State laws against price gouging

Michael Giberson provides this list:

State	Year	Notes
Alabama	1996	Code of Ala. § 8-31-1 thru § 8-31-6. LINK Alabama law; Any commodity or rental facility.
Arkansas	1997	A.C.A. § 4-88-301 – 4-88-305.
California	1994	Cal. Pen. Code § 396.
Connecticut	1986	Conn. Gen. Stat. § 42-230.
District of Columbia	2007	D.C. Code § 28-4101 thru 28-4102.
Florida	1992	Fla. Stat. § 501.160.
Georgia	1995	O.C.G.A. § 10-1-393.4.
Hawaii	1983	Haw. Rev. Stat. § 209-9
Idaho	2002	Idaho Code § 48-603; Food, fuel, pharmaceuticals, water.
Illinois	2005	Ill. Admin. Code tit. 14, §§ 465.10 thru 465.30.
Indiana	2002	Ind. Code §§ 4-6-9.1-1 thru 4-6-9.1-7; Fuel.
Iowa	1993	61 IAC 31.1(714); Merchandise needed by victims of disasters.
Kansas	2002	K.S.A. § 50-6,106; Any necessary property or service.
Kentucky	2004	Ky. Rev. Stat. Ann.  § 367.374.
Louisiana	1993	La. R.S. 29:732 LINK Louisiana law.
Maine	2006	10 M.R.S.A. § 1105.
Massachusetts	1990	Md. Reg. Code tit. 940, § 3.18; Petroleum products only.
Michigan	*	Mich. Stat. Ann. § 445.903(1)(z); General consumer code provisions not limited to emergencies.
Mississippi	1986	Miss. Code Ann. § 75-24-25(2).
Missouri	1994	15 CSR § 60-8.030; Necessities.
New Jersey	2001	N.J.S.A. §§ 56:8-107 to 8:109; LINK New Jersey law; Necessities.
New York	1979	NY Gen Bus §396-r.
North Carolina	2003	N.C. Gen. Stat. § 75-38; LINK North Carolina law.
Oklahoma	1999	15 OK St. §§ 777.1 thru 777.5.
Oregon	2007	ORS 401.960 thru 401.970; LINK Oregon law; Essential consumer goods and services.
Pennsylvania	2006	Link Pennsylvania law.
Rhode Island	2012	Rhode Island General Laws §30-15-19; Essential commodities including home heating fuels, motor fuels, food and water.
South Carolina	2002	SC Code 39-5-145.
Tennessee	2002	TCA Title 47 Chapter 18 Part 51; LINK Tennesee Law.
Texas	1995	Tex. Bus. & Com. Code Ann. § 17.46(b)(27) LINK Texas law; Necessities.
Utah	2005	Utah Code § 13-41-101 thru 13-41-202. Link Utah law; Retail goods and services.
Vermont	2006	9 V.S.A. § 2461d; LINK Vermont law; Petroleum or heating fuel product only.
Virginia	2004	Va. Code §§ 59.1-525 et seq., LINK Virginia law; Any necessary goods and services.
West Virginia	2002	W.V. Code § 46A-6J-1
Wisconsin	2006	Wisc. ATCP Ch. 106; Link Wisconsin law.
		List updated November 3, 2012 by Michael Giberson. Please see list of resources below for useful links on price gouging. (http://knowledgeproblem.com/2012/11/03/list-of-price-gouging-laws/

Organ harvesting and Chinese-Israeli diplomacy

How Israel and China got into a diplomatic row over Knesset members and organ harvesting: Chinese embassy demands clarifications from Jerusalem after report on the settler radio station with the headline 'Israeli MKs to the UN: Investigate China’s organ harvest.'

Signing petitions without reading them can cause diplomatic problems (or maybe claiming not to have read them is a diplomatic solution).

Israel Radio: Douglas Goldstein interviews Bob Aumann about 2012 Economics Nobel

Bob Aumann is interviewed on Israel Radio, and talks about the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in economics.

"What is pairwise matching, and how does it affect our decisions in life, such as who we marry or where we study? Nobel Prize winner Robert Aumann explains the meaning of pairwise matching, which was the subject that brought the current winners, Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley, their prize."

Economic Science Association conference in Tucson, Nov 15-17

The North American regional conference will be held again in Tucson this year,from Thursday evening November 15 (reception) through Saturday 6:00p.m. November 17 (but there's a good chance that it will move in the future, as none of the current organizers are presently located in Tucson...)

The keynote speakers will be Ulrike Malmendier and Guillaume Frechette.

And "Four pioneers of experimental economics (John Kagel, Charles Plott, Reinhard Selten, and Vernon Smith) will offer their perspectives on how the field developed and where it should be headed."

Matching in the EU: Market Failures and Solutions

The Bellaterra Campus of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona is the center of matching and market design this week, with two conferences.

November 15: 4th Workshop of Matching-in-Practice:

Scientific Comittee: Estelle Cantillon (ECARES), Antonio Miralles (UAB-MOVE) and Péter Biro (HAS)

Program: download pdf

For further information: please write at info@movebarcelona.eu This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it

November 16: The European Science Foundation is sponsoring a workshop called

Matching in the EU: Market Failures and Solutions
Convened by: Péter Biró, Estelle Cantillon and Flip Klijn


"The proposed workshop (and future research) is exploratory and novel as it focuses on the frontiers at the interface of matching theory, laboratory experiments, empirical analysis and market design / policy making. The goal is to bring together active researchers from different fields to systematically explore the current European practices in student admissions (primary, secondary, and higher), entry-level professional labour markets, and other matching markets. We aim to find out
- which clearinghouses and decentralized matching markets are at work in the EU;
- what are the economical and social implications of the different policies;
- which problems (if any) are experienced by the matching schemes;
- how market failures can be solved; and
- how cultural differences between different EU countries do or should play a role in the redesign of the matching markets that experience failures."

