Medical marijuana in Israel

YNet has the story:
Medical marijuana takes off in Israel
"Even though Israel enforces a strict ban on recreational use of marijuana, Israeli doctors have prescribed it to more than 25,000 Israelis to alleviate their symptoms"

"Forbidden to export its cannabis plants, Israel is concentrating instead on marketing its agronomic, medical and technological expertise in the hope of becoming a world hub in the field. The prestigious Hebrew University of Jerusalem has just opened a cannabis research centre joining 19 other teams from local academic institutions.

"About 200 industry players gathered in Tel Aviv this month for Canna Tech, an international conference on the industry. Suited salespeople, some a little red-eyed despite a ban on consumption laid down by the organisers, exhibited products including electronic cannabis cigarettes, cannabis-based creams and ointments and a remedy for dry mouth.

"Some startups are focused on the plant's by-products, others on user accessories, but a few have bigger ideas. "Look at what has happened in the past two years, the speed at which legalisation of cannabis is advancing," said Saul Kaye, head of the first Israeli incubator for cannabis industry startups.

"We're not going to miss this opportunity, and seeing what the first investors are putting on the table, we feel that it is going to be very big." In January, US tobacco giant Philip Morris ploughed $20 million into Israeli company Syke, which produces precision inhalers for medical cannabis."

FCC incentive auction

USA Today covers the earliest stage of the FCC's incentive auction: FCC's complex incentive auction could net more than $30 billion

"The most sophisticated and complex spectrum auction ever conducted by the Federal Communications Commission is officially underway.

"When the entire process comes to an end more than three years from now, big wireless carriers that provide most of our smartphone access should have more bandwidth to delivery services to mobile-hungry consumers.

"TV broadcasters by Tuesday night must have made official their intentions to accept the FCC's opening price for the rights to the spectrum they currently use for digital TV broadcasts. Once the agency knows how much spectrum can be made available in this "reverse auction," then, in a few months, the FCC will open up the bidding in the "forward auction" in which companies such as AT&T and Verizon can bid on the reallocated spectrum in each of 400-plus localities."

Cherry blossom season in Tokyo

The cherry blossoms are out in force in Tokyo

Who Gets What and Why in Japanese―マッチメイキングとマーケットデザインの新しい経済学 単行本 –

The Japanese translation has come out, and I will be travelling to Japan this week to talk about market design. (Professor Yosuke Yasuda has described the lectures and discussions I'm involved in on April 5 and 6 here; Google Translate works well enough to give you the idea.)

Here's the link to the book in Japanese:

Who Gets What(フー・ゲッツ・ホワット) ―マッチメイキングとマーケットデザインの新しい経済学 単行本 – 

Presidential proclamation on organ donation

Presidential Proclamation -- National Donate Life Month, 2016

"My Administration has striven to support donors and recipients and to expand the availability of organs for transplant. In 2010, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), building on efforts within the transplant community, launched a nationwide kidney exchange program to bring together pairs of kidney donors and recipients in an effort to increase the quality and quantity of kidney transplants. HHS has also made more financial support available to low-income living donors to help cover expenses like travel and lodging costs that are often incurred throughout the donation process. The Affordable Care Act offers greater security to living donors by prohibiting insurers from denying health coverage to someone with a preexisting condition –-donating an organ may have previously been considered a preexisting condition and prevented individuals from obtaining the care they deserved after selflessly giving an organ to someone in need.
...
"NOW, THEREFORE, I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and the laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim April 2016 as National Donate Life Month. I call upon health care professionals, volunteers, educators, government agencies, faith-based and community groups, and private organizations to join forces to boost the number of organ, eye, and tissue donors throughout our Nation. "

*************
And here's the White House blog:
Saving Lives and Improving Health Care through Innovation in Organ Donations and Transplants
APRIL 1, 2016 AT 7:10 PM ET BY JEFFREY ZIENTS, THOMAS KALIL, DR. MARY WAKEFIELD

"Summary: The White House, in collaboration with HHS, announces a Summit to highlight initiatives to shorten the time to receive life-saving organs.
...

