Tuesday, April 17, 2018

Market design as a growing part of computer science

I'm encouraged to see this from Northwestern CS:
SPECIAL QUARTER: DATA SCIENCE & ONLINE MARKETS - APRIL 15 TO JUNE 15

"In recent years many aspects of social engagement has shifted to what can be broadly thought of as online markets. These markets; which include eBay, Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, StubHub, Wikipedia, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, etc.; are run by technology companies and are built by teams of software engineers. The science of designing and optimizing these online markets, however, is underdeveloped.  Designing a marketplace that works well is challenging because the behavior of participants in the market place depends on the design of the marketplace. ..."

Monday, April 16, 2018

Safe exchange zones

Marketplaces aren't just tools to bring potential transactors together, they can also seek to make transactions (physically) safe.  Criminals can lurk among Craigslist buyers and sellers, and so there's been a growth of "safe exchange zones".


See e.g. this recent story from New Jersey, where the police department set up a safe exchange zone following a robbery/murder:
"Passaic Mayor Hector Lora says that his town installed the zones inside and outside of the police station after a series of robberies and scams related to online sales.

“The biggest difference that it makes is that it provides a safe area for individuals to make these transactions and be able to make it back home,” Lora says.

“We have 24 hour surveillance, 24 hour staffing, and it's round the clock,” says Deputy Chief Christopher Storzillo.

"Lora says that he hopes that other towns follow suit and add their own safe exchange zones.

"But until other towns have these zones, officials urge anyone who is buying or selling items online to meet in a public, well-lit place and to call authorities if anything seems suspicious."
**************

It turns out that safe exchange zones are a thing, here are some databases to help locate one near you:




Sunday, April 15, 2018

More Backpage (.com) news


From the Washington Post:
Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer pleads guilty in three states, agrees to testify against other website officials
"Carl Ferrer, the chief executive of Backpage.com whose name was conspicuously absent from an indictment of seven other Backpage officials unsealed Monday, has pleaded guilty in state courts in California and Texas and federal court in Arizona to charges of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution. In addition, he agreed to testify against the men who co-founded Backpage with him, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who remained in jail Thursday in Arizona on facilitating prostitution charges.
Backpage, in addition to hosting thinly veiled ads for prostitution since 2004, was accused of hosting child sex trafficking ads on its site and even assisting advertisers in wording their copy so they didn’t overtly declare that sex was for sale, federal investigators allege. In a remarkable three-paragraph admission in his federal plea agreement, Ferrer wrote that “I conspired with other Backpage principals … to find ways to knowingly facilitate the state-law prostitution crimes being committed by Backpage’s customers.
...
"Ferrer’s sudden capitulation launched a wild seven days for Backpage. A day after Ferrer’s first secret plea, the federal government arrested seven of Ferrer’s former colleagues, including Lacey and Larkin, and shut down Backpage’s websites in the U.S. and around the world. ...
"Then on Wednesday, President Trump signed into law “FOSTA,” the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, a bill inspired by the stories of children being prostituted on Backpage..."
**********************
And here's a story from Quartz that follows the work of economists researching the (not all bad) effects of internet marketplaces for prostitution.

Saturday, April 14, 2018

Are financial markets too fast? A discussion of high speed trading (with Eric Budish)




"On this episode of The Big Question, Chicago Booth Review's Hal Weitzman talks with Chicago Booth professor of economics Eric Budish, Chicago Trading Company's Steve Crutchfield, and former Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner Sharon Bowen about how speed affects financial markets and what, if anything, we should do about it."

Eric points out that competition among exchanges has worked well in driving down trading fees, and poorly in selling access--"co-location"--since each exchange has a monopoly on selling speedy access to its data.

Friday, April 13, 2018

Market design conference at Columbia


COLUMBIA MARKET DESIGN CONFERENCE
Friday, April 13, 2018 - Saturday, April 14, 2018

April 13, 2018

8:00-8:25 Breakfast & Registration
8:25-8:30 Introduction by Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia University)
Session 1:
Chair: Guillaume Haeringer (Baruch College)
8:30-9:30  Yusuke Narita (Yale University), “Regression Discontinuity Design Meets Market Design”
10:30-10:45 Coffee Break
Session 2:
Chair: Jay Sethuraman (Columbia University)
10:45-11:45 Ran Shorrer (Penn State University), “Need vs. Merit: The Large Core of College Admissions Markets,” (joint with Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Romm).
12:45-1:45 Lunch
Session 3:
Chair: José Montiel Olea (Columbia University)
1:45-2:45 Mohammad Akbarpour (Stanford University), “Credible Mechanisms,” (joint with Shengwu Li).
2:45-3:45 Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft Research),  “Optimal Data Acquisition for Statistical Estimation,” (joint with Yiling Chen, Brendan Lucier, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Juba Ziani).
3:45-4:00 Coffee Break
Session 4:
Chair: Yash Kanoria (Columbia University)
4:00-5:00 Alfred Galichon (New York University), “A Model of Decentralized Matching without Transfers,” (joint with Yu-Wei Hsieh).
5:00-6:00 Josh Mollner (Northwestern University), “Lottery Equilibrium,” (joint with Glen Weyl).
6:30 Dinner (off campus)

