Uploading letters of recommendation to grad schools and academic jobs

The time of year when I write letters for undergrad students applying to grad schools, and graduate students applying for jobs, is just ending. There are a bunch of services via which letter writers are asked to upload their letters. Some (further) consolidation would be efficient.  Below are some reflections on the process of uploading letters (I didn't send any through the U.S. Post Office this year.)

Uploading recommendations for graduate school
**************
ApplyYourself, Inc. has sold software to many schools.
"This online Recommendation service is provided by ApplyYourself, Inc. ("ApplyYourself"), a subsidiary of Hobsons, Inc.. ApplyYourself provides online Recommendation services for educational and other institutions."

It asks you to set a new password for each graduate program, and doesn't link to the accounts with the same password that I've already set up for other graduate programs at that university, not to mention for other schools. Multiple graduate programs in the same school need to have the same information added each time. It requires complicated passwords:
In order to begin your online Recommendation for xxx, you first need to create your password. After creating your password, you will be logged in automatically and will find further instructions on how to complete the Recommendation. Password must be between 8-30 characters, contain at least 1 uppercase letter (A-Z), 1 lowercase letter (a-z), 1 number (0-9), and 1 of the following special characters: !@#$%^&*()_+|~-=\`{}[]:";'<>?,./ Spaces are not allowed."

When submitting multiple letters to the same school you sometimes get this:
"An error has occurred. You either have more than one connection to this website or you did not properly log out of your last session. Please close all browser windows, then open a new browser window to access this site.Also, please be sure to logout of all future sessions to prevent this situation. Once logged in, you can logout by clicking on the 'logout' link located in the upper right hand corner of the page."
*****************
CollegeNET Letters of Recommendation is a service used by several universities, and when I log on I can see multiple (in this case 2) letter requests.  I can't submit one letter, but have to submit it again for each application. But at least I didn't have to logout and log in again...  Some universities (Princeton is one) ask you lots of questions that have to be filled in on a web form before you can proceed to upload your letter. Here's the kind of error message you get for not filling in some essential detail about yourself, like your zip code.
The data you just supplied contains 1 omission or datatype mismatch.
This problem will have an explanation above it.
Both the explanation and the problem will be in a box.

Data Validation:

Some fields are required by the institution to have a value.
Other fields need the data to satisfy length limitations
or certain formatting constraints.
Once these corrections are made,
the form will be ready for submission

Once you succeed in submitting the letter, it signs off with this helpful suggestion
You should print or save this page for your records. The information below can be used to track your form should you have any questions.
*******************
Law Schools use a service provided by the Law Schools Admissions Council
LSAC Evaluations is now LSAC Applicant References
It requires you to open an account, complete with security questions such as "what is your favorite number?"  It took me many attempts before finding a username and password that it would accept.
When I tried to upload my letter, I got an error message saying that they didn't accept pdf files.  Fortunately it accepted a .docx file. But after it has been slowly uploaded, you have to proofread it and check a box certifying that you have before the very slow webpage digests it...

********************************************
********************************************
Uploading jobmarket letters for economists is by and large easier than uploading letters for admission to grad schools, and my impression is that it is somewhat easier than jobmarket letters for other disciplines. This is largely due to the large market share presently enjoyed by econjobmarket.org, which makes it easy to upload a generic letter that will be sent to each of the employers enrolled on econjobmarket.org to whom that student has applied.  (I recalled from previous years that with somewhat more effort you can upload different letters to be sent to different employers. This year I had trouble figuring out how to do that, but minutes after sending a query on the contact page got a reply that explained how to do it--the key is to find where to turn off autodelivery:)

Their competition comes from two directions. One is from similar services, some of which are discussed below. In economics, these command a much smaller part of the market, i.e. each letter uploaded to them goes to fewer employers. The main competition to econjobmarket.org is software companies that sell a platform to universities for all of that university's applications. That is, for many letters of recommendation, you go to the university web site to upload your letter. There must be only a few software suppliers, since many of these sites look the same.

Here are some notes, first on two upload platforms, then on two fairly typical university sites.

AcademicJobsOnline  didn't make it easy to see which jobs were being applied to, hence it encouraged a generic letter that could be sent to any academic position. This is the feedback you get after uploading a letter.

AcademicJobsOnline.org	Refs * Jobs * Employers * Help * Logout

Done Reference Letter Submission: Confirmation

Your letter has been successfully submitted. This is the final confirmation; no more confirmation or receipt will be sent by email.  

*********************
Interfolio also made it easy to submit a generic letter (one that would go with any application), and I didn't see an easy way to submit an application-specific letter.

********************
While many schools with their own websites seem to use common software,  I had trouble convincing the unique HBS site that I was a human being, since I failed to write the correct captcha the first time I tried. In between attempts I had to upload my letter again, i.e. it deleted the letter I had uploaded before failing to prove I was human.

***************
Columbia University's online Recruitment of Academic Personnel System (RAPS) site is annoying, since you  get requests for each position that a candidate applies for, and each requires (the same) letter, but after you have uploaded the letter for one position you have to close your browser before it will let you upload the letter for the next.
**********

NYU Stern's Faculty Management System site asks you to use Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox (but even when I do it often doesn't recognize the .pdf files I try to upload, and gives me an error message telling me to upload a pdf...) I've mostly had to email in the letters to Stern...

*************************
Update: some further guidance for the perplexed from EJM:

Hi Professor Roth,

You can upload letters for a candidate to only be delivered to a particular institution the candidate has applied to by clicking on the "show applications" button for a candidate. A list of all their currently active applications will appear as well as options to submit individual letters for each of them.