"But there is still more we can do. The vast majority of the organ waiting list is made up of people waiting for a kidney transplant. These Americans are hoping for a life-saving transplant that can add more years to their lives. In addition to the tremendous human cost, the kidney waiting list carries a huge cost to the public purse; Medicare pays more than $34 billion per year – more than the entire budget of the National Institutes of Health – to care for patients with end-stage kidney failure.

A recent transformative innovation called kidney paired donation (KPD), which pools living donors and recipients to increase the likelihood of matches, can improve this. In order to increase the number of potential transplants, the Department of Health and Human Services launched a nationwide KPD program in 2010 to build on this practice.

Alex Nichifor is celebrated in Romania

Here's an article in Business Magazin (in Romanian) celebrating Alex Nichifor:

Profesorul român de la Stanford care a colaborat cu doi laureaţi ai premiului Nobel pentru economie

Tomorrow at Stanford Hillel

I'll join Ken Arrow tomorrow, to help celebrate Stanford Hillel's 50th anniversary:

Community Open House: Something for Everyone

Saturday, April 2 @ 12:00 pm

	Learn about the economics of matchmaking with Professor Al Roth at 2:30 pm.

Following lunch at noon, long-time Hillel Director Rabbi Ari Cartun will be leading the community in Jewish learning. All levels of experience are welcome.

At 2:30 pm, we're excited to host esteemed faculty member Nobel Laureates for TED Talks at Hillel@Stanford. What do the Fiddler on the Roof classic, "Matchmaker," and economic theories have in common? Find out Saturday during a discussion on the economics of matchmaking with Al Roth. Join American economist, writer and political theorist Ken Arrow for his reflections on an academic life and the role of Judaism in it.

The Jewish Women's Theatre will lead a special performance entitled, "UNCUFFED" at 3:30 pm. JWT was co-founded by Stanford alumna Ronda Spinak, '80, "with the express purpose of developing stories written by Jewish women about their lives in America today," she said.

At 4:30 pm, former Hillel staff member Rabbi Mychal Copeland will discuss her book, Struggling in Good Faith, a multifaceted source book telling the story of reconciliation, celebration and struggle for LGBTQI inclusion across the American religious landscape. Rabbi Copeland was the rabbi at Hillel@Stanford for more than 10 years. She currently serves as Director of InterfaithFamily/Bay Area.

Click here for the full schedule and RSVP here for weekend events.

WHEN:

Saturday, April 2, 2016.
12:00 pm – 5:00 pm

WHERE:

Hillel-Ziff Center, Stanford, CA 94305 Map

Headlines that could have been published on April 1

You can't make this stuff up...

College Will No Longer Ask Students to Examine One Another's Vaginas 

Woman discovers 'boyfriend' of two years is woman when she removes blindfold during sex

No Turkish fabric to make anti-Turkish T-shirts, say Russian designers

Sanctions imposed after downing of military plane are hindering production of patriotic garments, reports The Moscow Times

Thai Man May Go to Prison for Insulting King’s Dog


Driving instructors 'may offer lessons in return for sex', Netherlands government confirms
The practice, known as 'ride for a ride', has been deemed 'legal but undesirable'

Mexico City officially changes its name to – Mexico City

Common enrollment system launches in Detroit, primarily for charter schools

A school choice system in Detroit is starting with charter schools.
The Detroit Free Press has the story:
Common enrollment system launches in Detroit today

"The nonprofit Excellent Schools Detroit is launching a common enrollment system today that is designed to make signing up for school easier and more equitable for Detroit families.

"Parents of children entering kindergarten or ninth grade in the fall will be able to use the new system during a 30-day window starting April 1. More than 40 schools are on board, most of them charters, as well as one private school

"Detroit Public Schools was part of the planning process but is not participating. Spokeswoman Michelle Zdrodowski said the district is in a state of transition and whether it joins is a decision that should be made by a school board once the district transitions from emergency management back to local control.
...
"Common enrollment has been a hot topic for years in conversations about education reform in Detroit.

