Worldwide university rankings, compared to GNP

Rankings have lots of problems, but here is an ambitious attempt to look at universities all around the world.

"The Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU) was first published in June 2003 by the Center for World-Class Universities and the Institute of Higher Education of Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China, and then updated on an annual basis. ARWU uses six objective indicators to rank world universities, including the number of alumni and staff winning Nobel Prizes and Fields Medals, number of highly cited researchers selected by Thomson Scientific, number of articles published in journals of Nature and Science, number of articles indexed in Science Citation Index - Expanded and Social Sciences Citation Index, and per capita performance with respect to the size of an institution. More than 1000 universities are actually ranked by ARWU every year and the best 500 are published on the web. "

Here are the 2009 rankings.
Two of the top ten are from England (#4 Cambridge and #10 Oxford), the rest are in the U.S. The difference in the "overall score" between #2 and #10 is smaller than the difference between #1 and #2, but this may just have to do with how the scales are normalized. The highest ranked university from a country other than the U.S. or England is University of Tokyo, at #20.

Here is a table of Percentage Distribution of Top Universities by Country with Their Share of Global Population and GDP
Only 15 countries have universities ranked in the top 100, and an additional 24 countries have at least one university ranked in the top 500. The top producers of universities are producing them disproportionately to their share of world GDP or population, for example the U.S. has 55.0% of the top 100 universities, and 30.3% of the top 500, but only 23.6% of GDP and 4.5% of population. (Israel is a big outlier, with 1.0% of the top 100 and 1.4% (i.e. 7 universities ) of the top 500, from an economy with 0.3% of world GDP and 0.1% of population.
I have taught at the universities ranked #1, 25, and 50, and studied at #2 and 7. Based on this limited and skewed sample, and on other universities I know well, I can see that both wealth and the quality of the students are big components of university quality, not always perfectly correlated. (What makes the #1 university so extraordinary is the extent to which it succeeds in assembling so much of both in the same place, and what makes the Israeli universities so remarkable is certainly not their wealth.)

Based on the quality of students from various countries who we see in the U.S., I would guess that, if student quality were the main thing being measured, both Turkey and Iran (each with one university in the #400-500 range) are not getting the credit they deserve. (Many of our students from those places had their undergraduate education at home, and apparently got it at pretty good places; even those who come to the U.S. for their undergraduate education are obviously being drawn from pools of students for whom education is a priority.)
Similarly, there may also be countries where wealth rather than student quality is doing most of the work in putting one of their universities into the top 500, and talented and committed students there might be better advised to study overseas if they can. I'm thinking of Saudia Arabia, with one university in the 400-500 range. A number of Gulf countries have been investing in universities, and it will be interesting to see how well they succeed, and how that changes them if they do.

(A very interesting paper by my colleague Eric Chaney looks at the history of scientific productivity in the Muslim world, and gives some food for thought about what aspects of the general culture might promote vibrant universities: "Tolerance, Religious Competition and the Rise and Fall of Muslim Science")

Match Up 2017: April 20-21 at Microsoft Research New England

MATCH-UP 2017, the fourth workshop in the series of interdisciplinary and international workshops on matching under preferences, will take place April 20-21, 2017.