A more detailed description of how to do this (with pictures) can be found here: http://www.econjobmarketblog.blogspot.com/2013/11/how-to-guide-recommenders.html

EC14, now called Economics and Computation, at Stanford June 8-12 (submission deadline is Feb 11)

Here's the announcement and call for papers. The deadline is Feb 11 for paper submission.

Two related conferences will be coordinated at Stanford at the same time, the NBER market design conference, and the NSF Decentralization conference (see the announcement here).

You can also see how closely interwoven computer science and economics/market design have become by looking at the program committee, which includes both computer scientists and economists mixed up (or maybe mixed up computer scientists and economists):

General Chair: 
Moshe Babaioff, Microsoft Research
ec14-general-chair@acm.org

Program Chairs:
Vincent Conitzer, Duke University
ec14-pc-chairs@acm.org

David Easley, Cornell University
ec14-pc-chairs@acm.org

Workshop Chair:
Robert Kleinberg, Cornell University
ec14-workshops-chair@acm.org

Tutorial Chair:
Shuchi Chawla, University of Wisconsin - Madison
ec14-tutorial-chair@acm.org

Senior Program Committee (one per area):

Theory and Foundations SPC:

Larry Blume, Cornell University
Aaron Bodoh-Creed, UC Berkeley
Felix Brandt, TU Munich
Shuchi Chawla, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Edith Elkind, Oxford University
Joan Feigenbaum, Yale University
Michal Feldman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Drew Fudenberg, Harvard University
Nicole Immorlica, Northwestern University and Microsoft Research
Anna Karlin, University of Washington
David Kempe, University of Southern California
Scott Kominers, Harvard University
Ron Lavi, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Vahab Mirrokni, Google Research
Utku Unver, Boston College

Artificial Intelligence and Applied Game Theory SPC:

Itai Ashlagi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Arpita Ghosh, Cornell University
Kate Larson, University of Waterloo
Kevin Leyton-Brown, , University of British Columbia
David Pennock, Microsoft Research
Ariel Procaccia, Carnegie Mellon University
Tuomas Sandholm, Carnegie Mellon University

Experimental, Empirical, and Application SPC:

Eric Budish, University of Chicago
Yan Chen, University of Michigan
Ben Edelman, Harvard University
Ashish Goel, Stanford University
Muthu Muthukrishnan, Rutgers
Denis Nekipelov, UC Berkeley
Sid Suri, Microsoft Research
Steven Tadelis, UC Berkeley

Local Arrangements:
Yoav Shoham, Stanford University

Dmitry Taubinsky (job market candidate), on attention

Among the economists I'm engaged with on the job market this year is Dmitry Taubinsky. He studies attention as a scarce resource, so you shouldn't forget to think about hiring him.  His job market paper is

From Intentions to Actions: A Model and Experimental Evidence of Inattentive Choice

Abstract:  A growing body of evidence suggests that people's inattention may be a signi ficant friction in domains of behavior ranging from medical compliance, to financial decisions, to residential energy use. In this paper, I present a psychologically grounded model of inattentive choice and investigate its implications for dynamic decisions. The model explains seemingly puzzling patterns of consumer behavior, makes novel predictions that I con rm in two experiments, and generates a rich set of market implications. Applied to repeated actions, the model provides an attention-based foundation for the formation of "good" habits in domains such as exercise or energy use. The model explains the recent evidence on the intertemporal spillover effects of temporary incentives, and makes testable predictions about when attention-focusing cues, such as reminders, will dampen or amplify the effects of incentives. Consistent with these predictions, the first experiment reported in this paper shows that while temporary interruptions to daily routines decrease subsequent performance of the behavior, reminders have the largest impact after an interruption. Applied to tasks that must be completed by a deadline, the model identifies when longer deadlines will make people less likely to complete a task. But additionally, the model leads to new comparative statics, tested in the second experiment reported in this paper, about how reminders can eliminate the potentially perverse effect of longer deadlines. Finally, I apply the model to study market interactions between sophisticated firms and inattentive consumers: the model predicts how firms will take advantage of consumer's inattention through sales strategies such as rebates, and also leads to a dynamic theory of how firms use reminder advertisements to steer the behavior of inattentive consumers.

Dan Fragiadakis (job market candidate)

Among the economists I'm engaged with on the job market this year is Dan Fragiadakis. You should think about hiring him.  His job market paper is


Improving Welfare in Assignment Problems: an Experimental Investigation (pdf) (with Peter Troyan). 
Abstract:
"Many institutions face the task of allocating objects (such as university dormitories) to individuals (students) without the use of monetary transfers.  A common solution to this problem is the Random Serial Dictatorship (RSD): agents are ordered randomly, and one at a time, each is assigned her favorite good according to her submitted preferences.  While RSD provides each agent with a dominant strategy of ranking objects truthfully, it may produce socially undesirable outcomes whereby it is possible to make some agents substantially better off at only a small cost to others.  In this paper, we study the prospect of raising welfare in assignment problems by incentivizing agents to report goods they value similarly as indifferent.  Specifically, we modify RSD by ordering agents earlier who report more indifference, a method similar to that used by the Stanford Graduate School of Business to assign MBA students to educational trips abroad.  While theory predicts weak welfare gains in equilibrium, this requires agents to calculate nontrivial best response strategies that deviate from simple truth-telling. In practice, it is unknown whether agents will be able to find these equilibria and, if they cannot, what the welfare implications of using such mechanisms will be. Motivated by these observations, we run a lab experiment where we find  that many agents follow natural heuristics that entail reporting indifferences between objects that are similar in value. Average earnings increase significantly compared to RSD, but the way in which indifference is rewarded can alter the variance in earnings.  This suggests that institutions that use RSD can benefit by rewarding indifference, but should choose how to do so carefully."

