ESRC Game Theory Workshop: Matching Under Preferences, Feb 6 at the LSE

http://www.maths.lse.ac.uk/ESRC_Game_Theory_Workshop.html

 Wednesday, February 6, 2013, London School of Economics

ESRC Game Theory Workshop
"Matching Under Preferences"

The 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences was awarded to Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design". The LSE Department of Mathematics has a strong research group on Game Theory and Discrete Mathematics. At the occasion of the Nobel prize, it organises this workshop, sponsored by a grant from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) on "Games and Economic Behaviour".

The highlight of this workshop is a popular talk by Alvin Roth himself: "Who Gets What? The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design", and its summary shows the practical importance of the topic of the workshop.

Speakers:

Sophie Bade (Royal Holloway)	Lars Ehlers (Université de Montreal)	Aytek Erdil (Cambridge)
Flip Klijn (Institute for Economic Analysis, Barcelona)	David Manlove (Glasgow)	Alvin Roth (Stanford)

Location: Shaw Library (6th floor, Old Building, LSE)

Maps of the LSE campus can be found here: http://www2.lse.ac.uk/mapsAndDirections/findingYourWayAroundLSE.aspx

Everybody is welcome and participation is free. However, due to the expected popularity of the event, in particular the talk by Alvin Roth at 4:10pm, it is compulsory to register on a FIRST REGISTERED, FIRST SERVE basis by email to Rebecca Lumb at R.C.Lumb@lse.ac.uk.
Please note that participation for the following talks is now fully booked and reservations can no longer be taken:
Erdil at 2pm; Bade at 2:45pm; Roth at 4:10pm.Refreshments and lunch will be provided to registered participants.

Schedule and Abstracts

(2-page downloadable PDF)

10:05 welcome

10:15 Flip Klijn (Institute for Economic Analysis, Barcelona)
"A Many-to-Many Rural Hospital Theorem"

Abstract:
We show that the full version of the so-called "rural hospital theorem" generalizes to many-to-many matching problems where agents on both sides of the problem have substitutable and weakly separable preferences. In contrast with the existing literature, we reinforce our result by showing that when agents' preferences satisfy substitutability, the domain of weakly separable preferences is also maximal for the rural hospital theorem to hold.
(Joint work with Ayse Yazici.)

11:00-11:30 coffee break

11:30 Lars Ehlers (Université de Montreal, Canada)
"Strategy-Proofness Makes the Difference: Deferred-Acceptance with Responsive Priorities"

Abstract:
In college admissions and student placements at public schools, the admission decision can be thought of as assigning indivisible objects with capacity constraints to a set of students such that each student receives at most one object and monetary compensations are not allowed. In these important market design problems, the agent-proposing deferred-acceptance (DA-)mechanism with responsive strict priorities performs well and economists have successfully implemented DA-mechanisms or slight variants thereof. We show that almost all real-life mechanisms used in such environments--including the large classes of priority mechanisms and linear programming mechanisms--satisfy a set of simple and intuitive properties. Once we add strategy-proofness to these properties, DA-mechanisms are the only ones surviving. In market design problems that are based on weak priorities (like school choice), generally multiple tie-breaking (MTB) procedures are used and then a mechanism is implemented with the obtained strict priorities. By adding stability with respect to the weak priorities, we establish the first normative foundation for MTB-DA-mechanisms that are used in New York City.
(Joint work with Bettina Klaus.)

12:15 David Manlove (Glasgow)
"Junior Doctor Allocation and Kidney Exchange: Theory and Practice"

Abstract:
Matching problems typically involve assigning agents to commodities, possibly on the basis of ordinal preferences or other metrics. These problems have large-scale applications to centralised clearinghouses in many countries and contexts. Moreover, these problems have received much exposure in recent months due to the award of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences to Al Roth and Lloyd Shapley.
In this talk I will describe the matching problems featuring in two centralised clearinghouses in the UK that have involved collaborations between the National Health Service and the University of Glasgow. One of these deals with the allocation of junior doctors to Scottish hospitals, and the other is concerned with finding kidney exchanges among incompatible donor-patient pairs across the UK.
In each case I will describe the applications, briefly outline the theoretical underlying problems, discuss the algorithmic techniques for their solution, and give an overview of results arising from real data connected with the matching schemes in recent years.
(Joint work with Rob Irving and Gregg O'Malley.)