Dean Rachel Croson

Economist Rachel Croson Named Dean of the UT Arlington College of Business

"Much of Croson’s research has centered on experimental and behavioral economics, investigating how people make economic decisions and how to improve them, she said.

"Those subject areas draw on and contribute to many disciplines, including economics, management, marketing, operations, political science and sociology, and her work has been published in myriad journals. As director of UT Dallas’ Negotiations Center, she connected negotiation scholars with practitioners and business leaders to inform business practice through education and outreach.

"Croson also is the co-editor of a forthcoming book, Oxford Handbook of Economic Conflict Resolution, with Gary Bolton, and is currently researching motivations for charitable giving, among other subjects."
**********

A big mabruk to Dean Rachel Toni Algaze Croson.

Bicker at Princeton

Vikram Rao writes about recent changes in the matching process of students to eating clubs at Princeton:

Professor Roth,

I'm a fan of your blog and recently came across an event that you might find interesting. I studied as an undergrad at Princeton, which is known for its "eating clubs" - similar to frats or sororities, but they are co-ed, serve meals, and function as daytime study and lounge spaces. Anyway, admission to half the eating clubs is by "sign-in" where a lottery occurs if too many students try to sign in. The other half of the clubs have a process called "bicker" - a traditional matching process where prospective members show up for a few days of events and then members discuss and vote on each prospective member.

Recently, a few of the clubs decided to allow prospective members to bicker two clubs instead of one (http://www.dailyprincetonian.com/2012/11/08/31741/). Students rank their clubs and then show up to events for both; they are NOT allowed to indicate equal preference for both clubs (this fact isn't in the article but I know from friends). The interesting situation arises when a student is accepted at both clubs - the matching algorithm will always default to the student's preference for club (so if I get into club A and B and said I preferred B beforehand, I will be placed in B). 

On the face of things, this sounds unremarkable. However, I think this matching market has an interesting wrinkle for students who are admitted to two clubs. 

Following the "bicker" process, prospective members are ranked by each club. Prospective members aren't supposed to find out how they did at bicker, but as you might imagine gossip spreads and the people who were ranked the highest often find out about it. Those who did well feel like they belong and are more excited about the club. 

Given the opportunity to bicker more than one club, I suspect that some students will be indifferent or close to indifferent between two clubs. But they will be forced to rank the two clubs. Following the bicker process, it might turn out that they did much better at their #2 ranked club. But the match will sort them into their #1 ranked club. Given the aforementioned desire to “belong”, it’s possible that this could lead to instability in the match (Student: “Now that I know I did so much better at club C bicker, I wish I ranked it ahead of club D!”). Perhaps a way to solve this is to let students indicate indifference between the two clubs beforehand and then have the algorithm place them in the club that ranked them higher.

This situation seems to differ from say a medical residency or a job where most people probably want their best possible job regardless of how well their application was perceived by those doing the evaluation. With a social group like this, you don’t just want to get in but might also want to feel “wanted” in an ongoing way.

David Warsh reflects on Howard Raiffa's memoir and career

On the anniversary of the Cuban Missile crisis, David Warsh reads some books, ending up with Howard Raiffa's memoir, about which he has this to say:

High drama, great stuff.  But I wanted something a little closer to life as we had lived it in the decades since that narrow escape. I found it in Memoir: Analytical Roots of a Decision Scientist, by Howard Raiffa. His name is hardly a household word. Raiffa is one of those intellectuals who in the years since World War II fundamentally transformed the world in which we live, as one of the foremost pioneers of the application of mathematics to business – not just game theory, but Bayesian statistical decision analysis as well.

Aas it happens, between 1968 and 1975 Raiffa also organized, and then  administered the joint US- Soviet think-tank known as the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis. IASSA (pronounced YASSA), itself hardly a household word, is one of the durable outgrowths of the Cuban missile crisis and, in many ways, a symbol of the strange interregnum of the 1970s known as détente. Last week in Vienna, IASSA celebrated its fortieth anniversary having been, among other things, the cradle of climate modeling.

It is not the career you would have expected from a rangy kid in the Bronx who loved basketball better than schoolbooks.  At thirteen, Raiffa played in a high school championship game inMadison Square Garden. At sixteen, in 1940, however, he met Estelle Schwartz, whom he would marry five years later. She was a student at Manhattan’s High School of Music and Art; to stay close, he enrolled in the City College of New York. He loaded up on math courses; his basketball aspirations shifted from playing to coaching. Three semesters later, he enlisted, eventually becoming an air traffic control officer working on radar for the Army Air Corps. When peace came, he was sent toJapan.

After mustering out, Raiffa switched to theUniversity of Michigan.  He turned out to be a much better student that he had thought. Since the engineering profession was said to be generally anti-Semitic; he resolved to become an actuary. Estelle Raiffa obtained a masters degree in elementary education, teaching autoworkers’ kids at Willow Run, near Ann Arbor.  Six years later they were still there.  Raiffa had run into Kenneth Arrow, Robert Tucker, John Nash, Abraham Wald, Lawrence Klein and Robert Solow. He had become a mathematician, working in the borderlands of economics, psychology and the new field of operations research.

Abraham Wald was killed in a air crash; to replace him, Columbia hired Raiffa in 1952.  (He turned down what would have been a better-paying offer to work with Claude Shannon at Bell Labs).   Columbia had been a hotbed of statistics since before the war; it was teaching there that Raiffa began his conversion to the Bayesian approach, gradually learning to update initial beliefs with objective new information as it arrived, just as Rev. Thomas Bayes, the early eighteenth-century amateur mathematician, had first maintained should be done when thinking probabilistically.

Having been trained in the verities of classical (Neyman-Pearson) statistics, Raiffa’s colleagues complained: “Look, Howard [he says they would say], what are you trying to do?  Introduce squishy judgmental psychological stuff into something which we think is a science?”  In reply, he quoted the legendary Leonard Jimmie Savage (by then Savage had joined Milton Friedman and Allen Wallis at the University of Chicago): “Yes, I would rather build an edifice on the shifting sands of subjective probabilities than build upon a void.”