Venue:Microsoft Research New England Cambridge, MA 02142

	DAY 1
8:00 A.M.	Breakfast
8.45 A.M.	Invited Talk 1 —Estelle Cantillon, Université libre de Bruxelles The efficiency – stability tradeoff in school choice: Lessons for market design Abstract: A well-known result for the school choice problem is that ex-post efficiency and stability may not be compatible. In the field, that trade-off is sometimes small, sometimes big.  This talk will summarize existing and new results on the drivers of this trade-off and derive the implications for the design of priorities and tie-breaking rules.
9.30 A.M.	Session 1
10.30 A.M.	Break
10.50 A.M.	Session 2
12.30 P.M.	Lunch
1:00 P.M.	Outlook Talk 1 – Al Roth, Stanford Frontiers of Kidney Exchange Abstract: Kidney exchange is different from many market design efforts I’ve been involved in, because it affects the everyday conduct of transplant centers, so we’re constantly adapting to their big strategy sets…(in contrast to e.g. annual labor markets or school choice which don’t affect the daily conduct of residency programs and schools …)The early design challenges in kidney exchange mostly involved dealing with congestion (and the solutions involved long chains, standard acquisition charges, and attempts to better elicit surgeons’ preferences over kidneys).The current challenges to kidney exchange involve creating more thickness in the markets, and I’ll touch on several new initiatives: 1. Frequent flier programs to encourage transplant centers to enroll more of their easy to match pairs; 2. Global kidney exchange; 3. Information deserts: populations of Americans who don’t get transplants; 4. Deceased donor initiated chains ; a. Increasing deceased donation: military share, priority in Israel
2:00 P.M.	Session 3
3.40 P.M.	Break
4:00 P.M.	Session 4
5:00 P.M.	Invited Talk 2 – Aaron Roth, UPENN Approximately Stable, School Optimal, and Student-Truthful Many-to-One Matchings (via Differential Privacy) Abstract: In this talk, we will walk through a case study of how techniques developed to design “stable” algorithms can be brought to bear to design asymptotically dominant strategy truthful mechanisms in large markets, without the need to make any assumptions about the structure of individual preferences. Specifically, we will consider the many-to-one matching problem, and see a mechanism for computing school optimal stable matchings, that makes truthful reporting an approximately dominant strategy for the student side of the market. The approximation parameter becomes perfect at a polynomial rate as the number of students grows large, and the analysis holds even for worst-case preferences for both students and schools. Joint work with: Sampath Kannan, Jamie Morgenstern, and Zhiwei Steven Wu.
5.45 P.M.	Break
6:00 P.M.	Poster Lightning Talks
6.30 P.M.	Reception and Poster Session
8:00 P.M.	END
	DAY 2
8:00 A.M.	Breakfast
8.45 A.M.	Invited Talk 3 — Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford Matching under preferences: beyond the two-sided case Abstract: I will present an overview of several recent papers showing that most of the key results of matching theory generalize naturally to a much richer setting: trading networks. These networks do not need to be two-sided, and agents do not have to be grouped into classes (“firms”, “workers”, and so on). What is essential for the generalization is that the bilateral contracts representing relationships in the network have a direction (e.g., one agent is the seller and the other is the buyer), and that agents’ preferences satisfy a suitably adapted substitutability notion. For this setting, for the cases of discrete and continuous sets of possible contracts, I will discuss the existence of stable outcomes, the lattice structure of the sets of stable outcomes, the relationship between various solution concepts (stability, core, competitive equilibrium, etc.), and other results familiar from the literature on two-sided markets.
9.30 A.M.	Session 5
10.30 A.M.	Break
10.50 A.M.	Session 6
12.30 P.M.	Lunch
1:00 P.M.	Lunch w/Outlook Talk 2 — David Manlove, University of Glasgow Selected Algorithmic Open Problems in Matching Under Preferences Abstract: The research community working on matching problems involving preferences has grown in recent years, but even so, plenty of interesting open problems still exist, many with large-scale practical applications.  In this talk I will outline some of these open problems that are of an algorithmic flavour, thus giving an outlook on some of the research challenges in matching under preferences that the computer science community might seek to tackle over the next decade.
2:00 P.M.	Session 7
	Making it Safe to Use Centralized Markets: Epsilon - Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design Speakers: Ben Roth and Ran Shorrer Abstract: A critical, yet under-appreciated feature of market design is that centralized markets operate within a broader context; often market designers cannot force participants to join a centralized market. Well-designed centralized markets must induce participants to join voluntarily, in spite of pre-existing decentralized institutions they may already be using. We take the view that centralizing a market is akin to designing a mechanism to which people may voluntarily sign away their decision rights. We study the ways in which market designers can provide robust incentives that guarantee agents will participate in a centralized market. Our first result is negative and derives from adverse selection concerns. Near any game with at least one pure strategy equilibrium, we prove there is another game in which no mechanism can eliminate the equilibrium of the original game. In light of this result we offer a new desideratum for mechanism and market design, which we term epsilon-dominant individual rationality. After noting its robustness, we establish two positive results about centralizing large markets. The first offers a novel justification for stable matching mechanisms and an insight to guide their design to achieve epsilon-dominant individual rationality. Our second result demonstrates that in large games, any mechanism with the property that every player wants to use it conditional on sufficiently many others using it as well can be modified to satisfy epsilon-dominant individual rationality while preserving its behavior conditional on sufficient participation. The modification relies on a class of mechanisms we refer to as random threshold mechanisms and resembles insights from the differential privacy literature.
3.40 P.M.	Break
4:00 P.M.	Session 8
5.20 P.M.	Break
5.30 P.M.	Invited Talk 4 — Marek Pycia, UCLA Invariance and Matching Market Outcomes Abstract: The empirical studies of school choice provide evidence that standard measures of admission outcomes are the same for many Pareto efficient mechanisms that determine the market allocation based on ordinal rankings of individual outcomes. The paper shows that two factors drive this intriguing puzzle: market size and the invariance properties of the measures for which the regularity has been documented. In addition, the talk will explore the consequences of these findings: the usefulness of non-invariant outcome measures and of mechanisms that elicit preference intensities.
6.15 P.M.	Closing Remarks
6.30 P.M.	END

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

The discussion of whether there should be incentives for organ (particularly kidney) donation remains heated. But there seems to be a growing consensus that removing financial disincentives is important, ethical, and do-able. Here's a paper that I presume will be published jointly with the one in my previous post.

Living and Deceased Organ Donation Should Be Financially Neutral Acts
F. L. Delmonico, D. Martin, B. Domínguez-Gil, E. Muller, V. Jha, A. Levin, G. M. Danovitch andA. M. Capron
Article first published online: 31 MAR 2015
DOI: 10.1111/ajt.13232

"Introduction: The supply of organs—particularly kidneys—donated by living and deceased donors falls short of the number of patients added annually to transplant waiting lists in the United States. To remedy this problem, a number of prominent physicians, ethicists, economists and others have mounted a campaign to suspend the prohibitions in the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984  (NOTA) on the buying and selling of organs. The argument that providing financial benefits would incentivize enough people to part with a kidney (or a portion of a liver) to clear the waiting lists is flawed. This commentary marshals arguments against the claim that the shortage of donor organs would best be overcome by providing financial incentives for donation. We can increase the number of organs available for transplantation by removing all financial disincentives that deter unpaid living or deceased kidney donation. These disincentives include a range of burdens, such as the costs of travel and lodging for medical evaluation and surgery, lost wages, and the expense of dependent care during the period of organ removal and recuperation. Organ donation should remain an act that is financially neutral for donors, neither imposing financial burdens nor enriching them monetarily.
...
Pilot Experiments of Financial Incentives Are Fundamentally Wrong
"Proponents of financial incentives claim to be merely seeking pilot programs to test their proposals [2, 4]. However, an experiment that abandons a moral principle—in this case, the principle that the human body as such should not be treated as an object of commerce—cannot preserve that principle. There is no reason to perform the experiment unless the result can affect subsequent decisions; thus, conducting an experiment with organ payments only makes sense if policymakers are willing to suspend the prohibition on paying for organs as a permanent matter.