"In fall 2014, the nonprofit Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice issued a report that said Detroit should launch a citywide enrollment system.

"The report highlighted the complexity of Detroit's public school market, with roughly 100 schools in DPS,  dozens of charter school districts (made up of about 100 schools) and 15 schools in the EAA, the state reform district. It said the system is hard for parents to navigate and fuels unhealthy competition among schools for students.

"Families have been disappointed. Families have been hurt, and they don't feel a lot of trust in the different systems," said Maria Montoya, director of communications and strategic partnerships for Enroll Detroit. She was part of the team that helped design the common enrollment system in New Orleans, called OneApp, in 2012.

"The idea that their application will be fairly considered, and it's not a person (at a school) picking them out and saying, 'We don't need any more autistic kids,' it's really hard for them to believe."

"A committee that included officials from Excellent Schools Detroit, DPS, charter schools, the Education Achievement Authority, community groups and parents designed Enroll Detroit. It was built by the New York-based Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice and Acumen Solutions."

A proposal to give refugees legally recognized financial claims against the countries that persecuted them, by Joseph Bloger and Mitu Gulati

When I recently visited Duke Law School I had the pleasure of talking with Joseph Blocher and Mitu Gulati about their very innovative thoughts on resettling refugees, by giving them legally recognized financial claims against the countries that made them refugees, that could be pursued by their host countries.  Here's a link to their paper:

Competing for Refugees: A Market-Based Solution to a Humanitarian Crisis

Joseph Blocher 

Duke University - School of Law

G. Mitu Gulati 

Duke University School of Law
January 26, 2016

Columbia Human Rights Law Review, Forthcoming
Duke Law School Public Law & Legal Theory Series No. 2015-48 
Abstract:      

The unprecedented scale of the modern refugee crisis demands novel legal solutions. As a matter of national incentives, the goal must be to design mechanisms that discourage countries from creating refugees, and encourages other countries to welcome them. One way to achieve this would be to recognize that persecuted refugee groups have a financial claim against their countries of origin, and that this claim can be traded to host nations in exchange for acceptance. Modifications to the international apparatus would be necessary, but the basic legal elements of this proposal already exist. In short, international law can and should give refugees a legal asset, give host nations incentives to accept them, and give oppressive countries of origin the bill.

Whither Game Theory? by Fudenberg and Levine (we need to learn more about learning)

Whither Game Theory? Drew Fudenberg David K. Levine, January 31, 2016

Abstract: We examine the state of game theory. Many important questions have been answered, and
game theoretic methods are now central to much economic investigation. We suggest areas where
further advances are important, and argue that models of learning and of social preferences
provide promising routes for improving and widening game theory’s predictive power, while
preserving the sucesses of existing theory where it works well. We emphasize in particular the
need for better understanding of the speed with which learning takes place, and of the evolution
of social norms.

Who Gets What and Why? at Duke Law School (video: one hour including Q&A)

Here's a video of one of the talks I gave at Duke Law School last Wednesday, sponsored by The Duke Project on Law and Markets.



And here is a link to Kim Krawiec's blog post about this and my other talks at Duke on the same day: Our Day Of Market Design,

 It came with this picture:

And here is a link to some more pictures from Kim:
"Who Gets What And Why? Photos And Video

Our communications folk were out in full force for Al Roth’s lecture on Wednesday and have already posted some nice photos from the event and uploaded a video of the lecture to YouTube. "

Surprising consequences of minimum tick size in financial markets

Two papers on minimum tick sizes as elements of market design:

What Drives Price Dispersion and Market Fragmentation across U.S. Stock Exchanges?

