Repugnance and/or disgust

I like to distinguish what I've called repugnant transactions from those that elicit disgust. By repugnant transactions I mean transactions that some people want to engage in and that others don't want them to (e.g. same sex marriage, or buying or selling a kidney, or ordering horse meat at a U.S. restaurant). One sign that a transaction is viewed as repugnant by a sufficiently big part of the population is if it is illegal. Disgusting transactions most often don't elicit legislation (except in a consumer protection way), e.g. it's illegal in CA to offer to sell horse meat for human consumption, but not, say, spit: the difference being that some people would like to buy and eat horse meat.

However there's no denying that part of what makes some transactions repugnant to some people is that they find them disgusting (see e.g. Martha Nussbaum on same sex marriage). There have been recent reports in the press and blogosphere on attempts to link physiological indicators of disgust to, among other things, political proclivities.

Nicholas Kristof in the NY Times gives a quick overview of some conclusions of this sort: Our Politics May Be All in Our Head

Mark Liberman at Language Log takes a closer look: Physiological politics, and suggests that at least some of the results could be artifacts of the experiment. (He has a followup here: Icktheology.)

In the context of organ transplantation, I've noted that the repugnance to sales of organs is hard to equate with a visceral disgust reaction, since there isn't repugnance to transplants in general. There may of course be specific exceptions to that, see e.g. this article in the American Journal of Transplantation:

"Specific Unwillingness to Donate Eyes: The Impact of Disfigurement, Knowledge and Procurement on Corneal Donation" (p 657-663)M. Lawlor, I. Kerridge, R. Ankeny, T. A. Dobbins, F. BillsonPublished Online: Jan 29 2010 2:23PM

Eating dogs

A NY Times op-ed considers the repugnance of eating the dog...

"Although dog-eating is taboo in the United States, personal consumption of dog meat is legal in most states. Likewise, Americans find horse-eating offensive; a five-year federal ban on slaughtering horses for human consumption was lifted last year. (Chicken-fried horse steak with onion gravy was on the menu at the Harvard Faculty Club until 1985.) Horse meat is consumed in France, just as dog meat is eaten in countries like Ghana, Nigeria, Tonga, parts of Asia and even Switzerland. In Poland, some ingest dog fat as a curative. The status of dog meat as a hard-luck food is also well documented — Germans during the two world wars referred to it as “blockade mutton.”

 "Yet in the United States, dog-eating has been a longstanding flashpoint for anxieties about race and citizenship. In 1904, a group of scantily clad Philippine Igorots from the Luzon highlands reenacted a daily “Bow Wow Feast” at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis. Loosely based on the custom of sumang, in which a dog was sacrificed and eaten after military victory, the dog-eating spectacle was a sensation. Touring Los Angeles in 1906, the Igorots, now suspiciously “fat and glossy,” were blamed for an “epidemic of thefts” of over 200 “high-class dogs,” according to The Los Angeles Times.

 "No dog theft was ever substantiated, but American politicians readily declared that the Igorots were “unfit” for American citizenship, a pressing matter in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War, when the United States defeated Spain, claimed its empire and annexed the Philippines. Moreover, the arrival of millions of immigrants from southern and eastern Europe and the rise of Jim Crow laws in the South fueled white nativist fears of racial mongrelization. Between 1901 and 1904, the Supreme Court ruled that the Constitution need not “follow the Flag”; the country could legally annex an overseas territory and deny its people citizenship. New American humane education programs in Philippine public schools stressed the importance of animal kindness, including the proper care of pet dogs, as a keystone of civilization, moral agency and, perhaps, future independence. "

Abandoned horses not headed for foreign tables

Speaking of the pony express, Activists Keep Nev. Horses From Going to Slaughter
"With the financial backing of the wife of oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens and others, activists on Saturday purchased almost all 174 horses up for sale at a state-sanctioned auction in Nevada to keep the horses from going to the slaughterhouse.

"Stephanie Hoefener of the Lancaster, Calif.-based Livesavers Wild Horse Rescue group said activists purchased 172 horses for $31,415. The other two horses were acquired by private individuals for their personal use, she said.
...
"The horses were rounded up by the U.S. Bureau of Land Management last month near the Nevada-Utah line and turned over to the Nevada Department of Agriculture for disposal.

