I'll post market design related news and items about repugnant markets. See also my Stanford profile. I have a general-interest book on market design: Who Gets What--and Why The subtitle is "The new economics of matchmaking and market design."
Focused on five points of life: organs, tissues, marrow, platelets, and blood. Many nonprofit health organizations sponsor blood and marrow drives and organ/tissue sign-ups across the nation. National Donor Day was started in 1998 by the Saturn Corporation and its United Auto Workers partner with the support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and many nonprofit health organizations.
Each year, February 14th is significant for more than just Valentine's Day. Today is designated as National Donor Day focusing on the "five points of life" organ, tissue, marrow, platelets, and blood donation. Donation drives are held throughout February nationwide. Be a hero! Be a donor! And THANK YOU!
"The surgery was successful and the four patients are in stable condition, according to Dr Thai Minh Sam, head of the hospital’s urology department.
Nguyen Thi Hue, 58, volunteered to donate one of her kidneys to her daughter Vu Thi Hue, 32, from Kien Giang province who had end-stage renal disease and has been on dialysis since June 2014.
But she and her daughter did not match well, Sam said at a press meeting held yesterday.
Another pair in the same situation, Le Thi Anh Hong, 31, from Dak Nong province with end-stage renal disease, has been on dialysis since April 2015.
Hong’s stepfather, Truong Ngoc Xuan, 51, could not donate one of his own kidneys to his daughter as they were incompatible.
Paired donation matches an incompatible donor and recipient to another pair in the same situation.
Doctors at Cho Ray Hospital carefully consulted opinions from leading experts in kidney transplant and explained the procedure to two donor/recipient pairs who agreed to undergo paired kidney exchange.
Hue’s mother gave one of her own kidneys to Hong. In exchange, Hong’s stepfather, Xuan, donated one of his own kidneys to Hue. Doctors removed the kidneys from the donors in the morning and transplanted them in the recipients on January 11."
עשרות מתיישבים החליטו לתרום את אחת הכליות שלהם לאדם זר, ללא תמורה. המעשה האצילי הפך אפילו לסוג של תחרות בין היישובים. "ביצהר מובילים עם 10 תורמים, ואנחנו רק שלושה", מסביר תורם מאיתמר. היוזמה מדהימה, אך התרומות לא מיועדות באמת לכל אחד: מרביתן ליהודים בלבד
Google translate:
Competition between the settlements who contribute more organs to complete strangers?
Dozens of settlers decided to donate one of their kidneys to a stranger, for no consideration. Even the noblest deed became a kind of competition between communities. "Yitzhar lead with 10 donors, and we are only three," says Itamar contributor.
A recent meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences of the Vatican: Summit on Organ Trafficking and Transplant Tourism resulted in a statement and a number of news stories. Here are several that caught my eye, with divergent views on the situation in China and how it is changing:
From the NY Times: Debate Flares Over China’s Inclusion at Vatican Organ Trafficking Meeting
"China has admitted that it extracted organs from death row prisoners for decades, in what critics have called a serious violation of the rights of inmates who cannot give genuine consent. Since Jan. 1, 2015, Chinese officials have said they no longer use prisoners’ organs, though doubts persist.
“We urge the summit to consider the plight of incarcerated prisoners in China who are treated as expendable human organ banks,” wrote the 11 signatories, who included Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Australia; Arthur Caplan of the New York University Langone Medical Center; David Matas and David Kilgour, both Canadian human rights lawyers; and Enver Tohti, a former surgeon from the western Chinese region of Xinjiang."
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From Statnews.com China moves to stop taking organs from prisoners, WHO says
"The World Health Organization says China has taken steps to end its once-widespread practice of harvesting organs from executed prisoners but that it’s impossible to know what is happening across the entire country.
At a Vatican conference on organ trafficking this week, a former top Chinese official said the country had stopped its unethical program, but critics remain unconvinced.
In an interview Thursday, WHO’s Jose Ramon Nunez Pena said he personally visited about 20 hospitals in China last year and believes the country has reformed. But he acknowledged that it was still possible “there may still be hidden things going on.” China has more than 1 million medical centers, although only 169 are authorized to do transplants.
Nunez Pena said he had seen data including organ transplant registries and was convinced the country was now shifting away from illegally harvesting organs.
“What is clear to me is that they’re changing,” he said. “But in a country as huge as China, we can’t know everything.”