"Suspending the prohibition on organ sales for a certain period so a trial can be conducted would make reinstatement of the prohibition difficult to accomplish. Assuming that any trial would need to be conducted for a number of years to provide reliable information, the basic attitude of the population toward donation would be reshaped during the trial period towards an expectation of financial rewards and hence commercialized “donation.” If as a consequence, paying donors crowds out altruistic donation [10], such effects would likely persist after the pilot trial [11]. Moreover, if the benefits offered do not produce enough organs, the proponents are unlikely to abandon their efforts but will rather lobby to increase the value of the incentive and try again. Taking on the risks involved in such experiments seems difficult to defend, since the donation rates in countries that have prohibited payment exceed those in countries where payment is legal or tolerated. The latest confirmation of the deleterious effect of payment comes from the marked rise in living related and deceased donation in Israel following the enactment in 2008 of a law ending the practice of paying for Israelis to go to countries where they could get transplants with purchased kidneys [12].

"If pilot experiments of payments to organ donors are conducted in the United States, it would foster the resumption of programs of financial “gratuities” in the Philippines, India, Pakistan and Egypt where “the intersection of a high poverty level (which translates to a large number of individuals susceptible to exploitation) and a high corruption index (which translates to a high likelihood that exploitation of the vulnerable would occur)” [13].

"Finally, the advocates have never explained the details of such experiments—their length, the jurisdictions that would be involved, the comparator (historical data vs. an active “control” group in the same or another jurisdiction that would still be subject to existing law), or the metrics by which the results would be evaluated.

Removal of Disincentives to Donation Should Be a Priority
"The energies directed to the debate about financial incentives would be better utilized in finding ways to remove barriers to organ donation, in particular financial disincentives. For example, it has been estimated that living donors in the United States may incur on average $6000 or more in costs for travel expenses and lost wages [14]. During the recent recession, the rate of living kidney donations decreased in the United States because some potential donors could not afford to bear such expenses [15] and were either unaware of, or did not meet the requirements for, programs that (due to limited funding) cover some of but not all of donors' financial costs and losses [14].

"The removal of financial disincentives is not only ethically preferable but is also recognized as legitimate by the WHO Guiding Principles [16], other international standards [17, 18] and the laws in many countries [19], which differentiate between paying money for an organ as such and reimbursing donors for the expenses and financial losses they bear as a consequence of their gift. The costs of the potential donor's care from predonation screening to postoperative recovery, lost wages and the costs of care for those dependent upon the donor should be borne by whichever entity is paying for the transplant procedure (private insurance, Medicare, Medicaid, etc.). The payments may be made directly from that entity or through the transplant program but in no case should they come directly from the organ recipient. Financial provision should also be made for the maintenance of long-term follow up and treatment of any conditions related to the nephrectomy or partial hepatectomy, including any costs not covered by the donor's medical insurance. The aim should be to provide coverage to ensure the donor does not suffer an economic loss from medical complications.

"The Live Donor Community of Practice (LDCOP) of the American Society of Transplantation (AST) has recognized the need to identify effective strategies to improve access to LDKT/LKD and improve LKD education and evaluation processes. The LDCOP has suggested that “Expansion of the National Living Donor Assistance Center (NLDAC) is likely to have the most immediate and substantial impact on attenuating financial disparities in LKD” [20].

"Thus, if a donor's medical insurance does not provide complete coverage of costs related to the donation procedure, the additional insurance could be administered by the existing NLDAC and provided by the entity that is paying for the transplant procedure [21]. This can be done without creating a financial incentive of the sort that would arise were donors given general medical insurance that they would otherwise lack. We recognize that NLDAC does not currently provide for this donor insurance; so we have requested that a Task Force be convened by HHS Secretary Burwell to develop pilot programs for removing these financial obstacles to organ donation [22]. Complications related to the donor nephrectomy or partial hepatectomy are not difficult to identify. They include for example perioperative infections (wound, urinary tract, or pneumonia), an extremity deep vein thrombosis, depression in the weeks following the donation and conditions of later onset which treating physicians may attribute to the donor surgery, such as an intestinal obstruction. The LDCOP is reportedly underway with drafting codes of organ donor complications (such as ICD codes used by CMS).

"Donors should also be provided with life insurance to cover death as a result of being a living donor. The death should be attributable/associated with the donor procedure; and would be a readily recognizable complication of bleeding, pulmonary embolism, myocardial infarction, or sepsis (as has occurred following living liver donation).

"Discrimination against donors seeking to purchase their own health and life insurance has been reported [23] and must be outlawed.

"Making available reimbursement for the actual costs or losses incurred, regardless of donors' financial resources, would not enrich them but merely make donating a kidney a financially neutral act. Similarly, the families of deceased organ donors should not have to pay any expenses generated by posthumous donation, such as costs related to the evaluation of potential donor and organ suitability, or prolongation of the donor's time in an ICU to enable postmortem donation. Since covering expenses leaves living donors and the families of deceased donors in neither a better nor a worse financial situation than they would have been had they not taken part in the process of donating organs, there would be no need to modify NOTA's prohibition on paying for organs. When combined with the removal of other systemic barriers to donation and adoption of best practices in living donation, as recently recommended by the LDCOP [20], eliminating financial disincentives should produce a substantial and sustainable increase in the rate of kidney donation as experienced in Israel, but is also being implemented in Australia, Canada, and the Netherlands [12]."

