke Shimazono, "The state of the international organ trade: a provisional picture based on integration of available information, Bulletin of the World Health Organization Volume 85, Number 12, December 2007, 901-980


HT: various correspondents

Kidney exchange scheduled to begin in Hong Kong

The South China Morning Post has the story:

New kidney donation scheme starts in October after change in Hong Kong law allows strangers to donate organs to patients
This is aimed at speeding up the long waiting time for a suitable organ and surgeries will be done at four of the city’s 43 public hospitals

"The paired organ donation arrangement, made legal after Hong Kong passed an amendment to its Human Organ Transplant Ordinance last month, allows a donor-patient pair who may not be a match for each other to donate organs to another donor-patient pair and vice versa, so that patients on both sides get the transplants they need.
...
"There is a huge supply-demand gap for kidney transplants in the city. As of June 30 this year, there were 2,214 patients on the transplant list in Hong Kong but each year there are only about 80 living or deceased donors. Two years ago the average waiting time for a kidney was over four years.
...
"Before the change in the law, strangers could not make live donations to transplant patients. Couples had to be married for more than three years and friends needed to obtain approval from the Department of Health’s Human Organ Transplant Board for live donations.

"Professor Philip Li, the chairman of the authority’s Central Renal Committee said in the UK and the Netherlands, the paired kidney donation programme was very mature and they were now having a very large number of successful matchings.

 “In Hong Kong, we are just starting, it will be quite a while before we actually see a significant effect,” Li said."

Vatican statement on organ transplantation

When I posted recently about the Vatican conference on organ trafficking and transplant tourism I focused on the participation of China, and the reaction it drew.

Now I've had a closer second look at the conference statement  (whose title is Statement of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism). (UPDATED LINK HERE: https://www.pas.va/en/events/2017/organ_trafficking/final_statement.html )

It's a very tough statement, which casts quite a broad net when talking about "crimes against humanity." Here's the opening paragraph:

"In accordance with the Resolutions of the United Nations and the World Health Assembly, the 2015 Vatican Summit of Mayors from the major cities of the world, the 2014 Joint Declaration of faith leaders against modern slavery, and the Magisterium of Pope Francis, who in June 2016, at the Judges’ Summit on Human Trafficking and Organized Crime, stated that organ trafficking and human trafficking for the purpose of organ removal are “true crimes against humanity [that] need to be recognized as such by all religious, political and social leaders, and by national and international legislation,” we, the undersigned participants of the Pontifical Academy of Sciences Summit on Organ Trafficking, resolve to combat these crimes against humanity through comprehensive efforts that involve all stakeholders around the world."

Here's the paragraph defining what those crimes against humanity are, which to my eye seems to conflate three very different things. It is number 1 in their list of recommendations.

"That all nations and all cultures recognize human trafficking for the purpose of organ removal and organ trafficking, which include the use of organs from executed prisoners and payments to donors or the next of kin of deceased donors, as crimes that should be condemned worldwide and legally prosecuted at the national and international level."

That is, if I read the full statement correctly (you should read it yourself), they are proposing that 

1. taking organs from executed prisoners, 
2. making payments to living donors, and 
3. making payments to next of kin of deceased donors 

should all be considered crimes against humanity.  

Incidentally, the phrase "crimes against humanity"  is one that I hear most often in the context of genocide, although I recognize that it is also used for other horrific crimes that target populations.

I am not encouraged that this will lead to a sensible discussion about either incentives for donation or (even) removing financial disincentives.

More from the Festival of Economics Trento

I'm back home, after two exciting days in Trento (and two long days of travel). There are a bunch of videos, and some press coverage, for those of you who speak Italian or like to use Google Translate.

You can hear the videos in English if you click on the URL, then start the video by clicking on the arrow in the middle of the screen, and then clicking on the gear icon in the lower right hand corner to select English. (It isn't enough to just click on the English symbol in the upper right...)

Here's a 1 minute video in English, a sort of trailer for my talk on global kidney exchange:

*********

Here's a link to the full video of my first talk, on global kidney exchange.
Mercato e disuguaglianze nella salute

The questions and answer period begins at minute 44, with a question by the eminent transplant nephrologist Giuseppe Remuzzi about his concern (which he mentions is also Frank Delmonico's) that the Philippines and Mexico, where Global Kidney Exchange has begun, are places where there is not only transplant infrastructure, but also illegal, black market organ trafficking.  He ends by saying that he remains to be (but hopes to be) convinced that GKE is a good idea.
My answer begins at minute 46:40.
I replied in part "One reason people get kidneys in illegal black markets is that they don't have better opportunities.  We would like to provide them with a better opportunity..."