"Agriculture department officials acknowledge the stray horses could have wound up at slaughterhouses because they did not have the federal protections afforded to wild-roaming horses.
"The horses are believed to be strays or descendants of horses abandoned by private owners over the years in Pilot Valley north of West Wendover.

''For advocacy groups to step up to the plate and make a financial commitment like this to save the horses, we think this is a wonderful thing,'' Nevada Department of Agriculture spokesman Ed Foster said.

"Jill Starr, president of Lifesavers, said the purchase of the horses at the Fallon auction was made possible by the financial backing of Madeleine Pickens and other donors.

"Starr said high bidders of such horses usually are representatives of slaughterhouses in Mexico and Canada. The meat of the horses is processed for sale in Europe and Asia, where it fetches as much as $25 a pound, she added. "

For previous posts on the American repugnance for the use of horse meat for human consumption, as compared to the high prices it fetches overseas, see here.

Eating horsemeat is good for horses, says Britain's Princess Anne

The Telegraph has the story (and a video):
Princess Anne: why Britain should consider eating horsemeat
"The Princess Royal, who is President of World Horse Welfare, says that Britain should consider eating horsemeat because it would improve standards of care for the animals"

 "Princess Anne was speaking at the World Horse Welfare Organisation annual meeting when she made the comments:
"Our attitudes to the horsemeat trade may have to change" she said, because those in the trade "value their horses and look after them well" and therefore "should we be considering a real market for horsemeat and would that reduce the number of welfare case?
"I think this need a debate," the Princess Royal added."

Limits on the scope of markets

Tim Sullivan points me to this old post by Abe Othman on his blog Constructive Economics: Horseflesh and Hypocrisy

"T. Boone Pickens, from his autobiography The Luckiest Guy in the World:

I believe the greatest opportunity lies in a free marketplace. There are powerful forces afoot trying to restrict that freedom in the interests of the vested and already wealthy.

"T. Boone Pickens, in congressional testimony on a bill to prevent the slaughter of horses for food:

The whole thing, it’s a boondoggle on the American people…People that are for the slaughter should be forced to go down on that kill floor…The brutal slaughter of horses for consumption by wealthy diners in Europe and Japan cuts against our moral and cultural fiber — it’s just plain un-American.

"Remember, if they can come after the horse slaughterers, they can come after the hedge funds. So if you really believe in free markets, have some horse today!"
********

I'm inclined to think that Mr. Pickens is  being neither inconsistent nor hypocritical, but rather that he has opinions about the proper scope of markets.

When Steve Leider and I surveyed people on their attitudes towards whether kidneys should be for sale, one set of questions we asked concerned attitudes towards markets.

We measured agreement with statements that markets cause “an unfair distribution of income,” “rewards people fairly,” “lead to an efficient use of resources,” “require a lot of government control,” and are overall “fair and ethical.” However there was no correlation between disliking markets generally and disliking a market for kidneys: if anything, social conservatism was a predictor of dislike of kidney markets, and that was correlated with approval of markets generally. So, a picture began to emerge of people who liked markets generally, but thought they should they should not be extended into certain domains.  Maybe that's the view T. Boone Pickens is expressing.

(See Leider, Stephen and Alvin E. Roth, ''Kidneys for sale: Who disapproves, and why?'' American Journal of Transplantation , 10 (May), 2010, 1221-1227.)

Eating horse meat in France: could it become repugnant even there?

Alex Peysakhovich sends along the following evidence that there are those in France who find eating horsemeat repugnant...and take out ads on buses. Of course the chevalines (horse butchers) are fighting back with stickers of their own...

Repugnant markets on the radio

Repugnant Markets on the radio: I'll join Ken Taylor and Debra Satz on Philosophy Talk today, June 3

"We might ban buying or selling horse meat in the US not for the protection of horses, but because we find it morally repugnant. Yet this moral repugnance is clearly not universal, and on some level may even be arbitrary, given France's attitude toward horse meat. What role, if any, should moral repugnance play in determining the rules of our marketplaces? Even if we want to eliminate the influence of moral repugnance, can we? Debra and Ken hold their noses with Al Roth from Stanford University, author of Who Gets What ― and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design."