Matching and market design at the INFORMS meeting in Philadelphia, Nov 1-4

If I were at the INFORMS meeting in Philadelphia, I'd enjoy lots of sessions on matching and market design, by a variety of (increasingly young) market designers.

Session Information		: Sunday Nov 01, 08:00 - 09:30
Title:	Matching Markets
Chair:	Itai Ashlagi,MIT, 100 Main st, Cambridge Ma 02139, United States of America, iashlagi@mit.edu
Abstract Details
Title:	Welfare-sensitive Assortment Optimization: An Application to School Choice
	Presenting Author:	Peng Shi,MIT Operations Research Center, 1 Amherst Street, E40-149, Cambridge MA 02139, United States of America, pengshi@mit.edu
Abstract:		In many settings, a planner gives a set of options to agents, who choose among them to maximize their own value, but agents' choices have externalities on system revenue/cost. Examples include school choice, public housing, and health insurance. Welfare-Sensitive Assortment Optimization is to find a set of options that maximize the sum of agents' values and system revenue. We give efficient algorithms under MNL utilities and various constraints, and apply this to improve school choice in Boston.
Title:	Near Feasible Stable Matchings With Couples
	Presenting Author:	Thanh Nguyen,Krannert School of Management, Purdue University, West Lafayette IN, United States of America, nguye161@purdue.edu
	Co-Author:	Rakesh Vohra,University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, United States of America, rvohra@seas.upenn.edu
Abstract:		The National Resident Matching program strives for a stable matching of medical students to teaching hospitals. With the presence of couples, stable matchings need not exist. For any student preferences, we show that each instance of a matching problem has a `nearby' instance with a stable matching. The nearby instance is obtained by perturbing the capacities of the hospitals.
Title:	Matching With Externalities
	Presenting Author:	Jacob Leshno,Columbia University, 3022 Broadway,, Uris Hall, 406, New York NY 10027, United States of America, jleshno@columbia.edu
Abstract:		We show existence of stable matching in markets with a continuum of students. Stable matchings are characterized as rational expectations market clearing cutoffs.
Title:	What Matters in Tie-breaking Rules? How Competition Guides Design
	Presenting Author:	Afshin Nikzad,Stanford University, 37 Angell Court, APT 116, Stanford Ca 94305, United States of America, afshin.nikzad@gmail.com
	Co-Author:	Itai Ashlagi,MIT, 100 Main st, Cambridge Ma 02139, United States of America, iashlagi@mit.edu
		Assaf Romm,Harvard, Boston, United States of America, assaf.romm@gmail.com
Abstract:		School districts that adopt the Deferred Acceptance (DA) mechanism to assign students to schools face the tradeoff between fairness and efficiency when selecting how to break ties among equivalent students. We analyze a model with with random generated preferences for students and compare two mechanisms differing by their tie-breaking rules: DA with one single lottery (DA-STB) and DA with a separate lottery for each school (DA-MTB). We identify that the balance between supply and demand in the market is a prominent factor when selecting a tie-breaking rule. When there is a surplus of seats, we show that neither random assignments under these mechanisms stochastically dominates each other, and, the variance of student's assignments is larger under DA-STB. However, we show that there is essentially no tradeoff between fairness and efficiency when there is a shortage of seats: not only that DA-STB (almost) stochastically dominates DA-MTB, it also results in a smaller variance in student's rankings. We further find that under DA-MTB many pairs of students would benefit from directly exchanging assignments ex post when there is a shortage of seats, while only few such pairs exist when there is a surplus of seats. Our findings suggest that it is more desirable that ``popular" schools use a single lottery over a separate lottery in order to break ties, while in other schools there is a real tradeoff.

and

Title:	Two-Sided Matching Markets
Chair:	Peng Shi,MIT Operations Research Center, 1 Amherst Street, E40-149, Cambridge MA 02139, United States of America, pengshi@mit.edu
Co-Chair:	Yash Kanoria,Assistant Professor, Columbia University, New York, United States of America, ykanoria@columbia.edu
	Itai Ashlagi,MIT, 100 Main st, Cambridge Ma 02139, United States of America, iashlagi@mit.edu
Abstract Details
Title:	On the Efficiency of Stable Matchings in Large Markets
	Presenting Author:	Sangmok Lee,Univ of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, United States of America, sangmok@sas.upenn.edu
	Co-Author:	Leeat Yariv,Caltech, 1200 E california Blvd, Pasadena, United States of America, lyariv@hss.caltech.edu
Abstract:		We study the wedge between stability and efficiency in large one-to-one matching markets. We show stable matchings are efficient asymptotically for a large class of preferences. In these environments, stability remains an appealing objective even on efficiency grounds, and monetary transfers are not necessary for efficiency purposes. Nonetheless, for severely imbalanced markets, when preferences entail sufficient idiosyncrasies, stable outcomes may be inefficient even asymptotically.
Title:	Short Lists in Centralized Clearinghouses
	Presenting Author:	Nick Arnosti,Stanford University, Stanford CA, United States of America, narnosti@stanford.edu
Abstract:		In the presence of frictions, participants in centralized clearinghouses generally fail to list all acceptable match partners. As a consequence, mutually acceptable pairs are left unmatched. The number of unmatched agents (and the happiness of matched agents) depends crucially on the structure of correlations in participants' preferences. This work identifies a fundamental tradeoff between match quality and quantity, and uses this to offer guidance for the design of school choice mechanisms.
Title:	How Much Choice is There in Two-sided Matching Markets?
	Presenting Author:	Itai Ashlagi,MIT, 100 Main st, Cambridge Ma 02139, United States of America, iashlagi@mit.edu
Abstract:		We study the structure of two-sided random matching markets with tiers. Our results provide insights on the amount of choice agents have in the core.