Here's a video of the panel on my book: Matchmaking. La scienza economica del dare a ciascuno il suo  Play Video  It begins with a talk about the book, by Professor Dino Gerardi.  Afterwards I spoke in reply to questions from the moderator and the audience, and you can hear me in Italian translation.


And here's the panel on markets for organs "exploitation or opportunity?" also in Italian:
Mercati per il corpo umano: sfruttamento o opportunità?
I very much enjoyed meeting Ignazio Marino, the transplant surgeon who was for a time Mayor of Rome.

Below are some news reports on these sessions

*********
Here's a news story right after my talk on global kidney exchange, which was introduced by Tito Boeri:
"Il sistema delle catene" per donare gli organi
Al Teatro Sociale il Nobel Roth descrive il suo progetto per incrociare pazienti e donatori di Paesi ricchi e poveri
G-translate: "The Chain" system for organ donation
Al Teatro Sociale Nobel Roth describes his project to meet patients and donors of rich and poor countries

and here:
Dai modelli matematici si possono salvare molte vite umane. Il Premio Nobel Alvin Roth a Trento
"From the mathematical models you can save lives. The Nobel Prize Alvin Roth in Trento
We die because we can not afford a transplant. Roth: "Our program intends to solve the problem by crossing supply and demand"

and here:
Reni, l’algoritmo che ridà speranza Il Nobel Roth: sgretolare le iniquità
Il Nobel Roth: il sistema si autofinanzia. Allo studio anche un’assicurazione

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Here's a story covering my "book talk," in which Prof Dino Gerardi talked about the Italian translation of Who Gets What and Why, and I answered questions:
Matchmaking. La scienza economica del dare a ciascuno il suo

*************
Here's a story about the panel discussion on markets for body parts, moderated by Mario Macis, with Nico Lacetera, me, and Ignazio Marino, the transplant surgeon who was  mayor of Rome:
Mercati per il corpo umano: sfruttamenti o opportunità
Il premio Nobel Roth ha dialogato con l'ex sindaco di Roma (e chirurgo) Marino su trapianti e denaro

************
Here's a pre-festival story:

Festival dell'economia, su il sipario

Oggi alle 16 l'inaugurazione al Palazzo della Provincia. Alle 18 al teatro Sociale l'apertura è affidata al Nobel Alvin Roth. Da domani anche la nostra emittente sarà in piazza S.Maria Maggiore 

And here are two article from the Italian Jewish press:
Festival Economia – Pagine Ebraiche
Salute diseguale, in cerca di una cura
Pubblicato in Attualità il ‍‍30/05/2017 - 5

Il Nobel Alvin Roth a Pagine Ebraiche
“L’economia può riparare il mondo”

************
Updates:

Business Insider Italia has an interview with Ignazio Marino:
Ignazio Marino: “Il mercato nero dei trapianti si può mettere all’angolo salvando molte vite”
(Google translate doesn't seem to do a good job turning it into English, but the very last sentence is
"Quello che ci ha mostrato Roth è un sistema trasparente e può togliere ossigeno ai trafficanti”.
GT renders that as 'What showed us Roth is a transparent system and can remove oxygen to "traffickers.'


Here's a story with an inflammatory headline but a reasonable account, as near as I can tell from Google Translate:
L'economista che vuole legalizzare il traffico d'organi per salvare ricchi (e poveri) del mondo
"The economist who wants to legalize organ trafficking to save the rich (and poor) in the world
"In the US there are 100 thousand people on the waiting list for a kidney transplant but only 12 thousand a year. In the Philippines you do not pay you dialysis. In China they were using executed prisoners as donors. The organs of the problem is global and the Nobel Alvin Roth has the answer (maybe): scambiamoceli among us"
by Francesco Floris, June 7, 2017 

Kidney Paired Donation in Developing Countries: a Global Perspective

 Vivek Kute and his colleagues argue that one of the lessons from the developing world is that kidney exchange can save many lives, but may need to be organized differently in some ways than in the developed world.

Kidney Paired Donation in Developing Countries: a Global Perspective by Vivek B. Kute, Vidya A. Fleetwood, Sanshriti Chauhan, Hari Shankar Meshram, Yasar Caliskan, Chintalapati Varma, Halil Yazıcı, Özgür Akın Oto & Krista L. Lentine, Current Transplantation Reports (2023)  (here's a link that may provide better access]

Abstract

...