April 14, 2018

8:00-8:30 Breakfast & Registration
Session 1: 
Chair: Xiaosheng Mu (Harvard University)
8:30-9:30 Juan Carlos Carbajal (University of New South Wales), “Selling Mechanisms for a Financially Constrained Buyer,” (joint with Ahuva Mu’alem).
9:30-10:30 Ben Brooks (University of Chicago) “Optimal Auction Design with Common Values: An Informationally Robust Approach,” (joint with Songzi Du).
10:30-10:45 Coffee Break
Session 2:
Chair: Qingmin Liu (Columbia University)
10:45-11:45 Philipp Strack (Berkeley),  “A Theory of Auctions with Endogenous Valuations,” (joint with Alex Gershkov, Benny Moldovanu).
11:45-12:45 Jacob Leshno (Columbia University),  “Monopoly without a Monopolist: An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin Payment System,” (joint with Gur Huberman, Ciamac C. Moallemi).

Thursday, April 12, 2018

Re-transplanting an organ that survives its recipient

From UCLA (where Dr. Jeff Veale is innovating):
‘Re-gifting’ of previously transplanted kidneys extends life for new recipients
Approach could help people who might not otherwise receive a transplant

"Typically, previously transplanted kidneys are lost to future use when the first recipient dies. But Dr. Jeffrey Veale, a transplant surgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who has performed the rare surgery three times, maintains that re-donating previously transplanted kidneys should become standard practice.
...
"Veale sums up the re-gift this way: One kidney helped three people live.

“In the United States about 25 percent of those who receive a donated kidney die while their kidney transplant is still functional,” said Veale, director of the UCLA Kidney Exchange Program. “Re-gifting that viable organ to another patient on the waiting list gives new hope to patients who otherwise may not be considered for a transplant.”

With a re-gifted kidney, people who had been reliant on dialysis for years could live normal lives, spending time with their loved ones, traveling or doing anything else that people who aren’t on dialysis may take for granted.

Each year in the U.S., less than 20 percent of patients on the United Network for Organ Sharing kidney transplant waiting list will receive a transplant, and 13 people on that list die each day. If transplanting kidneys a second time were standard practice, it would open up a currently unutilized pool of donors."


Wednesday, April 11, 2018

Backpage.com, seized by the FBI and indicted by the Department of Justice

The latest development in the legal battle of Backpage.com, an online marketplace for sex and, apparently, trafficking in women and children, has resulted in the closing of the site.

On April 6 2018 the content of the site was replaced with a notice beginning “backpage.com and affiliated websites have been seized as part of an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, with analytical assistance from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center.” 
The accompanying indictment (https://www.justice.gov/file/1050276/download )suggests that the proprietors of Backpage.com may have helped write the site’s content, and thus not be protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act. 

In a parallel development, in March (of 2018) the Senate passed (by a vote of 97 to 2) and forwarded to the President for signature the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017, as previously passed by the House of Representatives. It amends the Communications Act of 1934, “to  clarify  that  section  230  of  such  Act  does  not  prohibit  the  enforcement  against providers and users of interactive computer services of Federal and State criminal and civil law relating to sexual exploitation of  children  or  sex  trafficking…” https://www.congress.gov/115/crpt/hrpt572/CRPT-115hrpt572-pt1.pdf .  

Tuesday, April 10, 2018

Vanderbilt market design conference

Vandebilt hosted a market design conference this past weekend:
Vanderbilt Market Design Conference April 7-8, 2018

Saturday, April 7
Opening Remarks 8:15-8:30 am. John Weymark (Vanderbilt University)
Session 1 8:30 - 10:00 am. Chair: Myrna Wooders (Vanderbilt University)
Coffee Break 10:00 - 10:20 am
Session 2 10:20 - 11:50 am. Chair: Greg Leo (Vanderbilt University)
Lunch 11:50 am - 1:10 pm
Session 3 1:10 - 3:25 pm. Chair: Eun Jeong Heo (Vanderbilt University)
Coffee Break 3:25 - 3:45 pm
Session 4 3:45 - 5:15 pm. Chair: Antonio Nicolo (University of Padova and University of Manchester)