Get Philosophy Talk

Radio

Sunday at 11am (pacific) on KALW 91.7 FM Local Public Radio, San Francisc

Ken wrote thoughtfully about this yesterday on the Philosophy Talk blog:
REPUGNANT MARKETS,  Ken Taylor
*************
Update: and here we are at KALW:

Ken Taylor, Debra Satz, and Al Roth in the studio at Philosophy Talk
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DeyV20-VQAAApPH.jpg 

And here's a link to a recording of the show:

Repugnant markets: listen to my Philosophy Talk chat with Ken Taylor and Debra Satz

Repugnance can be local: horse sausage in France

A repugnant (and even illegal) transaction in one place may be perfectly ordinary in another. Alex Peysakhovich recently came by with some horse meat sausage from a boucherie chevaline in France...

Horse meat at the Harvard faculty club

At the Harvard faculty club (starting I believe in WW I or II) "members happily consumed horsemeat, obtained from the racetrack at Suffolk Downs. It was so popular, chicken-fried and served up with onion gravy that it stayed on the menu until 1985 when the new French chef refused to cook frozen food."

Note what the chef found repugnant.

Peter Coles snapped the following picture by the club's coat room, of a French political cartoon about the pleasures of hippophagy .

Theft and armed robbery

Theft is such a threat to civilization that it made it into the ten commandments. As an opportunistic act it must be as old as property, but it probably didn't become a profession until after markets allowed the development of concentrated and transportable forms of wealth. Even so, theft as a profession, and its close cousin, armed robbery, must be at least as old as agriculture.

So for a very long time, at least for some kinds of items, part of marketplace design includes ways to thwart thieves, or catch them. But security is costly in many ways, not least being that if you make your marketplace hard for thieves to enter, you may also discourage customers. So losses from theft (and payment of theft insurance premia) are often a cost of doing business, leading to the occasional story that could be a movie: Well-dressed thief steals €6 million worth of Chopard jewels in Paris.

"Suspicion has fallen on the Pink Panthers, the name given to a diffuse international gang with origins in the Balkans. French police describe the group’s crimes as lightning-fast hold-ups: daring, but planned down to smallest detail.
In December thieves staged a €74 million jewel theft at the Harry Winston boutique in the Avenue Montaigne, near the Place Vendôme, off the Champs-Elysees. Four robbers, two disguised as women, calmly emptied the store as staff and customers lay on the floor.
The Harry Winston raid came a year after the same store was attacked by robbers who forced staff to empty its safes, taking at least €10 million worth of jewels.
The Pink Panthers have accumulated loot worth up to €200 million in an estimated 120 attacks on stores in around 20 countries since their first robbery in Mayfair in London in 2003.
Two weeks ago Paris police arrested two Serbians, alleged to be Panthers, and charged them with carrying out armed raids on stores in Monaco, Switzerland and Germany.
Last Thursday a former soldier from Montenegro, also said to be a Panther, was sentenced to 15 years in jail for a 2005 jewel robbery in the Riviera resort of Saint-Tropez. The court in Draguignan also fined Dusko Martinovic €130,000 for the raid, which he carried out in 90 seconds with two accomplices who have not been caught. The trio escaped into the Mediterranean aboard a speed boat before the police reached the boutique that they had emptied.
The world record for a jewellery theft remains the $100 million (£62 million) robbery of diamonds in Antwerp, Belgium, in 2003. "

While diamonds can presumably be resold easily, some items, like an iconic artwork or a thoroughbred race horse are too identifiable. But that doesn't always protect them from theft: sometimes thieves steal them and try to ransom them back to the original owners, and sometimes they may be destined to be enjoyed privately by wealthy criminals in distant places. Here's one list of The 10 Most Infamous Heists, some of them still unsolved.

Update: The Times of London reports on a modern form of theft: Criminal gang bought own music on iTunes and Amazon using stolen cards.
A gang of criminal musicians bought their own music online with stolen credit cards, and received royalties...

Repugnance watch: Greyhound racing banned (even) in Florida

Florida had an active greyhound racing industry, now banned by referendum:
Here's the story from the Orlando Sentinal:
How vote to end Florida greyhound racing won and what comes next

"After years of failing to push greyhound racing reform through the Florida Legislature, animal-welfare advocates took their mission directly to the state’s voters this week — scoring such a decisive victory that proponents say it signals the eventual end of the sport across the country.