and

Session Information		: Sunday Nov 01, 13:30 - 15:00
Title:	Market Design
Chair:	Gabriel Weintraub,Professor, Columbia University, Uris Hall, New York NY 10027, United States of America, gyw2105@columbia.edu
Abstract Details
Title:	Incentive Issues in Paired Organ Donation
	Presenting Author:	Eduardo Azevedo,Assistant Professor, Wharton, 3620 Locust Walk, Wharton, SHDH 1400, Philadelphia Pe 19102, United States of America, eazevedo@wharton.upenn.edu
	Co-Author:	Nikhil Agarwal,MIT, 77 Mass Ave, Cambridge MA, United States of America, agarwaln@mit.edu
		Itai Ashlagi,MIT, 100 Main st, Cambridge Ma 02139, United States of America, iashlagi@mit.edu
		Clayton Featherstone,Wharton, 3620 Locust Walk, Wharton, SHDH 1400, Philadelphia Pe 19102, United States of America, claytonf@wharton.upenn.edu
Abstract:		In the last few years a new type of organ donation has arisen. In a paired kidney exchange two recipients with incompatible live donors receive organs from each other's live donor. Sometimes transactions involve more recipients and/or donors. While many exchanges happen in a decentralized way, others happen in large centralized exchanges. We empirically examine how agents in these markets respond to incentives and whether incentives are misaligned with social goals.
Title:	Optimal Procurement Mechanisms for Differentiated Products
	Presenting Author:	Gabriel Weintraub,Professor, Columbia University, Uris Hall, New York NY 10027, United States of America, gyw2105@columbia.edu
	Co-Author:	Daniela Saban,Stanford University, 655 Knight Way, Stanford CA, United States of America, dsaban@stanford.edu
Abstract:		We study the mechanism design problem faced by a buyer that selects an assortment of differentiated products and unit prices from a set of suppliers with private costs. Then, consumers can choose their most preferred product from this set. The buyer maximizes consumer surplus; to do so, he must balance the trade-off between variety and price competition. We characterize the optimal mechanism and use these results to analyze practical mechanisms.
Title:	Efficiency and Stability in Large Matching Markets
	Presenting Author:	Yeon-koo Che,Columbia University, 420 West 118th Street, 1029 IAB, New York NY, United States of America, yeonkooche@gmail.com
	Co-Author:	Olivier Tercieux,Professor, Paris School of Economics, Department of Economics, Paris, France, tercieux@pse.ens.fr
Abstract:		We study efficient and stable mechanisms in matching markets when the number of agents is large and individuals' preferences and priorities are drawn randomly. When agents' preferences are correlated over objects, the prevailing mechanisms are either inefficient or unstable even in the asymptotic sense. We propose a variant of deferred acceptance which is asymptotically efficient, asymptotically stable and also asymptotically incentive compatible.
Title:	Market Fragmentation
	Presenting Author:	Rakesh Vohra,University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, Philadelphia, United States of America, rvohra@seas.upenn.edu
	Co-Author:	Ahmad Peivandi,Participation And Unbiased Pricing In Cds Settlement Mechanisms, Georgia State University, 35 Broad St, Atlanta, United States of America, apeivandi@gsu.edu
Abstract:		Centralized markets reduce the costs of search for buyers and sellers. Their `thickness' increases the chance of of order execution at competitive prices. In spite of the incentives to consolidate, some markets, have fragmented into multiple trading venues. We argue in this paper that fragmentation is an unavoidable feature of any centralized exchange. Our argument introduces a new way to think about participation in a mechanism when the outside option is endogenous.

and
Session Information : Monday Nov 02, 08:00 - 09:30

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Title: Matching Markets and Their ApplicationsChair: Thayer Morrill,NC State University, Raleigh, NC, United States of America, thayer_morrill@ncsu.edu

