I'll post market design related news and items about repugnant markets. See also my Stanford profile. I have a general-interest book on market design: Who Gets What--and Why The subtitle is "The new economics of matchmaking and market design."
Our communications folk were out in full force for Al Roth’s lecture on Wednesday and have already posted some nice photos from the event and uploaded a video of the lecture to YouTube. "
As part of the Summer School on Matching and Market Design, I'll be delivering the Arrow Lecture at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem today. It's open to the public:
Here are all the 2014 Edelman Award Presentations, including the one my colleagues and I gave on kidney exchange, on March 31. Ours is the second from the top (the winning entry is first), and to see the video you have to scroll to the bottom of the description or our lecture (reproduced below) and click on "View Presentation." (I couldn't figure out how to embed it here.)
The video of our presentation (35 minutes) is more elaborate than most of the lectures I've done, since it includes some video footage. I joined Josh Morrison of the Alliance for Paired Donation and Itai Ashlagi of MIT in making the presentation. Mike Rees spoke in some of the videos. Ross Anderson and David Gamarnik joined us to answer questions, and Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver joined for the celebratory dinner later in the day. (For our efforts, we are all 2014 Edelman Laureates.)
Alliance for Paired Donation with Boston College, Stanford University and MIT: Kidney Exchange
Many end-stage renal disease sufferers who require a kidney transplant to prolong their lives have relatives or associates who have volunteered to donate a kidney to them, but whose kidney is incompatible with their intended recipient. This incompatibility can be sometimes overcome by exchanging kidneys with another incompatible donor pair. Such kidney exchanges have emerged as a standard mode of kidney transplantation in the United States. The Alliance for Paired Donation (APD) developed and implemented an innovative operations research based methodology of non-simultaneous extended altruistic donor (NEAD) chains, which, by allowing a previously binding constraint (of simultaneity) to be relaxed, allowed better optimized matching of potential donors to patients, which greatly increases the number of possible transplants. Since 2006, the APD has saved more than 220 lives through its kidney exchange program, with more than 75% of these achieved through long non-simultaneous chains. The technology and methods pioneered by APD have been adopted by other transplant exchanges, resulting in thousands of lives already saved, with the promise of increasing impact in coming years. The percentage of transplants from non-simultaneous chains has already reached more than 6% of the total number of transplants from live donors (including directed living donors) in the last year. We describe the long-term optimization and market design research that supports this innovation. We also describe how the team of physicians and operations researchers worked to overcome the skepticism and resistance of the medical community to the NEAD innovation.
Here (and below) is the video of the public lecture I gave in October, and an accompanying interview, as part of the Centennial celebration at the University of Illinois College of Business, where I had my first academic job in 1974.
Here's a video of the lecture I gave on Columbia on November 8, in honor and in memory of Ken Arrow. My title was "Market Design in Large Worlds: The Example of Kidney Exchange."
My discussants were Parag Pathak and Joe Stiglitz, and you can see them too.
I used slides (and so did Parag), but they don't seem to have made it fully onstage in the video. But the audio is good, and you can see how good looking we all are...
The theme of my talk is that one big lesson of market design is that participants have big strategy sets, and this has implications for, among other things, how marketplaces need to be adaptively maintained. One of Parag's examples in his discussion is how more NYC schools have begun to screen students since more effective choice was introduced, and how this may sometimes work against the goals that increased choice was intended to achieve (so that the NYCDOE is working to reduce screening by schools...).
The six NAS research briefings are available at NASonline.org at the link for the 151st annual meeting, on (one, long) video: six Research Briefings by new NAS members
They are all worth listening to. (You have to scroll down to get to the Research Briefings.)
My lecture starts at 47:30 (and you can get there directly by clicking on the link "Market Design: The Economist as Engineer. Alvin E. Roth" It's 20 minutes (it was supposed to be 15, with 5 minutes for questions, but I wasn't the worst offender...).
Not shown in the rush is the final slide from my Nobel lecture, about market design being a team sport:
Below is a video of my 40 minute talk at Berkeley on Monday, on Kidney Exchange: Within and Across Borders, at the final workshop on Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design, at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath). (But we warned or reassured, this isn't a mathematical lecture...)
Here's a video of a public lecture followed by a discussion (about half an hour each) about my book Who Gets What and Why, which just came out in German. The location of the lecture was once an East German government building where the head of state had his office, and is now a business school, the European School for Management and Technology. I was introduced by Gerhard Caspar, the head of the American Academy in Berlin and former president of Stanford. (My talk begins about minute 11:30 of the video, the discussion begins about minute 41, with Christoph von Marschall, Managing Editor of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, which touches on market designers in Germany, the legal barriers to kidney exchange there, and refugee resettlement.)
This was a Nobel year unlike any in recent memory, since the Covid pandemic prevented the festivities from being held in Stockholm as they usually are. The Nobel lectures by Milgrom and Wilson were recorded at Stanford, and they received their medals from the Swedish consul in a private ceremony.
