Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Breast feeding

Some people find the sight of breast feeding repugnant, and the usual way that makes the news is with a story like this: Breastfeeding 'upsets diners'. In the spirit of "man bites dog," this more unusual headline caught my eye: Woman Pleads Guilty in Drunken Breast-Feeding Case. The crime is child neglect, and the issue is that alcohol passes through the breast milk. "Attorneys believe it's the first such case prosecuted in North Dakota."

Unraveling and uncertainty: The NBA draft

Last year, the NY Times published a story about high school basketball player Brandon Jennings, who went to play pro ball in Italy rather than going to the University of Arizona: At 19, Plotting New Path to N.B.A., via Europe. About the risks involved they wrote then:

"Instead he chose to play in Italy, where he will earn $1.2 million this season in salary and endorsements, including a shoe contract with Under Armour. Roma signed Jennings to a three-year deal but has little at risk because his contract must be bought out if he leaves for the National Basketball Association.
If Jennings has a strong season with Roma and is among the top 10 selected in next June’s N.B.A. draft, as expected, more players may follow his route. "

As the June 25 draft approaches, here's another story about Jennings, for whom not everything has worked out as hoped: After a Year in Europe, Brandon Jennings Wants to Be Drafted by the Knicks.

"Now, he has his eye on the Knicks.
“I really want to come here, I’m not going to lie,” Jennings said Monday after working out for the Knicks and expressing his appreciation for Coach Mike D’Antoni’s run-and-gun offense. ...The Knicks have the eighth selection in next week’s draft but seem unlikely to pick Jennings if Davidson’s Stephen Curry is available. ...Ricky Rubio, an 18-year-old from Spain whom Jennings called “all hype” last week, is more likely to be the first point guard chosen."
...
"The biggest strikes against the 6-foot-2, 169-pound Jennings are his underwhelming numbers for his Italian club team, Lottomatica Virtus Roma. He averaged 5.5 points, 1.6 rebounds and 2.3 assists in 17 minutes. But he is hoping N.B.A. general managers will see a player with more experience than nearly everyone else in the pool.
“I had to go out there and earn my spot,” he said of his experience in Italy. “It was a job. And I was playing against bigger and stronger guys every day.”
Jennings spoke maturely about his time in Europe, highlighting the character-building value of testing his mettle abroad. But he conceded that at times, it was frustrating. As a freshman at Arizona, the college he committed to before changing plans, he could have been at the center of a successful team that made a run in the N.C.A.A. tournament.
In Italy, Jennings spent most of his time on the bench, trying to make sense of his coaches’ decisions to use him primarily as a defensive player. He said he worried about his draft stock and remembered the critics who told him to go to college.
“It was a humbling experience for me,” Jennings said. “If I would have went to college, I would have played 30 minutes and I would have got whatever I wanted, but I had to go earn my spot.” "

Despite the risk, if Jennings does well in the draft tomorrow, others are likely to follow him to Europe, and soon.
Because of One-and-Done Rule, Others May Follow Jennings's Path:
Talented Recruit Chose European Payday Instead of Mandated College Season


"One year after Jennings's decision to play in Italy, there are signs that his success in the draft could trigger a small but significant movement. Jeremy Tyler, a talented forward from San Diego, already has decided to skip his senior year of high school to play overseas, and several others are now also considering following Jennings's unconventional route to the NBA.
Sonny Vaccaro, the former shoe company executive who helped orchestrate Jennings's move, said he has had in-depth discussions with the parents of seven elite players still in high school about playing overseas instead of going to college.
...
"Because players need to be 19 years old and a year out of high school before entering the NBA draft, they have had few options other than to attend college for at least a year. They view Jennings as a trailblazer because he chose a creative -- if not risky -- route, signing a professional contract instead of adhering to NCAA rules that forbid compensation. "

Update 6/25/09: Jennings chosen 10th, by Milwaukee Bucks. (But the uncertainty lasted right until he was chosen:
"Brandon Jennings' first decision was to not attend the NBA draft. When he was taken 10th by the Milwaukee Bucks, he suddenly showed up.
About a half hour before the draft got under way on Thursday night, Jennings' agent released a statement that his client, who decided to play in Europe last season rather than attend college, would be with his family rather than at the draft with many of the other future NBA players.
There had been media speculation that the 6-foot-1 Jennings, who averaged 5.5 points and 2.3 assists for Lottomatica Virtus Roma of the Italian League, would fall out of the lottery.
"Because we do not have strong grasp of Brandon's draft position, I've advised that he and his family enjoy this day in a more private setting with the people he loves the most,'' Bill Duffy, president and CEO of BDA Sports Management, said in the statement."

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

Even adoption is sometimes viewed as repugnant

Sometimes even the adoption of a child strikes some people as a repugnant transaction that should be prevented. The recent case of the singer Madonna, in Malawi to adopt a second child, is an example. But the http://c.ymcdn.com/sites/nabsw.org/resource/collection/E1582D77-E4CD-4104-996A-D42D08F9CA7D/NABSW_Trans-Racial_Adoption_1972_Position_(b).pdfsame point of view surfaces sometimes in the U.S.

