Sunday, November 5, 2017

The market for hunting exotic animals without traveling to exotic places

The NY Times has a story about the Ox Ranch, which describes itself as offering  "18,000 acres of the best Texas Hill Country Hunting."  Some of the prey on offer are not native, however, and the business model arouses repugnance in some quarters.

Blood and Beauty on a Texas Exotic-Game Ranch

"The price to kill a bongo at the Ox Ranch is $35,000.

"Himalayan tahrs, wild goats with a bushy lion-style mane, are far cheaper. The trophy fee, or kill fee, to shoot one is $7,500. An Arabian oryx is $9,500; a sitatunga antelope, $12,000; and a black wildebeest, $15,000.
...
"The ranch’s hunting guides and managers walk a thin, controversial line between caring for thousands of rare, threatened and endangered animals and helping to execute them. Some see the ranch as a place for sport and conservation. Some see it as a place for slaughter and hypocrisy.
....
"The ranch has about 30 bongo, the African antelopes with a trophy fee of $35,000. Last fall, a hunter shot one. “Taking one paid their feed bill for the entire year, for the rest of them,” said Jason Molitor, the chief executive of the Ox Ranch.
"To many animal-protection groups, such management of rare and endangered species — breeding some, preventing some from being hunted, while allowing the killing of others — is not only repulsive, but puts hunting ranches in a legal and ethical gray area.
“Depending on what facility it is, there’s concern when animals are raised solely for profit purposes,” said Anna Frostic, a senior attorney with the Humane Society of the United States.
"Hunting advocates disagree and say the breeding and hunting of exotic animals helps ensure species’ survival. Exotic-game ranches see themselves not as an enemy of wildlife conservation but as an ally, arguing that they contribute a percentage of their profits to conservation efforts.
We love the animals, and that’s why we hunt them,” Mr. Molitor said. “Most hunters in general are more in line with conservation than the public believes that they are.”
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The ranch also offers other activities, including these related to guns, which in the U.S. are sometimes regarded simultaneously (by different parts of the population) as both repugnant and protected transactions.

Guns & Shooting


Tank Driving

Drive a WWII Sherman Tank, shoot it's guns, and run cars over!

Machine Gun Shooting

Shoot Machine Guns... MP5, SAW, M4, PKM, P90, and .50 BMG!

Skeet Shooting

Learn to shoot Skeet, Trap, 5 Stand, and Wobble Trap.

.50 cal Shooting

Shoot the biggest and scariest semi automatic gun in the world!

Saturday, November 4, 2017

Market design in the Oxford Review of Economic Policy, edited by Kominers, Teytelboym and Crawford


Market Design

ARTICLES

Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 33, Issue 4, 2 November 2017, Pages 541–571, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grx063
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 33, Issue 4, 2 November 2017, Pages 572–588, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grx040
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 33, Issue 4, 2 November 2017, Pages 589–612, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grx041
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 33, Issue 4, 2 November 2017, Pages 613–634, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grx046
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 33, Issue 4, 2 November 2017, Pages 635–649, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grx043
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 33, Issue 4, 2 November 2017, Pages 650–675, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grx042
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 33, Issue 4, 2 November 2017, Pages 676–704, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grx048
Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Volume 33, Issue 4, 2 November 2017, Pages 705–720, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxrep/grx047

Friday, November 3, 2017

Payday lending and check cashing


In the WSJ:
The Hand-to-Hand Combat to Save Payday Lending
Payday lenders and consumer advocates fuel letter-writing campaigns ahead of the introduction of regulatory oversight

"Florida payday lender Amscot Financial Inc. in the summer of 2016 rounded up about 600,000 letters from customers protesting a regulator’s plan to clamp down on high-interest loans. The letters, many handwritten, were scanned, packed in 131 cartons and shipped to Washington.

The unusual campaign by Amscot was part of a fight between the payday industry and consumer advocates to try to sway the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, which is expected in the coming days to introduce federal oversight of the $38.5 billion industry.