I wrote about another of Dan's papers with Pete Troyan yesterday, which is Pete's job market paper.

Pete Troyan (job market candidate) on the rural hospital problem (among other things)

Among the economists I'm engaged with on the job market this year is Pete Troyan. You should think about hiring him.  His job market paper is

Market Design under Distributional Constraints: Diversity in School Choice and Other Applications (with Daniel Fragiadakis)

Abstract:

"Distributional constraints are important in many market design settings. Prominent examples include the minimum manning requirements at each branch in military cadet matching and diversity in school choice, whereby school districts impose constraints on the demographic distribution of students at each school. Standard assignment mechanisms implemented in practice are unable to accommodate all of these constraints. This leads policymakers to resort to ad-hoc solutions that eliminate blocks of seats ex-ante (before agents submit their preferences) to ensure that all constraints are satisfied ex-post. 

We show that these solutions ignore important information contained in the submitted preferences, resulting in avoidable inefficiency. We introduce a new class of dynamic quotas mechanisms that allow the institutional quotas to dynamically adjust to the submitted preferences of the agents. We show how a wide class of mechanisms commonly used in the field can be adapted to our dynamic quotas framework. Focusing in particular on a new dynamic quotas deferred acceptance (DQDA) mechanism, we show that DQDA Pareto dominates current solutions. While it may seem that allowing the quotas to depend on the submitted preferences would compromise the strategyproofness of deferred acceptance, we show that this is not the case: as long as the order in which the quotas are adjusted is determined exogenously to the preferences, DQDA remains strategyproof. Thus, policymakers can be confident that efficiency will be improved without introducing perverse incentives. Simulations with school choice data are used to quantify the potential efficiency gains."

I'll get a chance to blog about another of his papers when I post on Dan Fragiadakis, as they have another joint paper (an experiment) that is Dan's job market paper.

Three students on the economics job market this year (2013-14): Fragiadakis, Taubinsky, Troyan

One sign that I'm in still in transit between retiring from Harvard and settling in at Stanford is that I'm not the chair of the dissertation committee of anyone on the econ job market this year. I am on the dissertation committee of three candidates however, two graduating from Stanford this year and one from Harvard.

They are Dan Fragiadakis and Pete Troyan from Stanford, and Dmitry Taubinsky from Harvard.

Dan is primarily an experimenter and Pete primarily a theorist, and they are both market designers who have collaborated with one another.

Dmitry is a behavioral economist who does both theory and experiments.

I hope to post a bit more about each of them in the coming days, and I'll link to those posts below when I do.
**************************
Updates:

Thursday, December 5, 2013

Pete Troyan (job market candidate) on the rural hospital problem (among other things)

Friday, December 6, 2013

Dan Fragiadakis (job market candidate)

Saturday, December 7, 2013

Dmitry Taubinsky (job market candidate), on attention

Comment on the proposed federal regulation limiting bone marrow compensation

I've written earlier about the proposed regulations that would reverse the effect of the 9th circuit court of appeals decision to allow some bone marrow donors to be compensated. The opportunity to comment on the proposed regulation closed Monday at midnight Eastern time. (Here are all the comments.) Below is a comment on the proposed regulations, signed by a number of economists, myself included. Note point 2 in particular, which points out that the regulation would cut off research on the effect of incentives.

December 2, 2013

Shelley Grant, MHSA, Branch Chief,
Blood Stem Cell Transplantation Program, Division of Transplantation Healthcare Systems Bureau,  Health Resources and Services Administration 5600 Fishers Lane, Room 12C–06, Rockville, Maryland 20857


Comment on Change to the Definition of ‘‘Human Organ’’ Under Section 301 of the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984. Health Resources and Services Administration, HHS. RIN 0906–AB02.

We are academic economists who study how incentives and other mechanisms affect individual behavior and whose research is concerned with improving public welfare. We are writing in opposition to the proposed rule changes by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) that would ban compensation for bone marrow donations. The reasons we oppose the proposed rule change are that it ignores the most critical benefits of offering economic incentives (point 1 below) and prevents the ability to properly assess and improve the benefits of offering incentives (points 2 and 3 below) despite the HHS proposed regulation explicitly stating (Section III. Impact Analysis) “Economic and Regulatory Impact Executive Order 12866 directs agencies to assess all costs and benefits of available regulatory alternatives” (Italics added). The HHS document also states that “The provisions of this rule will not affect the following elements of family well-being: Family safety, … parental rights in the education, nurture, and supervision of their children,” and this regulation could prevent parents such as the lead plaintiff in Flynn v. Holder from obtaining bone marrow transplants for their children.1

1. The proposed regulation entirely ignores potential benefits to bone marrow recipients. The motivation for the ban focuses entirely on concerns for potential donors and gives no weight to the consideration of the patients in need of a bone marrow transplant. There are many patients whose health conditions worsen each year waiting unsuccessfully for a matched bone marrow donation. Depending on the patient's race, there is between an 8 and 50 percent chance that there will be no match in the existing registry. As a result, hundreds of patients die each year due to an
inadequate supply of donors.2 Economic incentives have the potential to motivate more bone marrow donations thereby saving and prolonging the lives of potentially thousands of patients. Indeed, the benefit-cost of adding one potential donor to the registry indicates enormous positive value, between 5 and 7 times the benefit to the cost.3 By entirely ignoring these potential benefits, the proposed regulation fails to accurately present the welfare consequences of the ban.

