Everything for Sale? The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts (Video of the panel discussion)

Here's the video of the panel discussion I participated in at Johns Hopkins on May 7, Everything for Sale? The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts: the panelists were James Childress, Michele Goodwin, Alvin Roth and Debra Satz

The video, including introductions before and questions after, is an hour and 20 minutes. The introduction by Mario Macis starts around minute 6:40, and includes audience voting on questions of whether they would be in favor of regulated markets for kidneys, for hearts, for blood, for human eggs and sperm, and for breast milk. The panel discussion, moderated by Jeff Kahn, starts at minute 14, with each of the panelists, in alphabetical order, giving an 8 minute opening statement. (Mine begins at 33:20, and ends at 41:41, pretty close to the 8 minute guideline:) .)

School Choice: video of an interview I did in Israel

Here's an interview I did while in Israel in April, mostly about school choice (but also about some of my personal history, game theory, etc.) It starts at minute 4:00 of this news broadcast, and goes until minute 12:45...

Public schools and private philanthropy

Public school budgets are always stretched to their limits, and one of the ways those limits are sometimes surmounted is with an infusion of private funds, from big foundations with an interest in education, and also, apparently, from wealthy individuals. The NY Times has a story on how this part of school financing for New York City schools flourished more under the former mayor than it appears to be under the current one.
Public Schools Fund, Under de Blasio, Is Struggling to Lure Wealthy Donors

"The Fund for Public Schools, the nonprofit organization that former Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg and his schools chancellors built into a fund-raising juggernaut, has struggled to attract donations under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

The fund, which raised an average of $29 million a year over the last decade, has raised just $18 million this fiscal year, which ends June 30, fund officials said. About half of that comes from two large multiyear grants that began under the Bloomberg administration."

9th workshop Matching in Practice June 8 - June 9 in Barcelona

9th workshop Matching in Practice, June 8 - June 9

The program for the 9th workshop of Matching in Practice is up:

Scientific Program

Day 1: June 8, 2015 

11:00 – 11:30     Welcome Coffee 

11:30 – 12:00     Registration

12:00 – 13:30    Keynote presentation – Christopher Avery (Harvard Kennedy School of Government)

The Common Application and the DA Algorithm in School Assignment (with Cara Nickolaus and Parag Pathak)

13:30 – 14:30     Lunch

14:30 – 16:30     Strategic Choice and Affirmative Action

Dynamic Reserves in Matching Markets with Contracts: Theory and Applications, by Orhan Aygün and Bertan Turhan

College Admission with Multidimensional Privileges: The Brazilian Affirmative Action Case, by Orhan Aygün and Inacio Bo

Self-selection in School Choice, by Li Chen and Juan Sebastián Pereyra

16:30 – 17:00     Coffee break

17:00 – 18:30     Empirical Estimation of Preferences in School Choice

Demand Analysis using Strategic Reports: An application to a school choice  mechanism, by Nikhil Agarwal and Paolo Somaini

Structural Estimation of a Model of School Choices: the Boston Mechanism vs. Its Alternatives, by Caterina Calsamiglia, Chou Fu and Maia Güell

20:00                  Dinner

Day 2: June 9, 2015 

9:30 – 11:00       Educational Choice, Incentives and Welfare

College Diversity and Investment Incentives, by Thomas Gall, Patrick Legros and Andrew F. Newman

 Socio-economic status and enrollment in higher education: Do costs matter? by Koen Declercq and Frank Verboven

 11:00 – 11:30     Coffee break 

11:30 – 12:15       Re-matching

The Design of Teacher Assignment: Theory and Evidence, by Julien Combe, Olivier Tercieux and Camille Terrier

12:15 – 13:00      Panel discussion on matching practices (TBD)

13:30                     Lunch

Scientific Committee: Dorothea Kübler, Antonio Miralles and Joana Pais

Registrations If you plan to attend the meeting (and are not a speaker), please contact Antonio Miralles at amirallesasensio@gmail.com

Venue: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Edifici Balmes, Carrer Balmes 132, Barcelona

High Frequency Trading in Santa Cruz today

Featuring Stanford students Josh Mollner and Markus Baldauf, and open to the public:

Market Design: High Frequency Trading

Program, May 15, 2010

Welcome & Keynote, 10:00 - 10:45 am

• Sayee Srinivasan, Chief Economist, Commodity Futures Trading Commission

Session 1, 10:45 am - 12:15 pm

Market Integration and High Frequency Trading

• Jonathan Brogaard, UW Foster School of Business, Department of Finance

High-Frequency Trade and Market Performance

• Joshua Mollner,  Stanford University, Department of Economics

Lunch, 12:15 - 1:30 pm

Session 2, 1:30 - 3:00 pm

Knew the News: Infrastructure Dynamics of Trading Surrounding Prescheduled Economic Announcements