“A 69-percent vote in Florida — a state with a still-conservative electorate — shows that this is now unstoppable,” said Carey Theil, executive director of GREY2K USA, the main force behind the Yes on 13 campaign to support the racing ban. “It sends a message not only to the remaining dog tracks in the nation but all around the world that dogs are members of our families and we will not tolerate industries that harm them.
...
"Florida’s 11 active dog tracks will have until Jan. 1, 2021, to phase out their live greyhound racing. They’ll still be able to race horses, if their tracks can accommodate the event, and they’ll still be able to have wagering on simulcast races from other tracks, including from dog tracks in the five remaining states where the practice is still active and legal."
*******

A NY Times article begins by considering the problem of rehoming the racing dogs who will be retired, but includes an interesting feature of the industry that has kept dog racing active in Florida:

Thousands of Greyhounds May Need Homes as Florida Bans Racing

"Florida’s tracks remained in part because of state laws that require them to continue racing in order to keep their lucrative gambling operations. In Florida, only existing “parimutuel” facilities like dog tracks and horse tracks could obtain licenses to operate card rooms and slots."

Dynamic Matching and Queueing Workshop July 5-6, 2022 Paris School of Economics

Dynamic Matching and Queueing Workshop July 5-6, 2022 Paris School of Economics

In Person & Zoom Event    Registration

July 5th:

12:00 PM (UTC+2): Lunch (Room R2-20)

2:00 PM (UTC+2): “Matching in Dynamic Environments” - Amin Saberi (Stanford)

3:00 PM (UTC+2): “Near-Optimal Policies for Dynamic Matching” - Itai Ashlagi (Stanford), Itai Gurvich (Northwestern) and Suleyman Kerimov (Stanford)

4:00 PM (UTC+2): Coffee Break

4:30 PM (UTC+2): “A Dynamic Estimation Approach for Centralized Matching Markets: Understanding Segregation in Day Care” - Olivier De Groot (TSE) and Minyoung Rho (UAB)

5:30 PM (UTC+2): “Choices and Outcomes in Assignment Mechanisms: The Allocation of Deceased Donor Kidneys” - Nikhil Agarwal (MIT), Charles Hogdson (Yale) and Paulo Somaini (Stanford)

July 6th:

2:00 PM (UTC+2): “You Can Lead a Horse to Water: Spatial Learning and Path Dependence in Consumer Search” - Charles Hodgson (Yale) and Greg Lewis (Amazon)

3:00 PM (UTC+2): “Online Matching in Sparse Random Graphs: Non-Asymptotic Performances of Greedy Algorithm” - Nathan Noiry (Télécom Paris), Flore Sentenac (CREST) and Vianney Perchet (CREST)

4:00 PM (UTC+2): Coffee Break

4:30 PM (UTC+2): “Constrained Majorization: Applications in Mechanism Design” - Afshin Nikzad (University of Southern California) / Online

5:30 PM (UTC+2): “Price Discovery in Waiting Lists: A Connection to Stochastic Gradient Descent ” - Itai Ashlagi (Stanford), Jacob Leshno (Chicago Booth), Pengyu Qian (Purdue University), and Amin Saberi (Stanford) / Online

6:30 PM (UTC+2): Social gathering

Organizers: Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia), Julien Combe (CREST, Polytechnique), Victor Hiller (Panthéon-Assas, LEMMA) and Olivier Tercieux (PSE)   

Paris School of Economics, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 PARIS

Indian weddings in New England: the hotel market

The Boston Globe reports: For hotels, a perfect match--Recession-hit hosts embrace Indian weddings.

"On a hot, sunny Saturday in early May, a raucous wedding procession of women in bright, shimmery saris and men in long embroidered kurtas and sunglasses danced through a hotel parking lot behind a van blaring bhangra beats. The groom brought up the rear on a dappled white horse.

"It was the first time the Marlborough Best Western had hosted a traditional Indian wedding and, in keeping with Indian culture, it was an elaborate, all-day affair, with 450 guests.

"Best Western is among the many hotels actively pursuing this lucrative market as they struggle to make up for last year’s recession-diminished revenues.

"The InterContinental Hotel, the Ritz-Carlton, the Taj Boston, and the Westin in Waltham have all hosted Indian wedding expos in the past year. Hyatt Hotels Corp. developed an Indian wedding webinar to educate staff about ceremonial customs, cuisine, even popular brands of alcohol.