Sunday, April 8
Session 5 8:30 - 10:00 am. Chair: Olivier Tercieux (Paris School of Economics)
Coffee Break 10:00 - 10:20 am
Session 6 10:20 - 11:50 am. Chair: Tommy Andersson (Lund University)
  • "Fair Matching under Constraints," Yuichiro Kamada (University of California, Berkeley) and Fuhito Kojima* (Stanford University)
  • "Effcient and Incentive-Compatible Liver Exchange," Haluk Ergin (University of California, Berkeley), Tayfun Sonmez (Boston College), and M. Utku Unver* (Boston College)

Monday, April 9, 2018

Does binding early admissions violate antitrust laws?

The DOJ seems to be looking into early decision in college admissions. Inside Higher Ed has the story, which makes it sound as if the investigation is focused on whether colleges (still) announce their early-decision admissions to their competitors, who then refrain from admitting those students.

Justice Department Investigates Early-Decision Admissions

"The Justice Department has started an investigation into whether some colleges' early-decision admissions programs violate federal antitrust laws through agreements among institutions or through the sharing of information about accepted applicants.
...
"The Justice Department letter does not detail what agreement or practices are being investigated. But the letter gives some indication, by outlining the documents that colleges are being required to maintain. These are:

"Agreements, both formal and informal, to exchange or otherwise disclose the identities of accepted students with persons at other colleges or universities.
Communications with persons at other colleges or universities relating to the transmission of identities of accepted students, including the justifications for such transmission.
Internal documents relating to the transmission of identities of accepted students to or from persons at other colleges or universities.
Communications in which identities of accepted students are sent to or received from persons at other colleges or universities.
Communications with persons at any other college or university relating to any student accepted at the college or university.
Records of actions taken or decisions made based in whole or part on information received from another college or university about the identities of accepted students.
Admissions records of any individual identified in any transmission as accepted by another college or university, including applications from, internal analyses of, and communications with the applicant."

Sunday, April 8, 2018

Update on Martin Van Buren high school in NYC

One goal of the school choice program in NYC is to allow students to avoid failing schools, to which no one can be assigned unless they specifically include it on their preference list.  The idea is that these schools will become smaller, which might allow them to be fixed.  This is what has happened with Martin Van Buren High School (named after the 8th President of the U.S.):

Martin Van Buren High School is off receivership, in “good standing:” elected officials
"The state Department of Education made the announcement that Van Buren High was also in good academic standing and would be removed from the Priority School List, which gives schools three years to improve in English Language Arts and mathematics. The state also requires schools to have a 60 percent graduation rate.

"From 2014-2015 Van Buren’s graduation rate was 55 percent, but as of the 2016-2017 school year, it had risen to 67 percent."
***********

See my previous posts on Van Buren HS:

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Saturday, April 7, 2018

School choice in Chicago and in D.C.

Here's some news about the new school choice system in Chicago.
Here's the press release from Chicago Public Schools:
Overwhelming Majority of CPS Students Receive Offers to Preferred School Choices Through GoCPS High School Application Process 
81 Percent of Students Will Receive Their First, Second or Third Choice; More Than 26,909 Incoming Freshmen Participated in GoCPS

And here's some background information from GoCPS
Round 1 high school offers were officially released to 8th grade students and families by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) this afternoon via the new single application system—GoCPS.

Last spring, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously in favor of moving to a single application for all public high schools in the district. The decision was a historic shift that solved a major pain point for families and students who, until now, had to navigate more than 290 schools and program options.

New Schools for Chicago and Kids First Chicago have worked diligently alongside community partners, schools, students, parents, and district leaders to ensure successful implementation in the first year of GoCPS. Together with CPS, we are excited to highlight some results of the Round 1 application period:
  • 93% of 8th graders successfully submitted applications to high school through the new GoCPS system.
  • 92% of students who applied were matched to a school.
  • 81% of students were matched to one of their top 3 choices.
Compared to other urban districts, these participation and match results in GoCPS’s first year are exceptional. For example, Denver Public Schools uses a similar system and their highest participation rate is 84% after many years of implementation.

With the right support and plan for continued improvement, Chicago could emerge as the leader not only in universal enrollment, but also in the adoption of modern systems and processes to better serve large, complex student populations.