2. The proposed ban will prevent the most policy relevant academic research that is critically needed to determine whether and how economic incentives can be used to save lives. Alternative research methods that do not directly examine actual incentives for actual bone marrow donations (e.g., surveys), or uncontrolled studies that do not appropriately account for confounding factors (i.e., differences in incentivized and non-incentivized populations), will produce unreliable policy evidence. Recent work, consisting mainly of Randomized Controlled Studies (RCTs) examining economic incentives to motivate blood donations, shows positive results when evaluating actual incentives for actual blood donations in natural contexts. This robust evidence contrasts with earlier results using alternative methods not examining actual incentives and donations.4 This is not just an academic point; empirical evidence obtained with rigorous methods should be used to inform policy. This rigor should apply in general, but it is especially critical in the context of bone marrow donations where thousands of lives are at stake every year and where adopting a ban without appropriate evidence could have disastrous  consequences.

3. The ban will eliminate the opportunity to offer any form of economic incentive, not just cash payments. The policy would thus prevent even non-cash rewards that have been shown to significantly increase blood donations with no harm to the quality of the blood supply.5 The proposed change will thus prevent many potential types and sizes of incentives that could be effective. Appropriately designed research could shed light on whether different types of incentives and incentive amounts would have different effects on donations, but the proposed regulation would make this type of research illegal.

In addition to inappropriately assessing the cost-benefit analyses, we oppose the ban for the
following two reasons. First, allowing for the compensation of bone marrow donors does not mean
that donors have to accept the compensation. When offered, donors could still choose to not accept the incentive or could even donate it to charity. Second, donating bone marrow through the
apheresis process and donating whole blood or plasma share a critical characteristic: donors
provide renewable material that is extracted with minimal risk and that their body regenerates
quickly. The US government has never prevented compensation for these other blood products despite deliberations,6 thus from this renewable material perspective there is no reason to have different policies for these types of donations.

In summary, the proposed regulation ignores the potential beneficial effects that offering compensation to bone marrow donations will have on the well-being of patients who need a transplant but are unable to find a match in an uncompensated-only donation system. This implies that “all costs and benefits of available regulatory alternatives” have not been assessed. Moreover, it makes it illegal to conduct the very research that would be critically necessary to establish the effects that incentives can have on donations. For these reasons, we oppose this regulation proposed by HHS that would ban all forms of compensating bone marrow donors.

Signed,
Theodore Bergstrom, University of California at S. Barbara Stefano DellaVigna, University of
California at Berkeley Julio J. Elias, Universidad del CEMA, Argentina
Rodney Garratt, University of California at S. Barbara
Michael Gibbs, University of Chicago Judd Kessler, University of Pennsylvania Nicola Lacetera,
University of Toronto Stephen Leider, University of Michigan John List, University of Chicago
Mario Macis, Johns Hopkins University
Daniel McFadden, University of California at Berkeley Matthew Rabin, University of California at
Berkeley Alvin Roth, Stanford University
Damien Sheehan-Connor, Wesleyan University
Robert Slonim, University of Sydney
Alex Tabarrok, George Mason University



Footnotes:
1 The lead plaintiff, Doreen Flynn, has three daughters afflicted with Fanconi anemia who may need
multiple bone marrow transplants during their teen years.
2 Bergstrom, Garratt, and Sheehan-Connor 2009, Tables 2 and 4.
3 Ibid, Table 7.
4 Lacetera, Macis and Slonim 2013.
5 Ibid.
6 Starr, 1998.


References
Bergstrom, T., Garratt, R., Sheehan-Connor, D. 2009. One chance in a million: altruism and the bone marrow registry. American Economic Review 99, 1309–1334.
Lacetera, N., Macis, M., Slonim, R. 2013. Economic rewards to motivate blood donations. Science 340: 6135, 927–928.
Starr, D. 1998. Blood: An epic history of medicine and commerce. Imperial College, London.

First heart transplant: Dec. 3 1967

Here's the story: First heart transplant: Dec. 3 1967

"Shortly after midnight, Dr. Christiaan Barnard, heading a team of 20 doctors, removes the heart from the body of a young woman named Denise Darvall--who had been hit by a car--and places it into a 53-year-old grocer, Louis Washkansky, who was dying of heart disease.

Barnard would later say that he wasn't sure the surgery was successful until five hours later, when he electrically shocked the transplanted heart and it started beating. Washkansky was soon able to speak and even walk a bit, but died only 18 days after the operation when he developed double pneumonia--a consequence of having his immune system suppressed so that his body wouldn't reject the new organ.

A month later, Barnard repeated the procedure on a 58-year-old dentist named Philip Blaiberg, giving him the heart of a young black man, Clive Haupt, who had died of a stroke--a very controversial decision in racially segregated South Africa,  Blaiberg was kept in a sealed suite of hospital rooms for more than two months and was not given steroids--treatment that had weakened Washkansky. He managed to live for 19 months.

Other doctors had performed heart transplants on animals, but none had been willing to do the surgery on humans, in part because of legal issues, particularly in the United States, where district attorneys had threatened to prosecute doctors who took organs from people who were brain dead, but had not yet died.

Barnard's surgery, however, made it more acceptable to use organs from brain-dead patients. He had been able to take advantage of the absence of legal restraints in South Africa; in fact, he had gone ahead with the operation without seeking permission of his hospital's executives. He only told them about it afterwards. "

Compensation for donors: it's not just kidneys

I'll be speaking later this year about deceased donation at a conference of the International Society for Heart & Lung Transplantation. When I went to their website to arrange some hotel details, I saw this announcement about the Society's position that "the sale of organs from both live and deceased donors is unethical and violates the Universal Declaration of Human Rights."