(For an illuminating account of this revolution in statistical thinking, including a chapter on what Raiffa did next, see The Theory that Would Not Die: How Bayes Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, & Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy, by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne, Yale University Press, 2011.  It is at least a very useful complement to Nate Silver’s The Signal and the Noise – Why So Many Predictions Fail but Some Don’t, Penguin, 2012, and in some ways a much better book.)

It was when HarvardBusinessSchoolhired him in 1957 that Raiffa’s major phase began. By then, Games and Decisions: Introduction and Critical Survey, the text he had written withDuncan Luce, had appeared and opened a portal through which game theorists and economists would pass in the next generation. (Its original title had been Conflict, Cooperation, and Conciliation.)  A new department of statistics was forming, one that included Frederick Mosteller, Raiffa, John Pratt and, for a time, the ancient Greek scholar Robert Schlaifer. In the next few years Raiffa’s students included Richard Zeckhauser, Robert Wilson, Michael Spence. Edith Stokey, Roger Myerson, Eric Maskin (at least three future Nobel laureates among them), and even a young Lawrence Summers, who pronounced Games and Decisions among the most eye-opening books he had ever read.  B-school students called Raiffa “Mr. Decision Tree.”  He started an institute to intensively train forty professors in the new methods of game theory, decision analysis, and operations research. Several subsequently became influential business school deans: Lawrence Fouraker at Harvard; Robert Jaedicke at Stanford; Donald Jacobs at Northwestern.

It was in 1966 that President Lyndon Johnson asked National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy to investigate whether some new form of high level cooperation with the Soviets might be possible. The missile crisis had demonstrated the value of the teletype connection linking the White House and the Kremlin that was the “hotline” that Thomas Schelling had proposed in 1958.  Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove was making vivid to moviegoers the dangers of mutual incomprehension.  Perhaps a bricks-and-mortar East-West center for high-level social scientists working together on problems experienced by communist and capitalist societies alike – energy, water resources, food and agriculture, population studies, urban policies – would enhance chances for peace. (It subsequently turned out that Francis Bator, Bundy’s deputy at the NSC, had thought up IASSA and planted the idea with the president, much as W.W. Rostow had first imagined the UN’s Economic Commission for Europe as a bridge between East and West, over which economist Gunnar Myrdal would preside for a decade in Geneva in the 1950s.) In early 1968, Raiffa agreed to take on the task.

The Soviets agreed. Newly-elected President Richard Nixon signed on. Viennawas chosen. What emerged, when the heavily renovated old palace outside of Vienna finally opened its doors in 1973, was a thinking-person’s version of what by then truly was a household word:  the Club of Rome.  That self-proclaimed “group of world citizens, sharing a common concern for the future of humanity” had grabbed headlines in the early 1970s with a bootleg computer model designed to demonstrate the need  for “lifeboat ethics” – a Dr. Strangelove script for the newspapers.

Clearly some sort of deeper dispassionate long-term thinking was needed about where the planet was headed.  So Raiffa populated the Vienna installation with first-rate intellects willing to take one- or two-year appointments in order to get things started, including Arrow, George Dantzig, Tjalling Koopmans, William Nordhaus, Alan Manne — and Donella and Dennis Meadows, principal authors of Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth. Raiffa hired talented Soviets; decreed that seminars would be conducted only in English, anticipating a trend that has since spread around the world; and encouraged the development of small environmental models, as opposed to the behemoths that Soviet planners preferred. “Howard was a latter-day George Washington,” says Mark Thomson, who served as Raiffa’s executive assistant in those years. “He was devoted in every way possible to the overall cause.”  Bundy later said that IASSA had succeeded only “because Howard didn’t know that it was impossible.”

IASSA slowed down some when Raiffa returned to Harvard in 1975, after three years as director, and soon thereafter founded its Project on Negotiation. (His 1985 Art and Science of Negotiation: How to Resolve Conflicts and Get the Best Out of Bargaining is today Raiffa’s best-read book. Harvard Law Professor Roger Fisher, who died, at 90, in August, soon joined the Negotiation project and later  sold 8 million copies of Getting to Yes: Negotiating Agreement without Giving In, cowritten with William Ury. Events accelerated; IASSA’s appointments became less spectacular. There was a fracas during the Reagan administration over whether it had become a nest of Soviet spies.  Institutes for Advanced Study in Princeton and Berlin impinged on its turf.  Its most successful project, climate modeling, was essentially spun out, to the International Energy Workshop and the UN’sIntergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Still, if the YouTube selections from the celebration in Vienna last week are any guide, IASSA remains a vital intellectual center, sponsoring systems analysis work on an array of interesting problems, ready to play a part whenever the next global crisis – food? water? – becomes acute.  The Raiffas attended, despite a twenty-year-long battle with Parkinson’s Disease that has reduced his mobility, before flying home for his friend Fisher’s memorial service.

Decision analysis is now firmly established. The carefully–designed controlled experiments for which Daniel Kahneman (and, by extension, his late research partner Amos Tversky) received the 2002 Nobel Prize in Economics, were predicated on an extensive body of body of prior work. It was after receiving Carnegie-Mellon University’s Dickson Prize, one of a handful of such awards that exist within the penumbra of the Nobel, that Raiffa undertook his Memoir. In its closing pages, he envisages departments of decision science within universities. These, he says, would offer instruction to undergraduates (Societal Risk Analysis, for example, Organizational Design and Structures of Constitutions); perform research on decision-making at once empirical, normative and prescriptive; and train a new breed of specialists: decision advisors, or DAs, equipped to help decision makers confront the intricate choices they must make. It all takes time, of course. Big mistakes still occur (remember Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction?). But what a long way we have come in the half centuty since the Cuban missile crisis.

