Legacy exhibition at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm

Legacy: 14 Nobel Laureates on inspiration, role models and the value of passing something on

A video exhibition by the artists David Hodge and Hi-Jin Kang Hodge will open at the Nobel museum in Stockholm on March 13 and run through November 15. I was interviewed for it at Stanford.

Here's a trailer for the video

I haven't seen the video of my interview, and don't remember well all the things we talked about, but this paragraph in the exhibition description could possiblyl refer to me talking about Lloyd Shapley:

"In one part of the exhibition, the video installation Legacy is shown, where Nobel Laureates discuss the importance of legacies, both personal and professional. One of the participants tells us that one of his greatest role models in science was a professor that he never worked with. But he was still inspired by their way of thinking and solving problems, methods that made such an impression of him that he in turn could use them for problem solving in other fields. "

Market design and repugnance interview, in Japanese

For readers of this blog who might like to read an interview in Japanese, here is one that includes discussion of both market design and repugnant transactions, by Ayako Hirono of Nikkei Business.

ノーベル賞経済学者が挑む「禁断の取引」

アルビン・ロス米スタンフォード大学教授に聞く

Sally Satel on compensation for kidney donors

Sally Satel, in the Pacific Standard, makes the case for compensating kidney donors, illustrated with a photo including the first organ donor, Richard Herrick, who gave a kidney to his identical twin brother in 1954 (and passed away in 2010):

The Case for Compensating Kidney Donors
"Our current system is failing dramatically because altruism isn’t a sufficiently motivating force to give up an organ. We need to test incentives, to reward people who are willing to save the life of a stranger through donation."

Dr. John P. Merrill (left) explains the workings of a then-new machine called an artificial kidney to Richard Herrick (middle) and his brother Ronald (right). The Herrick twin brothers were the subjects of the world's first successful kidney transplant, Ronald being the donor.

Reflections on practical market design, by Moritz Hardt

Moritz Hardt reflects on the political parts of market design, in connection with some of his (more or less) recent, discouraging experience in proposing its use to the California Public Utilities Commission: Towards practicing differential privacy.

Long story short, the CPUC decided not to give data to some users rather than to adopt a privacy standard that would have allowed those users to get useful data.

It's a long post, well worth reading, about what went wrong and what could have been done better. I'll just summarize some of his subject headings, as he thinks about how he'll go about this in the future, in the second part of his post, called On practicing differential privacy:

Focus on win-win applications
"Apply differential privacy as a tool to provide access to data where currently access is problematic due to privacy regulations. Don’t fight the data analyst. Don’t play the moral police. Imagine you are the analyst
....
Don’t empower the naysayers
"for differential privacy to be a major success in practice it would be sufficient if it were successful in some applications but certainly not in all—not even in most.
...
Change your narrative
"Don’t present differential privacy as a fear inducing crypto hammer designed to obfuscate data access. That’s not what it is. Differential privacy is a rigorous way of doing machine learning, not a way of preventing machine learning from being done.
...
Build reliable code repositories
"A weakness of the differential privacy community has been the scarcity of available high quality code.
...
Be less general and more domain-specific
"... reading the scientific literature on differential privacy from the point of view of a domain expert can be very frustrating. Most papers start with toy examples that make perfect sense on a theoretical level, but will appear alarmingly naïve to a domain expert.
...
Be more entrepreneurial
"The CPUC case highlighted that the application of differential privacy in practice can fail as a result of many non-technical issues. These important issues are often not on the radar of academic researchers.
...
So, is differential privacy practical?
"I like the answer Aaron Roth gave when I asked him: It's within striking distance."

Delay in Boston school choice this year

Here's the story in the Boston Herald: BPS apologizes 
for Boston schools lottery hang-up

"Incoming school Superintendent Tommy Chang says he wants all city parents to enroll their children in Boston Public Schools — but a glitch in the BPS lottery this spring will delay choices for many families until long after most private and charter schools have sent out acceptance letters and expect an answer.

Chang told Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” yesterday, “I think Boston Public Schools need to be an option for all parents.”