OUR WORK TO SUPPORT CHILDREN, FAMILIES & THE DISTRICT
  • Free enrollment support to families, communities, and schools via our Kids First Chicagoinitiative. 
  • Ongoing parent focus groups on the GoCPS application process. Working in partnership with CPS, we have polled parents at each stage of the new enrollment process to gain insightful user feedback. 
  • Work directly with the district in creating and distributing clearer and more effective information on school quality for parents and students as they prepare to apply to and accept their school options.
***********
Here's a story from D.C. that highlights that even a good school choice enrollment system doesn't create enough good schools to accommodate all the children, so that until we have enough good schools, school choice will be "playing the lottery" for some families. (But a good system allocates places more efficiently...)
The D.C. lottery is intended to give all kids a fair shot at a top school. But does it?

"Before the District implemented a lottery system using a single application in 2014, parents had to keep track of about 30 lottery deadlines and applications. Charter schools operated their own lotteries, and the traditional public school system ran separate lotteries for lower and upper grades. Chaos ensued. Parents often had to go to each school to submit a lottery application.

Adding to the confusion, charter schools informed parents of the lottery results at different times, which resulted in parents enrolling their children in the first school they heard back from and then, when they received a slot at a more desirable campus, enrolling them there, too.

When Scott Pearson took over the D.C. Public Charter School Board in 2012, he met with Kaya Henderson, who was chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, and they pushed for a unified lottery system. Denver, New Orleans and New York had already streamlined the process, so the technology and precedent were there.

By spring 2014, My School DC was ready for use. Schools aren’t required to enlist in the common lottery, and Pearson said it wasn’t an easy sell.

He worked on convincing the big charter networks, including KIPP and Democracy Prep, to participate, and most other schools followed.

“We had a target customer in mind, and it was a single mom living east of the river who was unbelievably burdened and often locked out of the ability to participate in school choice,” Pearson said.

The engineering behind My School DC is based on the algorithm that earned the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for formulas that matched thousands of medical residents with hospitals, kidney donors with recipients and New York students with high schools.

Neil Dorosin, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which develops lottery algorithms, said parents can’t cheat the system, and schools can’t sift through applicants to choose who they want.

Software assigns participants a number that sticks with them until they are matched with a school. Children then get to enroll in that school while remaining on the wait list for any school that a family ranked higher but did not get into.

“All the algorithm is doing is just implementing what that city’s rules are,” Dorosin said. “If you are looking for unfairness, it is not in the algorithm.”

"

Friday, April 6, 2018

Market Design: Public lecture at Reed College

I'll speak today at Reed College in Portland OR:

Matching Markets and Market Design

Markets and marketplaces, which are ancient human artifacts and ubiquitous modern ones, come in many varieties. Roth will speak about some unusual marketplaces he's helped design, including the National Resident Matching program through which most American doctors get their first jobs, school choice, and kidney exchange.

Alvin Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor Emeritus of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard. Roth shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. His work is in game theory, experimental economics, and market design.

Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the economics department.
 Friday, April 6 at 4:15pm

Thursday, April 5, 2018

Cursing sex traffickers in Nigeria

In some religious traditions, curses are performative, i.e. performing a curse is thought to have consequences for those cursed.  In Nigeria, a traditional leader is applying this to public policy.

The NY Times has the story:
A Voodoo Curse on Human Traffickers

"On March 9, Oba Ewuare II, the traditional ruler of the kingdom of Benin, in southern Nigeria, put a voodoo curse on anyone who abets illegal migration within his domain. At the same time, he revoked the curses that leave victims of trafficking afraid that their relatives will die if they go to the police or fail to pay off their debt.

"Before being smuggled into Europe, women and girls in the area, which falls in present-day Edo State, are made to sign a contract with the traffickers who finance their journey, promising to pay them thousands of dollars. The agreement is sealed with a voodoo, or juju, ritual, conducted by a spiritual priest, known here as a native doctor.
...
"Edo is not one of Nigeria’s poorest states. But in the early 1980s women there started traveling to Italy to trade in gold and beads, and “saw a thriving market in prostitution,” said Kokunre Agbontaen-Eghafona, a professor at the University of Benin and a researcher for the International Organization for Migration. She believes this “founders factor” is the main reason Edo has become such a center of human trafficking."

Wednesday, April 4, 2018

Universidade de São Paulo celebrates Marilda Sotomayor

Marilda Sotomayor

Especialista fala de trajetória na Teoria dos Jogos e “Matchings”

Em evento da série “USP Lectures”, Marilda Sotomayor falou de Teoria dos Jogos, suas experiências e contato com laureados do Nobel
[G.translate: Specialist talks about trajectory in Game Theory and "Matchings"
In an event of the "USP Lectures" series, Marilda Sotomayor spoke about Game Theory, her experiences and contact with Nobel laureates]

Tuesday, April 3, 2018

Bob Wilson, Paul Milgrom and Dave Kreps on the future (and past) of Economics

An interview at Stanford GSB with three of the greatest game theorists. You can read it at this link:
The Future of Economics
Three award-winning economists talk about where the field has been and where it’s heading.

