Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Game Theory and Applications in Lisbon, October 25-27, 2018

The Lisbon Meetings in Game Theory and Applications #10. The Anniversary Edition​. October 25-27, 2018

The program is here.

I'll be speaking at noon on Friday, with a working title of
Game theory in a large world:  Market design, and the example of kidney exchange

The announcement says:
"The UECE Lisbon Meetings in Game Theory and Applications are an annual event that brings together leading scholars doing theoretical or applied research in the field of game theory.

The first edition of the conference took place in 2009 and throughout the years it has become a reference event in the field, attracting renowned academics from all over the world.

In the tenth edition of the Lisbon Meetings, we are pleased to announce four keynote lectures  by

Prof. Itzhak Gilboa (HEC, Paris-Saclay, and Tel-Aviv University)
Prof. Itay Goldstein (University of Pennsylvania)
Prof. Alvin E. Roth (Stanford University)
Prof. Larry Samuelson (Yale University)

Prof. Gilboa will present the annual lecture in honor of the preeminent game theorist Jean-François Mertens

The organizing Committee

Filomena Garcia (Indiana University, ISEG/UECE)
Luca David Opromolla (Banco de Portugal, UECE)
Joana Pais (ISEG, UECE)
Joana Resende (CE-FUP, University of Porto)"


I also plan to give a short talk at a ceremony this evening,  about markets and market design along the lines of my book Who Gets What and Why (which was translated into Portugese as Como Funcionam Os Mercados }.


Here's a news story:
Teoria dos Jogos revoluciona ciência, economia e vida em sociedade
Prémio Nobel Alvin E. Roth cruza Teoria dos Jogos e transplante de rins

Tuesday, October 23, 2018

Ethics and Welfare Conference at Penn, Oct 26-7

This conference will be the third in a series. The first was funded by the Becker-Friedman Institute at the University of Chicago in 2014, and the second was at the Harvard Business School.  Videos and papers from the previous conferences can be found at https://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/normative-ethics-and-welfare-economics and https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/conferences/2016-newe/Pages/schedule.aspx

"This conference is divided into seven main sessions, each devoted to a different normative question. In each session, both economic and philosophical perspectives will be presented, and ample time will be provided for audience discussion. The conference will close with a distinguished panel of economists and philosophers, who will discuss the themes raised by the conference."

Here's the program:

Friday, October 26, 2018
8:15-8:45      Breakfast

8:45-9:00      Opening Remarks

Benjamin Lockwood, University of Pennsylvania
Itai Sher, University of Massachusetts Amherst
9:00-10:30      Session 1: Ethics and Economics of Climate Change

Dale Jamieson, New York University
Christian Traeger, University of Oslo
Discussant: Arthur Van Benthem, University of Pennsylvania
10:30-11:00      Break

11:00-12:30      Session 2: Normative Uncertainty and Normative Diversity

Stefan Riedener, University of Zurich (Paper)
Itai Sher, University of Massachusetts Amherst (Paper)
Discussant: Christian Tarsney, University of Groningen
12:30-2:00      Lunch

2:00-3:30      Session 3: Preferences for Redistribution and Moral Psychology

Raymond Fisman, Boston University (Paper)
Fiery Cushman, Harvard University (Paper)
Discussant: Geoffrey Goodwin, University of Pennsylvania
3:30-4:00      Break

4:00-5:30      Session 4: Poverty, Inequality, and Health

Martin Ravallion, Georgetown University (Paper)
Jennifer Prah Ruger, University of Pennsylvania (Paper)
Discussant: Mark Pauly, University of Pennsylvania
5:30-6:30      Break

6:30-9:00      Conference Dinner (for speakers and discussants)

Saturday, October 27, 2018.
8:30-9:00      Breakfast

9:00-10:30      Session 5: Behavioral Welfare Economics and Paternalism

Benjamin Lockwood, University of Pennsylvania (Paper)
Erik Angner, Stockholm University
Discussant: Douglas Mackay, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
10:30-11:00      Break

11:00-12:30      Session 6: Algorithms, Data and the Public Good

Rakesh Vohra, University of Pennsylvania (Paper)
Helen Nissenbaum, Cornell University
Discussant: Daniel Singer, University of Pennsylvania
12:30-1:30      Lunch

1:30-3:00      Session 7: Happiness and Social Welfare

Kristen Cooper, Gordon College
Dan Haybron, Saint Louis University (Paper)
Discussant: Alex Rees-Jones, University of Pennsylvania
3:00-3:30      Break

3:30-5:00      Closing Panel

Ruth Chang, Rutgers University
Joel Sobel, University of California, San Diego
John Broome, University of Oxford
Steven Sheffrin, Tulane University
Moderator: Amy Sepinwall, University of Pennsylvania

Monday, October 22, 2018

Axel Ockenfels on Economic Engineering: Public Lecture in NYC tomorrow, Oct 23

Axel Ockenfels will be speaking in New York City tomorrow...

A LEIBNIZ LECTURE:
ECONOMIC ENGINEERING OF HUMAN COOPERATION AND COMPETITION

"What do climate change, shortage of organ donors, and traffic congestion have in common? They can all be addressed with behavioral economics. Join us for a lecture by Leibniz Prize recipient Professor Axel Ockenfels.

"Many economic and societal challenges can only be addressed with a change in human behavior. Market design can offer solutions because market rules affect our behavior in predictable ways. Traffic jams, for example, cost time, money and impact our health, while recent advances in technology would allow for the design of new markets for road use that promote cooperation and prevent congestion. Climate change is fundamentally a problem of insufficient cooperation that can be addressed if recognized as such and acted on accordingly in international climate negotiations.