Yong Chao 

University of Louisville - College of Business - Department of Economics

Chen Yao 

University of Warwick

Mao Ye 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
January 23, 2016
Abstract:      

We propose a theoretical model to explain two salient features of the U.S. stock exchange industry: (i) sizable dispersion and frequent changes in stock exchange fees; and (ii) the proliferation of stock exchanges offering identical transaction services, highlighting the role of discrete pricing. Exchange operators in the United States compete for order flow by setting “make” fees for limit orders (“makers”) and “take” fees for market orders (“takers”). When traders can quote continuous prices, the manner in which operators divide the total fee between makers and takers is irrelevant because traders can choose prices that perfectly counteract any fee division. If such is the case, order flow consolidates on the exchange with the lowest total fee. The one-cent minimum tick size imposed by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission’s Rule 612(c) of Regulation National Market Systems for traders prevents perfect neutralization and eliminates mutually agreeable trades at price levels within a tick. These frictions (i) create both scope and incentive for an operator to establish multiple exchanges that differ in fee structure in order to engage in second-degree price discrimination; and (ii) lead to mixed-strategy equilibria with positive profits for competing operators, rather than to zero-fee, zero-profit Bertrand equilibrium. Policy proposals that require exchanges to charge one side only or to divide the total fee equally between the two sides would lead to zero make and take fees, but the welfare effects of these two proposals are mixed under tick size constraints.

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

Why Trading Speed Matters: A Tale of Queue Rationing under Price Controls

Chen Yao 

University of Warwick

Mao Ye 

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
September 16, 2015

Abstract:      

Queue rationing under price controls drives speed competition in liquidity provision. We find that a one-cent tick size generates higher revenues and longer queues of liquidity provision for lower-priced (larger relative tick size) securities. Speed allows high-frequency traders (HFTs) to establish time priority in the queue; non-HFTs are forced to demand liquidity despite increased liquidity provision revenue. Difference-in-differences tests using exchange-traded funds (ETFs) tracking the same index show that speed competition led by queuing does not affect transaction costs controlling relative tick size, but a larger relative tick size reduces liquidity and increases HFT liquidity provision.

**********

And here are links to video presentations by Mao Ye:

The high-frequency trading paper is on:

http://submit.utahwfc.org/2015_webcast/uwfc_2015_video_1.html

The exchange competition paper is on

http://submit.utahwfc.org/2016_webcast/uwfc_2016_video_5.html

A trading firm promises to restrain itself from early exploding offers

Self restraint doesn't always do the trick, but is worth a try: here's a post from the Jane Street blog.

Unraveling of the tech hiring market

Thu, 2016/03/17 - 3:20pm - David Powers | OCaml

Recruiting talented people has always been challenging.

In some years that meant competing with a hot new company that aggressively courted every fresh graduate with promises of stock options and IPO glory.  In other years there wasn’t a specific company so much as an entire rising industry looking for people (I’m looking at you cloud services, driverless cars, and peer-to-peer sharing).  Either way, we understood the yearly back and forth.  Our job was to explain to candidates how we stacked up, and more importantly, why a career at Jane Street might be the right choice for many of them.

But this year I got to learn a new name for a new challenge.  “Unraveling”.

I first encountered it in a book I was reading for fun: "Who Gets What, and Why", by the Nobel Prize-winning economist Alvin Roth.  He does a lovely job explaining the idea of a matching market.  In a matching market each person wants only one of each item, each item is unique, and each item can be given to at most one person at a time.  Jobs are a classic matching market, and just like any market, matching markets can work well, or poorly.

Unraveling is one of the primary things that makes a matching market fail.  When a market unravels  matches start to happen earlier and earlier, to the point where people no longer get a complete view of their options.  In the book Roth relates the story of a person who stepped off of a plane to find three voicemails on his phone.  The first offered him a job, the second urged him to respond soon, and the last rescinded the offer because he hadn't responded quickly enough.

We call them exploding offers, and this year they have gotten completely out of hand as companies race to the bottom in their efforts to recruit the next wave of interns and fresh graduates.

Colleges try to impose deadline limits explicitly to stop unraveling, and in the past these have largely been honored.  The cheating and fudging, such as it was, was kept to the fringes.  But this year it seems like the seal is broken, and we've seen major companies delivering internship and full-time offers with 2 week (and less) hard deadlines.  Other companies now routinely deliver expiring bonus offers for signing early.  Many of these offers circumvent or outright break the guidelines set down by schools, and if past matching markets are a model for this one, next year will come with even earlier offers and worse conditions.