• Greg Laughlin, UC Santa Cruz, Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics

"Need for Speed? Exchange Latency and Market Quality"

• Albert Menkveld, VU University Amsterdam, Department of Finance

Break, 3:00 - 3:30 pm

Session 3, 3:30 - 5:45 pm

Performance Evaluation of Algorithmic Trading Strategies

• Iaryna Grynkiv, Barclays, Equities Algorithmic Trading

Competition Among Exchanges

• Markus Baldauf,  Stanford University, Department of Economics

The Random Walk of High Frequency Trading

• Eric Aldrich, UC Santa Cruz, Department of Economics

Dinner, 6:30 - 8:30 pm

The workshop will take place in Engineering 2, Room 499.

The Guardian on Iranian kidney sales

The Guardian reports on a bad outcome in Iran's market for kidneys--the recipient dies, and the donor isn't doing well: Kidneys for sale: Iran’s trade in organs

"Iran is the only country in the world where it is legal to sell a kidney. Donors get money from the buyer and from the state, a system which eradicated waiting lists but, detractors say, exploits the poor and vulnerable. Here, we follow one terrible story"

Recent travels...Nigeria

Nigeria's Daily Independent covers the talk I gave there on Monday:
Exchange Programme’ll Improve Kidney Transplant In Africa – Expert

By Oyeniran Apata, Lagos

A Nobel Prize winner for Economic Science, Professor Alvin Roth, has declared that the poor state of Nigerian patients with chronic renal disease can be improved through effective kidney exchange programme.

Roth identified high cost of management, poor infrastructure, low awareness and non-direct donors as some of the factors contributing to the prevalence of the pitiable conditions in the country and the continent of Africa as a whole.

Delivering a paper as the keynote speaker at the second Covenant University International Conference on African Development Issues tagged, “Biotechnology, ICT, Materials and Renewable Energy: Potential Catalyst for African Development,” Roth lamented that Nigeria with a poor renal registry was able to successfully carry out only 143 Kidney Transplants (KTs) in 10 years against 11,000 carried out successfully in the United States of America.

Professor Ruth in his paper entitled, “Kidney Disease in Nigeria and the U.S. and Possibilities of Co-operation and Mutual Aid,” lamented that despite the huge number of successes recorded in the U.S., America is still falling behind in the treatment of kidney failure.

“I want to talk to you today about how we have taken some initial steps to increase kidney transplant in the U.S. through kidney exchange, and how such a programme might be extended to Africa and be a catalyst to build medical infrastructure in Africa,” he said.

He added that the kidney transfer waiting list in the USA was getting longer year in year out as more people are dying while waiting to be treated.

"In his words he said, “In 2003, 83,000 Americans were in immediate need of a kidney transplant; in 2014, 100,000 Americans were in immediate need of a kidney transplant. More patients on the wait list are dying every year. In 2003, 4,000 Americans died waiting for a kidney transplant, in 2013, 4,500 Americans died waiting for a kidney.”



He lamented that as similar epidemiological data is hard to come by in Africa, the prevalence of chronic renal failure and End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) have remained high worldwide and the epidemiology has changed significantly in the last decade in industrialised countries, contending that patients’ outcome is still appalling in developing countries.

He added: “There is paucity of information on the magnitude of the burden of renal disease in our environment. Obtaining accurate data is hampered by the poor socio-economic status of most patients with lack of access to specialised care in tertiary institutions, where most of the data are generated.”

Chancellor of the university and General Overseer of the Living Faith Bible Church Worldwide, Dr. David Oyedepo, stated that the conference was aimed at enabling the country to benefit from the wealth of experience of the experts and particularly Roth’s application of economic theory in finding solutions for “real world” problems."

***********
Update: here's some more coverage: Faith-Based Organizations, Private Sector, Crucial to Successes in Kidney Transplantation – Professor Alvin Roth

The State of College Admissions--NACAC report

The Chronicle of Higher Ed summarizes the NACAC report on college admissions: 3 Key Findings About College Admissions
"Here are three sets of findings from NACAC’s annual "State of College Admission" report:

Yield Rates Are Sliding

Nationally, application surges continue for most colleges, with more than 70 percent reporting year-to-year increases in 10 of the last 15 years. For the fall 2013 admission cycle, 32 percent of freshmen submitted seven or more applications.