NEW: ISHLT Position on the Trafficking of Donor Organs
"Tales from the Organ Trade” and similar documentaries are reminders that organ trafficking remains an important international problem. In line with the previously stated ISHLT position and in concert with other national and international transplantation societies, the ISHLT strongly and emphatically endorses the Declaration of Istanbul which seeks to abolish the illegal and immoral trade in donor organs which is supported in part by so called “transplant tourism”. As a corollary of which,  the Society values and supports every effort to improve the availability of donor organs by legitimate process thereby providing community access to these life sustaining therapies.


They link to their 2007 position statement, reproduced here:

International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation
Statement on Transplant Ethics
Approved April 2007

Thoracic organ transplantation improves the length and quality of life of patients with severe
heart or lung disease. It is a societal endeavour bound by ethical principles. The donation of
organs from a deceased patient must always be made freely and without coercion. The gift
of an organ by a live donor, such as a pulmonary lobe transplant, must be made in the same
fashion and with informed consent. To ensure that these principles are adhered to, the
transplant process must be transparent, legally regulated and open to both national and
international scrutiny.

The ISHLT endorses the view of the World Medical Association that the sale of organs from
both live and deceased donors is unethical and violates the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.

Obtaining organs for transplantation from the bodies of executed prisoners contravenes the
principle of voluntary donation. A condemned prisoner and his relatives cannot consent
freely. Furthermore, such practices provide a perverse incentive to increase the number of
executions and it lays the judicial process open to corruption.

ISHLT members should discourage patients from seeking transplantation in countries where
transplantation is not open to external scrutiny and the ethical standards of the ISHLT
cannot be assured, regardless of whether payment for organs is involved. ISHLT members
should work with their own governments to ensure that such ‘transplant tourism’ that
contravenes these ethical principles is made illegal.

Members of the ISHLT should not participate in or support the transplantation of organs
from prisoners or the sale of organs for transplantation. Any ISHLT member who has been
found to have contravened this ethical principle may have their rights and privileges as a
member suspended or removed by the ISHLT Board.

Individuals submitting data about clinical transplantation, or the use of human tissue, for
presentation at any of the ISHLT’s meetings, to the Society’s Registry or for publication in
the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation will be asked to sign a personal statement
confirming that the principles of both the Declaration of Helsinki formulated by the World
Medical Association and of this ethical statement by the ISHLT have been adhered to.

References
Rothman DJ, Rose E, Awaya T, Cohen B, Daar A, Dzemeshkevich SL, Lee CJ, Munro R,
Reyes H, Rothman SM, Schoen KF, Scheper-Hughes N, Shapira Z, Smit H. The Bellagio Task
Force report on transplantation, bodily integrity, and the International Traffic in Organs.
Transplant Proceedings 1997; 29: 2739-45. Also available at the International Committee of
the Red Cross web-site:
http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList302/87DC95FCA3C3D63EC1256B66005B3
F6C (accessed 1st May 2007)
Declaration of Helsinki. http://www.wma.net/e/policy/pdf/17c.pdf (accessed 1st May 2007)

Horse meat served in an Israeli restaurant, with subsequent apologies

Here's the story from Haaretz: Psst! That's horse you're eating, Tel Aviv waiter admits
Turkiz serves horse regularly but didn't mention it in the dish description; waiter tells the couple what the menu didn't.

apparently the restaurant has horse meat on its menu, but left it out of the description of at least one dish.

(Many Israelis may share the American repugnance for eating horse, but an additional complication there is that horses don't have split hooves nor chew their cud and so are not kosher.  Apparently the sale of horse meat for human consumption is legal there, unlike here in California...)

HT: Ran Shorrer

An investigative journalist at the Telegraph is offered a kidney for sale

Britons being sold illegal kidneys for surgery in Sri Lanka
Patients awaiting kidney transplants in the UK are being offered illegal organs which are then used in operations at a Ski Lankan hospital

George Dantzig's math library is available for "private treaty sale"

Here is the sale site, and here is Michael Trick's blog post on the sale, Own a Ton of Operations Research History.

That post ends with this observation: " I suspect in the future, there will be far fewer libraries from great researchers.  I know that my own “library” is really nothing more than the hard drive on whatever computer I am using."

High pay isn't repugnant in Switzerland after all, at least not to 65%

Here's the story from Bloomberg: Swiss Voters Reject Strict CEO Pay Limits in Referendum

"Swiss voters rejected a proposal to limit executives’ pay to 12 times that of junior employees yesterday, a measure that would have gone further than any other developed nation.
The measure was opposed by 65 percent of voters, the government in Bern said yesterday.
...
"“It’s a big relief,” Valentin Vogt, president of the Swiss Employers’ Association, said in an interview on Swiss national television SRF. “It’s a signal that it’s not up to the state to have a say in pay.”
Switzerland is the home to at least five of Europe’s 20 best-paid chief executive officers. Opposition to excessive pay has stiffened among the traditionally pro-business Swiss following the government bailout of UBS AG (UBSN), Switzerland’s biggest bank, in 2008 and a plan -- later scrapped -- by Novartis AG (NOVN) to pay outgoing Chairman Daniel Vasella as much as $78 million.
In March, Swiss voters approved the so-called fat-cat initiative that gave company shareholders a binding vote on managers’ pay and blocked golden handshakes and severance packages."
*******************

But sometimes high pay strikes some people as repugnant, and it's not just hedge fund managers: take a look at this story from the NY Daily News.

Top 16 NYC charter school executives earn more than Chancellor Dennis Walcott

What happens when Big Data meets human resources?