"And India New England, a newspaper published in Waltham, has had so much demand from advertisers that it put out two wedding supplements instead of one last year and plans to do the same this year.

“Literally, this market is just exploding,’’ said publisher Upendra Mishra."

..."The weddings, [wedding planner and decorator Shobha Shastry] said, typically range from $50,000 to $150,000 and can go as high as $300,000.

"The average cost of a wedding in Massachusetts, by comparison, is closer to $30,000, according to the research company the Wedding Report Inc."

..."There are about 1,500 Indian weddings a year in the region, according to India New England — more than double the number 10 years ago."

Rules of the road for cars and bikes

In many places where cars and bikes share a road, they customarily (if not legally) follow different rules. In England, a trial program will allow bikes to travel the wrong way down some one-way streets: Cyclists will be given green light to ignore one-way signs.

"Cyclists will be permitted to ride the wrong way along one-way streets under a change intended to encourage more people to give up their cars or use them less.
The Government will announce today that cyclists will be permitted to ignore no-entry signs: a practice already followed by many, including David Cameron, the Conservative leader.
The Department for Transport is authorising a trial in the Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea, Mr Cameron’s home authority in West London, in which a small plate saying “Except cyclists” will be attached to poles carrying no-entry signs.
If the trial is successful, the department intends to extend the policy to the rest of Britain and permit thousands of one-way streets to become two-way for bikes. It believes that long diversions around one-way systems are a significant deterrent to new cyclists, who might be less confident about breaking the rules."

On this side of the pond, Brookline MA is trying something similar, although not on the roads that I ride to work: Right way or wrong way? Brookline tries out new bike lanes

Lynne Kiesling at KP has a nice post on whether cars and bikes should obey the same rules of the road: Roads and paths as common-pool resources, and the problem of governing them

The rules of the road are a relatively recent invention: 2009 marks the 100th anniversary of Boston’s first traffic regulations, as issued by the Board of Street Commissioners. Peter DeMarco of the Boston Globe reports A century ago, driving laws tamed Boston’s wild streets.

"Back then there were no street signs, no stop signs, no traffic lights, no double center lines, no traveling lanes, and no yield signs. Automobiles had to battle horse-drawn carriages and wagons, bicyclists, trolleys, and pedestrians for space on the road. And while we joke today about how infrequently we obey traffic laws in Massachusetts, a century ago, there were scarcely any laws to obey."

Of the new laws adopted in 1909 he says:"A number of the laws are still very much in use today. Boston got its first one-way streets, adopted a new rule requiring drivers to “signal if about to turn,’’ and began requiring drivers to pass on the left - all in 1909. Parking within 10 feet of a curb was prohibited, double parking was outlawed (well, at least on paper), and police, fire, and other emergency vehicles (including postal carriers and doctors) were given the right of way.
But the rules also show how little our state’s first motorists actually knew about driving, and how Boston streets were really a free-for-all. Drivers had to be told not to stop in the middle of the street, not to park on sidewalks, and not to drive in reverse. The regulations include basic diagrams, reprinted in newspapers for all to study, explaining how to properly make a right turn, a left turn, and a U-turn - revolutionary stuff in 1909, when license exams consisted of a paltry 12 questions."
...
"Most cars were rudimentary, lacking not only turn signals, brake lights, and treaded tires, but also speedometers, windshields (thus the need for driving goggles), roofs, shock absorbers, power steering, and heat (necessitating leather driving coats and gloves). Steam-engine cars could explode, while hand-crank starter rods could spin back and break your arm. To apply brakes, you pulled hard on a lever. Seat belts, alas, didn’t exist."

Update: a column in the London Times suggests that bike riders will have to become more law abiding if London is to become more like Amsterdam, with high volume bike traffic: Time’s up, bike bandits

Markets for hunting

In New England, battles about repugnant transactions often pit social liberals against social conservatives, with the liberals trying to make some transaction possible that the conservatives believe should be banned, as in debates about Same sex marriage in Iowa, and New England.