The Ethicist column in the NY Times describes the issue: Madonna and Child "There is a creepy evocation of colonialism when a rich American or European swoops into a poor African nation and grabs a child, as if the country were a baby plantation. Critics charge that the adoptive parents benefit from the persistence of poverty. They do, but in much the same way as Lenny Bruce described the modus operandi of Jonas Salk, J. Edgar Hoover and himself: “These men thrive upon the continuance of disease, segregation and violence.” That is, they respond to but do not promote human misery. (O.K., except for Hoover.) "

In the end, a court approved the adoption, reversing a lower court.
Malawi court approves Madonna's adoption of Mercy

"Madonna has succeeded in her attempt to adopt a second child from Malawi after an appeal court overrode residency demands and ruled that “every child has the right to love”.
The decision by the African state’s highest court means the singer could take four-year-old Chifundo “Mercy” James to New York within days.
But it will do nothing to silence complaints that Madonna has used her wealth and celebrity to bypass the country’s laws."
...
"Madonna’s application to adopt Chifundo was initially rejected by a lower court in April because the singer is not resident in Malawi, and because a judge decided that the young girl would fare perfectly well in the orphanage where she has lived. " (emphasis added)
...
"But at Malawi’s Supreme Court of Appeal yesterday a panel of three judges said that the singer’s commitment to helping disadvantaged children should have been taken into account. Madonna has founded a charity, Raising Malawi, for orphans there.
They also argued that the residency disqualification was a narrow interpretation of largely outdated laws.
...
"The Human Rights Consultative Committee said it fears that the ruling has opened up the country’s vulnerable children to trafficking. "

Notice that the initial Malawi judge found the adoption so repugnant that he preferred to leave the child in an orphanage. (I doubt that even in Malawi the judge thought the child would be better off in the orphanage than in a family; rather his feeling must have been that something about the adoption was so repugnant that Malawians should be willing to have the child bear this cost.)

This kind of repugnance, with children bearing the cost, is found not only in the developing world. In the US, the National Association of Black Social Workers is also well known for its opposition to transracial adoption. (Here's an updated link to their September 1972 Position Statement on Trans-Racial Adoptions.) Until relatively recently, this opposition led to adoption practices in the U.S. that discouraged interracial adoption, and often prevented minority children from finding permanent adoptive families. This began to change only with legislation in the 1990's: see
A Guide to The Multiethnic Placement Act of 1994 As Amended by the Interethnic Adoption Provisions of 1996
"The Multiethnic Placement Act (MEPA) was enacted in 1994 amid spirited and sometimes contentious debate about transracial adoption and same-race placement policies. At the heart of this debate is a desire to promote the best interests of children by ensuring that they have permanent, safe, stable, and loving homes that will meet their individual needs. This desire is thwarted by the persistent increases in the number of children within the child protective system waiting for, but often not being placed in, adoptive families. Of particular concern are the African American and other minority children who are dramatically over-represented at all stages of this system, wait far longer than Caucasian children for adoption, and are at far greater risk of never experiencing a permanent home. Among the many factors that contribute to placement delays and denials, Congress found that the most salient are racial and ethnic matching policies and the practices of public agencies which have historically discouraged individuals from minority communities from becoming foster or adoptive parents. MEPA addressed these concerns by prohibiting the use of a child's or a prospective parent's race, color, or national origin to delay or deny the child's placement and by requiring diligent efforts to expand the number of racially and ethnically diverse foster and adoptive parents."

Monday, June 22, 2009

Why did books replace scrolls? Random access and the market for texts

Why did books replace scrolls?

That is, why did the modern form of the book, the codex, with pages bound together on a spine, replace pages sewn together and rolled up in a scroll? (Today, the term codex is mostly used for old, hand-written books that predate the printing press.)

It isn't that scrolls are no longer produced. Every week in synagogues around the world, as a new portion of the Torah is read , the parchment scroll is advanced, from right to left, until it is time to start the annual cycle again.

But if you want to browse, you don't use the scroll, you look in a book. It's easier to flip back and forth in a book, to compare passages, to read ahead and find out what is coming, to look back and remember what came before, to share with another reader who may be at a different place. In computerese, books (in codex form) are random access devices, while scrolls are sequential access machines.

And, except for the Torah, there basically aren't any more scrolls. Books have completely replaced scrolls, since books are so much easier to use.

Technologies like the printing press also made it cheap to produce texts as books, but if we didn't find books superior, it would still be possible to buy versions of your favorite novels or math texts (or dictionaries!) in scroll form. While a kosher Torah scroll to be used in public prayer in a synagogue is hand written by a scribe, there are printed Torah scrolls for non-ritual use: the technology for attaching single-sided printed pages together in a scroll isn't any obstacle. (Remember how early computer printers used to work on a continuous stream of accordian-folded paper?)

Search, which is easier in books than in scrolls, is even easier in digital texts such as we find online: e.g. here you can search not only the Five Books whose contents make up the Torah scroll, but the entire Hebrew Bible (and here is a link to the weekly portion).

So computers and the internet and the Kindle and other ways to handle texts electronically are just the latest chapters in the ancient, ongoing story of the market for texts.