Repugnance is not immutable

In a New Yorker article called Love on the March, Alex Ross writes

"I am forty-four years old, and I have lived through a startling transformation in the status of gay men and women in the United States. Around the time I was born, homosexual acts were illegal in every state but Illinois. Lesbians and gays were barred from serving in the federal government. There were no openly gay politicians. A few closeted homosexuals occupied positions of power, but they tended to make things more miserable for their kind. Even in the liberal press, homosexuality drew scorn: in The New York Review of Books, Philip Roth denounced the “ghastly pansy rhetoric” of Edward Albee, and a Time cover story dismissed the gay world as a “pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality, a pitiable flight from life.”
...
"By the mid-eighties, when I was beginning to come to terms with my sexuality, a few gay people held political office, many states had dropped long-standing laws criminalizing sodomy, and sundry celebrities had come out. ...But anti-gay crusades on the religious right threatened to roll back this progress. In 1986, the Supreme Court, upholding Georgia’s sodomy law, dismissed the notion of constitutional protection for gay sexuality as “at best, facetious.”
...
"Today, gay people of a certain age may feel as though they had stepped out of a lavender time machine. That’s the sensation that hit me when I watched the young man in Tempe shout down a homophobe in the name of the President-elect. Gay marriage is legal in six states and in Washington, D.C. Gays can serve in the military without hiding their sexuality. We’ve seen openly gay judges, congresspeople, mayors (including a four-term mayor of Tempe), movie stars, and talk-show hosts. Gay film and TV characters are almost annoyingly ubiquitous. The Supreme Court, which finally annulled sodomy laws in 2003, is set to begin examining the marriage issue. And the 2012 campaign has shown that Republicans no longer see the gays as a reliable wedge issue: although Mitt Romney opposes same-sex marriage, he has barely mentioned it this fall. "


*********

Here's a different kind of repugnant transaction, that affected a much smaller part of the population: http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/10/the-sex-lives-of-conjoined-twins/264095/

Junior high school photo

One benefit of getting 1500 emails with the subject heading "Congratulations" is that I've reconnected with old friends. One sent me this photo from 1966, and another classmate reassured me that I haven't changed a bit...

Kidney Grafts Function Longer in Europe Than in the United States

There's a report that Kidney Grafts Function Longer in Europe Than in the United States

"Kidney transplants performed in Europe are considerably more successful in the long run than those performed in the United States. While the one-year survival rate is 90% in both Europe and the United States, after five years, 77% of the donor kidneys in Europe still function, while in the United States, this rate among white Americans is only 71%. After ten years, graft survival for the two groups is 56% versus 46%, respectively.

"The results of the study show particularly large differences in graft survival among children and young adults between Europe and the US. One reason for the poorer results in the United States may be the fact that costs of anti-rejection drugs are usually reimbursed by Medicare for only three years, while in Europe, the statutory health insurance guarantees lifelong reimbursement of costs. In the United States, patients who have undergone kidney transplants often have to pay for these drugs themselves. Costs amount to around US $20,000 per year."

Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks

The Workshop on Information and Decision in Social Networks will take place today and tomorrow at MIT. (I'm flying today and speaking tomorrow.) Here's the program.

Some old repugnance fades: same sex marriage and marijuana

Votes still being counted in some states...but here's the NY Times: In Maine and Maryland, Victories at the Ballot Box for Same-Sex Marriage

"Voters in Maine and Maryland approved same-sex marriageon an election night that jubilant gay rights advocates called a historic turning point, the first time that marriage for gay men and lesbians has been approved at the ballot box.

"While six states and the District of Columbia have legalized same-sex marriage through court decisions or legislative decisions, voters had rejected it more than 30 times in a row.
Results for the other two states voting on same-sex marriage, Minnesota and Washington, were still coming in late Tuesday..."


And here's the headline over at Slate: Gay Marriage Legalized! What an Amazing Day To Be an American.
*******************

On a different matter, Marijuana legalization passes in Colorado, Washington

"Voters in Washington and Colorado passed ballot initiatives Tuesday to legalize marijuana for recreational use, the biggest victory ever for the legalization movement.
...
"But in many ways, it's just the beginning of the battle. Marijuana is still illegal in the eyes of the federal government, which overrules states' rights."

Physician assisted suicide on the ballot today in MA

On the ballot today in MA (where I'm no longer voting, since our move) is a proposition (Question 2) that would allow physician assisted suicide for some terminally ill patients. Another would decriminalize medical marijuana.  (If I were still living in MA I would vote for both; instead I get to vote in CA to raise my taxes...also a repugnant transaction in a way...)


Here's the question on the ballot:

This proposed law would allow a physician licensed in Massachusetts to prescribe medication, at a terminally ill patient’s request, to end that patient’s life. To qualify, a patient would have to be an adult resident who (1) is medically determined to be mentally capable of making and communicating health care decisions; (2) has been diagnosed by attending and consulting physicians as having an incurable, irreversible disease that will, within reasonable medical judgment, cause death within six months; and (3) voluntarily expresses a wish to die and has made an informed decision. The proposed law states that the patient would ingest the medicine in order to cause death in a humane and dignified manner.

The proposed law would require the patient, directly or through a person familiar with the patient’s manner of communicating, to orally communicate to a physician on two occasions, 15 days apart, the patient’s request for the medication. At the time of the second request, the physician would have to offer the patient an opportunity to rescind the request. The patient would also have to sign a standard form, in the presence of two witnesses, one of whom is not a relative, a beneficiary of the patient’s estate, or an owner, operator, or employee of a health care facility where the patient receives treatment or lives.

The proposed law would require the attending physician to: (1) determine if the patient is qualified; (2) inform the patient of his or her medical diagnosis and prognosis, the potential risks and probable result of ingesting the medication, and the feasible alternatives, including comfort care, hospice care and pain control; (3) refer the patient to a consulting physician for a diagnosis and prognosis regarding the patient’s disease, and confirmation in writing that the patient is capable, acting voluntarily, and making an informed decision; (4) refer the patient for psychiatric or psychological consultation if the physician believes the patient may have a disorder causing impaired judgment; (5) recommend that the patient notify next of kin of the patient’s intention; (6) recommend that the patient have another person present when the patient ingests the medicine and to not take it in a public place; (7) inform the patient that he or she may rescind the request at any time; (8) write the prescription when the requirements of the law are met, including verifying that the patient is making an informed decision; and (9) arrange for the medicine to be dispensed directly to the patient, or the patient’s agent, but not by mail or courier.