This unraveling has been the subject of a lot of discussion, both internally at Jane Street and with the various schools we recruit at, who see it - rightly - as bad for their students.  How can someone make a thoughtful decision about where they want to build a career without the time to interview at more than one or two places?  Unfortunately, most of this discussion is out of the public light, and so the unraveling continues.

We can't control the actions of others, but we also don’t have to follow the herd, so we'd like to be clear:

Jane Street is committed to making sure that you have the time and information you need to decide on an offer from us.  Our offer letters do have good-until dates as a matter of professional practice, but we try to work with every candidate to choose a date that works for them.  We are also happy to extend the date if something unexpected comes up, or, frankly, if someone just needs more time.

Choosing where to start your career is a big decision and we hope you have the time to make a good one.

Who Gets What and Why at the European School for Management and Technology in Berlin--video

Here's a video of a public lecture followed by a discussion (about half an hour each) about my book Who Gets What and Why, which just came out in German.   The location of the lecture was once an East German government building where the head of state had his office, and is now a business school, the European School for Management and Technology.  I was introduced by Gerhard Caspar, the head of the American Academy in Berlin and former president of Stanford. (My talk begins about minute 11:30 of the video, the discussion begins about minute 41, with Christoph von Marschall, Managing Editor of the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel, which touches on market designers in Germany, the legal barriers to kidney exchange there, and refugee resettlement.)

Compensation for donors: crowding in and crowding out, in the Washington Post

The Washington Post reports a recent study  by Dr Tom Peters surveying Americans on their willingness to donate, and how this would be effected by different levels of compensation: What would happen if Americans were paid to donate their kidneys?


"For those already willing to donate to anyone, 63 percent said that the payment would make them even more likely to do it. Of those in the second group, composed of those willing to donate to a restricted group, 60 percent said they would be more likely to consider it. And in the third group that was unwilling to donate, 26 percent said they would reconsider because of the money.

The researchers also found that there were some people who would be more reluctant to donate if money was involved. In the first group 8 percent would be less willing, 9 percent in the second group, and 18 percent in the third group.

"Thus," the researchers concluded, "payment motivated more US voters to positively consider donor nephrectomy rather than to reject the notion of donating a kidney."
**********

HT: Frank McCormick, Philip Held

Who Gets What and Why at Duke Law School:

It looks like Duke Law School is seriously addressing the incentives of lecture-goers to arrive on time: lunch is served on a first come first served basis...

Al Roth: Who Get's What and Why?

Wednesday, March 23, 2016 • 12:30 PM • Law School 3037Duke Law Events

Alvin E. Roth, The Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics, Stanford University, and co-recipient, 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences will discuss his book, "Who Gets What - And Why: The Hidden World of Matchmaking and Market Design." A bagged lunch will be served to attendees on a first come, first serve basis. Sponsored by The Duke Project on Law and Markets. Please contact Victoria Zellefrow (victoria.zellefrow@law.duke.edu) with any further questions.

I'll also speak at the Law and Markets faculty workshop, on global kidney exchange. Kim Krawiec is the host, and here's the title of her blog post yesterday: Tomorrow Is Al Roth Day!
(You can see why I can't resist her invitation to talk...)

Steine lecture at Vanderbilt

I'll be in Nashville today, speaking at Vanderbilt, in their Steine Lecture series.

Nobel Prize-winning economist will deliver Steine Lecture March 22

Alvin Roth

Alvin E. Roth, who shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, will discuss “Who Gets What and Why: The Economics of Matching and Market Design” from 4 to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, March 22, in Wilson Hall, Room 103. A reception will follow his talk, which is part of the Department of Economics’Steine Lecture Series.

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. He works in the areas of game theory, experimental economics and market design.

Roth is responsible for re-designing the National Resident Matching Program, through which approximately 20,000 doctors a year find their first employment as residents at American hospitals. He also is one of the founders and designers of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, which serves incompatible patient-donor pairs.