Chang, currently a superintendent in Los Angeles schools, will take the Hub post in July pending school committee approval.

In an automated call Sunday, the district notified registrants for grades K, 6 and 9 that they won’t receive their fall assignments until early April, after the School Committee votes on March 25 whether to close Elihu Greenwood Leadership Academy, Rogers Middle School, West Roxbury Academy, Community Academy and the Middle School Academy program.

“We completely understand and apologize for the delay,” said district spokeswoman Denise Snyder. “We try very hard to coordinate our timeline for (school) assignments, understanding that families have several educational options and it’s hard for them if the results are not all aligned. ... But if we did not delay the (school assignment) round, many families could have ended up in a school that was closing.”

Jon Clark, co-director of three K-8 Brooke Charter Schools in Boston, said their school lotteries, like those of many other charter schools, are tomorrow, acceptances will be mailed the following day, and parents will have until March 18 to respond.

“We aren’t unfortunately coordinated (with Boston Public Schools) in any meaningful way,” Clark said. “If we had a common system, we could make it more simple for parents.”

Many private schools mail acceptance letters this week and expect an answer and deposit by early April."
**************

Boston district schools use a centralized clearinghouse run by a deferred acceptance algorithm to match children to public schools, but they don't yet have a single application system that includes the charter schools, hence this kind of snafu is possible... A number of cities have coordinated the district and charter schools in a single application process, and the quote above from the charter school director Mr Clark makes me optimistic that this may be politically possible in Boston under the new Superintendent.

Breast milk plan to purchase and sell breast milk cancelled in Detroit

Steve Leider writes:

"An Oregon-based company Medolac (partnering with the Mothers Milk Cooperative) was trying to expand its program of buying breastmilk from nursing mothers with surplus milk into Detroit.  However, several local groups reacted very negatively, arguing that this would cause many mothers to sell all their milk (therefore harming their own children).  Ultimately it caused the company to cancel their plans."

Here's a positive story on the proposal, focusing on a seller of breast milk (who produced more than her baby could consume), followed by many negative stories (focusing on the possibility that women would sell breast milk even if they did not have a surplus):

 Breast milk company cancels campaign to recruit Detroit moms

"She breast-fed Jaden, but when Johanna was born, she wouldn’t latch on to breast-feed.

So Short was getting up at 4 am to pump and put that milk the in the freezer. Eventually, she said she wound up with an overflowing freezer stuffed with 2,000 ounces of breast milk.

"I had a storage problem! I just didn't have anywhere else to put more frozen milk," she laughs. 

For a while, Short was donating that milk to a local, non-profit milk bank.

But a friend told her about Medolac, which pays moms $1 an ounce for breast milk.

The company says it then sells that milk, at a profit, to hospitals, where it helps premature babies.

Over the next nine months or so, Short says she sent about 5,400 ounces to Medolac.

"It did help cover some bills. I bought myself a porch swing! That was my treat to myself because I really wanted a porch swing! And we definitely paid bills with it. There was a time when my husband was working fewer hours, so it really helped us cover bills."

And, Short says she originally planned to stop breastfeeding Johanna after a year. But she's continued, because of Medolac.

"It was a great incentive for me to continue and make a little bit of extra money and help some other babies who need it."

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

Detroit moms protest breast milk banking effort

"A group of Detroit women is accusing an Oregon breast milk bank of exploiting women by asking them for their breast milk — a particular concern given the city's deep poverty, low rates of breastfeeding and high infant mortality.

That effort, they say, will take the precious substance — packed with potentially life-saving health benefits — away from Detroit babies."

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

 Company offering to buy breast milk creates controversy (video of news broadcast, with interviews)

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

Oregon firm drops plan to buy Detroit breast milk

"An Oregon-based company has backed away from a plan to purchase breast milk from Detroit mothers, saying Thursday that opposition from community groups made the environment here “toxic.”

"Detroit organizations unleashed a firestorm of questions last week and argued the plan by Medolac Laboratories smacked of exploitation of the city’s impoverished mothers. Detroit has the highest infant mortality rate in the nation, as well as the greatest percentage of children living in extreme poverty.