(I'm not an early adopter myself, but here's a review of the new Kindle from yesterday's Washington Post that makes it sound as if, after maybe a little more progress on the electronic front, trees may soon be able to start sleeping at least a little easier.)

Your grandchildren's houses may not have bookshelves.

Saturday, June 20, 2009

Liver Transplant for Jobs in Tennessee

The title of this post doesn't mean that people are donating organs in return for work, but that Apple's founder Steve Jobs has received a liver transplant. In Tennessee.

This reveals something about the regionalized waiting system for deceased donor organs in the United States, picked up in a WSJ article by Laura Meckler: Jobs's Transplant Highlights Differing Wait Times

"Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs's decision to travel to Tennessee for a liver highlights the significant disparities in transplant waiting times across the country -- the source of a longstanding controversy over the fairest way to distribute scarce organs.
For liver transplants, the wait is particularly agonizing. Kidney replacements can often be put off for years through dialysis, where a machine does the work of the kidneys. But there is no such treatment for liver disease.
There are 15,771 Americans waiting for a liver today, according to the United Network for Organ Sharing. Last year, 1,481 people died awaiting a donor.
Faced with a sometimes years-long wait, patients typically have only a few options. They can wait their turn at a home-state transplant center, knowing that their chances will improve as they get sicker; look for a friend or family member willing to undergo major surgery to contribute half of his or her liver; or seek out a hospital where the waiting times are typically shorter.
Those who travel out of state must be evaluated at the new hospital, but there is no prohibition to being on the wait list at more than one transplant center. UNOS doesn't keep statistics on how many people choose to travel out of state."
The story, incidentally, seems to be something of a scoop for the WSJ. Other newspapers are reporting the story on an "as reported in the WSJ" basis (apparently the transplant was two months ago). E.g. here is the Washington Post: Jobs, on Leave From Apple, Reportedly Had Liver Transplant

Update (6/23/09): Memphis Hospital Says It Did Jobs’s Liver Surgery.
"Methodist University Hospital in Memphis acknowledged Tuesday that it had performed a liver transplant on Steven P. Jobs, the chief executive of Apple."
...
"Methodist has one of the shortest waiting times of any liver transplant center in the country, according to a transplant registry operated by the Arbor Research Collaborative for Health and the University of Michigan."
...
"A scoring system, known as a MELD score, determines where a patient ranks on a transplant waiting list. The higher the score, the sicker a patient is and the higher the ranking. Any ties are decided by who has had that score the longest.
In its statement, Methodist said that Mr. Jobs had received a liver transplant because he was the patient of his blood type with the highest MELD score and thus “the sickest patient on the waiting list at the time a donor organ became available.” "

Further update (6/24/09): A CNN story discusses the regional allocation system, and how it favors those who are healthy and wealthy enough to be on waiting lists at multiple places around the country, under the provocative headline: Did Steve Jobs' money buy him a faster liver transplant?

Political pressure in Illinois college admissions

At the University of Illinois, politically connected applicants sometimes gained admission over the protests of admissions staff. Here are some stories (the first from InsideHigherEd.com, reporting on the second two from the Chicago Trib, and the last two on the fallout):
Blago-Style Admissions
Clout goes to college
U. of I. admissions: How politicians pressured university to admit students
Governor Appoints Panel to Investigate U. of Illinois Admissions
Federal Investigators Subpoena Admissions Records at 3 Illinois Universities

College admissions is serious stuff in Illinois. (Or, to put it another way, state politics includes everything.)

Update: the Chicago Trib has kept following the story, and now has quite a collection of articles: Clout goes to college.
Further update (7/13/09) from the Chronicle: Backlash Over U. of Illinois 'Clout' Scandal Spreads to Trustees and News Media
(8/3/09): The chairman of the Board of Trustees at the University of Illinois resigned on Monday amid increasingly incendiary accusations that he encouraged an academic version of “pay to play” politics to flourish, allowing students to be admitted based largely on personal and political connections.

Friday, June 19, 2009

Computer assisted markets

I'm giving a brief talk today on Computer Assisted Markets at the HBS Digital Economy Symposium. I plan to talk about how some of the markets I've helped design are part of the digital economy (whatever that is), at least in the sense that they are operated by computers.

I'm thinking here of labor market clearinghouses for doctors, kidney exchange, and school choice mechanisms, as well as the American Economic Association's newish coordination mechanisms for the economics job market, namely early market signaling, and a late market scramble.

I enumerate this list to emphasize that these markets use computers in a variety of different ways. The slide with which I'll begin my talk lists some of these, in increasing order of how "intensely" the market is computationally assisted:

–Markets can be run on computers (making transaction rules very well specified, and performing market operations very quickly, avoiding congestion.)
– Markets can be accessed over the internet (reducing transaction costs and increasing market thickness and scope.)
–Markets can use computers as trusted intermediaries (allowing confidential information to be entered and handled and transmitted in a trustworthy way.)
–Market outcomes can be determined by (computationally intensive) algorithms (e.g. integer programs to find optimal kidney exchanges that couldn't be found any other way).