13:00-14:00 lunch (buffet at the Shaw Library)

14:00 Aytek Erdil (Cambridge)
"Prioritizing Diversity in School Choice"

Abstract:
Promoting diversity in schools has recently emerged as an important policy goal. Typically school choice programs take into account student preferences and allocate scarce schools on the basis of priorities, using stability as the solution concept. Therefore a notion of prioritizing diversity is essential. We introduce a rich class of priorities which capture intuitive notions of diversity. Substitutable priorities with ties not only ensure existence of stable assignments, but also allow students of same types to be treated equally. Moreover we describe an algorithm which finds an optimal stable assignment.
(Joint work with Taro Kumano.)

14:45 Sophie Bade (Royal Holloway)
"Pareto Optimal, Strategy Proof, Non-Bossy and Anonymous Random Matching Mechanisms"

Abstract:
Take any Pareto optimal, strategy proof and non-bossy matching mechanism for a housing problem. Define a uniform randomization over this mechanism by drawing the assignment of agents to the roles in the mechanism from a uniform distribution over all possible such assignments. I show that any such uniform randomization is equivalent to random serial dictatorship. According to random serial dictatorship the probability of a matching is calculated as the fraction of all orders of dictators according to which said matching arises divided by the grand set of all possible orders of dictators. This extends the Abdulkadiroglu and Soenmez' (1998) celebrated equivalence result between the uniform randomization over Gale's top trading cycles mechanism and random serial dictatorship to the entire set of all Pareto optimal, strategy proof and non-bossy matching mechanisms. 15:30-16:05 coffee break

15:30-16:00 coffee break

16:10 Alvin Roth (Stanford)
"Who Gets What? The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design"

Abstract:
What are markets and marketplaces? How do they work? How do they fail? How can we fix them when they are broken? In recent years economists have stepped forward as market designers to try to craft answers to these questions. These questions are particularly difficult for matching markets, which are markets in which you cannot just choose what you want, but also have to be chosen. If a market has an application or selection procedure then it is a matching market, and matching markets determine some of the most important transitions in life. Who goes to which schools and universities? Who gets which jobs? Who gets scarce organs for transplant? I'll illustrate with examples of recent market designs, in school choice, labor markets, and kidney exchange.

17:15-18:30 reception in the Senior Common Room (5th floor)

---

This workshop is part of an ESRC sponsored series of one-day workshops. At LSE these are organised by Olivier Gossner and Bernhard von Stengel.

School choice in Chicago and England, and some ideas about comparing manipulabiliby

The current (February 2013) issue of the AER has the following paper by Parag Pathak and Tayfun Sonmez, which combines some incisive observation with some new theory:

School Admissions Reform in Chicago and England: Comparing Mechanisms by Their Vulnerability to Manipulation

Parag A. Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez Abstract:

"In Fall 2009, Chicago authorities abandoned a school assignment mechanism midstream, citing concerns about its vulnerability to manipulation. Nonetheless, they asked thousands of applicants to re-rank schools in a new mechanism that is also manipulable. This paper introduces a method to compare mechanisms by their vulnerability to manipulation. Our methodology formalizes how the old mechanism is at least as manipulable as any other plausible mechanism, including the new one. A number of similar transitions took place in England after the widely popular Boston mechanism was ruled illegal in 2007. Our approach provides support for these and other recent policy changes.  "

Here's their story of school choice in England (where I am today):


"In England, forms of school choice have been available for at least three decades.  The nationwide 2003 School Admissions Code mandated that Local Authorities, an operating body much like a US school district, coordinate their admissions practices. This reform provided families with a single application form and established a common admissions timeline, leading to a March announcement of placements for anxious 10 and 11 year-olds on National Offer Day. The next nationwide reform came with the 2007 School Admissions Code. While strengthening the enforcement of admissions rules, this legal code also prohibited authorities from using what they refer to as ‘‘unfair oversubscription criteria’’ in Section 2.13:

In setting oversubscription criteria the admission authorities for all 
maintained schools must not: give priority to children according to the order of other schools 
named as preferences by their parents, including ‘first preference first’ arrangements.

A first preference first system is any ‘‘oversubscription criterion that gives priority to children according to the order of other schools named as a preference by their parents, or only considers applications stated as a first preference’’ (School Admissions Code 2007, Glossary, p. 118). The 2007 Admissions Code outlaws use of this system at more than 150 Local Authorities across the country, and this ban continues with the 2010 Code. The best known first preference first system is the Boston mechanism, and since 2007 it is banned in England.  The rationale for this ban, as stated by England’s Department for Education and Skills, is that ‘‘the ‘first preference first’ criterion made the system unnecessarily complex to parents’’ (School Code 2007, Foreword, p. 7). Moreover, Education Secretary Alan Johnson remarked that the first preference first system ‘‘forces many parents to play an ‘admissions game’ with their children’s future.’’