"Despite the advantages of KPD programs, they remain rare among developing nations, and the programs that exist have many differences with those of in developed countries. There is a paucity of literature and lack of published data on KPD from most of the developing nations. Expanding KPD programs may require the adoption of features and innovations of successful KPD programs. Cooperation with national and international societies should be encouraged to ensure endorsement and sharing of best practices.

Summary

KPD is in the initial stages or has not yet started in the majority of the emerging nations. But the logistics and strategies required to implement KPD in developing nations differ from other parts of the world. By learning from the KPD experience in developing countries and adapting to their unique needs, it should be possible to expand access to KPD to allow more transplants to happen for patients in need worldwide."

...

" Despite the advantages of KPD programs, they remain rare in the developing world, and the programs that exist have many differences with those of developed countries. Program structure is one of these differences: multi-center, regional, and national KPD programs (Swiss, Australia, Canada, Dutch, UK, USA) are more common in the developed than the developing world, whereas single center programs are more common

...

"kidney exchanges frequently take weeks to months to obtain legal permission in India despite the fact that only closely-related family members (i.e., parents, spouse, siblings, children, and grandparents) are allowed to donate a kidney [47].

...

"Protecting the privacy of a donor, including maintaining anonymity when requested, is common practice among developed countries but uncommon in developing nations. Anonymous allocation during KPD is a standard practice in the Netherlands, Sweden, and other parts of Europe, but this is not the case in countries such as India, Korea, and Romania [14, 48, 49]. In areas where anonymity is not maintained, the intended donor/recipient pair must meet and share medical information once a potential exchange is identified, but before formal allocation of pairs occurs. The original donor/ recipient pair may refuse the proposed exchange option for any reason and continue to be on the waitlist. In India, nonanonymous KPD allocation is standard practice and has the goal of increasing trust and transparency between the transplant team and the administrative team [14, 49]. Countries differ in philosophical approaches to optimizing trust and transparency, and objective data on most effective practices would benefit the global community."

********

Tomorrow I hope to have a few words to say about the equally unique situation in China.

######

Update:

Tuesday, September 19, 2023

Organ transplantation in China: in transition--and controversy about paying funeral costs

Compensation for plasma donors--calls for a ban in Canada

At the same time as there are calls for decriminalizing drug use in Canada (see yesterday's post), there are calls for bans on compensating plasma donors. (Repugnance is a big topic..)

This post collects some thoughts on compensation for plasma donors, following my participation in the recent Plasma Protein Forum.

Much discussed there is the rash of recent legislation and proposed legislation in Canada to ban compensation for donors (a sort of repugnance event...).

E.g.
B.C. joins 3 other provinces in banning payment for blood and plasma
Alberta, Ontario and Quebec already have laws prohibiting profit from blood donations

Senator introducing bill to ban payments for blood donation
"“The point of this bill is better safe than sorry,” Wallin said.

“Canadian blood donors are not meant to be a revenue stream.”

Time to end for-profit plasma donations

Canada must never allow another tainted blood crisis and must put an end to cash-for-blood clinics. by (Senator) PAMELA WALLIN

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

One perplexing feature of this debate is that Canada already buys lots of plasma from the U.S., where it is supplied by paid donors. No one seems to be suggesting that should be changed.

(Here are my posts to date on plasma in Canada.)

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

In related notes, China seems to be ramping up it's "source" plasma collection (obtained at the source via plasmapheresis, as distinct from "recovered" plasma obtained from whole blood donations), with collection of about 7 million liters in 2017.  My understanding is that Chinese law forbids the importation of blood products except for albumin.

See this Lancet editorial from 2017:

The big business of blood plasma

"China,  a  country  that  holds  the  questionable  honour  of  being a world leader in liver disease, is now also the highest consumer  of  serum  albumin,  using  300  tonnes  annually,  roughly  half  of  the  worldwide  total  use,  according  to  an  article  in  the  Financial  Times. 

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

In Brazil, compensation of plasma donors is forbidden (along with compensation of organ donors) in the Constitution, article 199

"(4) The law establishes the conditions and requirements to allow the removal of human organs, tissues, and substances intended for transplantation, research, and treatment, as well as the collection, processing, and transfusion of blood and its by products, all kinds of sale being forbidden."

Markets for organs

In Reward Organ Donors , Sally Satel writes in the Asian WSJ about the recent changes in Singapore law regarding compensation for donors (see my previous posts here and here). She goes on to outline the design of the kind of market she would like to see, and ways in which perceived repugnance might be addressed.