Some markets make essential use of only some of these forms of computational assistance, and some use them all.

Here is my full set of slides: Computer Assisted Markets.pptx

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Retail market for gold

You may not have thought that we were missing gold-dispensing vending machines, but we're about to find out, the NY Times reports.

"If gold is the ultimate sanctuary for small investors who have taken furious flight to quality, then Thomas Geissler may have invented the ultimate vending machine.
"After creating an online platform for trading precious metals this year, his small company has hit on a frontier beyond the Internet: the seemingly endless line of devices at airports and train stations that spit out cigarettes, condoms, toothpaste and candy bars in exchange for a little cash. But his machines will allow customers to buy small chunks of gold."

Of course, there are some special market design problems to address:
"The machines will be tested with explosives to make sure they are resistant to theft, Mr. Geissler said."

HT: Scott Kominers and Andrea Hawksley

Wednesday, June 17, 2009

Queuing to tee up at the Bethpage State Park Black Course

The USGA 2009 US Open golf tournament begins tomorrow, June 18. The host golf course is the Bethpage State Park Black Course. You have to be pretty skilled to qualify ("Entries are open to professional golfers and amateur golfers with an up-to-date men’s Handicap Index® not exceeding 1.4 under the USGA Handicap System™. ")

But if you just want the experience of playing on the same course as the top pros, the Black is a public golf course. You could just sign up for a tee time. Or could you? It turns out not to be quite so easy.

Just as markets can unravel, so can queues. A reliable symptom is people waiting on line overnight, especially if they have to wait for more than one night. Getting a tee time at this particular famous public (i.e. not rationed by price) golf course on Long Island seems to qualify: Parking All Night at Bethpage, Hoping to Drive. Note the well developed rules for regulating the queue, which include a rule meant to prevent the substitution of capital for leisure.

"Bethpage has five public golf courses: Black, Red, Blue, Yellow and Green. But the bulk of tee times for the courses, particularly the famed Black, can be hard to get through the phone-reservation system, which has 70,000 registered users. At least one company floods the system each night with hired callers, then resells the times as part of golf packages.
Yet there is one way to ensure a time at Bethpage Black, a major-championship course with $50 fees during the week, $60 on weekends, and double that for non-New Yorkers: get to the parking lot and spend a night. Maybe two. Maybe more."
...
"A sign there explains the complex rules of the “Walk Up Car Line.” Most important is that someone must be at the car for part of every hour. For the Envoy, on this Saturday afternoon, that person was Steve Atieh, 25, from Basking Ridge, N.J., who planned to play the Black course with two brothers and a friend.
They teed off 39 hours after arriving, about 11 hours after their car battery died while the radio broadcast a Yankees game."
...
"Steve Tomasheski was sitting in space No. 3 when someone offered $1,000 for it. He declined, afraid to disappoint his playing partners. Please do not tell his wife."
...
"At 7 p.m., Michael Azzue, an assistant supervisor at Bethpage, arrived in a cart. “Who’s No. 1?” he said, shouting. Azzue attached a plastic bracelet around Atieh’s wrist. At least one person from every car must be present when a supervisor arrives between 6 and 9 p.m. That person must be one of the golfers the next morning, to prevent hiring a nongolfer to do the waiting, which used to happen."

Apparently it is repugnant to pay someone to wait in line for you, although the story suggests that there is some demand for this, and people who arrive a little late (and before the monitoring kicks in) sometimes buy places from early arrivals.

Endnote: "Success has many fathers...", here's a story on a dispute about who really deserves the credit for designing the course. (Credit is a subject worth a discussion in its own right. In my experience, success in complex design projects often does have many fathers, with lots of people contributing in critical ways.)

Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Michael Sandel on Markets and Morals

My Harvard colleague, the political scientist Michael Sandel, lectures on the BBC on Markets and Morals The Reith Lectures. Here is the transcript: MARKETS & MORALS LECTURE TRANSCRIPT (I don't know how long the BBC will keep these links live...).

Sandel begins by noting that he thinks that Economics is "a spurious science."

"It’s a spurious science in so far as it is used to tell us what we ought to do because questions of what we ought to do in politics or as a society are unavoidably moral and political, not merely economic questions, and so they require democratic debate about fundamental values. Economists can inform us about possible implications of policy choices, but they can’t tell us - and they don’t really claim to tell us - what’s right and wrong, what’s just and unjust. "

The gist of his argument is here:

"Looking back over three decades of market triumphalism, the most fateful change was not an increase in the incidence of greed. It was the expansion of markets and of market values into spheres of life traditionally governed by non-market norms. We’ve seen, for example, the proliferation of for profit schools, hospitals and prisons; the outsourcing of war to private military contractors. We’ve seen the eclipse of public police forces by private security firms, especially in the US and the UK where the number of private guards is more than twice the number of public police officers. Or consider the aggressive marketing of prescription drugs to consumers in the United States. If you’ve ever seen the television commercials in America on the evening news, you could be forgiven for thinking that the greatest health crisis in the world is not malaria or river blindness or sleeping sickness, but a rampant epidemic of erectile dysfunction. (LAUGHTER) Or consider some recent proposals to use market incentives to solve social problems. Some New York City schools are trying to improve academic performance by paying children 50 dollars if they get good scores on standardised tests. In Dallas, they’re trying to encourage reading by paying children 2 dollars for each book they read.
Or consider the vexed issue of immigration policy. Gary Becker, the Nobel Prize winning free market economist at the University of Chicago, has a solution: to resolve the contentious debate over whom to admit, the US, he says, should simply set a price and sell American citizenship for 50,000 dollars, or perhaps 100,000. Immigrants willing to pay a large entrance fee, Becker reasons, would automatically have desirable characteristics. (LAUGHTER) They are likely to be young, skilled, ambitious, hardworking; and, better still, unlikely to make use of welfare or unemployment benefits. (LAUGHTER) Becker also suggests that charging admission would make it easier to decide which refugees to accept - namely those sufficiently motivated to pay the price. Now you might say that asking a refugee fleeing persecution to hand over 50,000 dollars is callous. So consider another market proposal to solve the refugee problem, one that doesn’t make the refugees themselves pay out of their own pockets. An American law professor proposed the following: that an international body assign each country a yearly refugee quota based on national wealth. Then let nations buy and sell these obligations among themselves. So, for example, if Japan is allocated 20,000 refugees per year but doesn’t want to take them, it could pay Poland or Uganda to take them in. According to standard market logic, everyone benefits: Poland or Uganda gains a new source of national income; Japan meets its refugee obligations by outsourcing them; and more refugees are rescued than would otherwise find asylum. What could be better?
There is something distasteful about a market in refugees, even if it’s for their own good, but what exactly is objectionable about it? It has something to do with the fact that a market in refugees changes our view of who refugees are and how they should be treated. It encourages the participants - the buyers, the sellers and also those whose asylum is being haggled over - to think of refugees as burdens to be unloaded or as revenue sources rather than as human beings in peril. What this worry shows is that markets are not mere mechanisms. They embody certain norms. They presuppose, and also promote, certain ways of valuing the goods being exchanged. Economists often assume that markets are inert, that they do not touch or taint the goods they regulate. But this is a mistake. Markets leave their mark. Often market incentives erode or crowd out non-market incentives. "

He then speaks briefly about Gneezy and Rustichini on childcare late fines (Gneezy, U., and A. Rustichini “A Fine is a Price,” Journal of Legal Studies, vol. XXIX, 1, part 1, 2000, 1-18.), about Titmuss on paid versus unpaid blood banks, and on his own reservations about tradeable pollution permits. He sums this up as follows:

"My general point is this. Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if turned into commodities, so to decide when to use markets, it’s not enough to think about efficiency; we have also to decide how to value the goods in question. Health, education, national defence, criminal justice, environmental protection and so on - these are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. To decide them democratically, we have to debate case by case the moral meaning of these goods in the proper way of valuing. This is the debate we didn’t have during the age of market triumphalism. As a result, without quite realising it, without ever deciding to do so, we drifted from having a market economy to being a market society. The hope for moral and civic renewal depends on having that debate now. It is not a debate that is likely to produce quick or easy agreement. To argue about the right way of valuing goods is to bring moral and even spiritual questions into public discourse. Is it possible to bring moral and religious disagreements into public life without descending into intolerance and coercion? That is the question I’ll turn to in the next lecture. Thank you very much."

Update: In his second lecture, Morality in Politics, Sandel discusses why he thinks paying surrogate mothers is a bad idea (apparently in Britain it is illegal, and so there's a thriving market in which British couples hire surrogate mothers in India). He also discusses arguments for and against same sex marriage. Here is the Programme transcript of the second lecture from the BBC.

HT: Tim Harford

Monday, June 15, 2009

Children can't get organ donations in Japan, because they can't be deceased donors

Even organ donation can be regarded as repugnant.
CNN reports on a Boy not allowed to get life-saving transplant in Japan.

""We were told by his doctor at the end of last year that the heart transplant operation was the only way for him to survive," Ando said.
But the law in Japan prohibits anyone under the age of 15 from donating organs -- meaning Hiroki can't get a new heart in his home country.
According to the web site for Japan Transplant Network, a non-governmental group that supports changing Japan's transplant law, "this stipulation has greatly reduced the possibility of transplants to small children; heart transplants to small children have become impossible."
Lawmaker Taro Kono is spearheading efforts to change the law, which was enacted in 1997. Japan's parliament is now debating four proposed amendments-- including one that would scrap the age limit. "

It appears that the thought of a child dying and having his or her organs transplanted is so distressing that it's against the law; it's considered a repugnant transaction. But because small children can't receive adult hearts, which are too big, this repugnance leads to the deaths of other children.

The boy in question still has a chance:

"Hiroki is now at Columbia University Medical Center in New York, awaiting a new heart. His father says he knows that the transplant issue is a difficult one for families.
"The honest wish from the recipient's side is to have a donor show up as soon as possible," he said, pausing. "I still do not know whether I can make a decision to give my child's heart to someone else if I am faced with such a situation. But unless the people face the issue and think about it seriously, I do not think the time will come soon to see more people volunteering to donate organs."