But there are other kinds of transactions that liberals find repugant and conservatives defend. One of these concerns buying and selling permission to shoot captive game in game farms: Slaughter to some, game to others: Hunting preserves offer captive animals

"For the privilege of killing two boars, Cabral's father and grandfather paid $1,200. By their reckoning, that gets them enough bacon, pork chops, and ham to last their families nearly a year.
"I see it like I'm going grocery shopping," said Russell Mulgrew, Cabral's grandfather.
Not everyone shares that view. Opponents, including some hunters, say captive hunting is anything but sporting for one simple reason: There is no fair chase when the animal has no hope of escape.
As commercial interest grows in Maine to expand these preserves and opposition ratchets up across the country, a deep-seated ethical debate over the ranches is being pushed into the public eye.
"It's morally and ethically wrong to enclose animals and charge a fee to kill them. It's a theme park environment where the prize is a dead animal," said Robert Fisk Jr., president and director of Maine Friends of Animals.
New England's captive parks attract hundreds of hunters each year. In Maine, 388 animals were killed in 2005, although that fell to 262 by 2007. The parks rarely make headlines unless it's about someone notable - such as Massachusetts' former governor William F. Weld boasting about shooting a wild boar in 1991 but initially failing to say that it was in a New Hampshire game park.
Vermont banned new game preserves late last year, largely over concerns about disease, especially chronic wasting disease, a contagious, fatal neurological illness among deer. An effort to outlaw seven existing shooting ranches in Maine for ethical reasons, which was supported by Fisk's group, failed last month. Two other Maine bills are pending: one to permit a new game preserve and the second to expand the variety of animals at others. New Hampshire has two game parks, but no new ones are allowed.
Big-game shooting preserves are prohibited in Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Still, it is estimated that there are more than 1,000 game ranches in at least 28 states, according to the Humane Society of the United States, which has an ongoing campaign to end captive hunting. Debates over the ranches have surfaced from New York to North Dakota in recent years."

In England, a legal ban on hunting foxes with dogs (the whole picturesque business, but no fun for the fox) seems to be falling into disuse:

Death knell for hunting ban as police abandon monitoring operations:
"Police forces are to stop monitoring hunts in a change of policy that sounds the death knell for the hunting ban, The Times has learnt."
...
"Richard Brunstrom, Chief Constable of North Wales and the Acpo spokesman on rural affairs, said: “Hunting is definitely not a policing priority. It is not illegal to wear a red coat and ride a horse in a public place.” The new guidance undermines one of the most controversial pieces of legislation introduced by the Labour Government, which took up 700 hours of parliamentary time. Since the Hunting Act came into force in 2004, there have been eight prosecutions, of which only three have been successful, with one pending. Hunting has thrived. Mr Brunstrom said that police had to chose which areas of law enforcement to devote scarce resources to. He said: “If you look at hunting, the penalties do not include a prison sentence for offenders. This puts the Hunting Act to the lower rather than the higher end of offences. Parliament had the chance to include imprisonment as a sentence but did not do so.” "
...
"A spokesman for the League Against Cruel Sport said: “We fought for 80 years for the hunting ban and, while we accept it is not a high priority for police, a ban was the will of Parliament and is the will of the people and we are going to press for more prosecution cases to be brought.” "

See also The hunt ban: a bad law with nowhere to run

Could/should eating rabbits become repugnant?

We see lots of old repugnancies fading away (such as bans on same sex marriage), but new ones form from time to time too (like the ban on eating horse meat in California, which went into effect in 1998). Now Whole Foods is selling rabbit meat, and demonstrators are demonstrating their repugnance. The Atlantic has the story:
Are Rabbits Pets or Meat? : "Some people are incensed that Whole Foods is selling rabbit meat, and the debate they're caught up in reveals the contradictions in how we relate to different creatures in different ways. "

"No one is talking about selling kittens and puppies at the meat counter, but for the group of bunny-loving pet owners protesting near the Whole Foods in Union Square, they might as well be. Fifty or so women and men of all ages carry signs, pass out flyers and pamphlets, and try to spread their message to passing Manhattanites. “Boycott Whole Foods,” they say, “because they’re killing rabbits.”

Earlier this year, after developing its own welfare standards, Whole Foods launched a rabbit-meat pilot program across several North American regions that involves selling whole rabbit carcasses. In response, rabbit-protection activists organized a day of action this past weekend outside of more than 40 stores across the country. 

“Remember,” explains one website dedicated to this day, “Whole Foods says they are carrying rabbit meat because of customer demand. We need to show that enough customers demand that Whole Foods NOT carry rabbit meat.”

...