...
"Campbell Fraser, an organ trafficking researcher at Griffith University in Australia, agreed the trends over the past few years have shown a drop in the number of foreigners going to China for transplants and an increase of organ seekers heading to the Middle East.
At a press conference at the Chinese Embassy in Italy following the two-day Vatican organ conference, Fraser said migrants — including Syrians, Somalis and Eritreans — sometimes resort to selling off a kidney to pay traffickers to get them or their families to Europe.
“Egypt is where the biggest problem is at the moment,” he said, adding that it has the best medical facilities in the region and can perform the live donor surgeries.
He estimated as many as 10 such illicit transplants could be happening per week, though he had no statistics and said he based his research largely on anecdotal information from recipients, law enforcement, doctors and even some organ “brokers.”
Fraser said he has access to transplant patient “chat boards” because he himself had a kidney transplant in his native Australia in 2003.
Nunez Pena said it was likely that organ trafficking would find its way to conflict-plagued regions. “We’re hearing about a lot of problems in Egypt, Pakistan and the Philippines,” he said, predicting that authorities were poised to break up an organ smuggling ring in Egypt in the next few weeks. “Wherever you have vulnerable people, you will see these kinds of problems.”
A journal has decided to retract a 2016 study because of concerns that its data on the safety of liver transplantation involved organs sourced from executed prisoners in China. The action, taken despite a denial by the study’s authors that such organs were used, comes after clinical ethicist Wendy Rogers of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia, and colleagues authored a letter to the editor of Liver International on 30 January, calling for the paper’s retraction in the “absence of credible evidence of ethical sourcing of organs.”
For years, Chinese officials have come under fire for allegedly allowing the use of organs from executed prisoners for transplants, including for foreigners coming to the country for so-called medical tourism. In January 2015, it explicitly banned the practice and set up a volunteer donation system, but doubts persist that much has changed.
The disputed study—published online in October 2016—analyzed 563 consecutive liver transplantations performed before the ban (from April 2010 to October 2014) at a medical center in China. Suspicious, Rogers organized the protest letter to the journal. “Publication of data from prisoners is ethically inappropriate given that it [is] not possible to ensure that the prisoners freely agreed either to donate their organs, or to be included [in] a research program,” she tells ScienceInsider.
The site http://donationethics.com/hosts a letter signed by many ethicists opposing an amendment to the National Organ Transplant Act to reverse the court decision outlawing payment to blood stem cell donors. (Got that? the letter is pro compensation.)
The site is full of interesting related links.
Here's the site's front page:
This site houses an open letter to Shelley Grant of the Department of Health and Human Services regarding a proposed amendment to the National Organ Transplant Act that would effectively outlaw offering compensation for hematopoietic cells donation. The signatories are professional ethicists who believe that the proposed amendment is unethical and should be rejected.
The details of the proposed amendment can be found here.
The case that prompted the amendment, Flynn v. Holder, is explained here.
Peter M. Jaworski conceived of the letter and is its primary author.
David Faraci was a major contributor to the letter and maintains the website.
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Here's a link to Hemeos, a startup service for matching stem cell donors to patients, which plans to compensate donors.
Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital's Dr. Adam Bingaman
"Dr. Adam Bingaman, head of the live-donor kidney transplant program, joined the Texas Transplant Institute at Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital in 2007 and became the Director of Abdominal Organ Transplantation in 2012. ... "For those awaiting a kidney transplant but lacking a live-donor match, the only chance for a kidney donation may be from a kidney-paired donor (KPD) exchange. This offers a transplant option for patients with a living donor who is both willing and medically fit but isn’t a compatible match with the recipient.
The donor’s information is entered into a nationwide database with those of other incompatible donors and recipients who are willing to exchange kidneys. It is here that the process of finding suitable exchanges occurs. Kidney-paired donation provides a means for all transplant centers to increase patient access to live-donor transplantation.
Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital’s Program
Launched in 2008, the paired-donor program at Texas Transplant Institute at the Methodist Specialty and Transplant Hospital has performed more kidney-paired donation exchanges than any other center. The program focuses not just on the kidney recipient, but on the donor as well. All transplants are performed in one integrated facility, with targeted care provided for the donor from initial screening to post-surgery follow-up for two years.