...

"Kiddada Green, executive director of the Black Mothers Breast Feeding Association, called the Lake Oswego company’s decision not to collect breast milk in Detroit a “victory to Detroit mothers.”

Tommy Andersson.on the prospects for kidney exchange in Scandinavia

Tommy Andersson talks to Swedish radio about kidney exchange: Matematisk modell kan lindra organbrist (Google translate: Mathematical model can alleviate the organ shortage)

"More than 600 people are now on the waiting list to get a new kidney and organ shortage that the waiting time for a kidney transplant is more than two years. Question is about the work that Swedish transplant hospital and economists at Lund now start doing that one can say that it is really about mathematics that saves lives.

- If everything goes as it should, we expect to increase the number of kidney transplants in Sweden by 10-15 per cent a couple of years. In this sense, it literally saves lives, says Associate Professor Tommy Andersson."

Extra-marital sex in France: Gleeden (and the importance of hyphens)

The NY Times is shocked: Extramarital Dating Site Unsettles the Land of Discreet Affairs

"The ads for the dating website Gleeden, which bills itself as “the premier site for extramarital affairs designed by women,” were recently splashed on the backs of buses in several French cities. Seven cities decided to withdraw the ads, and opponents have mobilized against them on social media, providing the latest example of a prominent cultural divide in France about the lines between public morality, private sexual conduct and the country’s vaunted freedom of expression.
...
"A campaign by Ashley Madison, another extramarital website, featured President François Hollande and his three predecessors with smudged lipstick on their faces. “What do they have in common?” the ad asked. “They should have thought of ashleymadison.com.”
...
Gleeden, launched in 2009, has a million subscribers in France, and 2.4 million globally, who can anonymously trawl profiles for lovers.
**********

An aside: some years ago, there was a book called Eats, shoots and leaves, pointing out that punctuation is important: the presence or absence of a comma can change how you read that book title.  Similarly, hyphens are important, although the NY Times has made "extramarital" one word--there's a world of difference between extra marital sex and extra-marital sex...

Kidney disease in the United States--in 4 graphs

Kidney disease statistics for the United States (and here) from the National Kidney and Urologic Diseases Information Clearinghouse (NKUDIC), run by the National Institute of Diabetes and Digestive and Kidney Diseases (NIDDK), National Institutes of Health (NIH)

Dynamic games in this summer's Jerusalem School of Economic Theory, June 24-July 3 2015

...with some experimenters on the faculty too...

26th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory

Dynamic Games

Event date: Jun 24 - Jul 3, 2015 

Organizers:

Eric Maskin, Director (Harvard University)
Elchanan Ben-Porath, Codirector (The Hebrew University)
Drew Fudenberg (Harvard University)



In many economic, social, and political settings, participants interact strategically not just once but over time.


When raising its import tariffs today, for example, a country will try to anticipate the reactions of its trading partners tomorrow. And an oligopolistic firm can learn from its rivals’ past pricing behavior so as to gauge what prices they are likely to set now.


The Summer School will emphasize theoretical aspects of dynamic games, but will also include work on experiments.


List of speakers:
Robert Aumann (The Hebrew University)
Martin Cripps (University College London)
Guillaume Fréchette (New York University)
Drew Fudenberg (Harvard University)
Sergiu Hart (The Hebrew University)
Johannes Hörner (Yale University)
Navin Kartik (Columbia University)
George Mailath (University of Pennsylvania)
Eric Maskin (Harvard University)
Abraham Neyman (The Hebrew University)
Larry Samuelson (Yale University)
Alistair Wilson (University of Pittsburgh)

Academic jobs in the humanities

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences reports on declines in jobs posted in the humanities:Danger Signs for the Academic Job Market in Humanities?

Sources: Information drawn from published data from the national scholarly society for each field. (See endnote below for complete list of sources.) Counts represent the total de-duplicated number of positions advertised in the previous year. Philosophy counts are for the previous calendar year, while counts for all other disciplines are for previous academic year.