The proposed law would make it punishable by imprisonment and/or fines, for anyone to (1) coerce a patient to request medication, (2) forge a request, or (3) conceal a rescission of a request. The proposed law would not authorize ending a patient’s life by lethal injection, active euthanasia, or mercy killing. The death certificate would list the underlying terminal disease as the cause of death.

Participation under the proposed law would be voluntary. An unwilling health care provider could prohibit or sanction another health care provider for participating while on the premises of, or while acting as an employee of or contractor for, the unwilling provider.

The proposed law states that no person would be civilly or criminally liable or subject to professional discipline for actions that comply with the law, including actions taken in good faith that substantially comply. It also states that it should not be interpreted to lower the applicable standard of care for any health care provider.

A person’s decision to make or rescind a request could not be restricted by will or contract made on or after January 1, 2013, and could not be considered in issuing, or setting the rates for, insurance policies or annuities. Also, the proposed law would require the attending physician to report each case in which life-ending medication is dispensed to the state Department of Public Health. The Department would provide public access to statistical data compiled from the reports.

Kidney exchange at Northwestern

While most of my work has been with multi-hospital kidney exchange networks, kidney exchange is also thriving at single hospital centers like Northwestern's, which recently hit the 100th transplant in its kidney exchange (kidney paired donation) program: Northwestern Medicine Surgeons Perform 100th Kidney Paired Donation Transplant, and from a somewhat different angle (and quoting some of my colleagues there), Northwestern Memorial Hospital reaches kidney-transplant landmark

Coordination devices: daylight savings time, and the international dateline

Daylight savings time is a coordination device that we think about twice a year. The international dateline is another...

The Border That Stole 500 Birthdays
"So how exactly does drawing a line across the Pacific solve this issue? Why isn’t it enough merely to change the date at the stroke of midnight in each successive time zone? Because, if you think about it, that’s logically impossible. With only a single line moving westward across the planet, what exactly is it separating? The same date from itself? No — it is precisely because midnight separates two dates from each other that we need two date lines to separate them, one moving and one fixed.

"Picture that movable date line — the stroke of midnight — racing across the earth at the speed of one time zone an hour. When the clock strikes 12  in the first zone west of the fixed date line, a new date is born in a sliver one time zone wide, stretching from pole to pole. As the hours tick away, that slice grows wider across the Earth’s circumference. The new date races ahead of the sunrise, lighting up the east as the day races west. Inexorably, as the date circles the Earth to rejoin the fixed line, the “new” date becomes the “old” one, to be replaced in turn by the next one as the midnight hour once again crosses the date line"

An old interview about market design

I've been giving a lot of interviews lately, so it was interesting to receive an email reminding me of an interview I did over a year ago with Julia Shew and Anagha Vaidhyanathan. Here's the first paragraph--I generally can't recall clearly what I've said in interviews, and I hope I'm answering current ones as well.

Anagha: What inspired you to leave the academic nest and begin manipulating markets in the real world?

Roth: I haven’t left the classroom! We’re trying to create market design as an academic field in Economics and make it a way for Economists to earn their living. Market design is useful for a couple of reasons. First, to see if we know what we’re talking about. Second, to learn more – of course we don’t know what we’re talking about until we go out and see why things don’t work the way we think they should work. And third, to do some good in the world. Once we think we know something about how things might work better, we try to help out.

I speak at YULA Boys High School Beit Midrash

I haven't accepted many post-Nobel invitations yet, but if you're in LA after Shabbat tomorrow, I'll be there too, at Yeshiva University High School of Los Angeles:

Market design news, in Hebrew

Tali Heruti-Sover (טלי חרותי-סובר) interviews me (in English) and writes in Hebrew here.

חתן פרס נובל לכלכלה, פרופ' אלווין רות', על המתכון לחיים טובים

Lanie Ross speaks on deceased donor kidney allocation in Toronto

If you are in Toronto tomorrow, you can catch influential medical ethicist Lanie Ross speaking about deceased donor allocation.

Speaker Series: Lainie Ross, University of Chicago.

November 2, 2012: Deceased Donor Kidney Allocation:
Equity, Efficiency and Unintended Consequences

3:30-5pm EST, UWO

The Chu International Centre, Western Student Services Building (WSS) 2130

For information on parking, please visit here.

Download poster 

HT: Scott Kominers

Have a wedding? Need one? Bridal Brokerage...

What to do when the venue and caterers have been paid for with big upfront deposits, and at the last minute it doesn't seem like such a good idea to tie the knot?

What to do if you need a wedding in a hurry, and aren't fussy about the details of the reception?

It sounds like a missing market, and Bridal Brokerage is prepared to be the market maker, standing by to take your orders on either side...

Over 250,000 weddings are called off every year.

We purchase cancelled weddings and resell them to new couples.

Sellers recover deposits and upfront costs hassle-free.
Venues and providers enjoy uninterrupted business as usual.
Buyers find beautiful, pre-planned weddings at a fraction of the price.

Register with us and help us build a new market for weddings.

HT: Benjamin Kay

Spring School in Behavioral Econ at UCSD in March

Uri Gneezy writes to announce the

Spring School in Behavioral Economics

March 15 to March 21, 2013, San Diego

The Choice Lab at the Norwegian School of Economics (NHH) and the Rady School of Management at UC San Diego will host a spring school in behavioral economics. The goal of this spring school is to introduce graduate students to new and exciting research in the field. This is a great opportunity for graduate students to expand their behavioral skills and learn what behavioral economics research is about. Topics include social preferences, (psychological) games, incentives, charitable giving and behavioral interventions.