“God, that’s disgusting!” a woman says as she walks by, accepting a pamphlet from one of the protesters. “Rabbit is delicious,” says another, waving away the flyer. For every person who stops to the sign the petition, there are plenty more who don’t care or can’t be bothered."

HT: Muriel Niederle

Experiments on school choice: a survey by Hakimov and Kübler

Hakimov, R., Kübler, D. Experiments on centralized school choice and college admissions: a survey. Exp Econ (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10683-020-09667-7

Abstract: The paper surveys the experimental literature on centralized matching markets, covering school choice and college admissions models. In the school choice model, one side of the market (schools) is not strategic, and rules (priorities) guide the acceptance decisions. The model covers applications such as school choice programs, centralized university admissions in many countries, and the centralized assignment of teachers to schools. In the college admissions model, both sides of the market are strategic. It applies to college and university admissions in countries where universities can select students, and centralized labor markets such as the assignment of doctors to hospitals. The survey discusses, among other things, the comparison of various centralized mechanisms, the optimality of participants’ strategies, learning by applicants and their behavioral biases, as well as the role of communication, information, and advice. The main experimental findings considered in the survey concern truth-telling and strategic manipulations by the agents, as well as the stability and efficiency of the matching outcome.

From the Conclusions:

"The purpose and style of experiments on school choice and college admissions has changed over time. Many of the early experiments were tests of the theory. Horse races between different school choice mechanisms were conducted. Recently, many studies have dealt with systematic biases in behavior that matter in matching markets, such as bounded rationality, biased self-assessments, etc. Moreover, recent work also focuses on the question of how the exact implementation of a mechanism, e.g., static versus dynamic, with or without advice, afects market outcomes. Thus, the matching literature has started to establish behavioral regularities that can be of interest for policy makers involved in market design and behavioral theorists."

Animal rights and food production in CA--Proposition 2

Animal rights, and what kinds of food can be sold, continue to be an issue in California (and not just in connection with the 1998 referendum banning the sale of horse meat). Here are two stories about Proposition 2, on this year's ballot:
A California Ballot Measure Offers Rights for Farm Animals , and
The Barnyard Strategist

"Proposition 2, co-sponsored by the Humane Society and Farm Sanctuary, the biggest farm-animal-rights group in the United States, focuses on what are considered the worst animal-confinement systems in factory farms. The ballot initiative, which voters will decide on Nov. 4, requires that by 2015 farm animals be able to stand up, lie down, turn around and fully extend their limbs. In effect that translates into a ban on the two-foot-wide crates that tightly confine pregnant pigs and calves raised for veal — a space so small that they can’t turn around. And it would eliminate so-called battery cages where four or more hens share a space about the size of a file drawer."

Some years ago, New Zealand's Animal Welfare Act of 1999 gave considerable deference to the rights of "Non-Human Hominids," such as chimps and other 'great apes'. I recall Ted Bergstrom remarking at the time that there weren't many chimps in New Zealand, and that New Zealanders could have made more of a statement by giving rights to sheep. It looks like Californians are going to have an option like that at the polls next week.

More on eating horse meat (and saving horses)

Eat ponies to save them - says charity

"It maybe be controversial but an animal group is the latest to endorse the Princess Royal's suggestion of eating ponies in a bid to save their species..
The Dartmoor Hill Pony Association (DHPA) says the best way to save herds on the ancient moorland is by creating a "market" for them by eating them.
It follows comments by Princess Anne endorsing eating horses to improve their welfare.
...
"Founder of the DHPA, Charlotte Faulkner believes herders will only continue to keep the animals if there is a "sustainable market" for them.
In a letter proposing the idea sent to South West Equine Protection (SWEP), she said: "I am writing to ask whether SWEP would consider giving measured support to this understandably upsetting subject, which as pony lovers we find so hard to accept."

HT: Shengwu Li

David Warsh on Lloyd Shapley and his colleagues

After a head feint towards another topic, David Warsh writes about Lloyd Shapley and his colleagues David Gale, Herb Scarf, and Martin Shubik.