The program’s approach to building community partnerships enables patient access and follow-up care in less populated areas across Texas. The program’s team has forged relationships with nephrologists throughout the state and through dedicated clinics in Corpus Christi, Laredo, McAllen, Lubbock, Waco, Temple, and Austin. The transplant physicians and team members visit these locations regularly to check on patients who have either donated or received a kidney.
“We build relationships of trust,” Bingaman said. “Community partnering in underserved areas is very important to patient outcomes. Our goal is to integrate our services with those of a patient’s nephrologist, so that we provide a true umbrella of care.”
...
"The Texas Transplant Institute at Methodist offers an educational seminar three to four times a year. The series (and videoshere) teach people how to “End Your Wait” with an education program explaining living kidney donation and how to go about finding a donor on their own.
“We give them tools that help their awareness about the need for a kidney transplant,” Bingaman said. “We started this program because more than 50% of kidney donations do not come from family members. They are from coworkers, church members, or someone in the extended social network.”
“We’ve already hit a crisis point,” Bingaman said. “If you have kidney disease and diabetes and maybe heart disease, after six years on dialysis, you probably won’t be healthy enough for a transplant. So your best bet is to find a living donor as early as possible.”
Part of the international reaction to the recent U.S. travel ban on people from seven countries has been a call to boycott U.S. academic conferences.
Here, e.g. is one such call: In Solidarity with People Affected by the ‘Muslim Ban’: Call for an Academic Boycott of International Conferences held in the US
"Among those affected by the Order are academics and students who are unable to participate in conferences and the free communication of ideas. We the undersigned take action in solidarity with those affected by Trump’s Executive Order by pledging not to attend international conferences in the US while the ban persists. We question the intellectual integrity of these spaces and the dialogues they are designed to encourage while Muslim colleagues are explicitly excluded from them."
I have had an opportunity to think about this regarding the ASSA conference run in January by the American Economic Association, and it seems to me that such a boycott won't help the majority of academics (students and professors) from the banned countries who come to our conference, or to many American academic conferences.
In our (the AEA's) particular situation, my sense is that we have had few if any Yemeni and Sudanese economists participating in the AEA meetings, and the people potentially affected by the current U.S. entry bans are mostly Iranian.* And the majority of Iranians who have participated seem to be working or studying in the U.S.
So…if a travel ban is in place next January, and we moved the conference to some civilized city like Toronto, we would be depriving most of the potential Iranian participants of the ability to attend, since they couldn’t leave and then reliably re-enter the U.S..
My current sense is that the AEA will decide to take care of the Iranians as best we can (which for the minority who aren’t in the U.S. may involve some electronic communication efforts), rather than cater to any economists whose scruples would require us to abandon the Iranians living and working in the U.S. by moving the conference elsewhere.
To be clear, I think moving the AEA meetings outside of the U.S. would harm the majority of Iranians who participated in past years.
Of course I’m hopeful that we’ll have come to our senses long before then.
"A Dutch medical institution has launched an investigation after discovering that up to 26 women’s eggs may have been fertilised by the wrong sperm at its IVF laboratory.
"A “procedural error” between mid-April 2015 and mid-November 2016 during the in-vitro fertilisation was to blame, the University Medical Centre in Utrecht said.
"“During fertilisation, sperm cells from one treatment couple may have ended up with the egg cells of 26 other couples,” said a statement.
“Therefore there’s a chance that the egg cells have been fertilised by sperm other than that of the intended father.”
Although the chance of that happening was small the possibility “could not be excluded”, said the centre.
Half the women who underwent fertility treatment had become pregnant or given birth.
“For some of the 26 couples frozen embryos are still available but the chance remains that they [too] have been fertilised by the sperm from a man other than the intended father,” the UMC said.
"The couples had been informed, the centre said.
“The UMC’s board regrets that the couples involved had to receive this news and will do everything within its powers to give clarity on the issue as soon as possible.”
...
"Mix-ups do occur, including one in 2012 when a Singapore mother sued a clinic for alleged negligence after it mixed up her husband’s sperm with that of a stranger.
"The ethnic Chinese woman first suspected that something was amiss when her baby, who was born in 2010, had markedly different skin tone and hair colour from her Caucasian husband, news reports at the time said."
