Tuesday, April 8, 2014

Matching in Maastricht this week

There's lots of matching in Maastricht this week, here's the program (and here are the abstracts of papers)




Program


Wednesday, April 9
14:00-14:30 Registration: Ad Fundum14:30-14:45 Introduction to the Meeting: H0.06/Aula
14:45-15:30 Attila Tasnadi (Corvinus University of Budapest):Axiomatic Districting (joint with Clemens Puppe)
15:30-16:15 Coffee Break: Ad Fundum
16:15-17:00 Alexander Westkamp (Maastricht University):Strategy-Proof Tie-Breaking (joint with Lars Ehlers)
17:00-17:45 Bettina Klaus (University of Lausanne):Stochastic Stability in Assignment Problems (joint with Jonathan Newton)
Thursday, April 10
09:00-09:45 Baharak Rastegari (University of Glasgow):Size Versus Truthfulness in the House Allocation Problem
09:45-10:30 Jay Sethuraman (Colombia University):
Rationing Problems in Bipartite Networks (based on joint work with Herve Moulin, Shyam Chandramouli, Olivier Bochet, and Rahmi Ilkilic)
10:30-11:15 Coffee Break: Ad Fundum
11:15-12:00 Serge Galam (Sciences Po and CNRS):From Majority Rule Voting to Democratic Dictatorship
12:00-12:45 Friedrich Pukelsheim (University of Augsburg):Negative Voting Weights in the Former Electoral System for the German Bundestag
12:45-14:15 Lunch: Ad Fundum
14:30-15:15 Flip Klijn (IAE-CSIC and Barcelona GSE):A Many-to-Many “Rural Hospital Theorem” (joint with Ayse Yazici)
15:15-16:00 Szilvia Papai (Concordia University):Reasonably and Securely Stable Matching (joint with David Cantala)
16:00-16:30 Coffee Break: Ad Fundum
16:30-18:15 MC meeting: H0.04
18:30-19:30 Excursion in Maastricht: Start at entrance Onze Lieve Vrouwe Kerk (Church of Holy Mary)
19:30 Dinner at Harbour Club, Bassin, Maastricht
Friday, April 11
9:30-10:15 Albin Erlanson (Lund University):Strategy-Proof Package Assignment (joint with Karol Szwagrzak)
10:15-11:00 Christian Geist (Technical University of Munich):Finding Strategyproof Social Choice Functions via SAT Solving (joint with Felix Brandt)
11:00-11:30 Coffee Break: Ad Fundum
11:30-13:00 Rump Session13:00 Lunch: Ad Fundum
And if you go, be careful, I understand that Maastricht can be slippery.
Posted by Al Roth at 5:14 PM 0 comments
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Race based admissions, and the search for plaintiffs

The NY Times has an interesting story that touches on various transactions that some people regard as repugnant...in this case, race-based university admissions, and lawyers advertising for clients...

The story focuses on Edward Blum, the legal activist who has been at the forefront of the battle against using race as a criterion in admissions to American colleges and universities. Now he's looking for plaintiffs who think that some universities might be ignoring recent rulings.

"Admissions letters have just gone out, and there is no particular reason to think the court’s decision in Fisher v. University of Texas affected how students were selected. And the lawsuits Mr. Blum predicted have not materialized.
There are reasons for that, Mr. Blum told me last week. One is that it is hard to find plaintiffs willing to call attention to having been rejected by a prestigious institution, to blame that rejection on race discrimination and to persevere through years of litigation.
...
But Mr. Blum does not give up easily. He is launching a series of websites seeking plaintiffs.
“Were you denied admission to the University of North Carolina?” one asks. “It may be because you’re the wrong race.”
...
"Civil rights movements have long recruited plaintiffs, and so the sites may be said to be part of a proud tradition. But some may detect a whiff of the personal injury lawyer about them."
Posted by Al Roth at 5:26 AM 0 comments
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Monday, April 7, 2014

Fast and slow on changing views of formerly repugnant transactions: same sex marriage, and marijuana

Readers of this blog know that I've been following the change in public attitudes towards a number of formerly repugnant transactions. Recently two articles in the NY Times caught my eye, about the speed of change, and cautious attitudes even among supporters of change, regarding the legalization of marijuana, and same sex marriage. Basically both of these are gaining momentum, and mainstream politicians and corporate leaders sometimes feel caught in the middle.