Opt-out for organ donation faces opposition in Maryland

Religious groups oppose Maryland organ donation bill

"Maryland residents would have to opt out of the state's organ donation system under legislation before the General Assembly, angering religious groups that oppose it for ostensibly placing the state's law above God's.

"The measure would require Marylanders to opt out of organ donation when they applied for a driver's license or state ID, as opposed to the current system, in which they can volunteer to opt in.

"The government does not have a lien on our bodies," said Catholic League President Bill Donohue. "The whole idea of opting out is offensive, because the predicate here is that the state has some claim on our organs."

"The Catholic League joined Orthodox Jewish groups to defeat a similar New York bill in 2010.

"It cheapens the whole culture because the way we look at human life from conception to natural death becomes coarser and coarser," Donohue said. "The premise is that somehow the government owns your body unless you opt out ... if we accept that, what's next?"

"The bill, sponsored by Sen. Ron Young, D-Washington and Frederick counties, would require the Motor Vehicle Administration to notify people applying for or renewing driver's licenses or IDs that they will be an organ donor unless they expressly choose not to. It doesn't specify how the MVA must notify applicants. Donor organs and tissue can be used for transplants, therapy, or medical research and education.

"A House version is being sponsored by Del. Galen Clagett, D-Frederick County. Neither Young nor Clagett returned calls.

...

"About half of Maryland adults are registered organ donors, ranking it 27th among states, according to a 2012 report by organ donation group Donate Life.

"Libby Wolfe, executive director of Donate Life Maryland, said 2,300 people in Maryland are awaiting a donation, with 116,000 waiting nationwide. Donate Life Maryland opposes the "presumed consent" bill because countries with opt-out systems have seen a decrease in donors.

"If Maryland passes the bill, it would be the first state to have such a law. The legislatures in Virginia and New Jersey are also considering bills to create presumed-consent organ donation systems, according to the University of North Carolina Kidney Center, which tracks transplant-related bills."

I predict a surge in demand for kosher beef in Britain...

...after reading this in the Telegraph: Tesco beef burgers found to contain 29% horse meat

"In Tesco Everyday Value Beef Burgers, horse meat accounted for approximately 29 per cent of the meat. The supermarket announced last night that it was removing all fresh and frozen burgers from sale immediately regardless if they had been found to contain horse meat.
...
"More than a third (37 per cent) of the products tested in Ireland contained horse DNA, while the vast majority (85 per cent) also contained pig DNA.
...
"Prof Alan Reilly, the chief executive of the FSAI, said: “While there is a plausible explanation for the presence of pig DNA in these products, due to the fact that meat from different animals is processed in the same plants, there is no clear explanation for the presence of horse DNA in products emanating from meat plants that do not use horse meat.”

I speak at Birmingham Feb 4

http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/business/departments/economics/events/2013/february/prof-al-roth-nobel-prize-winner-guest-lecture.aspx

Prof Al Roth, Nobel Prize Winner - Guest Lecture

Location

Great Hall - Aston Webb Building

Date(s)

Monday 4th February 2013 (18:00-19:00)

Who Gets What: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design: A Guest Lecture by Professor Al Roth, 2012 Nobel Prize Winner for Economics, Stanford University, US.

Please complete the online form to register your interest to attend.

Recent Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Al Roth provides an open, guest lecture for the University of Birmingham’s College of Social Sciences on Monday 4^th February 2013.

Register to attend.

Described as “an economist who saves lives”, Roth’s application of economics and the idea of “matching algorithm” is enabling a creative use of his research – including life-saving work.

His research has been applied to:

Kidney Donation Exchange – matching incompatible patient-donor pairs with others, in as wide a network as possible (and no money changing hands)

Public Schools – by matching students to high schools based on preferences

Medical Students – matching medics to hospitals where they complete residency programmes

Professor Al Roth will deliver a guest lecture, together with an opportunity to ask questions. Refreshments will also be available after the lecture.

Please complete the online form to register your interest to attend.

Further information:

Doors will open at 5.45pm for a prompt 6.00pm start.

PLEASE NOTE: Due to the popularity of this event, the lecture will now be taking place in the Great Hall in the Aston Webb Building.

If you would like any information about the event please contact Guvinder Kaur Rajaniag.rajania@bham.ac.uk.

For live updates from the event, follow the College of Social Sciences’ twitter page@CoSS_Birmingham.  