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Here's are two recent updates on the Singapore story (and subsequent legal proceedings) from the Straits Times: the first has some details of how the error happened, the second speaks about the legal issues associated with possible damages that might be assessed, and if so for what... IVF mix-up at Thomson Medical: A look back at the case of 'Baby P'
A large group of scientific societies have signed this Multisociety letter deploring the recent Executive Order regarding travel to the U.S. (The American Economic Association is represented through its membership in COSSA, the Consortium of Social Sciences Associations.) http://www.cossa.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/01/Multisociety-Letter-on-Immigration-1-31-2017.pdf
"The Executive Order will discourage many of the best and brightest international students, scholars, engineers and scientists from studying and working, attending academic and scientific conferences, or seeking to build new businesses in the United States. Implementation of this policy will compromise the United States’ ability to attract international scientific talent and maintain scientific and economic leadership.
Today, we urge the Administration to rescind the Executive Order and we stand ready to assist you in crafting an immigration and visa policy that advances U.S. prosperity and ensures strong borders while staying true to foundational American principles as a nation of immigrants. "
Below are a variety of other reactions (in no particular order), many of which balance charters which require some scientific societies to be nonpartisan, with the concern that the recent Executive Order negatively affects their core mission.
On Christmas Eve in 2013 Alan Turing received a posthumous pardon from the crime of being homosexual in Britain in the 1950's. Tuesday, thousands of other men received similar posthumous pardons.
"Tuesday 31 January 2017
Thousands of men convicted of offences that once criminalised homosexuality but are no longer on the statute book have been posthumously pardoned under a new law.
"A clause in the policing and crime bill, which received royal assent on Tuesday, extends to those who are dead the existing process of purging past criminal records.
"The general pardon is modelled on the 2013 royal pardon granted by the Queen to Alan Turing, the mathematician who broke the German Enigma codes during the second world war. He killed himself in 1954, at the age of 41, after his conviction for gross indecency.
"Welcoming the legislation, the justice minister Sam Gyimah said: “This is a truly momentous day. We can never undo the hurt caused, but we have apologised and taken action to right these wrongs. I am immensely proud that ‘Turing’s law’ has become a reality under this government.”
"There is already a procedure in place for the living to apply to the Home Office to have their past convictions, relating to same-sex relationships, expunged from their criminal records.
"Under what is known as the disregard process, anyone previously found guilty of past sexual offences that are no longer criminal matters can ask to have them removed.
"A disregard can be granted only if the past offence was a consensual relationship and both men were over 16. The conduct must also not constitute what remains an offence of sexual activity in a public lavatory.
...
"Rewriting history will not be easy. The complexity of the evidence, for example, that led to Oscar Wilde’s conviction in 1895 for gross indecency – including evidence of procuring male prostitutes – would make it difficult to assess.
"The gay rights organisation Stonewall has suggested the playwright and author, who was sentenced to two years hard labour in Reading jail, should be entitled to a pardon.
"The Ministry of Justice said there would be no historical limit in relation to past offences. It declined, however, to say whether Wilde would be among those deemed posthumously pardoned."
A number of Iranian scientists received messages yesterday from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. These are long-term American residents who had chosen to go through the personal interview process needed to get into the Global Entry Program, which allows trusted travelers to enter the U.S. in an expedited way. (I use Global Entry, and it allows me to go to a kiosk which examines my passport and fingerprints, without the necessity of standing in a long line to speak to a border agent.)
Nevertheless, these individuals have been informed that they no longer meet the eligibility requirements. (Here's a screen shot...)
Note that the people who received this message had already passed "a comprehensive background investigation." Presumably that is what is meant by "extreme vetting." But now, it seems, a blanket nationality ban is being invoked.
"Reversing its stance of more than a century, theBoy Scouts of Americasaid on Monday that the group would begin accepting members based on the gender listed on their application, paving the way for transgender boys to join the organization.
“For more than 100 years, the Boy Scouts of America, along with schools, youth sports and other youth organizations, have ultimately deferred to the information on an individual’s birth certificate to determine eligibility for our single-gender programs,” the group said in a statement on its website. “However, that approach is no longer sufficient as communities and state laws are interpreting gender identity differently, and these laws vary widely from state to state.”
The announcement, reported on Monday night by The Associated Press, reverses a policy that drew controversy late last year when a transgender boy in New Jersey was kicked out of the organization about a month after joining.