The Summer School is comprised of a series of 10 half day lectures. The lectures will be delivered by Jim Andreoni, Alexander Cappelen, Martin Dufwenberg, Armin Falk, Uri Gneezy, Theo Offerman, Bertil Tungodden, Lise Vesterlund and Angelino Viceisza. A strong emphasis is given to informal interactions, and students will also be given the opportunity to present their work.

We will cover participants’ costs during the workshop, including housing and most meals. Unfortunately, we do not have funds to cover travel costs. About twenty five participants will be invited.

To apply, please send your curriculum vitae and a short (up to 1000 words) statement of research interest, all in one pdf file to rady.spring.school@gmail.com. We will also need a letter of recommendation to be sent to the same email address. The deadline for applications is Monday, December 31, 2012.

Alexander, Bertil and Uri

Uri Gneezy | The Epstein/Atkinson Chair in Behavioral Economics
Rady School of Management, UC san Diego | 9500 Gilman Drive #0553 La Jolla CA 92093, USA
Tel: 858-534-4312 | Fax: 858-534-0745 | http://management.ucsd.edu/faculty/directory/gneezy/

Hurricane Sandy and New York City's Specialized High School Admissions Test

Modeling a marketplace involves leaving out a lot of things that can actually happen in the market. People who work with models know this, but I'm constantly reminded by events just how rich a world it is that we try to model as simply as we can.  Take the case of New York City's elite exam schools, and Hurricane Sandy.

New York's exam schools, such as Stuyvesant and Bronx Magic (as the august Bronx High School of Science used to be called when I was in junior high) admit students on the basis of scores on the Specialized High School Admissions Test (SHSAT). So the exams are very high stakes for the very young scholars who take them, and many students engage in extensive test preparation (see e.g. this story).

The exams were scheduled for this past weekend: some students would take them on Saturday and some on Sunday. But the approach of Hurricane Sandy caused the Sunday exam to be rescheduled to November 18, three weeks later than originally scheduled, and three weeks later than the students who took the exam as scheduled on Saturday. This caused some distress to at least some parents who (because of recent news stories) emailed me. One was concerned that even some students who were scheduled to take the exam on Saturday may have contrived to get three more weeks of preparation:

"Those who thought to have more prep time for SHSAT opted to be absent today and using doctor's note to gain 3 weeks study time. I guess human nature always try to game the system.
"Inherent problem of NYC DOE system is that a student can take this test only once.  It is so high stake that some family try to game it.  I guess algorithm can not factor in this."

The Nobel sport of football at Stanford

The Nobel committee recognized two Stanford faculty members this year. And it's the football season.
So here I am, waving to the crowd from the field, with Brian Kobilka, who shared this year's Nobel prize in Chemistry. (The bottom pic is how we looked to my wife from the skydeck of Stanford's football stadium...)

Bartering girls in Pakistan

Pakistan court probes bartering of girls: Supreme court takes notice of barter of 13 young girls under tribal custom in Balochistan province.

"Pakistan's supreme court has ordered authorities to investigate the alleged barter of 13 children - all girls - to settle a blood feud in a remote area of the southwestern Balochistan province.
...
"Saeed Faisal, the deputy commissioner for the district, told the court that a tribal council had ordered the barter in early September.

"Faisal said that he did not know the girls' ages, but local media reported that they were aged between four and 13.
...
"Wani, the tradition of families exchanging unmarried girls to settle feuds, is banned under Pakistani law but still practiced in the country's more conservative and tribal areas."

"Kidney ethics" in Hebrew and in Israel

The phrase "מוסר כליות" (musar claiot) in Hebrew could be literally translated as "kidney ethics," but is an idiom that means something like "a guilty conscience" or maybe "remorse". It's the headline of this story in Haaretz magazine, about the grey market for organs in Israel...

This is the kind of thing that Jay Lavee wrote about trying to fix, in his op-ed that I blogged about yesterday.

Ht: Ran Shorrer

Me on the morning joe

Not just a drink, but also a tv show, listen to me try to avoid answering questions I know little about (just the first one, fortunately:) http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036789/#49549785 

Jay Lavee on organ transplantation policy in Israel

An op-ed by Jay Lavee, the Israeli transplant surgeon at the heart of recent dramatic revisions of transplant law and policy in Israel: Saving lives locally

Sridhar Tayur proposes an entrepreneurial way to reform organ waiting lists

Deceased donor organs in the United States are allocated through regional (not national) waiting lists, which leads to some dramatic differences in e.g. waiting times in different parts of the country. Individual candidates for transplantation can register as patients in different regions, if they are healthy and wealthy enough to move around. (e.g. Steve Jobs received a liver in Memphis, although I recall he worked at a company located in California...)  He had access to good transportation opportunities.

CMU professor Srihar Tayur, who will be speaking at Stanford GSB at noon today, has an entrepreneurial project, OrganJet,  intended to give that kind of access to transportation to people for whom it has previously been an insuperable obstacle.  Here's an article about his operation: Can Private Jets for the Poor Save Health Care Dollars?

Art vs. porn: do you know it when you see it?

An art museum in Vienna has had to censor the ads for its exhibits of male nudes: here's the story (in German, but with before and after pictures).  Penis-Plakat nach Protesten zensiert

HT: Muriel Niederle

Ads for kidneys in Iran

An article in Haaretz describes the market for kidneys ("kidney bazaar" בזאר הכליות) in Iran, and includes this picture of ads written on a wall  in Tehran.

"Qasemi Mustafa, head of Kidney Patients Support Association in Iran, said the average sum received by the donors ranged around $ 6,000 [paid by the recipient]. The Government adds that another thousand dollars."

HT: Ran Shorrer

Here's a closely related story in the Guardian: In the only country where the organ trade is legal, the streets near hospitals have been turned into a 'kidney eBay'

"Iran is the only country where the selling and buying of kidneys is legal. As a result, there is no shortage of the organs – but for those trying to sell a kidney, there is a lot of competition.
... "Competition means that some ads have been torn down. Some have added their information to ads by other donors. Others have placed their ads on people's doors or simply written them in marker pen on trees where they think they will catch people's attention.