The American Gastroenterological Association takes note of the Nobel for market design

The redesign of the match for Gastroenterology fellows is one of the projects mentioned in the Nobel documentation on p23), and the AGA takes note of that: Al Roth Wins Nobel Prize and AGA Recognized in Announcement. (Two key names on that project are Debbie Proctor and Muriel Niederle.)

The D.C. Circuit Rules that the Law Clerk Hiring Plan is History

Notice Regarding Law Clerk Hiring By D.C. Circuit Judges for the 2014-2015 Term

Although the judges of this circuit would uniformly prefer to continue hiring law clerks pursuant to the Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan, it has become apparent that the plan is no longer working. Because participation in the plan is voluntary, a significant percentage of all United States circuit judges must agree to follow it if it is to work appropriately. During the past few years, a significant and increasing number of circuit judges around the country have hired in advance of the plan’s interview and offer dates, and it is likely that they will continue to do so. As a result, continued adherence to the plan is no longer fair and equitable to either students or judges.

We stand ready to work with the judges of the other circuits to develop an appropriate successor to the current plan. In the meantime, however, the judges of this circuit will hire law clerks at such times as each individual judge determines to be appropriate. We have agreed that none of us will give “exploding offers,” that is, offers that expire if not accepted immediately. Rather, when a judge of this circuit gives a candidate an offer, the candidate will have a reasonable time to consider the offer and interview with other judges before accepting or declining. Additional practices applicable to individual judges may be found on the judges’ OSCAR pages.

• Online System for Clerkship Application and Review (OSCAR)

******************

See these previous posts for an account of its (unexpectedly long) death throes: http://marketdesigner.blogspot.com/search/label/clerks 

College admissions in China

Yan Chen and Onur Kesten have a new version of their paper on school choice mechanisms, inspired by the Chinese college admissions experiencewith what they call the "parallel mechanism": From Boston to Chinese Parallel to Deferred Acceptance: Theory and Experiments on a Family of School Choice Mechanisms

Abstract: We characterize a parametric family of application-rejection school choice mechanisms,
including the Boston and Deferred Acceptance mechanisms as special cases, and spanning the parallel mechanisms for Chinese college admissions, the largest centralized matching in the world. Moving from one extreme member to the other results in systematic changes in manipulability, stability and welfare properties. Neither the ex-post dominance of the DA over the Boston equilibria, nor the ex-ante dominance of the Boston equilibria over the DA in stylized settings extends to the parallel mechanisms. In the laboratory, participants are most likely to reveal their preferences truthfully under the DA mechanism, followed by the Chinese parallel and then the Boston mechanisms. Furthermore, while the DA is significantly more stable than the Chinese parallel mechanism, which is more stable than Boston, efficiency comparisons vary across environments."

The paper focuses on what they call the parallel mechanism, which falls between the Boston "immediate acceptance" and the Gale-Shapley "deferred acceptance" algorithms:

"While the sequential mechanism used to be the only mechanism used in CCA prior to 2003, to alleviate the problem of high-scoring students not accepted by any universities and the pressure to manipulate preference rankings under the sequential mechanism, the parallel mechanism has been adopted by 22 provinces by 2012. In the parallel mechanism, students can place several “parallel” colleges for each choice. For example, a student’s first choice can contain four colleges, A, B, C and D, in decreasing desirability. Colleges consider student applications, where allocations among the parallel colleges are temporary until a student is rejected from all the parallel colleges he has listed. Thus, this mechanism lies between the Boston mechanism, where every step is final, and the DA, where every step is temporary until all seats are filled. [An alternative interpretation of the parallel mechanism is that it approximates serial dictatorship with tiers (Wei 2009). Note, however, in the college admissions context when colleges have identical preferences, serial dictatorship and DA are equivalent.]"
...
"Transitioning from sequential to the parallel mechanisms, five provinces7 have adopted a hybrid between the sequential and parallel mechanisms, called the partial parallel mechanism. In Beijing, for example, a student can list one college as her first choice which retains the sequential nature, but three parallel colleges as her second choice. While variants of the parallel (and the partial parallel) mechanisms, each of which differs in the number of parallel choices, have been implemented in different provinces, to our knowledge, they have not been systematically studied theoretically or tested in the laboratory. In particular, when the number of parallel choices varies, how do manipulation incentives, allocation efficiency and stability change? In this paper, we investigate this question both theoretically and experimentally. We call the entire class of parallel (and partial parallel) mechanisms the Chinese parallel mechanisms, the simplest member of this class the Shanghai mechanism.
To study the performance of the different mechanisms more formally, we first provide a theoretical analysis and present a parametric family of application-rejection mechanisms where each member is characterized by some positive number e in{1,2,...}of parallel and periodic choices through which the application and rejection process continues before assignments are finalized.
As parameter e varies, we go from the familiar Boston mechanism (e = 1) to the Chinese parallel mechanisms (e in { 2,...}), and from those to the DA (e = infinity)."