Organ shortage in Switzerland

Switzerland has fewer organ donors than you would expect:
La Suisse manque cruellement de donneurs d'organes

Only 117 donors were registered last year.


HT Ran Shorrer

Sniping on eBay, revisited

Is Sniping A Problem For Online Auction Markets?

Matthew Backus, Tom Blake, Dimitriy V. Masterov, Steven Tadelis

NBER Working Paper No. 20942
Issued in February 2015
NBER Program(s):   IO 

A common complaint about online auctions for consumer goods is the presence of "snipers," who place bids in the final seconds of sequential ascending auctions with predetermined ending times. The literature conjectures that snipers are best-responding to the existence of "incremental" bidders that bid up to their valuation only as they are outbid. Snipers aim to catch these incremental bidders at a price below their reserve, with no time to respond. As a consequence, these incremental bidders may experience regret when they are outbid at the last moment at a price below their reservation value. We measure the effect of this experience on a new buyer's propensity to participate in future auctions. We show the effect to be causal using a carefully selected subset of auctions from eBay.com and instrumental variables estimation strategy. Bidders respond to sniping quite strongly and are between 4 and 18 percent less likely to return to the platform.

Some transplanted kidneys last a long time: Robert Phillips, transplanted in 1963, recently passed away

Colonial Beach man was longest-lived in world with donated kidney

"Phillips’ donor kidney lasted longer than any other in the world, except for those involving identical twins.

Phillips died in December at the age of 88.
...
"“It was a very new procedure at that time, and not always met with long-term success,” said Dr. Peter Ivanovich, a nephrologist with Northwestern University in Chicago. “There were many problems to overcome, there were limited anti-rejection medicines available at the time.”

Phillips had six siblings who were willing to donate a kidney, but doctors rejected each one.

Still, Phillips flew to Denver to meet Dr. Thomas Startzl, a pioneer in the field of transplants.

A prisoner in a nearby jail offered to donate his kidney to Phillips. It would have been the first time a living inmate donated an organ.

But at the last minute, doctors discovered the prisoner’s blood type wasn’t a match. Phillips was ready for surgery but there wasn’t a kidney for him.

Another sister, Ruth, traveled to Denver with him and begged Startzl to use one of her kidneys. Their blood types didn’t match either, and the odds of a successful outcome were low. When blood types match between donor and patient, the recipient’s body is less likely to reject the new organ.

“The chances were nil as we had completely different blood types and not before or since (to my knowledge) has this been successful,” Phillips wrote in a letter to a transplant society in 1972.

But he didn’t have long to live without a transplant. So Startzl decided to give it a try.

In the letter, Phillips wrote, “I feel great and would 100 times over take the transplant as opposed to the kidney machine. One is just existing, the other living.”

After the successful surgery, Phillips changed careers, then eventually retired to Colonial Beach and took care of his wife for six years before she died in 2006.

He never had trouble with his kidneys again.

“When he passed away, the amazing thing was, his heart was bad, things were bad, he was not in any pain and his kidney was still in good condition,” said Phillips’ niece, Beverly Ange, who took care of him in his final years."

Dynamic Allocation and Pricing: A Mechanism Design Approach, by Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu

Here's a book I haven't had a chance to see yet, but looks worthwhile:

Dynamic Allocation and Pricing
A Mechanism Design Approach
By Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu

"Overview
Dynamic allocation and pricing problems occur in numerous frameworks, including the pricing of seasonal goods in retail, the allocation of a fixed inventory in a given period of time, and the assignment of personnel to incoming tasks. Although most of these problems deal with issues treated in the mechanism design literature, the modern revenue management (RM) literature focuses instead on analyzing properties of restricted classes of allocation and pricing schemes. In this book, Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu propose an approach to optimal allocations and prices based on the theory of mechanism design, adapted to dynamic settings.