“After weeks of significant conversations at all levels of our organization, we realized that referring to birth certificates as the reference point is no longer sufficient,” Michael Surbaugh, the Scouts’ chief executive, said in a recorded statement on Monday.
The announcement came amid a national debate over transgender rights, with cities and states across the nation struggling with whether and how to regulate gender identity in the workplace, in restrooms and at schools.
In recent years, the Boy Scouts of America has expanded rights for gay people. In 2013, the group ended its ban on openly gay youths participating in its activities. Two years later, the organization ended its ban on openly gay adult leaders."
Is metaphor a verb? If so, a number of writers have taken Esther Duflo's recent Ely Lecture, "The Economist as Plumber,*" as an invitation to metaphor. The essays below add to the stock of metaphorical economists, in which you can find economists as artisans and craftspeople, weather forecasters, doctors and medical scientists, entrepreneurs, and of course as dentists, architects, engineers and now plumbers.
* and here's the video of Esther's Ely Lecture AEA Richard T. Ely Lecture: The Economist as Plumber: Large Scale Experiments to Inform the Details of Policy Making Esther Duflo, introduced by Alvin E. Roth View Webcast
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Yuji Ijiri passed away earlier this month. He was one of the pioneers of accounting as a form of information economics, with all that has meant for accounting rules as design features of organizations.
"At the age of 14, Yuji Ijiri began keeping the books at his father’s bakery in Japan. Later, as a professor at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, he became one of the most celebrated philosophers of accounting, illuminating its underlying logic and defending its traditions, while exploring new frontiers.
"Accountants weren't the stereotypical bean counters, following clear-cut rules that inevitably led to a certain set of numbers, Dr. Ijiri found. Instead, they were champions of accountability, struggling to find a fair balance between the needs of parties with conflicting interests. While investors pushed for maximum disclosure, for example, managers were concerned about giving out information that could benefit competitors."
Abstract
In various matching market settings, such as hospital-doctor
matching markets (Hatfield and Milgrom 2005), the existence
of stable outcomes depends on substitutability of preferences.
But can these stable matchings be computed efficiently, as in
the one-to-one matching case? The algorithm of (Hatfield and
Milgrom 2005) requires efficient implementation of a choice
function over substitutable preferences. We show that even
given efficient access to a value oracle or preference relation
satisfying substitutability, exponentially many queries may be
required in the worst case to implement a choice function. Indeed,
this extends to examples where a stable matching requires
exponential time to compute.
We characterize the computational complexity of stable
matchings by showing that efficient computation of a choice
function is equivalent to efficient verification—determining
whether or not, for a given set, the most preferred subset is
the entire set itself. Clearly, verification is necessary for computation,
but we show that it is also sufficient: specifically,
given a verifier, we design a polynomial-time algorithm for
computing a choice function, implying an efficient algorithm
for stable matching. We then show that a verifier can be implemented
efficiently for various classes of functions, such as
submodular functions, implying efficient stable matching algorithms
for a broad range of settings. We also investigate the
effect of ties in the preference order, which causes complications
both in defining substitutes and in computation. In this
case, we tightly connect the computational complexity of the
choice function to a measure on the number of ties.
As you may have heard, President Trump has signed an executive order that, among other things, temporarily bans visa entry to the U.S. for people from several countries (including Iran, which sends many students to U.S. universities, including many who remain as professors and in industry). It also takes a position I strongly disapprove about refugees (and was signed on Holocaust Remembrance Day, an occasion for me to recall with regret that we Americans did not rise well to the occasion of welcoming Jewish refugees from that genocide). I am among many academics who have signed a petition deploring these measures and imploring that they be reconsidered.
And here's a story in the Washington Post that explains some of the issues that particularly concern academics in our professional roles (and not just as American patriots committed to the freedom of ideas and many other freedoms).
12 Nobel laureates, thousands of academics sign protest of Trump immigration order
"What’s at stake, said Emery Berger, a professor in the College of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is not one of the organizers of the petition but supports the effort, begins with free exchange of information.
"But there’s more. He said he has already heard academics overseas planning to avoid, or boycott, conferences in the United States. “It’s very chilling,” he said.
"Students are horrified, he said, at the prospect of not being able to get back to their U.S. university if they return to their home country.
“I’m sure it will send really promising star students across the border to Canada or elsewhere,” Berger said. The order comes just as many U.S. universities are offering admission to overseas students for the next academic year."
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