As applicant pools expand, uncertainty usually grows. Many colleges have seen their yield rate — the percentage of accepted students who enroll — decline sharply. In the fall 2013 admission cycle, the average institutional yield rate was 35.9 percent, down from an average of 39.5 percent in 2010, and 48.7 percent in 2002.

It’s long been said that enrollment goals are subject to the whims of teenagers. Yet Mr. Fuller, the association’s president, says many decisions about where to enroll now hinge on last-minute conversations students have with their parents about affordability. Sometimes that means students who had planned to attend four-year colleges end up enrolling at community colleges. "Those kinds of conversations," he says, "are definitely playing into yield numbers."

Transfer Students Are Crucial

Many colleges are located in regions where the number of high-school graduates has plateaued. That’s one reason some enrollment officials are deciding to make transfer students a bigger piece of their recruitment puzzle.

Forty-four percent of four-year institutions reported an increase in transfer applicants over the previous five years, and 37.6 percent reported an increase in transfer enrollments. At public institutions, two-thirds of transfer students were previously enrolled at community colleges.

"A lot of us are really seeing the value of these students and what they add to the campus," Mr. Fuller says. "They’ve got a proven history."

As for the future, 58 percent of four-year colleges anticipate that recruiting transfer students will become more important over the next three years. (Public institutions were more likely than private ones to rate the importance of such students highly.) And 80 percent of respondents said their college had admissions counselors who work exclusively with prospective transfer students.

Recruitment Has No Borders

College-bound students everywhere are on the move. Over the last 40 years, the report notes, the number of students enrolled in colleges outside their home countries increased to 4.5 million from 800,000. That number is projected to exceed seven million by 2025.

Meanwhile, more and more foreign-born students are earning diplomas at American high schools. "Recruiting international students," the report says, "is no longer reserved only for those professionals who travel internationally."

Rethinking school competition in Sweden

There are calls for reforming Sweden's system of competition and school choice among lightly-regulated private schools. The Guardian has the story: Sweden urged to rethink parents' choice over schools after education decline--OECD recommends comprehensive reform including revised school choice arrangements and more effective regulation

"Sweden has been urged to halt the steep decline in the international ranking of its schools by taking action to limit parents’ and pupils’ right to choose.

A report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development(OECD) recommends “a comprehensive education reform” to restore the Swedish system to its previous standards.

"Andreas Schleicher, director of the OECD’s education directorate, was scathing about the country’s “disappointing” performance, saying he had once viewed Sweden as “the model for education”.

“It was in the early 2000s that the Swedish school system somehow seems to have lost its soul,” he said at a press conference in Stockholm. “Schools began to compete no longer on delivering superior quality but on offering shiny school buildings in shopping centres, and I think that’s the issue we are really seeing.”

"The call for “revised school choice arrangements” will have resonance in the UK, where the coalition government’s programme to launch free schools funded by public money was in part inspired by Sweden.

"Since the 1990s, Sweden has allowed privately run schools to compete with public schools for government funds. Critics on the left blame the voucher system for declining results, saying it has opened the door for schools more interested in making a profit than providing solid education. Conservatives say students have been given too much influence in the classroom, undermining the authority of teachers.

"The OECD report says: “Student performance on the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) has declined dramatically, from near the OECD average in 2000 to significantly below average in 2012. No other country participating in Pisa saw a steeper decline than Sweden over that period.”

...

"The report blamed the system of school choice for the failure of almost half of children from immigrant backgrounds (48%) to make the grade in mathematics.

"Rather than recommending rolling back Sweden’s system of free choice and competition in schools, however, it suggests that the country “revise school choice arrangements to ensure quality with equity”.

"That would involve limiting the independence of free schools from local education authorities by bringing in new national guidelines to allow municipalities to “integrate independent schools in their planning, improvement and support strategies”.

"The report also recommends helping disadvantaged families make better school choices, so that their children, as well as those from middle-class families, apply to the country’s more popular, better performing schools.

"Finally, it suggests that municipalities restrict the ability of some parents to choose their children’s schools by introducing “controlled choice schemes that supplement parental choice to ensure a more diverse distribution of students in schools”.

2nd Covenant University – International Conference on African Development Issues – 2015

I'll speak tomorrow in Nigeria, about kidney exchange and the possibilities it might offer for mutual aid between Africa and the U.S. in battling kidney disease, at the 2nd Covenant University – International Conference on African Development Issues – 2015

"Covenant University, in her continued quest for significant local and global impact, established the International Conference of African Development Issues (ICADI) series. ICADI is aimed at creating a unique platform for making innovative contributions towards value enhancement and capacity development of the black man and indeed, the African continent from the Covenant University context.