That's the question asked by this recent article in the Atlantic by Don Peck, which focuses on using nontraditional data to match workers to jobs, either for hiring new workers or for assigning workers to tasks within a firm.

One of the companies they mention (and one I'm interested in) is Knack, which has created video games which generate apparently useful kinds of data about individuals.

In general, there's a question of what should the inputs be for a matching algorithm, and for many purposes economists have focused on preferences, but 'big data' offers some possibilities for informing preferences and identifying good matches.

(See an earlier related post with links to other articles here: New sources of data for selecting who to hire )

School choice in New Orleans: schools have big strategy sets

In New Orleans (as in New York City), some schools have big strategy sets. The Times-Picayune reports: Two New Orleans high schools said they were 'full' -- then enrolled more students


"the data raises troubling questions about whether these two schools are truly "open admission" campuses or are secretly cherry-picking students. "I think it's a fact that school leaders of certain schools are deciding who gets a seat, and I don't think that's serving students well," said Caroline Roemer Shirley, head of the Louisiana Association of Public Charter Schools.

McMain Principal Bridgette Frick admitted taking in more freshmen after officially declaring the class full. She said she let in students who came to sign up at the school in July, after McMain was freed from OneApp.

So, too, did McDonogh 35 Principal Gerald DeBose. He said the school independently boosted ninth-grade enrollment beyond its initial number to offset an unexpected loss of students in 10th and 11th grade.

The Orleans Parish School Board allowed the schools to fill any open seats on their own over the summer. However, Recovery School District data show they were overenrolled well before then."

...

"In most parts of the country, charters run their own application lotteries. But suspicions arose in New Orleans that the lack of oversight left room for individual schools to prioritize some applicants over others, even though almost all are "open admission," meaning they have no stated entry requirements. 

...

"The state Recovery School District introduced OneApp in 2012 to address these and other issues. It applies to all New Orleans public schools in both the state-run district and about half of those overseen by the separate Orleans Parish School Board. The exceptions, for now, are Orleans Parish School Board charters that choose not to participate until their charters come up for renewal.

Celebrate Marilda Sotomayor at her 70th birthday conference in Brazil, July 25-31, 2014

Here's the conference website, which says in part:

It is a great pleasure to invite you to participate in the SÃO PAULO SCHOOL OF ADVANCED SCIENCES ON GAME THEORY – INTERNATIONAL WORKSHOP ON GAME THEORY AND ECONOMIC APPLICATIONS OF THE GAME THEORY SOCIETY, to celebrate the 70th birthday of Marilda Sotomayor. It will be held at the University of São Paulo, from July 25 to July 31, 2014.

The workshop will offer the participants the opportunity to interact with some of the most productive researchers in Game Theory. The week-long event will consist of mini-courses, conferences and contributed papers sessions, which will be complemented with a round table for discussions on themes of interest of the participants. The courses will start at the introductory level and will reach the frontiers of current research.

...

Mini-Courses

• MARKET DESIGN - ALVIN ROTH (University Stanford)
• SOCIAL CHOICE AND FAIR DIVISION - HERVÉ MOULIN (University of Glasgow)
• INFORMATION THEORY - DAVID PEREZ-CASTRILLO (University Autonoma de Barcelona)
• COOPERATIVE GAMES - ROBERTO SERRANO (Brown University)
• STOCHASTIC GAMES: ALGORITHMS AND EXISTENCE - T. E. S. RAGHAVAN (University Chicago)
• INTRODUCTION TO AUCTION THEORY - Vijay Krishna (Pennsylvania State Univ.)
  • CLUBS, COALITIONS AND NETWORKS - Myrna Wooders (Vanderbilt Univ.)

All the courses will be ministered in parallel, except for “Market Design”.

Plenary Lecturers

• AUMANN, ROBERT: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel and State University of New York at Stony Brook, USA.
• HART, SERGIU: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
• MASKIN, ERIC: Princeton University, USA
• NASH, JOHN: Princeton University, USA
• ROTH, ALVIN: Stanford University, USA.
• SCHMEIDLER, DAVID: Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel.
• SOTOMAYOR, MARILDA: Universidade de São Paulo, Brazil.

N.Y.C. turns to open data to help with high school choice

Here's an encouraging development: New York City is making data available to third party app developers to help families compare schools:  N.Y.C. turns to open data to help with high school choice

Deceased donor registration versus transplantation in Malaysia

The National News Agency of Malaysia (BERNAMA) has the following disheartening report on the difference between deceased organ donor registration and subsequent transplantation:

Sarawak News

---

November 16, 2013 19:10 PM

Organ Transfer Conducted From Only 435 Of 237,395 Registered Organ Donors - Lee Lam Thye

SIBU, 16 Nov (Bernama)- The Organ Donation Public Awareness Action Committee revealed that only 435 of the 237,395 registered organ donors had donated their organs after their death so far.

Its chairman, Tan Sri Lee Lam Thye, said the number was very small compared with the number of those who had registered to donate their organs upon their death.

He attributed this to, among others, the family members or next-of kin of the registered organ donors not allowing the organ transfer to be conducted when the former died.

"This happens because the registered donors did not inform their family members of their pledge to donate their organs upon their death.

"Hence, we advised those who have pledged to donate their organs upon their death to inform their family members of their decision," he told a media conference after an organ donation campaign here Saturday.

Eating horsemeat is good for horses, says Britain's Princess Anne

The Telegraph has the story (and a video):
Princess Anne: why Britain should consider eating horsemeat
"The Princess Royal, who is President of World Horse Welfare, says that Britain should consider eating horsemeat because it would improve standards of care for the animals"

 "Princess Anne was speaking at the World Horse Welfare Organisation annual meeting when she made the comments:
"Our attitudes to the horsemeat trade may have to change" she said, because those in the trade "value their horses and look after them well" and therefore "should we be considering a real market for horsemeat and would that reduce the number of welfare case?
"I think this need a debate," the Princess Royal added."