"My colleagues and I suggest a system in which a donor can accept a reward for saving the life of a stranger. A third party (the government, a charity or insurer) would provide the benefit and newly available organs would be distributed to the next in line -- not just to the wealthy. Donors would be carefully screened for physical and emotional impediments to safe donation, as is currently done for all volunteer living kidney donors. Moreover, they would be guaranteed follow-up medical care for any complications.
Many people are uneasy about offering lump-sum cash payments. A solution is to provide in-kind rewards, such as a down payment on a house, a contribution to a retirement fund or lifetime health insurance, so the program would not be attractive to people who might otherwise rush to donate on the promise of a large sum of instant cash.
Not only will more lives be saved through legal means of donor rewards, but fewer people will haunt the black-market organ bazaars of places like China, Pakistan, Egypt, Colombia and Eastern Europe. The World Health Organization estimates that 5% to 10% of all transplants performed annually -- perhaps 63,000 in all -- take place in these clinical netherworlds."

Market design course for health policy and medical students, at Stanford, taught by Alex Chan and Kurt Sweat

 Starting tomorrow, a short course in market design:

BIOS 203, Fall 2021: Market Design and Field Experiments for Health Policy and Medicine 

Primary Instructor: Alex Chan chanalex@stanford.edu | Office Hours: By appointment

Secondary Instructor: Kurt Sweat kurtsw@stanford.edu | Office Hours: By appointment

Description. Market design is an emerging field in economics, engineering and computer science about how to organize systems to allocate scarce resources. In this course, we study (1) the theory and practice of market design in healthcare and medicine, and (2) methods to evaluate the impact of such designs. Students will be provided with the necessary tools to diagnose the problems in markets and allocation mechanisms that render them inefficient, and subsequently develop a working toolbox to remedy failed markets and finetune new market and policy designs.

With a practical orientation in mind, we will learn how to construct rules for allocating resources or to structure successful marketplaces through successive examples in healthcare and medicine: medical residency matching, kidney exchange, allocation of scarce medical resources like COVID vaccine and tests, medical equipment procurement, online marketplace for doctors, and, if time permits, reward system for biopharmaceutical innovation. Guest lectures by practicing market designers and C-suite healthcare executives (CEO, CFO) would feature in the course as well.

An important goal of the class is to introduce you to the critical ingredients to a successful design: a solid understanding of institutions, grasps of economic theory, and well-designed experiments and implementation. In the final sessions, students will also learn how to design and deploy one of the most powerful tools in practical market design: A/B testing or randomized field experiments. These techniques are widely used by tech companies like UBER, Amazon, eBay, and others to improve their marketplaces.

At the end of the course, students should have acquired the necessary knowledge to become an avid consumer and user, and potentially a producer, of the market design and field experimental literature (recognized by 4 recent Nobel Prizes in Economics: 2007/2012/2019/2020).

Time & Location.

● Tue, Thu 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM (beginning November 16, 2021) at Encina Commons Room 119

Course Webpage. ● https://canvas.stanford.edu/courses/145148

Schedule and Readings

(* required readings, others are optional)

Session 1. Market design and Marketplaces – November 16

1. * Roth, A. E. (2007). The art of designing markets. harvard business review, 85(10), 118.

2. Kominers, S. D., Teytelboym, A., & Crawford, V. P. (2017). An invitation to market design. Oxford Review of Economic Policy, 33(4), 541-571.

3. Roth, A. E. (2002). The economist as engineer: Game theory, experimentation, and computation as tools for design economics. Econometrica, 70(4), 1341-1378

Session 2. Matching Markets: Medical Residents and the NRMP – November 18

1. * Chapter 1 in Gura, E. Y., & Maschler, M. (2008). Insights into game theory: an alternative mathematical experience. Cambridge University Press.

2. * Fisher, C. E. (2009). Manipulation and the Match. JAMA, 302(12), 1266-1267.

3. * National Resident Matching Program. (2021). Feasibility of an Early Match NRMP Position Statement

4. Roth, A. E., & Peranson, E. (1997). The effects of the change in the NRMP matching algorithm. JAMA, 278(9), 729-732.

5. Gale, D., & Shapley, L. S. (1962). College admissions and the stability of marriage. The American Mathematical Monthly, 69(1), 9-15.

Session 3. Kidney Exchange and Organ Allocation – November 30

1. * Wallis, C. B., Samy, K. P., Roth, A. E., & Rees, M. A. (2011). Kidney paired donation. Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, 26(7), 2091-2099.

2. * Chapter 3 in Roth, A. E. (2015). Who gets what—and why: The new economics of matchmaking and market design. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

3. Gentry, S. E., Montgomery, R. A., & Segev, D. L. (2011). Kidney paired donation: fundamentals, limitations, and expansions. American journal of kidney diseases, 57(1), 144-151.