Roth is president-elect of the American Economic Association and served for many years as chair of the association’s Ad Hoc Committee on the Job Market, which has designed a number of recent changes in the market for new Ph.D. economists. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Econometric Society and has been a Guggenheim and Sloan fellow. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford University.

The David Steine Lectureship was established in 1978 by multiple donors to provide support for an annual lecture in the Department of Economics in the College of Arts and Science. The lecture honors former Vanderbilt professor David L. Steine and addresses an economic problem of interest to the general public.

Transplanting kidneys that are infected with hepatitis C (to uninfected patients) or HIV (to already infected patients) to ease the organ shortage

Two stories, one on Hep C kidneys to uninfected patients, another on HIV kidneys to patients already infected with HIV.

Here's the first story, on transplanting Hep C infected kidneys to patients who don't have the disease: http://www.statnews.com/2016/03/18/kidney-transplant-hepatitis-c/

"Transplant surgeons at two US hospitals are about to do something long considered taboo: put kidneys from donors with hepatitis C into recipients without the infection.

In first-in-the-world clinical trials scheduled to launch later this spring, independent teams from the University of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University will take kidneys from deceased carriers of the hep C virus, put them into patients with renal failure, and then give them a 12-week course of an antiviral therapy in the hopes that they will emerge infection-free.

If successful, the trials could enable hundreds of transplants each year for patients who might otherwise die waiting for a kidney.
...
"The idea behind the two upcoming trials is to take older patients who have long waits ahead and don’t have living donors, and allow them to jump the queue — if they’re willing to take on a bit more risk.

The risk of hep C infection is deemed manageable, and ethically acceptable, thanks to the latest wave of hep C medications, which offer cure rates of 95 percent and higher.

“For a 60-year-old diabetic who doesn’t have a living donor, who hasn’t been on the wait list very long, they’re miserable on dialysis, their mortality rate is high — that person might roll the dice on this and say, ‘You know what? These drugs work, and it’s worth it to me to get off dialysis sooner,’” said Dr. Heather Morris, a nephrologist at the Columbia University Medical Center.

“Initially, we’re targeting the population that has the highest mortality risk while waiting for a transplant,” explained Dr. Christine Durand, a transplant infectious disease specialist at Johns Hopkins. But if the technique proves safe and effective, she added, organs from hep C patients might one day join the regular organ pool.

“If it was me who needed a kidney,” Durand said, “I would sign up for this.”
...
"Both the Penn and Hopkins studies are backed by Merck, the drug company that makes Zepatier, the latest hep C agent to hit the market. The company is supplying its $54,500-per-patient medicine for free and providing additional financial support for staff and lab tests.
**************
Here's the story about HIV kidneys:

Hahnemann to begin transplanting organs from HIV-positive donors

"The organs would be given only to patients who also are HIV-positive and have agreed to accept them. The transplants will be part of research that will carefully monitor both the transplant and the potentially deadly disease.

Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore announced last month that it would be the first to offer HIV-positive organs to HIV-positive patients on its waiting list. The advantage of such transplants is that they might reduce waiting times for HIV-positive patients and also free up other organs for patients who don't have the immune-weakening virus.

The new approach was made possible by the HIV Organ Policy Equity (HOPE) Act of 2013. Before that, it was illegal to transplant organs from people with HIV. The ban was enacted when the blood-borne virus was considered a death sentence, but now that it is so much more manageable, people who are infected often die of something else.

The Philadelphia hospital has now received permission from the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) to begin what are called HIV-positive to HIV-positive liver and kidney transplants. Doctors expect that most of the transplanted organs will be kidneys and that the first case will occur this year. The hospital currently has 45 HIV-positive patients either on its waiting list for kidneys or being evaluated for transplants."

Rabbi (and kidney donor)i Shmuly Yanklowitz on Judaism and organ donation (video)

Rabbi (and kidney donor) Shmuly Yanklowitz speaks about organ donation, drawing on Jewish sources, in this 14 minute video:

HT: Max Bazerman