The price of lunch for a good cause...we could do it by skype...on eBay today

Here's the eBay auction that will determine who I have lunch with at some future date.
I'll be checking on it this evening, to find out my price. (Right now I look like a bargain.)
It's  a fund raiser for Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley.
It's a good cause, so if you are in the area, think of a lunch in person. And if you are somewhere else, I'd be happy to arrange a lunch for an hour or so over skype at some mutually convenient time (you could be eating dinner while I eat breakfast...)

Here's part of the eBay description (which may be why I'm going at a bargain price:)
"When asked to be one of the celebrities for the JFS “Lunch With…” auction, Roth wrote “you should put up a warning to bidders that I’m not the kind of economist who can predict the future course of the economy, or even explain the financial crisis or the euro situation…” 

Dating is so 20th century (and how about marriage?)

Two recent articles on online dating sites both think that internet dating is changing courtship and marriage, by making it too easy to meet people.

The NY Times focuses on dating culture, and suggests that internet communication itself may remove some of the signaling that used to take place when dating was more formal, and the fact that multiple people can be dated contemporaneously may work to reduce investment in each date:  The End of Courtship?


"Traditional courtship — picking up the telephone and asking someone on a date — required courage, strategic planning and a considerable investment of ego (by telephone, rejection stings). Not so with texting, e-mail, Twitter or other forms of “asynchronous communication,” as techies call it. In the context of dating, it removes much of the need for charm; it’s more like dropping a line in the water and hoping for a nibble.

“I’ve seen men put more effort into finding a movie to watch on Netflix Instant than composing a coherent message to ask a woman out,” said Anna Goldfarb, 34, an author and blogger in Moorestown, N.J. A typical, annoying query is the last-minute: “Is anything fun going on tonight?” More annoying still are the men who simply ping, “Hey” or “ ’sup.”

...
"Online dating services, which have gained mainstream acceptance, reinforce the hyper-casual approach by greatly expanding the number of potential dates. Faced with a never-ending stream of singles to choose from, many feel a sense of “FOMO” (fear of missing out), so they opt for a speed-dating approach — cycle through lots of suitors quickly.

"That also means that suitors need to keep dates cheap and casual. A fancy dinner? You’re lucky to get a drink.

“It’s like online job applications, you can target many people simultaneously — it’s like darts on a dart board, eventually one will stick,” said Joshua Sky, 26, a branding coordinator in Manhattan, describing the attitudes of many singles in their 20s. The mass-mailer approach necessitates “cost-cutting, going to bars, meeting for coffee the first time,” he added, “because you only want to invest in a mate you’re going to get more out of.”
...
"THERE’S another reason Web-enabled singles are rendering traditional dates obsolete. If the purpose of the first date was to learn about someone’s background, education, politics and cultural tastes, Google and Facebook have taken care of that."
********************

Meanwhile, in The Atlantic, the concern is that as it becomes easier to meet people, the incentive to work to maintain existing relationships may be diluted: A Million First Dates--How online romance is threatening monogamy

"The positive aspects of online dating are clear: the Internet makes it easier for single people to meet other single people with whom they might be compatible, raising the bar for what they consider a good relationship. But what if online dating makes it too easy to meet someone new? What if it raises the bar for a good relationship too high? What if the prospect of finding an ever-more-compatible mate with the click of a mouse means a future of relationship instability, in which we keep chasing the elusive rabbit around the dating track?"

Repugnant organization of academic journals?

A new mathematics journal is raising questions about whether it might be promoting repugnant transactions. Timothy Gowers, one of the editors of Forum of Mathematics, CUP’s new open-access journal has a blog post called Why I've joined the bad guys, in which he discusses the fact that the journal will fund itself by charging the authors of articles.

He begins as follows:

"If you are not already familiar with this debate, the aspect of Forum of Mathematics that many people dislike is that it will be funded by means of article processing charges (which I shall abbreviate to APCs) rather than subscriptions. For the next three years, these charges will be waived, but after that there will be a charge of £500 per article. Let me now consider a number of objections that people have to APCs.

"It is just plain wrong to ask authors to pay to get their articles published.
There are many variants of this argument. For instance, an analogy is often drawn with vanity publishing: do we want vanity publishing for mathematical articles?