D.C.plans a single school choice system that includes both traditional and charter schools

Here's the story from the Washington Post:
D.C. rolls out unified enrollment lottery for traditional, charter schools

The story even includes a link to IIPSC.

And here's a link to the DC school choice site, My School DC

Seminar on modern matching, by Scott Kominers

If you are at loose ends in Cambridge MA this noon...

Scott Kominers: "Theory, Practice, and Engineering in (Generalized) Matching Market Design"

Date: Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Time: 12:00pm – 1:30pm
Place: Maxwell Dworkin 119

Speaker: Scott Kominers, Harvard Society of Fellows, Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and Harvard CRCS

Title: Theory, Practice, and Engineering in (Generalized) Matching Market Design

Abstract:
In recent years, matching theory has been widely applied in the design of centralized labor markets and school choice programs. At the same time, new theoretical discoveries have shown how to generalize matching algorithms to incorporate contract negotiation and complex market structures. I will survey the history of matching, from the marriage problem, through "marriage with dowries," to generalized matching with contracts. Then, I will discuss applications of generalized matching algorithms to the design of affirmative action and cadet--branch matching systems. I will conclude by showing how these results have recently contributed to the elimination of "walk-zones" in the Boston public schools match.

Bio:Scott Duke Kominers is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, a Research Scientist at the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and an Associate of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society. From 2011-2013, he was the inaugural Research Scholar at the Becker Friedman Institute for Research in Economics at the University of Chicago.

Kominers received his A.B. in Mathematics and Ph.D. in Business Economics from Harvard University, in 2009 and 2011, respectively. His research focuses on market design and its interactions with law and computer science. His specific research interests include matching theory, mechanism design, law and economics, privacy, and quadratic form representation theory.

Location: 

Maxwell Dworkin 119

More on the law and politics of compensating bone marrow donors

The legal battle is shaping up over the decision of the department of Health and Human Services to circumvent the decision of the ninth circuit court of appeals that it is legal to compensate bone marrow donors.  The Institute for Justice, which was a successful litigant in the court ruling, has outlined their current thoughts here:
Federal Officials Move to Block Life-Saving Research
HHS’ Proposed Rules Would Undo Court Ruling Legalizing Bone Marrow Compensation

They say in part:
"The proposed regulation would ban marrow compensation just when empirical research has begun into the effects of compensating donors.  A team of economists—Nicola Lacetera of the University of Toronto, Mario Macis of Johns Hopkins University, and Robert Slonim of the University of Sydney—were in the process of finalizing a research proposal that would have investigated the effects of donor compensation when they learned of the new rule.

“These new regulations make it impossible for researchers to obtain the necessary evidence to inform policy.  Our proposed studies would be made illegal by these new provisions,” explained Macis, who, along with Lacetera and Slonim, has published some of the leading work showing that economic incentives can be effectively used to increase blood donations without affecting blood supply safety.  “Properly designed compensation for bone marrow donors could similarly lead to significant increases in donations, thus giving potentially hundreds or thousands of people in need of a transplant every year a greater chance of survival.  At a minimum, the federal government should not make it illegal for researchers to find out whether incentives can help address the shortage of bone marrow donors.”

“I don’t think that anybody should go to jail just for trying to save somebody’s life,” added Doreen Flynn, who has three children with Fanconi anemia, a blood disease that frequently requires a bone marrow transplant and who was the lead plaintiff in the original lawsuit.  “If paying donors results in more marrow donations, we should pay them.  And it shouldn’t be a crime to investigate it.”
“We know what doesn’t work,” said Robert McNamara, also a senior attorney with the Institute and co-lead counsel in the case.  “We have 30 years of experience with an altruism-only marrow-donor program, and we know that has not succeeded in recruiting enough donors.  The only question is whether offering compensation can achieve better results.  We will not allow the federal government to make it a felony to find out the answer.  Hopefully, we will do that by persuading the government not to adopt this rule, but if we have to, we will sue them again.  And we will win—again.”

The proposed regulation is currently open for a period of public comment through December 2, 2013.  Individuals who have been impacted by blood-borne cancer or bone marrow donations are encouraged to leave comments on the Department of Health and Human Services’ website:  http://www.regulations.gov/#!submitComment;D=HRSA_FRDOC_0001-0115."
****************

You can follow some of the story in my earlier posts on bone marrow and compensation.

AEA Registry for Randomized Control Trials

This just in...

Dear AEA member:

The AEA has launched a new site to register randomized control trials (RCTs). The AEA encourages all investigators to register new and existing RCTs. Registration is entirely voluntary and is not currently linked to or required for submission and publication in the AEA journals.

The site is available at https://www.socialscienceregistry.org

On this site, you can register your forthcoming, ongoing, or even completed RCTs, with as little or as many details as you wish. The site will also permit you to store and make publicly-available additional information on your RCTs (reports, articles, data, and code). We believe that this will prove to be a very valuable resource for investigators to share their work and the site will be widely used by those who wish to find out about on-going and completed studies.

The registry is characterized by:

1) Simplicity and flexibility: Registering a trial is straightforward with only a minimal number of required fields. There is considerable flexibility to provide additional material at the time of registration or at any point in the life of the study. Materials can also be hidden from public view until completion of the study, or be made accessible only with the permission of the PI.

2) Adjustability and memory: Any registry entry can be amended by the PI at any point, but the registry keeps track of all versions.