4. Salman, S., Gurev, S., Arsalan, M., Dar, F., & Chan, A. Liver  Exchange: A Pathway to Increase Access to Transplantation.

5. Sweat, K. R. Redesigning waitlists with manipulable priority: improving the heart transplant waitlist.

6. Agarwal, N., Ashlagi, I., Somaini, P., & Waldinger, D. (2018). Dynamic incentives in waitlist mechanisms. AEA Papers & Proceedings, 108, 341-347.

Session 4. 1 st Half: Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets – December 2

1. * Roth, A. E. (2007). Repugnance as a Constraint on Markets. Journal of Economic perspectives, 21(3), 37-58.

2. * Minerva, F., Savulescu, J., & Singer, P. (2019). The ethics of the Global Kidney Exchange programme. The Lancet, 394(10210), 1775-1778.

3. Chapter 11 in Roth, A. E. (2015). Who gets what—and why: The new economics of matchmaking and market design. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.

2 nd Half: Market Design and Allocation during COVID-19 – December 2

1. * Emanuel, E. J., Persad, G., Upshur, R., Thome, B., Parker, M., Glickman, A., ... & Phillips, J. P. (2020). New England Journal of Medicine. Fair allocation of scarce medical resources in the time of Covid-19.

2. Piscitello, G. M., Kapania, E. M., Miller, W. D., Rojas, J. C., Siegler, M., & Parker, W. F. (2020). Variation in ventilator allocation guidelines by US state during the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic: a systematic review. JAMA network open, 3(6), e201

3. Schmidt, H., Pathak, P., Sönmez, T., & Ünver, M. U. (2020). Covid-19: how to prioritize worse-off populations in allocating safe and effective vaccines. British Medical Journal, 371.

4. Schmidt, H., Pathak, P. A., Williams, M. A., Sonmez, T., Ünver, M. U., & Gostin, L. O. (2020). Rationing safe and effective COVID-19 vaccines: allocating to states proportionate to population may undermine commitments to mitigating health disparities. Ava

5. Neimark, J. (2020). What is the best strategy to deploy a COVID-19 vaccine. Smithsonian Magazine.

Session 5. 1 st Half: Auction Design and Procurement in Medicine – December 7

1. * The Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. (2020). Improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats. Scientific Background on the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 20

2. * Song, Z., Cutler, D. M., & Chernew, M. E. (2012). Potential consequences of reforming Medicare into a competitive bidding system. Jama, 308(5), 459-460.

3. Newman, D., Barrette, E., & McGraves-Lloyd, K. (2017). Medicare competitive bidding program realized price savings for durable medical equipment purchases. Health Affairs, 36(8), 1367-1375.

4. Cramton, P., Ellermeyer, S., & Katzman, B. (2015). Designed to fail: The Medicare auction for durable medical equipment. Economic Inquiry, 53(1), 469-485.

5. Ji, Y. (2019). The Impact of Competitive Bidding in Health Care: The Case of Medicare Durable Medical Equipment.

6. Thaler, R. H. (1988). Anomalies: The winner's curse. Journal of economic perspectives, 2(1), 191-202.

7. Chapter 2 in Haeringer, G. (2018). Market design: auctions and matching. MIT Press.

2 nd Half: (GUEST LECTURE) Ralph Weber, CEO, MediBid Inc. on “The Online Marketplace for Medicine” – December 7

Session 6. A/B Testing and Field Experiments to Test Designs – December 9

1. * Chapters 1, 4 in List, John. (2021). A Course in Experimental Economics (unpublished textbook, access on course website)

2. * Gallo, A. (2017). A refresher on A/B testing. Harvard Business Review, 2-6.

3. Chan, A. (2021). Customer Discrimination and Quality Signals – A Field Experiment with Healthcare Shoppers.

4. Kessler, J. B., Low, C., & Sullivan, C. D. (2019). Incentivized resume rating: Eliciting employer preferences without deception. American Economic Review, 109(11), 3713-44.

5. Chapters 3, 5, 6, 7, 8 in List, John. (2021). A Course in Experimental Economics (unpublished textbook, access on course website)

6. The Committee for the Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. (2019). Understanding development and poverty alleviation. Scientific Background on the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2019.

Bonus Session (optional). (GUEST LECTURE) Donald Lung, CFO, Antengene on “Designing Markets to Access Biopharmaceutical Intellectual Property Across Regulatory Regimes – the Case of China” – Date TBD

Bonus Session (optional). (GUEST LECTURE) TBD – Date TBD