"Let me begin with the “it is just plain wrong” part. A number of people have said that they find APCs morally repugnant. However, that on its own is not an argument. "


HT: Will Dearden

Women soldiers in combat

The road to a top job in the American armed forces lies in the combat branches, and soldiers can be forgiven for wanting combat experience. Women soldiers (and sailors and airmen? Is there a gender neutral word for soldiers in the Air Force?) are no exception, but have been excluded from "combat" assignments. (Of course, particularly in anti-insurgent and anti-terrorist warfare, where there are no front lines, women soldiers have increasingly often been thrust into combat.)

It appears that this is another repugnance that is fading away (not without opposition): Formally Lifting a Combat Ban, Military Chiefs Stress Equal Opportunity

"WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon E. Panetta and Gen. Martin E. Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on Thursday formally lifted the military’s ban on women in combat, saying that not every woman would become a combat soldier but that every woman deserved the chance to try.
...
"In the most vocal official opposition to the changes, Senator James M. Inhofe of Oklahoma, who is set to become the senior Republican on the Armed Services Committee, warned that some in Congress may seek legislation to limit the combat jobs open to women.

“I want everyone to know that the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which I am the ranking member, will have a period to provide oversight and review,” Mr. Inhofe said in a statement. “During that time, if necessary, we will be able to introduce legislation to stop any changes we believe to be detrimental to our fighting forces and their capabilities. I suspect there will be cases where legislation becomes necessary.”

"Pentagon officials said that the different services would have until May 15 to submit their plans for carrying out the new policy, but that the military wanted to move as quickly as possible to open up combat positions to women. Military officials said that there were more than 200,000 jobs now potentially open to women in specialties like infantry, armor, artillery and elite Special Operations commando units like the Navy SEALs and Army Rangers.

"If a service determines that a specialty should not be open to women, Pentagon officials said that representatives of the service would have to make the case to the defense secretary by January 2016."

Tim Harford talks about kidney transplants and kidney exchange

Tim Harford talks about kidney transplants and kidney exchange in his new BBC Pop-Up Economics podcast that you can listen to here (about 15 minutes).

Market design for everyone (from libertarians to socialists)

Organized markets inevitably have rules, which establish the playing field rather than determine outcomes, which is what makes market design different from, say, central planning. (One metaphor I like is that a free market is like a wheel that can rotate freely because it has an axle and well-oiled bearings...another is that boxing became a sport rather than a brawl, safe enough to play, only after the rules endorsed by the Marquess of Queensbury were adopted to cut down on deaths in the ring...)

It turns out that market design can be liked by everyone from socialists to libertarians.

Here's Friedrich Hayek anticipating the subject, in The Road to Serfdom:

“There is … all the difference between deliberately creating a system within which competition will work as beneficially as possible and passively accepting institutions as they are. Probably nothing has done so much harm to the liberal cause as the wooden insistence of some liberals on certain rules of thumb, above all the principle of laissez faire.”
 …
“The attitude of the liberal towards society is like that of the gardener who tends a plant and, in order to create the conditions most favorable to its growth, must know as much as possible about its structure and the way it functions.”

both quotes are from p71 of this edition, which you can search
*********

And here's the Socialist Party of Great Britain (on the occasion of the recent Nobel economics prize for market design):

"As socialism will be a non-market society where the price mechanism won’t apply to anything, the winners’ research will be able to be used for certain purposes even after the end of capitalism...
"No doubt it would continue to be used to allocate organs to transplant patients and students to rooms. In fact, this last could be extended to allocating housing to people living in a particular area. While they may not get their first choice, people would get something for which they had expressed some preference and that corresponded to their needs and circumstances.

Cooking the Books: A Nobel Prize for Non-Economics | The Socialist Party of Great Britain »

Organs and elections in Israel

Assaf Romm wrote to me yesterday about a plan to solicit registrations for Israel's deceased organ donor list at today's national elections. If it works, it might make sense to rethink whether recruitment of deceased donors in the US should be mostly at the Department of Motor Vehicles...

"Adi (the Israeli organ donor card foundation) has decided to use election day (tomorrow) as an opportunity to register people as organ donors. 

"Here is the ynet article (in Hebrew): 

לראשונה: עמדות החתמה לכרטיס אדי בקלפיות

Assaf summarizes:
"This is a joint project invented by someone at the National Transplantation Center and approved by the Ministry of Health.