Drawing on their own recent work on the topic, the authors describe a modern theory of RM that blends the elegant dynamic models from the operations research (OR), management science, and computer science literatures with techniques from the classical mechanism design literature. Illustrating this blending of approaches, they start with well-known complete information, nonstrategic dynamic models that yield elegant explicit solutions. They then add strategic agents that are privately informed and then examine the consequences of these changes on the optimization problem of the designer. Their sequential modeling of both nonstrategic and strategic logic allows a clear picture of the delicate interplay between dynamic trade-offs and strategic incentives. Topics include the sequential assignment of heterogeneous objects, dynamic revenue optimization with heterogeneous objects, revenue maximization in the stochastic and dynamic knapsack model, the interaction between learning about demand and dynamic efficiency, and dynamic models with long-lived, strategic agents."

***************
And apparently it's on sale 'til March 31: MIT Press writes,
"The MIT Press is delighted to announce the recent release of Dynamic Allocation and Pricing: A Mechanism Design Approach by Alex Gershkov and Benny Moldovanu. In celebration of its publication, we invite friends and colleagues of the authors to receive a 30% discount off the book’s cover price when ordering this title directly through our website, mitpress.mit.edu, with discount code MDAP30."

First kidney exchange in Poland,February 2015

Here's the story, published February 18 2015: Poland's first living donor paired kidney exchange

"Poland's first kidney paired donation transplant was been performed last Tuesday by specialists at the Department of General and Transplant Surgery, University Hospital of the Infant Jesus in Warsaw.
Kidney extraction and transplantation surgeries were performed by Prof. Andrzej Chmura, Prof. Artur Kwiatkowski and Dr. Rafał Kieszek. Transplantation coordinator of the entire project was Aleksandra Tomaszek.
...
"The Department of General and Transplant Surgery, University Hospital of the Infant Jesus in Warsaw performs 40 percent of all transplants from living donors in Poland. 55 such procedures were performed in Poland in 2014."
**************

And here (in Polish) is an announcement of a lecture on matching algorithms used in kidney exchange:
Teoria gier w służbie transplantologii. Wykład interdyscyplinarny prof. Marka Szopy.
Google Translate renders it like this:
Game theory in the service of transplantation. Interdisciplinary lecture prof. Brand Sheds
(Google translate is thorough: it also tries to translate Polish names...:)

"Today will be a lecture by Professor. Brand Sheds on the use of algorithms in transplantation. The lecture is held in connection with the February first Polish cross-kidney transplant operation. During the lecture, professor of physics will bring the way in which they were matched donor organs and global trends that are based on algorithms."

Video of two lectures: Market design and the flow of information (50 minute) and kidney exchange (20 minutes)

This is a video of the lunchtime talk I gave in early February at the Information Theory and Applications workshop. The talk introduces market design, and focuses for examples on labor market clearinghouses (in labor markets with couples), such as the National Resident Matching Program, and school choice.


And here is the talk I gave at the market design session immediately after:

Behavioral macro economics

Here's the call for papers for an NBER conference:

"Call for Papers
NBER EFBEM Working Group
Andrew Caplin and Michael Woodford

We are organizing a meeting of the EFG research group on Behavioral Macro as part of the NBER's Summer Institute in Cambridge, MA, on Wednesday July 8. Note that the NBER Economic Fluctuations meeting itself is scheduled for Saturday, July 11, with other groups that may be of interest also meeting on other days of this same week. The meeting will run for the full day on July 8.

We are especially interested in papers that develop, test, and apply psychologically rich models of individual behavior, with implications for aggregate and/or financial market dynamics. One active focus of the group concerns perceptual constraints. The gap between potentially available information and subjectively perceived information has been the focus on much research in economics, psychology, and neuroscience. The resulting limits on comprehension have implications for inertial behavior and for both over-reaction and under-reaction to different types of shocks.

Another important focus is expectation formation, considering not simply how accurate or biased are forecasts, but also how people process past experience to predict the likely consequences of future actions. Research on this topic explores the implications of alternative models of expectation formation, both as explanations of positive phenomena and for purposes of policy design.

The group promotes work that tests models of perceptual constraints and expectation formation using survey data, laboratory and field experiments, and both individual-level and aggregate time series. Given its focus on psychologically and/or neuro-physiologically realistic theories, the group is actively interested in the generation of new forms of data that can aid in model estimation and policy evaluation.