"It was the first to be awarded outdoors and the first outside of Stockholm.
It was the first economics prize awarded to a student (Paul) with his disseration adviser (Bob).
It was the first awarded jointly to two people living across the street from one another.
Paul became the first to give TWO Nobel prize lectures, having already lectured on behalf of Vickrey in 1996.
The backyard ceremony was held behind a residence that had housed two economics laureates (Paul Milgrom & Joe Stiglitz), plus 3-time SuperBowl winning coach Bill Walsh!
"Also unusual is that, by focusing on Paul's auction contributions, the Nobel Committee had left unmentioned ten of Paul's twelve most highly cited publications."
"there are many cases where the “invisible hand” does not work. Prof. Wilson’s analysis of the winner’s curse in common-value auctions is a prominent example. “Sometimes the invisible hand needs a bit of help, and that’s where market design comes in – for instance, making sure bidders can update their value estimates during the bidding process itself”
*************
Here (live streamed today on Dec. 16) is an event originating in Vienna, including a video interview in which I talk to Ben Greiner. (It starts at 6pm CET, i.e. 9am PST):
"This event is being organized by the WU Department of Economics
"Nobel Prizes are awarded every year in December, on the anniversary of Alfred Nobel’s death. Nobel laureates are celebrated in the media, but hardly anyone knows anything about the research that goes on behind the scenes. We plan to change that. In cooperation with experts, we will be introducing the work of the winners of this year’s Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in terms that even laypeople can understand. We will analyze the innovative power of the work and discuss its significance and potential applications in practice.
Welcoming words: Tatjana Oppitz, Vice-Rector for Infrastructure and Digitalization
Discussion: Maarten Janssen, Professor of Economics, University of Vienna
Maarten Janssen is Professor of Microeconomics at the University of Vienna. Among many others, his research interests are in the fields of game theory, industrial organization and competition policy, and in particular auctions. He is particularly interested in the implications of information asymmetries in markets and market design.
Stefan Felder, Rundfunk und Telekom Regulierungs-GmbH: RTR
Stefan Felder studied at Technical University and University of Economics and Business in Vienna. He worked in the telecommunications industry and at the University of Vienna. As of 1998, he has been a member of the Austrian Regulatory Authority for Broadcasting and Telecommunications (RTR). He is an expert on spectrum auctions, competition analysis, and mobile communications. He is Head of Spectrum and Mobile Market at RTR.
Moderation: Maria Marchenko, WU
Maria Marchenko is an Assistant Professor at the WU Department of Economics. Her research lies in the fields of applied and theoretical econometrics using state-of the art techniques and theoretical concepts with applications to networks and labor market.
Video interview: Alvin E. Roth, Winner of the Nobel Prize 2012; Professor of Economics, Stanford University
Alvin E. Roth is Professor of Economics at Stanford University. In 2012, he won the Nobel Prize in Economic jointly with Lloyd Shapley “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.’’
Below you can listen to a podcast of my lecture in honor of Michio Morishima at the LSE last Thursday. (Update: I've also added links to video below.)
I showed slides in my lecture, but I think you can actually follow the talk without them. The introduction is by Professor Nava Ashraf. My talk ends at minute 60, and then you can hear a half hour of questions and answers, many raised by my discussion of repugnant transactions.
******************
Update:
Here are two videos of the event; the first mostly follows me and not the slides, the second is audio plus slides.
Is metaphor a verb? If so, a number of writers have taken Esther Duflo's recent Ely Lecture, "The Economist as Plumber,*" as an invitation to metaphor. The essays below add to the stock of metaphorical economists, in which you can find economists as artisans and craftspeople, weather forecasters, doctors and medical scientists, entrepreneurs, and of course as dentists, architects, engineers and now plumbers.
* and here's the video of Esther's Ely Lecture AEA Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Economist as Plumber: Large Scale Experiments to Inform the Details of Policy Making Esther Duflo, introduced by Alvin E. Roth View Webcast
***********
A video of my April 13 lecture on Controversial Markets is now available at the Zurich Center for Market Design. (The talk proper is about an hour, and then includes some Q&A about compensation for donors, among other things, starting at around minute 56.)
Columbia University Press posts a "video of Paul Milgrom's 2014 Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture that inspired Discovering Prices: Auction Design in Markets with Complex Constraints. Paul Milgrom discusses how prices can guide decentralized resource allocations in environments with non-convexities. His work on auctions led the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences to award him and Robert Wilson the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for improvement to auction theory and invention of new auction formats."
One hour of market design (45 minutes of lecture, 15 of very good questions and my attempts to answer them...)
"Published on May 13, 2013
Stanford University Professor and 2012 Nobel Laureate Al Roth speaks on his prize-winning research and ground-breaking successes with exchange markets and his life-saving favorite, kidney exchanges.
Dr. Roth was the keynote speaker for the GSB Spring Reunions on May 3, 2013. He was introduced by Dean Garth Saloner.
Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University.
Posts