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Abstract Details

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Title: Incentives in the Course Allocation Problem Presenting Author: Hoda Atef Yekta,University of Connecticut School of Business, Storrs, CT, CT, United States of America, Hoda.AtefYekta@business.uconn.edu
 Abstract: Kominers et al. (2011) introduced a heuristic for comparing incentives among the course allocation problem (CAP) algorithms. We investigate their method and adapt it to a more realistic setting with course overlap and a limited number of courses for each student. We compare algorithms including the bidding-point mechanism, the draft mechanism, and recently proposed algorithms like the proxy-agent second-price algorithm in their vulnerability to non-truthful bidding.  Title: Near-optimal Stochastic Matching with Few Queries Presenting Author: John Dickerson,CMU, 9219 Gates-Hillman Center, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, dickerson@cs.cmu.edu
 Co-Author: Avrim Blum,Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, avrim@cs.cmu.edu
 Nika Haghtalab,Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, nhaghtal@cs.cmu.edu
 Ariel Procaccia,Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, arielpro@cs.cmu.edu
 Tuomas Sandholm,Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, sandholm@cs.cmu.edu
 Ankit Sharma,Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, ankits@cs.cmu.edu
 Abstract: In kidney exchange, patients with kidney failure swap donors. Proposed swaps often fail before transplantation. We explore this phenomenon through the lens of stochastic matching, which deals with finding a maximum matching in a graph with unknown edges that are accessed via queries, and its generalization to k-set packing. We provide adaptive and non-adaptive algorithms that perform very few queries, and show that they perform well in theory and on data from the UNOS nationwide kidney exchange.  Title: The Secure Boston Mechanism Presenting Author: Thayer Morrill,NC State University, Raleigh, NC, United States of America, thayer_morrill@ncsu.edu
 Co-Author: Unut Dur,umutdur@gmail.com
 Robert Hammond,Decision Analyst, Chevron, 1400 Smith St, Houston, United States of America, rhammond@chevron.com
 Abstract: We introduce the first mechanism that Pareto dominates the Deferred Acceptance algorithm (DA) in equilibrium. Our algorithm, the Secure Boston Mechanism (sBM), is a hybrid between the Boston Mechanism and DA. It protects students that are initially guaranteed a school but otherwise adjusts priorities based on student rankings. We demonstrate that sBM always has an equilibrium that weakly dominates the DA assignment, and that in equilibrium no student receives worse than a fair assignment.  Title: Mechanism Design for Team Formation Presenting Author: Yevgeniy Vorobeychik,Vanderbilt University, 401 Bowling Ave, Nashville TN, United States of America, eug.vorobey@gmail.com
 Co-Author: Mason Wright,masondw@umich.edu
 Abstract: We present the first formal mechanism design framework for team formation, building on recent combinatorial matching market design literature. We exhibit four mechanisms for this problem, two novel, two simple extensions of known mechanisms from other domains. We use extensive experiments to show our second novel mechanism, despite having no theoretical guarantees, empirically achieves good incentive compatibility, welfare, and fairness.

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 Session Information : Tuesday Nov 03, 16:30 - 18:00

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Title: Dynamic Matching Markets
Chair: John Dickerson,CMU, 9219 Gates-Hillman Center, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, dickerson@cs.cmu.edu

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Abstract Details

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Title: Global Kidney Exchange
Presenting Author: Afshin Nikzad,Stanford University, 37 Angell Court, APT 116, Stanford Ca 94305, United States of America, afshin.nikzad@gmail.com
 Co-Author: Mohammad Akbarpour,Stanford, Stanford, CA 94305, Stanford, United States of America, mohamwad@gmail.com
 Alvin Roth,Stanford, Stanford, CA 94305, Stanford, United States of America, alroth@stanford.edu
 Abstract: In some countries, many patients die after a few weeks of diagnosis mainly because the costs of kidney transplantation and dialysis are beyond the reach of most citizens. We analyze the two proposals in which patients with financial restrictions who have willing donors participate in kidney exchange without paying for surgery. Our proposals can save thousands of patients, while substantially decreasing the average dialysis costs; in particular, we prove that they are "self-financing"  Title: Matching with Stochastic Arrival Presenting Author: Neil Thakral,Harvard, 1805 Cambridge Street, Cambridge MA, United States of America, nthakral@fas.harvard.edu
 Abstract: We study matching in a dynamic setting, with applications to public-housing allocation. Objects of different types that arrive stochastically over time must be allocated to agents in a queue. When objects share priorities over agents, we propose an efficient, envy-free, and strategy-proof mechanism. The mechanism continues to satisfy these properties if and only if the priority relations are acyclic. Estimated welfare gains over existing housing-allocation procedures exceed $5000 per applicant.  Title: Dynamic Kidney Exchange with Heterogeneous Types Presenting Author: Maximilien Burq,Student, MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA 02139, United States of America, mburq@mit.edu
 Co-Author: Itai Ashlagi,MIT, 100 Main st, Cambridge Ma 02139, United States of America, iashlagi@mit.edu
 Patrick Jaillet,MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge MA 02139, United States of America, jaillet@mit.edu
 Vahideh Manshadi,Yale University, 165 Whitney Ave, Rm 3473, New Heaven, United States of America, vahideh.manshadi@yale.edu
 Abstract: Kidney exchange programs face growing number of highly sensitized patients. We develop an online model that models such heterogeneity, and we prove that having some easy-to-match patients in the pool greatly reduces waiting times both in the presence of bilateral matching and chain matching. We provide simulations showing that some prioritizing leads to improved overall efficiency.  Title: Competing Dynamic Matching Markets Presenting Author: Sanmay Das,WUSTL, One Brookings Dr, CB 1045, St. Louis MO 63130, United States of America, sanmay@wustl.edu
 Co-Author: John Dickerson,CMU, 9219 Gates-Hillman Center, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, dickerson@cs.cmu.edu
 Zhuoshu Li,WUSTL, One Brookings Dr, CB 1045, St. Louis MO 63130, United States of America, zhuoshuli@wustl.edu
 Tuomas Sandholm,Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, sandholm@cs.cmu.edu
 Abstract: We extend a framework of dynamic matching due to Akbarpour et al. to characterize outcomes in cases where two rival matching markets compete. One market matches quickly while the other builds thickness by matching slowly. We present analytical and simulation results, both in general and for kidney exchange, demonstrating that rival markets increase overall loss compared to a single market that builds thickness.