About 750 Adi representatives will stand near the voting booths and will help citizens to sign the organ donor card at the same time they come to vote. This is the first time it has been done in Israel (and I couldn't find examples in other countries by searching in Google). Due to the recent advertising campaign for the (relatively) new priority law and increased attention in the public, Adi foundation expects about 720-750 thousand new organ donors during election day (and if they'll do half of that, it will still be an outstanding achievement in my opinion)."
++++++++++++++++

Post-election update:
Assaf writes:

"First, either I made a mistake reading, or they made a mistake when they wrote the article which they fixed later on. The numbers were supposed to be from 720,000 to 750,000 but not as an estimate but as a difference (which makes much more sense), that is, they expected about 30,000 new organ donor card holders.

"Second, The actual output was 15,000 new organ donor card holders, so about half as much as they expected. That also means about 20 donors per representative, which is about one donor every half an hour. Frankly, I think this is embarrassing and I wouldn't expect any less than that by putting an Adi booth at any crowded shopping mall... They are still very happy of course." 

Mechanisms of Matching: Stability and Applications (Lars Ehlers in French in Ottawa)

Lars Ehlers will be presenting a talk on Mechanisms of Matching: Stability and Applications, in connection with the 2012 Nobel prize. The announcement is in French...and I'm guessing the talk will also be.  Ehlers is a distinguished matching theorist in any language, so if you are in Ottawa tomorrow...


L’ASSOCIATION DES ÉCONOMISTES QUÉBÉCOIS DE L’OUTAOUAIS, EN COLLABORATION AVEC LE DÉPARTEMENT DE SCIENCE ÉCONOMIQUE DE L’UNIVERSITÉ D’OTTAWA,VOUS INVITE À UN COCKTAIL-CONFÉRENCE AYANT POUR THÈME :


« MÉCANISMES D’APPARIEMENT: STABILITÉ ET APPLICATIONS»
La conférence portera sur la contribution de Alvin Roth et Lloyd Shapley,
Lauréats du Prix Nobel en économie 2012
MARDI LE 22 JANVIER 2013, 17 h 30 à 19 h 30
À L’UNIVERSITÉ D’OTTAWA
120 rue Université, Faculté des sciences sociales (FSS), pièce 4007
Un cocktail et un léger buffet suivront
CONFÉRENCIER
Professeur Lars Ehlers, Département de science économique,
Université de Montréal
PRÉSIDENTE DE SÉANCE
Professeure Vicky Barham, Directrice, Département de science économique,
Université d’Ottawa
PRÉSENTATION ET DISCUSSION: 17H30 À 18H45


Monsieur  Lars Ehlers, professeur titulaire au Département de science économique de l’Université de Montréal, s’intéresse notamment à la manipulation des mécanismes d’appariement sur les marchés du travail et l’allocation d’objets indivisibles.  Il a remporté en 2012 le prestigieux ‘Social Choice and Welfare Prize’ reconnaissant sa contribution exceptionnelle à la théorie du choix social et de l'économie du bien être. Il est aussi membre du conseil d’administration de la ‘Society for Economic Design’, un organisme académique qui s’intéresse précisément au domaine de recherche pour lequel le prix Nobel 2012 a été décerné.  Dans le cadre de la compétition pour les Subventions ordinaires de recherche 2003 du Conseil de recherche en sciences humaines (CRSH), c’est d’ailleurs sa proposition de recherche qui a remporté la première place au Canada. Cette année, il a aussi été élu, et ce pour une durée de cinq ans, au  Council of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare. Ses travaux sur les mécanismes d’appariement ont notamment été publiés dans le Journal of Economic Theory.

Unraveling of college job hunting (and internships too)

Businessweek reports on the recruiting of undergrads, particularly undergrad business majors:

A Speedier Timetable for the College Job Hunt

"It used to be that undergraduate students could wait until winter or spring to conduct job searches. Students who plan to do that during the present school year may find that they’re out of luck.

"As the job market has improved, a growing number of employers are shifting most of their college recruiting to the fall. This year, employers said they planned to conduct about two-thirds, or 68 percent, of their college recruiting in the fall, up from 60 percent in the 2010-11 academic year, according to the National Association of Colleges & Employers’ Job Outlook 2013 report.

"The trend is more pronounced at undergraduate business schools, where recruiters from Fortune 500 companies, banks, and consulting firms are racing onto campuses to get access to top student talent as early as possible. Some are showing up as early as the end of August or September to talk to students, say college career services directors.
...
"The timetable for internship recruiting also has been pushed up to the fall over the last year or two, meaning that juniors must be ready to apply for internships almost as soon as they get on campus, say career services directors at business schools. At the Carlson School, the number of companies recruiting interns at the same time jumped 11 percent this fall over last, Kinross-Wright says.