"At the heart of the capital, near the Charity Association for the Support of Kidney Patients (CASKP), the number of ads has made the streets of Tehran into a sort of kidney eBay.
...
"Iran's controversial kidney procurement system, which has been praised by many experts and criticised by others, allows people to sell and buy kidneys under the state-regulated surveillance of two non-profit organisations, the CASKP and the Charity Foundation for Special Diseases. These charities facilitate the process by finding potential vendors and introducing them to the recipients, and are charged with checking the compatibility of a possible donation and ensuring a fair trade.

"After the transplant, the vendor is compensated by both the government and the recipient. In an interview with the semi-official Mehr news agency, the CASKP's director, Mostafa Ghassemi, estimated the total official price list to be around 7m rials, of which 1m is paid by the government. Iranians are not allowed to donate kidneys to non-citizens.

"In 2010, a total of 2,285 kidney transplants took place in the country, of which 1,690 kidneys were supplied from volunteers and 595 from those clinically brain-dead," he said. According to Mehr, the majority of people selling kidneys are aged 20-30. Despite the state control, bureaucracy and time-consuming procedures have left the door open for non-official direct negotiations, making the Iranian system more like a kidney market.

"Dr Benjamin Hippen, a transplant nephrologist with the Carolinas medical centre in North Carolina, US, has studied successes, deficiencies and the ambiguities of the Iranian system.

"Making a judgment about whether the 20-year-old system as a whole has been successful was complicated, he said. "The majority of those selling kidneys in Iran are disproportionately poor, and information about the long-term outcomes for sellers is quite limited. Too, it is increasingly clear that there are many different systems, rather than a single unified system in Iran.

"That said, Iran appears to have successfully addressed the shortage of organs, incentives for organs have not substantially attenuated the growth and development of organ procurement from deceased donors, and reported outcomes for recipients have been favourable."

"Comparing Iran with Pakistan, where organ trafficking is nominally illegal but still occurs, Hippen, who is an associate editor of the American Journal of Transplantation, said: "It seems to me that if Iran had not developed a system of incentives, the situation there today would look very much like the state of affairs in countries such as Pakistan."

"In the US, more than 100,000 people were estimated to be on the waiting list for kidney transplants in 2010 – waiting lists were eliminated in Iran in 1999.

"Hippen has pointed out that "since 1999, more than 30,000 US patients with kidney failure have died waiting for an organ that never arrived".

"Arguing in favour of allowing people to sell their kidneys, Sue Rabbitt Roff, a senior research fellow at the University of Dundee, said last year that it was time to "pilot paid provision of live kidneys in the UK under strict rules of access and equity".

NBER market design meeting photo

At the NBER meetings in Cambridge on Friday and Saturday, someone called for "Al's students and postdocs" to gather for a photo:

Ed Glaeser on Boston school choice

Ed Glaeser writes in the Boston Globe: Boston school-assignments: Listen to the Nobel committee

One sentence struck me as a little odd:
 "The current system owes much to Roth, a professor at UCLA, and Shapley, a Harvard colleague of mine (who, sadly, is leaving for Stanford)."

Back in my old haunts

I'll be guest lecturing today in my old market design class at Harvard, as now taught by Peter Coles and Ben Edelman. I'll speak about kidney exchange.

Then I'll go to the NBER workshop on market design:

9:00 amWilliam Fuchs, University of California at Berkeley

Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University
Costs and Benefits of Dynamic Trading in a Lemons Market

Jacob Leshno, Microsoft Research
Dynamic Matching in Overloaded Systems

10:35 am

Kenneth Hendricks, University of Wisconsin and NBER
Daniel Quint, University of WisconsinSelecting Bidders Via Non-Binding Bids When Entry Is Costly 

Sergiu Hart, Hebrew University
Noam Nisan, Hebrew UniversityThe Menu-Size Complexity of Auctions 

Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University
Jinwoo Kim, Yonsei University
Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University
Efficient Assignment with Interdependent Values

1:30 pm

Itai Ashlagi, MIT
Alvin Roth, Stanford University and NBER
Kidney Exchange in Time and Space

Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College

M. Utku Unver, Boston College
Welfare Consequences of Transplant Organ Allocation Policies

3:20 pm

Peter Cramton, University of Maryland
Pacharasut Sujarittanonta, Cramton Associates LLC
Robert Wilson, Stanford University
Using an Auction to Dissolve a Partnership Efficiently

Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland
Jonathan Levin, Stanford University and NBER
Paul Milgrom, Stanford University
Ilya Segal, Stanford UniversityIncentive Auction Rules Option and Discussion

Saturday, October 20:

9:00 am

Aditya Bhave, University of Chicago
Eric Budish, University of ChicagoPrimary-Market Auctions for Event Tickets: Eliminating the Rents of "Bob the Broker" 

Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University

Nikhil Agarwal, Harvard University

Parag Pathak, MIT and NBER

Centralized vs. Decentralized School Assignment: Evidence from NYC

10:40 am

Qingmin Liu, Columbia University
Marek Pycia, University of California at Los Angeles
Ordinal Efficiency, Fairness, and Incentives in Large Markets

Scott Duke Kominers, University of Chicago
Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College
Designing for Diversity in Matching

1:00 pm

Elisa Celis, University of Washington
Gregory Lewis, Harvard University and NBER
Markus Mobius, Iowa State University and NBER
Hamid Nazerzadeh, University of Southern California
Buy-it-Now or Take-a-Chance: Price Discrimination through Randomized Auctions

Michael Kearns, University of Pennsylvania
Mallesh Pai, University of Pennsylvania
Aaron Roth, University of Pennsylvania
Jonathan Ullman, Harvard University
Mechanism Design in Large Games: Incentives and Privacy

David Rothschild, Microsoft Research
David Pennock, Microsoft Research
The Extent of Price Misalignment in Prediction Markets

3:00 pm

Adjourn

Kidney exchange in India

This story of kidney exchange in India reminds me of the early days in the U.S., before there was a thick marketplace. (In addition it sounds as if Indian laws make exchange difficult, no doubt with the intention of making difficult the cash-for-kidneys black market...)