That last quote is worth re-reading, as it captures a lot of the pathos on both sides of the transplantation transaction, in which one tragic death can sometimes save other lives.

If you aren't already registered as a deceased organ donor (i.e. as someone who is willing to have your organs donated if they can be used after your death), please think about registering now. If you live in the United States, you can often find the form on the website of your State Department of Motor Vehicles, since registration as an organ donor is often done when you get your driver's license.

Sunday, June 14, 2009

Education for matching

David Brooks reflects on what to tell high school graduates, and he thinks about skills we don't teach for making matches: Advice for High School Graduates.

"The most important decision any of us make is who we marry. Yet there are no courses on how to choose a spouse. There’s no graduate department in spouse selection studies. Institutions of higher learning devote more resources to semiotics than love.
The most important talent any person can possess is the ability to make and keep friends. And yet here too there is no curriculum for this."

In addition to thinking about how to educate young people how to navigate these life skills better, we can also think about how to design institutions to better facilitate them. Many high school graduates will find they have no problem making friends and even identifying potential mates while they are in college, where the market is thick. Once they disperse to the work force, both of those things may become harder, as the opportunities become less thick. Many of our customs and institutions related to marriage arose when more people married their high school and college sweethearts.

Saturday, June 13, 2009

"Yield" in college admissions

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a thoughtful article: What Yield Says About a College:

"As usual, some colleges had to do much more than others to fill their classes, a fact that complicates interpretations of yield.
For instance, two colleges may have ended up with identical yield rates. College A did not admit a single applicant early, but College B enrolled a third of its class through early decision, which guarantees a yield of virtually 100 percent for students in that pool.
“Any meaning that yield ever had is now gone, because the number can be manipulated,” says Daniel M. Lundquist, vice president for marketing and enrollment management at the Sage Colleges, in New York. “It’s a circus, and colleges all do admissions differently.”
How many applicants did a college have? How many did it admit? Did it use a waiting list? How big was its tuition-discount rate? And did its football team win the conference title last year?
The answers to such questions are necessary to put yield in context. Some universities, such as large flagships in the Midwest, have high yields because they face relatively little competition for students.
Other colleges see their yield rates drop as their appeal rises and they become more competitive with higher-ranked institutions. Take Dickinson College, whose yield was 26 percent this year, much lower than some of its highly selective competitors. “We could have a higher yield if we competed against lower-tier institutions,” says Robert J. Massa, vice president for enrollment and college relations. “I would rather have a lower yield and compete against top-tier institutions.”

"In some circles, yield is entangled with measures of prestige. U.S. News & World Report once factored yield rates into its rankings of colleges, but it stopped doing so in 2004 amid the debate over the growth of early decision. The magazine now publishes a list of the “most popular colleges,” based solely on yield rates. In the most recent list, Harvard was first, followed by Brigham Young University and the University of Nebraska at Lincoln."

Friday, June 12, 2009

The Economic Logic of Anonymity and Pseudonymity

My previous post talks about my recent NBER working paper with Muriel Niederle and Utku Unver. Earlier this week I received an email that this paper was featured on another blog, Economic Logic. The email was signed "Economic Logician." And when I looked carefully at the blog itself (which I had read before; it's one of the economics blogs I have on my bookmark list), I couldn't find any identifying information about the blogger, even after clicking on the links through which blog owners often identify themselves.

So I replied to the email asking "Are you blogging anonymously, incidentally? (May I ask why?)"

I received the following reply: "Yes, I remain anonymous. This allows me more liberty in my writing, and I hope the blog will gather reputation on its own merit, instead of being attached to a name."

This got me thinking about the market design aspects of anonymity , and its not so close relative pseudonymity. When I asked EL about his/her anonymity, I was referring of course to the fact that I don't know who he/she is, what his/her day job is, which personal pronoun is appropriate, etc. But when EL speaks of the blog developing a reputation, he/she is referring to the fact that the posts are under the repeated-use pseudonym Economic Logician (with respect to which the name of the blog is an eponym), so that each post can both rely on and help establish the reputation of the same unidentified/pseudonymous person who wrote the previous posts.

Lots of internet markeplaces allow pseudonymous usernames, and still manage to foster reputation building and trust. (In an earlier post I wrote about the redesign of eBay's reputation system from one in which feedback could only be identified or pseudonymous to one in which it can also be anonymous: "ENGINEERING TRUST - RECIPROCITY IN THE PRODUCTION OF REPUTATION INFORMATION," - by Gary Bolton, Ben Greiner, and Axel Ockenfels. ) That paper notes how being able to identify who left feedback led to reciprocal feedback, either jointly positive or jointly negative, which reduced the informativeness of certain kinds of feedback.

There are other contexts in which anonymity is encouraged or allowed (and not just in comments to blogs). The refereeing of academic papers for publication is an example in which we seem to believe that the benefits (increased frankness) of anonymity may overcome the costs (e.g. an increase in self-serving reviews).