Despite Support in Party, Democratic Governors Resist Legalizing Marijuana

"LOS ANGELES — California voters strongly favor legalizing marijuana. The state Democratic Party adopted a platform last month urging California to follow Colorado and Washington in ending marijuana prohibition. The state’s lieutenant governor, Gavin Newsom, has called for legalizing the drug.

But not Gov. Jerry Brown. “I think we ought to kind of watch and see how things go in Colorado,” Mr. Brown, a Democrat, said curtly when asked the question as he was presenting his state budget this year.

At a time of rapidly evolving attitudes toward marijuana legalization — a slight majority of Americans now support legalizing the drug — Democratic governors across the country, Mr. Brown among them, find themselves uncomfortably at odds with their own base."

*************
And here's a recent column by Frank Bruni: The New Gay Orthodoxy

"TO appreciate how rapidly the ground has shifted, go back just two short years, to April 2012. President Obama didn’t support marriage equality, not formally. Neither did Hillary Clinton. And few people were denouncing them as bigots whose positions rendered them too divisive, offensive and regressive to lead.

But that’s precisely the condemnation that tainted and toppled Brendan Eich after his appointment two weeks ago as the new chief executive of the technology company Mozilla. On Thursday he resigned, clearly under duress and solely because his opposition to gay marriage diverged from the views of too many employees and customers. “Under the present circumstances, I cannot be an effective leader,” he said, and he was right, not just about the climate at Mozilla but also, to a certain degree, about the climate of America.

Something remarkable has happened — something that’s mostly exciting but also a little disturbing (I’ll get to the disturbing part later), and that’s reflected not just in Eich’s ouster at Mozilla, the maker of the web browser Firefox, but in a string of marriage-equality victories in federal courts over recent months, including a statement Friday by a judge who said that he would rule that Ohio must recognize same-sex marriages performed outside the state.

And the development I’m referring to isn’t the broadening support for same-sex marriage, which a clear majority of Americans now favor. No, I’m referring to the fact that in a great many circles, endorsement of same-sex marriage has rather suddenly become nonnegotiable. Expected. Assumed. Proof of a baseline level of enlightenment and humanity. Akin to the understanding that all people, regardless of race or color, warrant the same rights and respect."
Posted by Al Roth at 4:53 AM 1 comments
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Sunday, April 6, 2014

Classifying Economics Nobels

Someone at the Nobel Foundation has compiled a list of Nobel prizes by fields, with a definition of "field" taken from the one-line prize citation. It makes for a lot of fields...so it may be subject to change. Here's what it looked like recently:

Applied game theory (1)

"for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design"

Development economics (2)

"for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries"
"for their pioneering research into economic development research with particular consideration of the problems of developing countries"

Econometrics (8)

"for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes"
"for having developed and applied dynamic models for the analysis of economic processes"
"for his clarification of the probability theory foundations of econometrics and his analyses of simultaneous economic structures"
"for his development of theory and methods for analyzing selective samples"
"for his development of theory and methods for analyzing discrete choice"
"for methods of analyzing economic time series with time-varying volatility (ARCH)"
"for methods of analyzing economic time series with common trends (cointegration)"
"for their empirical analysis of asset prices"

Economic governance (2)

"for her analysis of economic governance, especially the commons"
"for his analysis of economic governance, especially the boundaries of the firm"

Economic growth (1)

"for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development"

Economic growth theory (1)

"for his contributions to the theory of economic growth"

Economic history (3)

"for his empirically founded interpretation of economic growth which has led to new and deepened insight into the economic and social structure and process of development"
"for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change"
"for having renewed research in economic history by applying economic theory and quantitative methods in order to explain economic and institutional change"