3) Ability to work as a research portal for your RCTs: The registry can serve as an access point for collaborators, other scholars, students, and the general public providing links to data sets, survey instruments, experimental findings, and experimental protocols.

To register a trial, the PI simply needs to enter the following information: PI name, project title, study location, project status, keyword(s), abstract, trial start and end dates, intervention start and end dates, proposed outcome(s), experimental design, whether the treatment is clustered, planned number of clusters, planned number of observations, and IRB information. Optional fields allowing the PI to customize and enhance the information made available include details on sponsors and partners, survey instruments, an analysis plan, and other supporting documents. Help is available if the PI encounters any problem.

The AEA registry system will provide the PI with reminders to update the registration of an RCT at appropriate points in the trial's lifecycle. For example, the submitted end date will trigger an email asking the PI to enter post-trial information. If the trial has been extended, the PI can update the trial with the new end date.

We encourage you to explore the registry and to register your RCTs.

The committee on the registry for social experiments
Larry Katz (chair)
Esther Duflo
Pinelopi Goldberg
Duncan Thomas

Ohio execution stay for Ronald Phillips for possible organ donations

This will complicate my discussions in China...

Ohio execution stay for Ronald Phillips for possible organ donations

November 14, 2013 (COLUMBUS, Ohio) -- Ohio's governor delayed the execution of a condemned child killer to consider the inmate's unprecedented organ donation request, acknowledging that it's ''uncharted territory'' but expressing hope that the man might help save a life before losing his own.

Ronald Phillips, 40, was scheduled to be put to death Thursday with a lethal injection of a two-drug combination not yet tried in the U.S., but Gov. John Kasich issued a stay of execution Wednesday. The execution date has been reset for July 2.

"I realize this is a bit of uncharted territory for Ohio, but if another life can be saved by his willingness to donate his organs and tissues then we should allow for that to happen," Kasich said in a statement. He said he wanted to allow time for medical experts to study whether Phillips could donate non-vital organs, such as a kidney, before being executed.

Related Content

STORY: Organ-donor request delays Ohio killer's execution

Phillips, who was sentenced for raping and killing a 3-year-old girl in Akron in 1993, asked this week to donate a kidney to his mother and his heart to his sister. His attorney said it was an attempt to do good, not a delay tactic.

Ohio's prison medical policy accommodates organ donations, but prison officials rejected the request, saying it came too late to work out logistics and security concerns.

Kasich said Phillips' crime was heinous but his willingness to donate organs and tissue could save another life and the state should try to accommodate that.

Some 3,500 people in Ohio and more than 120,000 nationally are awaiting organ donations, said Marilyn Pongonis, a spokeswoman for the Lifeline of Ohio organ donation program.

If Phillips is a viable donor for his mother, who has kidney disease and is on dialysis, or for others awaiting live transplants of non-vital organs, the stay would allow time for those procedures to be performed, Kasich said.

Phillips' sister suffers from a heart ailment and he also wants to donate his heart to her.

Richard Dieter, executive director of the Death Penalty Information Center, said a Delaware death row inmate was permitted in 1995 to donate a kidney to his mother while in prison, though he was not facing imminent execution like Phillips.

"This step by the governor puts it into a more normal discussion of (how) an inmate, without any security problems, can help save another person and is that the right thing to do," he said. "With 24 hours to go before an operation had to be carried out, it definitely gets in the way of that process."

Vital organ donations raise larger ethical issues and have not been allowed during U.S. executions but have occurred in China, Deiter said.

Dieter, whose group opposes the death penalty, added: "If the whole idea is to save a life, there's one life to be saved simply by not executing the person at all."

Phillips made his request after the governor denied him mercy and Phillips had exhausted his other legal options. The state had left it up to Phillips' family whether the organs would be harvested after his death.

HT: Bernadette Keller

Saudi comedians mock the ban on women drivers with a video song

The NY Times has the story

"Their video, a play on the Bob Marley classic “No Woman, No Cry,” has gone viral, receiving more than 6.5 million views on YouTube since it was posted on Saturday. The catchy a cappella tune mocks the country’s restrictions, as well as the assertion by one Saudi cleric that driving would harm women’s ovaries."

Repugnant transaction watch: Saudi women drivers

The NY Times has the latest on a demonstration by Saudi women who wish to be allowed to drive in the Kingdom, and the reaction it has drawn: Saudi Women Rise Up, Quietly, and Slide Into the Driver’s Seat

"The public call for women nationwide to drive on Saturday was the latest push in a decades-old effort by a small group of activists to exercise what they see as a fundamental human right. Saudi Arabia, a hereditary monarchy, is the only country in the world where women are not allowed to drive."

Is the Common App still doing what it was designed to do?

The letters to the editor of the NY Times, following a recent article on the Common App and its troubles, include one (the second letter) from one of the founders of the Common App. It says in part:

"The unavoidable standardization of the Common Application, not to mention the online debacle for students trying to use it this year, causes serious questions regarding its service to both the candidate and the college.

As co-founder of the Common Application some 40 years ago (with Jack Osander of Princeton and Fred Jewett of Harvard), I sense that the Common App’s time is up. The sole original goal of the Common Application was to make applying to highly selective colleges easier for nontraditional, less advantaged but deserving students. Clearly, it worked early on.

Now it seems that the ease of applying via the Common App has transferred from the poorest to the most affluent students, whose families have no problem paying a dozen or more application fees — the more apps, the better the chance of admission somewhere special. This phenomenon also creates thousands more “ghost applications” (from students unlikely to enroll) for the colleges."

HT: Eric Budish

Earlier posts on the common app.