"Steve Canale, manager of global recruiting and staffing services for General Electric (GE), says his company hires nearly all its full-time hires and about 75 percent of its interns in the fall. The company used to do more intern recruiting in the spring, but has shifted course in the last few years, he says.

“We do our internship hiring in the fall now because it is so darn competitive,” he says. “Once one company started doing it, we had to do it, too, because the good students go quickly.”

HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Berkeley has a great new endowed chair, joint in Economics and the I-School, named for (and partly endowed by) the remarkable Google chief economist and former I-School Dean Hal Varian.

I SCHOOL'S FIRST ENDOWED CHAIR WILL BE THE HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Hal R. Varian

More information:

• Hal R. Varian
• The Hewlett Challenge

January 19, 2012

The School of Information is delighted to announce the creation of its first endowed chair, the Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics, thanks to a generous gift from Hal R. Varian and matching funds from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation.
“This is terrific for the school,” said I School Dean AnnaLee Saxenian, “and it’s fitting that the founding dean of the school is endowing its first chair. This will be a wonderful legacy for Hal.”
The Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics will fund the work of an eminent faculty member, with a joint appointment in the School of Information and the Department of Economics, whose work involves research and teaching in the area of Information Economics.
“I made this donation to support teaching and research in Information Economics,” explained Varian. “Information is the lifeblood of the economy. Everybody who works in the information field should know something about economics, and every economist should know something about information.”
Varian was the founding dean of the I School (then known as the School of Information Management & Systems) and is now the Chief Economist at Google, where he has been involved in auction design, econometric analysis, finance, corporate strategy, and public policy. He is also a UC Berkeley professor emeritus in business, economics, and information management.
A world-renowned economist, Varian has published numerous papers in economic theory, industrial organization, financial economics, econometrics, and information economics. He is the author of two major economics textbooks and the co-author of a bestselling book on business strategy,Information Rules: A Strategic Guide to the Network Economy. Varian also wrote a monthly column for the New York Times from 2000 to 2007.
“No area of research could be more exigent than the economics of information,” said Carla Hesse, the university’s Dean of Social Sciences. “This is a pathbreaking gift from a pathbreaking scholar.”
Dean Saxenian agreed. “The field of Information Economics is very important for understanding information and information behavior,” she said. “We couldn’t be where we are without a strong foundation in economics.”
The School of Information and the Department of Economics plan to hire a new faculty member by Fall 2013 to fill the endowed chair.
Varian’s gift allows the school to take advantage of a matching gift from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, through the Hewlett Challenge. The Hewlett Challenge is a $110-million challenge grant — the largest gift in the university’s history — to endow a total of 100 new faculty chairs across the university.
“The Hewlett matching grant offered a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and provided me a strong incentive to make a donation now,” said Varian. With the creation of the Hal R. Varian Chair in Information Economics, the Hewlett Challenge has now funded more than 90 of the 100 professorships and is on target to reach the full 100 soon.
“I have written a couple of papers on the incentive effect of matching grants,” commented Varian, “so in this case, it seems that ‘life imitates art.’”

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And here's the ad: you could apply for the position...
HAL R. VARIAN CHAIR IN INFORMATION ECONOMICS

Lunch (with me) for a good cause, to be auctioned on eBay

The auction will start this weekend...

The fundraiser auction for Jewish Family Services of Silicon Valley, for a lunch date with me (or with one of these real celebrities), is about to begin. The auction goes live on eBay this (Friday) evening, January 18, at 7:45 pm, and ends Monday evening, January 28, 2013. 

The webpage  http://www.jfssv.org/celebrities-Jan2013.html shows links to the auctions, which will work after the auction begins. If you try the links prior to then, eBay returns a message saying the auction has ended or is unavailable.

My auction link is  http://www.ebay.com/itm/261153805382 This link should only work beginning 7:45 pm on Friday January 18, and ending 7:45 pm Monday January 28, 2013.

Kidney exchange and market design at the NBER

The NBER has disseminated a lot of the work on kidney exchange, and asked me to summarize that work, in the December 2012 issue of the NBER Reporter: Kidney Exchange

The same issue also contains these brief profiles of me and of three other NBER research associates.

The NBER has been at the forefront of recognizing market design as a distinct new area in economics, with a Market Design Working Group organized in 2008, directed by Susan Athey and Parag Pathak.

You can browse the NBER working papers on market design here: Working Papers by NBER Working Group - MD