Payday loans are used by an estimated 10 million to 12 million Americans every year, many of whom live paycheck to paycheck. The loans are typically a few hundred dollars and due in two weeks, or on the borrower’s next payday. Their annualized interest rates, which can rise to nearly 400%, have long troubled regulators.

The CFPB rule would supplement a mishmash of state rules. It would likely require lenders to assess borrowers’ ability to repay and make it harder to roll over loans, a lucrative part of the business. The practice, where customers take out new loans to repay old ones, often leads to snowballing fees. Lenders say such requirements would wipe out the market for short-term payday loans."
...
"The CFPB’s payday rule is among a handful of recent regulations that generated millions of comments. In recent years, the Environmental Protection Agency’s rule to curb carbon emissions from power plants drew 4.3 million comments. The “net neutrality” plan governing internet-service providers attracted more than 22 million comments."

Thursday, November 2, 2017

Turkey to toughen laws on surrogacy, which contains "elements of adultery."

Turkey to toughen laws on surrogacy
The URL is more graphic than the headline: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/09/turkey-to-introduce-jail-for-surrogate-mothers.html

"Under the present law, surrogate motherhood is in a gray area. The 282/1 article of the Turkish Civil Code says that the relationship between mother and child is established through birth. This means that surrogate motherhood “has no basis in Turkish law” and that the surrogate mother is the mother. Should a couple try to have a child by a surrogate mother, establishing parenthood becomes a legal muddle. In vitro fertilization, on the other hand, is possible, and there are regulations in the Turkish bylaws about Assisted Reproduction and Infertility Centers, which can be used by married couples only.
If they want to have a child through a surrogate mother, most Turks simply choose to go abroad and come back with a baby, which they have registered under the name of the genetic parents. There are numerous stories about couples who go to Northern Cyprus, Ukraine or Georgia, where surrogacy is legal. Allegedly, the price for the process varies from $40,000 to $70,000. A simple Google search results in a list of websites of companies that advertise surrogate motherhood as part of their services. Turkish media has in the past published some personal stories of women who decided to become surrogate mothers in Northern Cyprus, describing the process and explaining the uneasy choices and decisions.
But the new law, reported by Hurriyet journalist Meltem Ozgenc, aims to fill in the gray area and ban surrogate motherhood altogether, including abroad, by Turkish citizens. It also bans “mediation,” “assistance,” “encouragement” or “advertisement” for surrogacy.
According to information that Al-Monitor has obtained, several provisions will be added to the current Law No. 2238 on the “Harvesting, Storage, Grafting, and Transplantation of Organs and Tissues.” The revision of the law is expected to pass within the scope of one of the upcoming decrees by the power of law — the main ruling mechanism since the government declared a state of emergency in July 2016 after the attempted coup.
The new draft law says: “Having a child or serving as a surrogate mother is banned if the pregnancy is undertaken through the reproductive cells taken from one or both of the partners, or if the embryo acquired from these cells are inseminated into others.”
According to the Hurriyet Daily News, the new draft law prohibits “undertaking a donation procedure to use someone else’s reproductive cells or embryo, as well as to donate, sell, use, stock, transfer, import and export reproductive cells or embryos for this purpose.”
The draft’s last paragraph adds that the penalties foreseen in the law are applicable even if the surrogacy takes place in a country where it is legal.
Besides introducing prison time between two to five years for those involved in surrogate motherhood, the law also clarifies legal eligibility for in vitro fertilization. More precisely, the additions to the existing legislation would confirm that the in vitro fertilization process could be applied if the couple cannot have a child in natural ways and if there is a medical necessity. Yet the procedure would be allowed just for married couples, and it can only be performed in licensed centers and by medical professionals granted authority by the Ministry of Health.
The emphasis on married couples is undoubtedly in line with mainstream Sunni religious interpretations of Islam in Turkey, as the statements by the country’s top religious affairs body have confirmed in the past. In 2015, the High Council’s platform of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet) said that in vitro fertilization between unmarried individuals “offended humane feelings and contained elements of adultery.” At the same time, it was stated that surrogate motherhood is also deemed religiously unacceptable, as it is viewed to contain elements of adultery. This view has been confirmed by some prominent religious figures, including Hayrettin Karaman and renowned televangelists such as Nihat Hatipoglu.
The adultery argument is a common basis for banning surrogacy within Sunni Islam, as the sperm of a man is introduced into the uterus of a woman other than his wife, which is prohibited by verses in the Quran. Other reasons for banning surrogacy, according to Ruaim Muaygil, are “preservation of lineage, exclusion of third parties in reproduction, upholding the rights of the child and protection from the negative effects of surrogacy.” On the other hand, more progressive professionals and scholars such as Muaygil clarify between traditional and gestational surrogacy, and use Islamic law and bioethics alongside medical evidence to show that “surrogacy is not only consistent with Sunni Islamic teachings, but is also both ethically justified and medically necessary.”