Some journals have double-blind refereeing, in which the authors as well as the referees may choose to remain anonymous during the review process (e.g. by deleting their names from the cover sheet, and also not posting the paper where Google can find it). Google now essentially prevents journals from enforcing anonymity on authors, since it gives authors a way to identify themselves if they wish, despite the requirement that their names and affiliations may not appear on the submitted paper. I think that preventing referees from knowing who the authors are would be a mixed blessing; it would level the playing field in certain desirable ways, but it might also remove information that would be valuable in evaluating the paper. (For example, if you read a paper saying that, on balance, the conclusions of Roth (1977) need to be revisited, it might be useful for you to know if Roth is one of the authors.)

Of course, marketplace rules may allow participants to be anonymous from some parties and not from others, and internet privacy rules are concerned with who can choose how individuals are identified. (See this nice take on the famous New Yorker cartoon about anonymity on the internet.)

So, anonymity has its uses, as does identity, and pseudonymity has some of the advantages and disadvantages of each. I'll keep blogging under my natural name for the time being, since, especially when my posts are unclear or incomplete, they may get some helpful context from the fact that they are linked to me and the work I do .

Thursday, June 11, 2009

Unraveling

Many markets have trouble coordinating on the timing of transactions, and this has led to market failures in markets as diverse as the market for college football bowls, and the labor market for federal court clerks, and in various medical markets, such as (most recently) gastroenterologists and orthopaedic surgeons.

Why do transactions in some markets happen inefficiently early? Here are the concluding paragraphs from our recent NBER working paper Unraveling Results from Comparable Demand and Supply: An Experimental Investigation
by Muriel Niederle, Alvin E. Roth, M. Utku Unver - #15006 (LS)

" It has been known at least since Roth and Xing (1994) that many markets unravel, so that offers become progressively earlier as participants seek to make strategic use of the timing of transactions. It is clear that unraveling can have many causes, because markets are highly multidimensional and time is only one dimensional (and so transactions can only move in two directions in time, earlier or later). So there can be many different reasons that make it advantageous to make transactions earlier. There can also be strategic reasons to delay transactions; see e.g. Roth and Ockenfels (2002) on late bidding in internet auctions.
Thus the study of factors that promote unraveling is a large one, and a number of distinct causes have been identified in different markets or in theory, including instability of late outcomes (which gives blocking pairs an incentive to identify each other early), congestion of late markets (which makes it difficult to make transactions if they are left until too late), and the desire to mutually insure against late-resolving uncertainty. There has also been some study of market practices that may facilitate or impede the making of early offers, such as the rules and customs surrounding "exploding" offers, which expire if not accepted immediately.
In this paper we take a somewhat different tack, and consider conditions related to supply and demand that will tend to work against unraveling, or to facilitate it. There seems to be a widespread perception, in markets that have experienced it, that unraveling is sparked by a shortage of workers.
But for inefficient unraveling to occur, firms have to be willing to make early offers and workers have to be willing to accept them. Our experiment supports the hypothesis that a shortage of workers is not itself conducive to unraveling, since workers who know that they are in short supply need not hurry to accept offers by lower quality firms. Instead, in the model and in the experiment, it is comparable supply and demand that leads to unraveling, in which attention must be paid not only to the overall demand and supply, but to the supply and demand of workers and firms of the highest quality. This seems to reflect what we see in many unraveled markets, in which competition for the elite firms and workers is fierce, but the quality of workers may not be reliably revealed until after a good deal of hiring has already been completed."

http://papers.nber.org/papers/W15006

Postscript: Skip Sauer over at The Sports Economist has a post about a 9th grader offered a college football scholarship in what is becoming a seriously unraveled market.

Wednesday, June 10, 2009

The market for beauty queens

Beauty queens are marketed as prizewinners, but they are also employees, as the firing of Miss California makes clear: Donald Trump to Miss California: You're fired.

"Wednesday brought another breathtaking twist to the saga of Carrie Prejean, the now-former Miss California USA who got the ax from the pageant's boss Donald Trump ...for not honoring her pageant commitments.
Trump told TMZ.com that Prejean refused to appear at roughly 30 events to which she was contractually bound. ...

Pageant officials say Tami Farrell, first runner-up to Prejean, will take over those responsibilities. Which, to be honest, nobody really understands. But they sound very important."

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...

Tuesday, June 9, 2009

Market for wedding guests

Here's an unusual market for temporary workers:
Japanese company does thriving trade in 'fake friends'

"Along with choosing a dress and booking a honeymoon, there is one other item to add to the wedding checklist in Japan: hiring fake friends.
Office Agents, a Tokyo-based company, rents out friends, work colleagues and even relatives to pad out the guest list.
Brides or grooms who want to impress their prospective partners with their sheer volume of friends are among those secretly padding the guest list with fakes.
The recession has also boosted the popularity of the service. With unemployment rising and a growing number of Japanese in part time jobs, people rent fake bosses or colleagues."

Are paperless tickets scalp proof?

The latest development in the ongoing war between ticket originators, fans, and scalpers is the ticketless ticket.