"The book I yearn to read some day is a deep examination about the way that psychology and strategic behavior came to economics in the twentieth century, in the guise of game theory. So far its leading characters pop up as individuals, either the subjects of biographies (John von Neumann in books by Steve Heims  and Norman Macrae) or recipients of Nobel Prizes – John Nash eighteen years ago (not long thereafter the subject of Sylvia Nasar’s A Beautiful Mind), and now Lloyd Shapley. If you had gotten up early yesterday morning, you could have seen, streaming live from Stockholm, via the Internet, the 89-year-old Shapley, an old man grasping a sheaf of notes, attempting to deliver a stripped-down talk about one aspect of his work, intermittently puzzled and confident, until a wave of applause relieved him of the need to persevere.

Against long odds, Shapley won the game that senior players sometimes call “Beat the Reaper.” Considering that he and Nash met as young men in the extraordinary hothouse that was the Princeton University Department of Mathematics in the days soon after World War II he is fortunate indeed. In a setting dominated by the polymath von Neumann, he and Nash quickly shouldered aside the founding father and divided up among themselves and their friends the competing programs that game theorists have pursued ever since.

You have to admire the alacrity with which the committee of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences acted, pairing Shapley, of the University of California at Los Angeles, with the vigorous, young Alvin Roth, who just left Harvard for Stanford University (a stripling at 60.) They did much the same in 1996, with William Vickrey, 82, of Columbia University; and, in 2007, with Leo Hurwicz, 90 of the University of Minnesota, pairing them in each case with much younger men. In Hurwicz’s case they beat the Reaper by less than a year; Vickrey died a few days after learning of his award, his heart burst from the renewed excitement of the chase. "

...

"The problem with the prizes is that they obscure the networks that have led to them, with countless others left out. Characteristically, the last slide of Roth’s lecture yesterday contained the photographs of fifteen or twenty collaborators who helped turn market design into one of the most exciting fields in economics: surgeons, medical administrators, educators, junior colleagues.  Such a slide, had it been prepared to accompany Shapley’s lecture, would have included a very different dozen or two collaborators, beginning with the mathematician’s famous father, the Harvard astronomer Harlow Shapley, who was a story in his own right, having successfully described in 1918 the size of the Milky Way galaxy and determined our sun’s position in it, only then to fight and lose a lifelong battle with Edwin Hubble about what lay beyond the boundaries of our galactic home (nothing, Shapley said). Three other contemporaries whom the younger Shapley met first atPrinceton, back in the day, would stand out.

There would be David Gale, who died in 2008. at 86, Shapley’s mathematician collaborator on the 1962 paper “College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage,” which was the beginning of the skein of work for which this year’s prize was given.  Had he lived a little longer, Gale might well have shared in the award. But there seemed nothing unfulfilled about Gale’s life, which was described inthis excellent article by the University of California at Berkeley (where he taught for forty years), as a passionate father, puzzle-monger, avid skier, tennis player, traveler and jazz aficionado. (He kept an office in the Ecole Polytechnique inParis as well.)

Then there is Herbert Scarf, 82, ofYale University, Shapley’s co-author on a key paper in 1974, “On Cores and Indivisibility.”  Scarf’s contribution to the study of traditional one-sided markets, which is the way the process of kidney exchange is understood, was discussed at some length in the long citation that accompanied the Nobel award. Unexamined, however, was Scarf’s forty-year quest to achieve a satisfying mathematical description of economies in which increasing returns, meaning falling costs, play a prominent role. Such increasing returns, or economies of scale, exist everywhere in the modern world, at least up to a point. Yet a satisfying framework for examining them so far had eluded mathematical economists, including Scarf.  The editor of his collected papers quotes a Chinese poem in this connection: “An old war-horse may be stabled, yet still it longs to gallop a thousand miles; and a noble-hearted man, though advanced in years, never abandons his proud aspirations.”

Finally there is Martin Shubik, 86.  Shubik, too, collaborated with Shapley often over the years; their 1971 paper on the “assignment game” was a key step in the  clear statement of the line of work for which the prize was given. “He was a superb mathematician, and I had a good economic intuition,” Shubik says of Shapley; “together we made a very good mathematical economist.” But Shubik has work of which he is more proud.  His 1959 article, “Edgeworth Market Games,” was the first to relate a truly economic concept (the contract curve) to a game-theoretic concept (the core),according to Eric Gordon, and so formed a bridge which game theorists have been crossing ever since.  By the time he and Shapley stated the connection formally ten years later, in “On Strategic Market Games,” Shubik’s future was assured.  It was Shubik who apparently campaigned successfully for Shapley for this year’s prize."