Economic psychology (2)

"for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty"
"for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms"

Economic sociology (1)

"for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour"

Economics of information (5)

"for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information"
"for their fundamental contributions to the economic theory of incentives under asymmetric information"
"for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information"
"for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information"
"for their analyses of markets with asymmetric information"

Experimental economics (2)

"for having integrated insights from psychological research into economic science, especially concerning human judgment and decision-making under uncertainty"
"for having established laboratory experiments as a tool in empirical economic analysis, especially in the study of alternative market mechanisms"

Financial economics (8)

"for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics"
"for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics"
"for their pioneering work in the theory of financial economics"
"for a new method to determine the value of derivatives"
"for a new method to determine the value of derivatives"
"for their empirical analysis of asset prices"
"for their empirical analysis of asset prices"
"for their empirical analysis of asset prices"

Game theory (6)

"for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games"
"for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games"
"for their pioneering analysis of equilibria in the theory of non-cooperative games"
"for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis"
"for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis"
"for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design"

General equilibrium theory (3)

"for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory"
"for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory"
"for having incorporated new analytical methods into economic theory and for his rigorous reformulation of the theory of general equilibrium"

Industrial organization (1)

"for his seminal studies of industrial structures, functioning of markets and causes and effects of public regulation"

Input-Output analysis (1)

"for the development of the input-output method and for its application to important economic problems"

Institutional economics (2)

"for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena"
"for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena"

International and regional economics (1)

"for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity"

International economics (2)

"for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements"
"for their pathbreaking contribution to the theory of international trade and international capital movements"

International macroeconomics (1)

"for his analysis of monetary and fiscal policy under different exchange rate regimes and his analysis of optimum currency areas"

Labor economics (3)

"for their analysis of markets with search frictions"
"for their analysis of markets with search frictions"
"for their analysis of markets with search frictions"

Macroeconometrics (3)

"for the creation of econometric models and the application to the analysis of economic fluctuations and economic policies"
"for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy"
"for their empirical research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy"

Macroeconomics (9)

"for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena"
"for their pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and for their penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena"
"for his achievements in the fields of consumption analysis, monetary history and theory and for his demonstration of the complexity of stabilization policy"
"for his analysis of financial markets and their relations to expenditure decisions, employment, production and prices"
"for his pioneering analyses of saving and of financial markets"
"for having developed and applied the hypothesis of rational expectations, and thereby having transformed macroeconomic analysis and deepened our understanding of economic policy"
"for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles"
"for their contributions to dynamic macroeconomics: the time consistency of economic policy and the driving forces behind business cycles"
"for his analysis of intertemporal tradeoffs in macroeconomic policy"

Management science (1)

"for his pioneering research into the decision-making process within economic organizations"

Microeconomics (4)

"for having extended the domain of microeconomic analysis to a wide range of human behaviour and interaction, including nonmarket behaviour"
"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory"
"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory"
"for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory"

National income accounting (1)

"for having made fundamental contributions to the development of systems of national accounts and hence greatly improved the basis for empirical economic analysis"

Partial and general equilibrium theory (2)

"for the scientific work through which he has developed static and dynamic economic theory and actively contributed to raising the level of analysis in economic science"
"for his pioneering contributions to the theory of markets and efficient utilization of resources"

Public finance (1)

"for his development of the contractual and constitutional bases for the theory of economic and political decision-making"

Theory of market institutions (1)

"for his discovery and clarification of the significance of transaction costs and property rights for the institutional structure and functioning of the economy"

Theory of optimal allocation of resources (2)

"for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources"
"for their contributions to the theory of optimum allocation of resources"

Welfare economics (1)

"for his contributions to welfare economics"

Welfare theory (2)

"for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory"
"for their pioneering contributions to general economic equilibrium theory and welfare theory"

Posted by Al Roth at 5:48 AM 0 comments
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