We are writing to you because you may have a paper or abstract appropriate for the program.  (We prefer papers to abstracts.) If you have a paper that you would like to present, please upload a copy here by March 30, 2015: http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=SI15EFBEM. You are also welcome to forward this call for papers to colleagues who may have a paper suitable for the program.

We regret that, because of resource constraints, it will likely be impossible to respond to everyone who submits a paper.  You should expect to be contacted only if your paper has been included on the program.  In addition, this call for papers is widely distributed and the meeting room is small, so unfortunately we cannot invite everyone who receives this call to the meeting. Invitations and logistical information will be distributed in late April.  If you have any questions or need additional information please contact Rob Shannon in the NBER's Conference Department at 617/868-3900 or rshannon@nber.org."

The marketplace for ideas: Academic Freedom and Anti-Semitism (and calls to boycott Israel)

In January, Larry Summers gave a speech at the Center for Law and Liberty at Columbia University Law School, titled Academic Freedom and Anti-Semitism. It is interesting not just for how he reflects on his statements on the subject when he was President of Harvard (he called proposed boycotts of Israel "anti-Semitic in effect if not intent"), but is also helpful for thinking about the once-again resurgent movement to boycott, divest from and sanction Israel and companies doing business there.

President Hennessy of Stanford recently spoke to the faculty Senate following a student Senate (re)vote that urged Stanford to divest from companies "facilitating State repression against Palestinians," with comments that clarified Stanford's policy (on boycotts and divestment generally, not on anti-Semitism in particular).

Following the student vote, I signed an online petition called Reject Stanford Divestment from Israel.  I recently signed another, and supported a third which isn't yet on the web. The letters are signed by people with a variety of positions on  Israeli policies and politics, but all disturbed by the singular obsession with Israel expressed by movements to boycott and divest from it.

I'm a reluctant signer of letters in general, and I imagine that everyone who signs a joint letter might have written with different wording or emphasis if they were writing on their own. But that didn't stop me from adding my name to these, under the circumstances.

Here's a Stanford Daily story on that student senate vote: Senate reverses divestment vote, passes resolution

As the story notes, we're not talking about a big vote: "The re-vote saw 10 Senators vote in favor of the bill, while four voted against and one Senator abstained."

But the world remains a dangerous place: here's a statement from a consortium of California Jewish community organizations, focusing in part on the recent murders in France and Denmark: Against the Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism

That statement concludes with this:
"History has shown that whenever one group is attacked, others are inevitably targeted as well. Let us stand together against all forms of hate and racism."
*************

Update: From the NY Times, March 5 2015--In U.C.L.A. Debate Over Jewish Student, Echoes on Campus of Old Biases, reports on a UCLA undergrad, interviewing for student government position, being initally voted down after being asked "“Given that you are a Jewish student and very active in the Jewish community,” ...“how do you see yourself being able to maintain an unbiased view?”

Here's a March 4 story on the anti-divestment letter from the Stanford Daily: http://www.stanforddaily.com/2015/03/04/faculty-members-send-letter-to-apirl-opposing-divestment/ 

Medical Matches: A Market Design Perspective. March 4 at Stanford Med

I'll speak on March 4 at the Stanford medical school. I gather that everyone is welcome, but you have to register in advance.

MEDICAL MATCHES: A Market Design Perspective
What Match Day, kidney donors, and economic theory have in common.

March 4, 2015
6:30 PM - 8:30 PM
WEDNESDAY
Register Now


Join the Stanford University Medical Center Alumni Association for an evening with Nobel Prize Winner Alvin Roth, MS ’73, PhD ’74, as he explains how he uses economic theory and marketplace algorithms to systemize courtship in real world settings. From redesigning the National Residency Matching Program to helping surgeons maximize transplant exchange programs, he will share how the economics of transactions help us find new ways of connecting.



Space is limited. Pre-registration is required. Register now!


Alvin Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University. Roth has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics, and is known for his emphasis on applying economic theory to solutions for "real-world" problems. In 2012, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.