"As a sequel to the success of the first International Conference on African Development Issues (ICADI) that was held in 2014, we are again motivated to organize the second edition of ICADI between 11 – 13 May 2015 at the African Leadership Development Centre, Covenant University, Ota. The University has secured the commitment of a Nobel Laureate, Prof. Alvin Roth as the Keynote Speaker. Al Roth is a Professor of Operations Research from Stanford University, USA, who has done a lot of groundbreaking research in the areas of game theory and market design with specific applications to healthcare. The conference has also enlisted other notable experts as guest speakers. The conference will feature keynote addresses, panel/roundtable discussions, research and industry track papers as well as presentations, workshops and exhibitions.

   Dates: May 11 – 13, 2015

     Theme: Biotechnology, ICT, Materials and Renewable Energy: Potential Catalyst for African Development

    Sub themes:
Biotechnology and sustainable development in Africa
ICT and developing the knowledge economy in Africa
Climate change and renewable energy solutions for African Development
Material science and engineering for African development
Policy frameworks for technology-oriented development paradigms in Africa
 
 Target Audience: Professionals and executives of agro-allied, pharmaceutical, health, chemical industries, ICT providers, engineering firms, research institutes, governmental agencies, policy makers, investors, researchers, academic institutions etc."

Harvard Magazine celebrates Sendhil Mullainathan

The Science of Scarcity

 “To put it bluntly,” says Mullainathan, “if I made you poor tomorrow, you’d probably start behaving in many of the same ways we associate with poor people.” And just like many poor people, he adds, you’d likely get stuck in the scarcity trap.

Kidneys in British Columbia: a recommendation for presumed consent, and against compensation for donors

Kidney Transplant Summit recommends presumed consent legislation to increase organ donation in BC.

"BURNABY, BC, May 6, 2015 /CNW/ - The Jury at the first-ever BC Kidney Transplant Consensus Summit hosted by The Kidney Foundation has recommended that British Columbia adopt presumed consent legislation, with the appropriate safeguards in place, to increase the number of kidney transplants in this province.

The Jury, chaired by the Hon. Wally Oppal QC, also considered but rejected the idea of offering financial incentives to organ donors. Living organ donors are currently reimbursed for expenses incurred in donating an organ, but not for the kidney itself. "As a society, we do not condone the sale of organs," said Oppal."


HT: Sangram Kadam

Everything for Sale? The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts, at Johns Hopkins, May 7

I'm in Baltimore for the next few days...

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School present
The 2015 Robert H. Levi Leadership Symposium
and Carey Symposium in Markets and Ethics

	Everything for Sale?The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts
	Thursday, May 7, 2015 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
	Reception to follow
	Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Alumni Auditorium 525 N. Wolfe Street Baltimore, MD 21205
	Welcome: Ruth Faden Andreas C. Dracopoulos, Director and Philip Franklin Wagley, Professor Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics Bernard T. Ferrari Professor and Dean Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Introduction: Mario Macis Assistant Professor of Economics and Management Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Panelists include: Professor James Childress Professor Michele Goodwin Professor Alvin Roth Professor Debra Satz Moderator: Jeffrey Kahn Robert Henry Levi and Ryda Hecht Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics

Data, big and small

Alex Peysakhovich and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz write in the NYT about  How Not to Drown in Numbers, about how you can't always interpret data in a dataset just by looking at the dataset in isolation...

"So what can big data do to help us make big decisions? One of us, Alex, is a data scientist at Facebook. The other, Seth, is a former data scientist at Google. There is a special sauce necessary to making big data work: surveys and the judgment of humans — two seemingly old-fashioned approaches that we will call small data."

Google buys Timeful from Yoav Shoham and Dan Ariely

Here's Timeful.  Here's Dan. Here's Yoav: This Stanford professor just sold his second startup to Google in less than 5 years.

Here's the Google announcement: Time is on your side—welcoming Timeful to Google
"Today we’re excited to announce that Timeful, Inc. is joining the Google family to help make getting things done in your life even easier. 

The Timeful team has built an impressive system that helps you organize your life by understanding your schedule, habits and needs. You can tell Timeful you want to exercise three times a week or that you need to call the bank by next Tuesday, and their system will make sure you get it done based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities. We’re excited about all the ways Timeful’s technology can be applied across products like Inbox, Calendar and beyond, so we can do more of the work for you and let you focus on being creative, having fun and spending time with the people you care about."