Wednesday, November 1, 2017

Callisto: Designing a reporting system for sexual assault


Callisto is an interesting website designed to reduce the under-reporting of sexual assault, and make it easier to identify serial predators. The "Match" option is particularly interesting in this regard.

"Callisto offers students three options:

Record. Survivors can create secure, encrypted, and time-stamped records about their sexual assault. On average, survivors who report begin the process 11 months after experiencing sexual assault. Callisto allows students to immediately preserve evidence on their own terms, at a time, place, and pace that is best for them.

Report. Survivors can electronically send the record they have created to their school. This equips schools with a detailed account of what happened before the student ever meets with them. Reports submitted through Callisto led to more rapid and thorough investigations and reduced the chances for human error.

Match. Survivors can help schools identify repeat offenders using Callisto’s matching function. This option allows survivors to store information about their perpetrator under the precondition that it will only be released to the school if another student names the same perpetrator."
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I can't find much about the use of the service or its impact on outcomes from their very brief annual report, however.

Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Market Design in the Economic Journal: Designing science

Two sections of the October 2017 Feature Issue of the Economic Journal deal with market design.  The second of these, on Designing Auctions, is apparent.  The first, on The Confidence Crisis in Science is less obvious, until you think of the problem of how to conduct open science (peer review, replication, etc.) as a problem in market design.  The first paper linked below lays out this point of view very clearly.
  1. FEATURE: THE CONFIDENCE CRISIS IN SCIENCE

    1. You have free access to this content
      The Research Reproducibility Crisis and Economics of Science (pages F200–F208)
      Zacharias Maniadis and Fabio Tufano
      Version of Record online: 24 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12526
    2. You have free access to this content
    3. You have free access to this content
      The Power of Bias in Economics Research (pages F236–F265)
      John P. A. Ioannidis, T. D. Stanley and Hristos Doucouliagos
      Version of Record online: 24 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12461
    4. You have free access to this content
      Persuasion Bias in Science: Can Economics Help? (pages F266–F304)
      Alfredo Di Tillio, Marco Ottaviani and Peter Norman Sørensen
      Version of Record online: 24 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12515

  2. FEATURE: DESIGNING AUCTIONS

    1. You have full text access to this content
      The German 4G Spectrum Auction: Design and Behaviour (pages F305–F324)
      Peter Cramton and Axel Ockenfels
      Version of Record online: 24 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12406
    2. You have full text access to this content
      Determining the Optimal Length of Regulatory Guarantee: A Length-of-contract Auction (pages F325–F333)
      Thomas Greve and Michael G. Pollitt
      Version of Record online: 24 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12405
    3. You have full text access to this content
      A Practical Guide to the Combinatorial Clock Auction (pages F334–F350)
      Lawrence M. Ausubel and Oleg Baranov
      Version of Record online: 24 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12404
    4. You have full text access to this content
      Auction Format and Auction Sequence in Multi-item Multi-unit Auctions: An Experimental Study (pages F351–F371)
      Regina Betz, Ben Greiner, Sascha Schweitzer and Stefan Seifert
      Version of Record online: 24 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12403
    5. You have full text access to this content
      Pro-competitive Rationing in Multi-unit Auctions (pages F372–F395)
      Pär Holmberg
      Version of Record online: 24 OCT 2017 | DOI: 10.1111/ecoj.12402