""Both the patients had approached us separately. They had come along with came individually with their respective wives as probable donors. But the transplants could not take place at that time as the blood groups of the patients and that of their respective wives did not match," said Dr Deepak Shankar Ray, the head of nephrology at RTIICS.

"Later, while scanning through the list of renal failure patients with renal failures and their prospective donors (related) who had come to the hospital, Ray happened to stumbled upon the fact that Manoj Kumar's blood group which is A +matched that of Umesh Prasad.

"Gupta's wife's, while Gupta's blood group was the same as which is B + matched that of Kumar's wife. While Nandarani and Gupta are B+, Kumar and Reena are both A+. The doctor then acted as a link between the two parties informing them that the transplants could happen if their wives were ready to donate their kidneys to someone else.
...
"Armed with no-objection certificates from the health department of their respective states (mandatory under the Organ Transplant Act), the patients came back returned to Kolkata a few weeks back.

"In Kolkata, advocate Subhomoy Samajddar filed affidavits at Alipore court that is required for unrelated donor transplant. The court has granted permission and we will forward all documents to the state health department next week that will complete all the legal formalities," said Sumato Ghosh, the legal manager at RTIICS."

Kidney exchange: stories of donors and recipients

Kidney exchange isn't just about the technology of matching and the logistics of arranging many surgeries, or difficult ones, it is also about the intensely personal stories of donors and recipients.  The news stories below open a window on some of those, from Vancouver British Columbia. to San Antonio Texas

Backing out was never an option for B.C. donor
"I was the last in the chain to do the donation," said Campbell, 48, of Qualicum Beach, B.C., who was scheduled to give one of her kidneys to a Montreal man days after her husband Steve got a kidney from an Ottawa donor. Organizers asked her repeatedly whether she would honour her commitment no matter what happened on the operating table to her husband, she recalled.

 "'And what happens if Steve doesn't do well, will you still be able to get on a plane and go?' They put a lot of faith in me not backing out."

  *********

FAITH, FREEDOM AND A KIDNEY: Healers in it for the long haul

""You have way too many antibodies. You're too big. You're too small. You're too tall. You're too short. There's always a reason to say, 'no.' A lot of times it's easier for hospitals to say, 'no,' Bingaman said. "It's much harder for them to say, 'yes.' " 

An inadvertent ad for Starbucks

5AM at our house yesterday, between phone calls...

and later that morning...

more photos here (by Linda Cicero for Stanford).

Unusual day yesterday...

Well, I had an unusual day yesterday. But I'm not much further along digesting it. So I think I'll go back to usual (non Nobel) blogging about market design.  I'm still working on answering emails, 'tho I'm sure to miss some, or give up before I get to the earliest ones. But I appreciate all the well wishes...

Blog may be delayed today...

Count me as surprised...

The market for chocolate (hint: rich people eat it...)

The venerable Onion has a competitor in the sometimes pretty funny New England Journal of Medicine, which notes the correlation between national chocolate consumption and per-capita Nobel prizes.And the Swiss eat a lot of chocolate. Slate has the story:

Why Do the Swiss Eat So Much Chocolate?: And does it help them win Nobel Prizes?

"A new study in The New England Journal of Medicine shows that a country's chocolate consumption correlates strongly with the number of Nobel Prizes its citizens win. According to the author’s calculations, Switzerland consumes the most chocolate and ranks second behind Sweden in laureates per capita. ...Switzerland doesn’t have the climate to grow cocoa. How did it become known for chocolate?

"Because the great chocolate innovators were Swiss. ... In 1819, Francois-Louis Cailler developed a recipe to turn gritty cocoa beans into a solid, smooth chocolate bar. Rudolph Lindt eventually perfected the smoothing process by adding cocoa butter with a machine he called the conche. In 1830, his countryman Charles-Amédée Kohler added hazelnuts to chocolate. Jean Tobler formulated the Toblerone bar in the late 1860s. Perhaps the greatest innovation came in 1875, when Daniel Peter figured out how to combine cocoa powder with local milk to create milk chocolate, which became an instant sensation. (The Swiss can’t take credit for cocoa powder, which was developed by Dutch chemist Coenraad J. van Houten in 1828.) Eventually, Kohler, Peter, and food magnate Henri Nestlé joined forces to create the Swiss Chocolate Society, which eventually became the Nestlé company. Today, Swiss consumers eat more than 23 pounds of the country’s most famous product per year.

"There’s another factor to Switzerland’s high chocolate consumption: wealth. (Which may also explain the correlation with Nobel prizes.) Few cocoa-producing countries are big chocolate consumers, because chocolate is a luxury. Ivory Coast, Indonesia, Ghana, and Nigeria, all of which have per capita GDPs well below the global average, lead the world in cocoa production. By contrast, wealthy Western Europe constitutes 6 percent of the world’s population, but eats 45 percent of its chocolate."

Matching students to professors and research projects

ResearchMat.chAlpha  http://researchmat.ch/ 

We're a quick and easy way to match students and professors for the most successful project collaborations.

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Winner: Best Business Model at Columbia Devfest 2012!

---

by a former spelling bee champ: http://www.nytimes.com/schoolbook/2012/03/23/a-spelling-champ-whose-e-u-o-n-y-m-should-have-been-joy/

HT: Mary O'Keeffe

Repugnance watch: Texas is different

Time Magazine has the story:

"Two Texas mothers set off a firestorm recently when they complained that a male assistant principal had severely paddled their daughters. One of the mothers pointed out that school policy required that officials of the same sex as the student do the paddling. Now the school board has responded — by dropping the rule requiring paddlers and students to be of the same sex.