Ray Fisman to Boston University

Boston University celebrates their newest senior hire (but the sub-headline in the BU Today story makes you wonder what they think their other economists do:
Economist Raymond Fisman to Join BU Faculty--Known for connecting theory to the real world

"BU’s newest economics professor has garnered a lot of attention for parking tickets. Not tickets Raymond Fisman received himself, but those in his much-cited 2006 study showing that UN diplomats from countries with a reputation for corruption, as well as anti-American sentiment, get more parking tickets than diplomats from countries that are considered less corrupt, like Sweden."

Raymond Fisman will bring an eclectic approach as the first Slater Family Professor in Behavioral Economics. Photo by Leslye Smith

Kidney exchange in the NY Times Magazine

Kidney exchange and public relations sometimes go hand in hand, which isn't a bad thing at all, since the more people who know about kidney exchange, the more transplants will be possible. A modest 6-transplant non-directed donor chain in California has attracted a nice story in this week's NY Times Magazine: The Great American Kidney Swap by By Malia Wollan.

Here's some of what the NY Times article has to say:

"A law-abiding American in need of a kidney has two options. The first is to wait on the national list for an organ donor to die in (or near) a hospital. The second is to find a person willing to donate a kidney to you. More than half the time, such donor-and-recipient pairs are incompatible, because of differences in blood type or the presence, in the donor’s blood, of proteins that might trigger the recipient’s immune system to reject the new kidney. The genius of the computer algorithms driving the kidney chains is that they find the best medical matches — thus increasing the odds of a successful transplant — by decoupling donors from their intended recipients. In the United States, half a dozen of these software programs allow for a kind of barter market for kidneys. This summer, doctors will most likely complete the last two operations in a record-breaking 70-person chain that involved flying donated kidneys on commercial airlines to several hospitals across the country.
...
"Economists call an arrangement like this a matching market. “It is not fundamental to economic theory to assume people are selfish,” Alvin E. Roth, an economist who teaches at Stanford University, told me. Roth won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2012 for his work using game theory to design matching markets, which pair unmatched things in mutually beneficial ways — students with public schools and doctors with hospitals. In such markets, money does not decide who gets what. Instead, these transactions are more akin to elaborate courtships.

"The classic example of a matching market is the college-admissions process. Every year, tens of thousands of students apply to Harvard University. But just because a student wants a spot in the freshman class and can afford tuition does not mean he gets in. Harvard must also want him to attend. In the case of kidney exchange, this matchmaking happens at a microcellular level. White blood cells contain genetic markers, proteins that help our immune systems distinguish between our bodies and foreign invaders. The more closely a transplant recipient’s genetic markers match a donor’s, the more likely the body is to adopt that foreign kidney as its own rather than attacking it."
*********

The average chain length for nondirected donor chains in the U.S. has lately been around 5, The latest longest chain accomplished 34 transplants (so it involved 68 people, donors and recipients).It's possible that that the number of transplants in the chain in this story was limited by the particular, proprietary commercial software that was used. One of the interesting things about kidney exchange is that most of the software is provided for free by the researchers who develop it, and is described in the open scientific literature. The  software used by the UNOS kidney paired donation pilot program is designed by Tuomas Sandholm and his colleagues at CMU, and Itai Ashlagi (at MIT until next year, when he comes to Stanford) and his colleagues have software that is very widely used by kidney exchange networks and large transplant centers, and the latest version of this software was described in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

You can download kidney exchange software from Itai's web page: here I've copied his instructions:

Kidney exchange source code. Instructions for how to compile can be found here. An older version in c# can be found here (for both cycles and chains), which also generates patient-donor pairs as well as compatibility matrices. The software finds an allocation that maximizes the number of transplants using cycles and chains each of a different bounded length. CPLEX is needed to use.

Bay Area Behavioral & Experimental Economics Workshop today in Santa Cruz

Here's the program: 2015 Bay Area Behavioral and Experimental Economics Workshop (BABEEW5) Program  May 2nd 2015, UCSC LEEPS Lab, Baskin Plaza.

Interviews in the TSEconomist,

In their March 2015 issue, The TSEconomist, a magazine published by students at the Toulouse School of Economics, interviews Ken Arrow, me, and Josh Lerner, after asking each of us to pose for a picture with a copy of the magazine:

• Nobel Corner: Interview with Kenneth Arrow
• Interview with Alvin Roth
• Interview with Josh Lerner

EduAction conference in Israel

Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, and me, yesterday.

I just returned from the EduAction conference in Israel, where I got to talk to the Jerusalem mayor, Nir Barkat about school choice, and to hear about the school choice program he implemented when he became mayor.