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Session Information		: Tuesday Nov 03, 11:00 - 12:30
Title:	Empirical Market Design
Chair:	Peng Shi,MIT Operations Research Center, 1 Amherst Street, E40-149, Cambridge MA 02139, United States of America, pengshi@mit.edu
Abstract Details
Title:	Market Congestion and Application Costs
	Presenting Author:	John Horton,Assistant Professor, NYU Stern School of Business, 44 West Fourth Street, Kaufman Management Center, New York NY 10012, United States of America, John.Horton@stern.nyu.edu
	Co-Author:	Dana Chandler,Civis Analytics, West Loop, Chicago IL, United States of America, dchandler@gmail.com
		Ramesh Johari,Stanford University, 475 Via Ortega, Stanford Ca 94305, United States of America, ramesh.johari@stanford.edu
Abstract:		We report the results of an experimental intervention that increased the cost of applying to vacancies in an online labor market by requiring workers to answer questions about the job. Although the ordeal positively selected candidates, it was the information in the answers that mattered for match formation. Although the overall number of matches and speed to fill a vacancy was unchanged, employers engaged in less recruiting activities and formed higher quality matches.
Title:	Experiments as Instruments: Heterogeneous Position Effects in Sponsored Search Auctions
	Presenting Author:	Justin Rao,Researcher, Microsoft Research, 641 Avenue of Americas, New York NY 10014, United States of America, Justin.Rao@microsoft.com
	Co-Author:	Matthew Goldman,UCSD, 9500 Gilman Dr., La Jolla CA 92093, United States of America, mrgoldman@ucsd.edu
Abstract:		The Generalized Second Price auction has been shown to achieve an efficient allocation and favorable revenue properties provided the causal impact of ad position on user click probabilities is a constant the scaling factor for all ads. We develop a novel method to re-purpose internal business experimentation at a major search engine and we strongly reject the conventional multiplicatively-separable model, instead finding substantial heterogeneity of the causal impact of position on CTR.
Title:	Optimal Design of Two-sided Market Platforms: An Empirical Case Study of Ebay
	Presenting Author:	Brent Hickman,Assistant Professor Of Economics, University of Chicago, 1226 E 59th St, Chicago IL 60637, United States of America, hickmanbr@uchicago.edu
	Co-Author:	Aaron Bodoh-creed,Assistant Professor Of Economics, Haas School of Business, University of California, Berkeley, S545 Student Services Building, Berkeley CA 94720, United States of America, acreed@berkeley.edu
		Joern Boehnke,Postdoctoral Fellow, Harvard University Center of Mathematical Sciences and Applications, Science Center 325, One Oxford Street, Cambridge MA 02138, United States of America, jboehnke@uchicago.edu
Abstract:		We investigate design of platform markets that house many auctions over time. We combine a unique dataset with a model of bidding where the option value of re-entering the market creates incentive for buyers to shade bids below private valuations in the current period. We show the model is identified using the Bellman equation for a representative bidder. We estimate the model and investigate the degree to which eBay is able to reduce transaction costs and approach the efficient allocation.
Title:	Stability of Demand Models Across Policy Reforms: An Emperical Study with Boston Public Schools
	Presenting Author:	Peng Shi,MIT Operations Research Center, 1 Amherst Street, E40-149, Cambridge MA 02139, United States of America, pengshi@mit.edu
	Co-Author:	Parag Pathak,MIT, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Building E17, Room 240, Cambridge MA 02139, United States of America, ppathak@mit.edu
Abstract:		In counterfactual analysis using demand modelling, an important but seldom checked assumption is that the proposed reform does not affect the demand model. We validate this assumption across a major school choice reform in Boston in 2014. To control for post-analysis bias, we precommit to forecasts before the reform. We find that while our prediction of the number of applicants were off, the logit and mixed-logit demand models we fit were stable before and after the reform.

Session Information		: Tuesday Nov 03, 13:30 - 15:00
Title:	Kidney Allocation and Exchange
Chair:	Naoru Koizumi,Assoc Professor, GMU, 3351 N Fairfax Dr, Arlington VA 22203, United States of America, nkoizumi@gmu.edu
Abstract Details
Title:	The Dynamics of Kidney Exchange
	Presenting Author:	John Dickerson,CMU, 9219 Gates-Hillman Center, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, dickerson@cs.cmu.edu
	Co-Author:	Tuomas Sandholm,Professor, Carnegie Mellon University, 5000 Forbes Ave, Pittsburgh PA 15213, United States of America, sandholm@cs.cmu.edu
Abstract:		We discuss analytic, optimization, and game-theoretic approaches to matching in dynamic kidney exchange. We consider dynamism (i) at the post-match pre-transplant stage (ii) as patients and donors arrive and depart over time, and (iii) as multiple exchanges compete for overlapping sets of participants. We empirically validate our models and theoretical results on over 150 match runs of the UNOS national kidney exchange.
Title:	A New Model to Decide Kidney–offer Admissibility Dependent on Patients' Lifetime Failure Rate
	Presenting Author:	Michael Bendersky,Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Israel, michael.bendersky@gmail.com
	Co-Author:	Israel David,Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Beersheba, Beersheba, Israel, idavid@bgu.ac.il
Abstract:		We propose a new model to decide kidney-offer admissibility depending on patient's age, estimated lifetime probabilistic profile and prospects on the waiting list. We allow for a broad family of lifetime distributions - Gamma - thus enabling flexible modeling of one's survival under dialysis. It yields the optimal critical times for acceptance of offers of different qualities and may serve the organizer of a donation program, the surgeon and the individual recipient practicing patient-choice.
Title:	Preemptive Approach to Kidney Allocation in USA
	Presenting Author:	Philip Appiahk-Kubi,Ohio University, 14 Pine ST, APT #1B, The Plains Oh 45780, United States of America, pa809911@ohio.edu
Abstract:		The new kidney allocation policy improves kidney utilization. However, the policy has no consideration for allocation of cadaveric kidneys under emergency situations; a problem observed by the National Kidney Foundation. This research evaluates a point scoring model with considerations for emergency allocation. Simulated results indicate that the model minimizes number of waitlist deaths by 2% while prioritizing sensitive candidates and waiting time.
Title:	Optimal Integration of Kidney Exchange Programs with Antibody Reduction Therapy
	Presenting Author:	Naoru Koizumi,Assoc Professor, GMU, 3351 N Fairfax Dr, Arlington VA 22203, United States of America, nkoizumi@gmu.edu
	Co-Author:	Monica Gentili,Georgia Tech, North Ave NW, Atlanta GA, United States of America, mgentili3@mail.gatech.edu
		Keith Melancon,George Washington University Hospital, 900 23rd St NW, Washington DC, United States of America, jmelancon@mfa.gwu.edu
Abstract:		Kidney paired donation (KPD) allows incompatible pairs to exchange kidneys with other incompatible pairs. However, evidence suggests there stills exist barriers to KPD utilization, especially among difficult-to-match transplant candidates and positive actual or virtual crossmatches. Using mathematical models, we investigate how to optimally integrate antibody reduction therapy in KPD to increase successful living-donor kidney transplants among difficult to match candidates.