Monday, April 2, 2018

Dutch marijuana: where a legal market must purchase from an illegal black market

 The Dutch (legal) market for marijuana seems as confused as the legal American markets in (now) 30 states, but in different ways.
The NY Times has the story:
Solving the Dutch Pot Paradox: Legal to Buy, but Not to Grow
By CHRISTOPHER F. SCHUETZE

"While licensed coffee shops have the right to sell small amounts of recreational cannabis and hash to buyers older than 18, they have to rely on the black market to acquire their wares in bulk.

Right now, you are allowed to buy the milk, but you can’t know anything about the cow,”...
...
"Last month, the national police union, Politie Bond, released a stinging report warning of the growth of organized crime in the country, fueled by the drug trade.

“The Netherlands fulfills many characteristics of a narco-state. Detectives see a parallel economy emerging,” the report stated, noting that while crime over all had decreased, those producing and trafficking drugs were becoming ever more sophisticated.
*********

The situation in the U.S. is at least as conflicted.  After a long history as a popular illegal drug, thirty states and Washington D.C. have legalized marijuana in some forms and for at least some uses. But marijuana is still a banned Schedule I drug under Federal law, even though marijuana (spelled “Marihuana” in Schedule I) seems no longer to fit the legal definition of a Schedule I drug.
(See Title 21 Code of Federal Regulations, Part 1308 — Schedules Of Controlled Substances, https://www.deadiversion.usdoj.gov/21cfr/cfr/2108cfrt.htm )


See, earlier,

Saturday, December 9, 2017

Saturday, March 31, 2018

Science in society at the Exploratorium (video of a panel discussion)

In late February I took part in a panel discussion about Science in Society, at the Exploratorium. Below is a photo, and the video of the discussion (about half an hour--the introductions go 'til 8:50, and the panel starts then).

On stage: Moira Gunn, Saul Perlmutter, Elizabeth Blackburn, Alvin Roth, Brian Kobilka



Friday, March 30, 2018

Kidney dialysis on the California Ballot?

An Orange County Register op-ed discusses a likely referendum to control dialysis costs, and some better proposals...

How to help the 18,000 Californians who need kidney transplants
By KURT SCHULER and MARC JOFFE

"The Kidney Dialysis Patient Protection Act, which is likely to appear on the state’s November ballot, is a well-intentioned but inefficient way for California voters to help dialysis patients.  The initiative would try to restrain kidneMy dialysis costs by limiting the profit margins of dialysis corporations to 15 percent. The group has collected more than 450,000 signatures to put the initiative on the ballot and will soon submit them to election officials. A much better policy option, however, is to encourage more kidney donations, which save lives and get patients off dialysis once and for all..."

"Kurt Schuler, a kidney donor, lives in Virginia and belongs to the Organ Reform Group and Network. Marc Joffe is a senior policy analyst at Reason Foundation."


HT: Frank McCormick

Thursday, March 29, 2018

Early admissions to competitive colleges

The WSJ updates us on early admissions (they continue to be a big deal):
 The Decision That Hurts Your Chances of Getting Into Harvard
Dartmouth College expects early-decision admits to make up nearly half its first-year class in the fall



"The admission rate for early-round candidates, who typically learn their fates in December, is often two or three times that of regular applicants. Harvard last year admitted 14.5% of early-action applicants and about 3.3% of regular-decision applicants. At Yale, those rates were 17.1% and 5%, respectively. Many institutions fill 40% or more of their incoming classes with early applicants.

"Dartmouth College expects students admitted through its early-decision process to make up nearly half its first-year class next fall. The school received 2,270 early applications, compared with roughly 20,000 in the regular cycle. Early-decision applicants make up 53% of Northwestern University’s current freshman class, and just over half at Vanderbilt University."
**********
And here's the view from Harvard:
Record-Low 4.59 Percent of Applicants Accepted to Harvard Class of 2022
"The College notified 998 students of their acceptance in the regular decision cycle at around 7 p.m. Wednesday afternoon. These accepted students make up 2.43 percent of the total 36,119 regular decision applicants, plus the 4,882 students deferred in the early action process. The accepted regular decision students join 964 students who were offered admission through Harvard’s early action process in December."
***************

Update: the Stanford story...
University admission rate drops to 4.3 percent for Class of 2022
"Stanford announced on Friday the admission of 1,290 students to the Class of 2022. These students, joined by the 750 who were accepted under the restrictive early action program in December, make up a total of 2,040 total students admitted to the incoming class."