"Ticketmaster is going to try issuing paperless tickets to reduce scalping. Resale companies are not amused.
http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2009/06/08/pm_ticketmaster/
"JILL BARSHAY: Miley Cyrus hopes she can cut out scalpers from her next tour by selling only paperless tickets. Ones you can't give or sell to someone else. Ones you buy online and pick up at the concert gate by showing your driver's license and a credit card.
Sean Pate is the spokesman for StubHub, the big ticket resale site, owned by eBay. He's predicting paperless tickets will mean long lines on concert night.
SEAN PATE: You know, we're going to see a lot of inconveniences for the fans, especially of Miley Cyrus's demographic. Her fans more than likely don't own credit cards.
That means mom or dad may have to listen to the concert too. Not to mention how mortifying it is for a 12-year-old to be seen with her parents.
Critics say some concerts will still sell out quickly. And prices will be jacked up. The question is by whom. Don Vaccaro is the CEO of TicketNetwork, another resale site. He points out that Miley Cyrus's management company, which is owned by Ticketmaster, is selling prime seats on its Web site starting tomorrow for $295."

Update: Here's the (June 16, 2009) take of the NY Times Ethicist column: Miley Cyrus Takes on the Scalpers.

HT: Steve Leider

Monday, June 8, 2009

Anesthesia was once repugnant

A wonderful story by Mike Jay in the Boston Globe, The day pain died , recounts how the first surgical use of anesthesia came long after its pain-killing properties were known. An impediment to its use, however, was the thought that pain relief was repugnant, i.e. there was something wrong in having a pain free operation.

Here is the beginning of Jay's story, and the end (emphasis added):
"The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word "anesthesia" itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city's physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever.
But what precisely was invented that day? Not a chemical - the mysterious substance used by William Morton, the local dentist who performed the procedure, turned out to be simply ether, a volatile solvent that had been in common use for decades. And not the idea of anesthesia - ether, and the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide, had both been thoroughly inhaled and explored. As far back as 1525, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus had recorded that it made chickens "fall asleep, but wake up again after some time without any bad effect," and that it "extinguishes pain" for the duration.
What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain.
Operating under anesthetic would transform medicine, dramatically expanding the scope of what doctors were able to accomplish. What needed to change first wasn't the technology - that was long since established - but medicine's readiness to use it.
Before 1846, the vast majority of religious and medical opinion held that pain was inseparable from sensation in general, and thus from life itself. Though the idea of pain as necessary may seem primitive and brutal to us today, it lingers in certain corners of healthcare, such as obstetrics and childbirth, where epidurals and caesarean sections still carry the taint of moral opprobrium. In the early 19th century, doctors interested in the pain-relieving properties of ether and nitrous oxide were characterized as cranks and profiteers. The case against them was not merely practical, but moral: They were seen as seeking to exploit their patients' base and cowardly instincts. Furthermore, by whipping up the fear of operations, they were frightening others away from surgery and damaging public health.
The "eureka moment" of anesthesia, like the seemingly sudden arrival of many new technologies, was not so much a moment of discovery as a moment of recognition: a tipping point when society decided that old attitudes needed to be overthrown. It was a social revolution as much as a medical one: a crucial breakthrough not only for modern medicine, but for modernity itself. It required not simply new science, but a radical change in how we saw ourselves."
...
"Once Morton had successfully demonstrated his technique of ether anesthesia, it was quickly seen that its implications reached considerably beyond the dental business. Before 1846 was out, it had been successfully tried by the most celebrated surgeon in Britain, Robert Liston, who pronounced that the new "Yankee dodge" had "the most perfect and satisfactory results" and was "a fine thing for operating surgeons." It was enthusiastically championed by an emerging generation of medical humanitarians, and the new buzzword "anesthesia" crystallized the sense of novelty and medical miracle. Chemistry had, as Thomas Beddoes had prophesied, come to rule over pain.
Despite its successes, resistance to the idea didn't vanish overnight. Until the end of the century, some doctors would maintain that pain had a necessary role in the preservation of life, but from 1846 onward they were outnumbered by those who insisted that it was the job of a physician to inflict as little of it as possible. Some religious voices would hold out for a good deal longer: Pope Pius XII would confirm that "the Christian's duty of renunciation and of interior purification is not an obstacle to the use of anaesthetics" only in February 1957.
Despite the long resistance, that demonstration in the Ether Dome marked a transition that was as irreversible as it was historic. The practice of medicine finally achieved a goal that it had, until that moment, never truly been able to imagine: loosening pain's age-old stranglehold on humanity. And in a sense, the invention was the least of it. The real milestone witnessed in Boston that day was the moment when culture had finally caught up with chemistry."

The article comes from Jay's new book The Atmosphere of Heaven.

Update: Dubner at Freakonomics follows up on this post and draws some interesting comments, including this one:

“So discredited had narcotic drugs become by the middle of the seventeenth century that when Nicolas Bailly, a barber-surgeon of Troys, administered a narcotic potion to a patient before an operation, the venture aroused widespread condemnation. Bailly was arrested and fined for practicing witchcraft. The stupefaction of patients by administration of herbal remedies was then forbidden in France under heavy penalty.”
(Victor Robinson, M.D.: Victory Over Pain. A History of Anesthesia, London: Sigma, 1947. p.40)— kaloniki "