Session Information : Sunday Nov 01, 13:30 - 15:00

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Title: Revenue Management in Online AdvertisingChair: Hamid Nazerzadeh,University of Southern California, Bridge Memorial Hall, 3670 Trousdale Parkway, LOS ANGELES 90089, United States of America, hamidnz@marshall.usc.edu

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Abstract Details

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Title: Recent Results in Internet Advertising Allocations Presenting Author: Nitish Korula,Research Scientist, Google, New York, nitish@google.com
 Co-Author: Hossein Esfandiari,University of Maryland, College Park MD, United States of America, hossein@cs.umd.edu
 Vahab Mirrokni,Google Research, New York, United States of America, mirrokni@google.com
 Morteza Zadimoghaddam,Google, New York NY 10011, United States of America, zadim@google.com
 Abstract: Advertising provides the economic foundation of the Internet. Internet advertising applications motivate a host of optimization problems with unique challenges and as such, there is a large body of literature on optimizing various aspects of ad allocations. I will survey some of the recent work in this field, with special focus on two problems: Designing algorithms that work well in both adversarial and stochastic settings, and algorithms that balance multiple system objectives.  Title: Multi-stage Intermediation in Online Internet Advertising Presenting Author: Ozan Candogan,University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, Chicago, United States of America, ozan.candogan@chicagobooth.edu
 Co-Author: Santiago Balseiro,Assistant Professor, Duke University, 100 Fuqua Drive, Durham NC 27708, United States of America, srb43@duke.edu
 Huseyin Gurkan,Duke, Duke University, Durham NC 27705, United States of America, huseyin.gurkan@duke.edu
 Abstract: We consider a setting where an advertiser tries to acquire impressions from an ad exchange, through a chain of intermediaries. We characterize equilibrium profits of intermediaries as a function of their position in the chain. We consider three value distributions for the advertiser: (i) exponential, (ii) Pareto, (iii) uniform. We establish that in (i) all intermediaries have the same profit, whereas in (ii) and (iii) respectively downstream/upstream intermediaries have higher profits.  Title: Adverse Selection and Auction Design for Internet Display Advertising Presenting Author: Nick Arnosti,Stanford University, Stanford CA, United States of America, narnosti@stanford.edu
 Co-Author: Marissa Beck,Stanford University, 579 Serra Mall, Landau Economics, Stanford CA 94305, United States of America, mbeck22@gmail.com
 Paul Milgrom,Stanford University, 579 Serra Mall, Landau Economics, Room 243, Stanford CA 94305, United States of America, milgrom@stanford.edu
 Abstract: We model an online display advertising environment with brand advertisers and better-informed performance advertisers. We consider a mechanism which assigns the item to the highest bidder only when the ratio of the highest bid to the second highest bid is sufficiently large. For fat-tailed match-value distributions, this mechanism captures most of the gains from good matching and improves match values substantially compared to the common practice of setting aside impressions in advance.  Title: Deals or No Deals: Contract Design for Selling Online Advertising Presenting Author: Hamid Nazerzadeh,University of Southern California, Bridge Memorial Hall, 3670 Trousdale Parkway, LOS ANGELES 90089, United States of America, hamidnz@marshall.usc.edu
 Co-Author: Vahab Mirrokni,Google Research, New York, United States of America, mirrokni@google.com
 Abstract: I will discuss some of the challenges in maximizing revenue of online advertising market. I will explain preferred deals: a new generation of contracts for selling display advertising that allow publishers to offer their inventory to “first look” buyers before the inventory is made available to other buyers (advertiser) in the general auction. I present algorithms for deal recommendation and show that deals can obtain significantly higher revenue than auctions.

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I'd also be glad to hear

Centralized Seat Allocation for Engineering Colleges in India
  Presenting Author:  Yash Kanoria,Assistant Professor, Columbia University, New York, United States of America, ykanoria@columbia.edu

Abstract:  The central government funds over 75 engineering colleges in India with 50,000 seats a year, and a diversity of programs and admissions criteria. We deploy a new, centralized, seat allocation mechanism, that accounts for the preferences of students as well as the admissions criteria for different colleges/programs using a deferred acceptance inspired approach.