"In his lecture, Professor Ockenfels will show how market rules can be engineered to promote cooperation and trust even in large communities and to encourage competition in small markets. Professor Ockenfels’ focus will be on human behavior in markets, which responds to market rules, but rarely in a fully rational way. He will show how market design can take on real-world challenges."

October 23 2018 | 06:30 PM until 08:00 PM

German House, 871 United Nations Plaza, New York, NY 10017,
Organizer: German Center for Research and Innovation (DWIH NY)

Market design to reduce inequality

The closing talk at the NBER market design conference was delivered by Scott Kominers, on the general theme that we may not care for fully competitive markets (and might prefer some use of price controls and rationing) for markets involving e.g. sellers who are relatively poor compared to buyers, since competition can exacerbate wealth inequality:

Redistribution through Markets
Piotr Dworczak, Scott Duke Kominers, Mohammad Akbarpour


Abstract: When macroeconomic tools fail to respond to wealth inequality optimally, regulators can still seek to mitigate inequality within individual markets. A social planner with distributional preferences might distort allocative efficiency to achieve a more desirable split of surplus, for example, by setting higher prices when sellers are poor -- effectively, using the market as a redistributive tool.

In this paper, we seek to understand how to design goods markets optimally in the presence of inequality. Using a mechanism design approach, we uncover the constrained Pareto frontier by identifying the optimal trade-off between allocative efficiency and redistribution in a setting where the second welfare theorem fails because of private information and participation constraints. We find that competitive equilibrium allocation is not always optimal. Instead, when there is substantial inequality across sides of the market, the optimal design uses a tax-like mechanism, introducing a wedge between the buyer and seller prices, and redistributing the resulting surplus to the poorer side of the market via lump-sum payments. When there is significant within-side inequality, meanwhile, it may be optimal to impose price controls even though doing so induces rationing.


Sunday, October 21, 2018

Matching with complex constraints

At the NBER market design conference yesterday, Fuhito Kojima spoke about his paper with Yuchiro Kamada on matching with 'upper bound' constraints of the kind that occur in matching children to day care in Japan.

Here's the paper:

FAIR MATCHING UNDER CONSTRAINTS: THEORY AND
APPLICATIONS by YUICHIRO KAMADA AND FUHITO KOJIMA

Abstract. This paper studies a general model of matching with constraints. Observing that a stable matching typically does not exist, we focus on feasible, individually rational, and fair matchings. We characterize such matchings by fixed points of a certain function. Building on this result, we characterize the class of constraints on individual schools under which there exists a student-optimal fair matching (SOFM), the matching that is the most preferred by every student among those satisfying the three desirable properties. We study the numerical relevance of our theory using data on governmentorganized
daycare allocation.

Saturday, October 20, 2018

Centralized Admissions for Engineering Colleges in India

Yesterday I had the opportunity to hear Yash Kanoria discuss the implementation and operation of a centralized college admissions system for engineering colleges in India.  It replaces a semi-centralized process that left some seats unfilled (when IIT and non-IIT seats were allocated to the same people).

There are some novel constraints that have to be satisfied, some of which can theoretically present intractable problems, but in practice they don't.

An appendix on history and background is a quick education in Indian education.

Below is a link to the paper, which seems to be a fine example of market design as economic engineering, which solved some important problems and has now operated successfully for several years. There are also problems (e.g. concerning vacancies in non-IITs) left to solve...:

Centralized Admissions for Engineering Colleges in India
by Surender Baswana, Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, Sharat Chandran, Yashodhan Kanoria, Utkarsh Patange

Abstract We designed and implemented a new joint seat allocation process for undergraduate admissions to over 500 programs spread across 80 technical universities in India, including the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology (IITs). Our process is based on the well known Deferred Acceptance algorithm, but complex affirmative action seat reservations led us to make a number of algorithmic innovations, including (i) a carefully constructed heuristic for incorporating non-nested common quotas that span multiple programs, (ii) a method to utilize unfilled reserved seats with no modifications to the core software, and (iii) a robust approach to reduce variability in the number of reserved category candidates admitted, while retaining fairness. Our new seat allocation process went live in 2015, and based on its success, including significant and provable reduction in vacancies, it has remained in successful use since, with continuing improvements.


Friday, October 19, 2018

NBER Market Design Conference at Stanford, October 19-20

Here's the program and participant list:

Friday, October 19
8:30 am
Continental Breakfast
9:00 am
Olivier Terceiux, Top Trading Cycles in Prioritized Markets, a synthesis of:
Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University
Olivier Tercieux, Paris School of Economics
Top Trading Cycles in Prioritized Matching: An Irrelevance of Priorities in Large Markets
Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University and NBER
Yeon-Koo Che, Columbia University
Parag A. Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University and NBER
Olivier Tercieux, Paris School of Economics
Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans’ OneApp
9:45 am
Surender Baswana, IIT Kanpur
Partha Pratim Chakrabarti, IIT Kharagpur
Sharat Chandran, IIT Bombay
Yash Kanoria, Columbia University
Utkarsh Patange, Columbia University
Centralized Admissions for Engineering Colleges in India
10:30 am
Break
11:00 am
Onur Kesten, Carnegie Mellon University
Selcuk Ozyurt, Sabanci University
Efficient and Incentive Compatible Mediation: An Ordinal Market Design Approach
11:45 am
Dirk Bergemann, Yale University
Benjamin A. Brooks, University of Chicago
Stephen Morris, Princeton University
Revenue Guarantee Equivalence
12:30 pm
Lunch Talk
Michael Schwarz, Microsoft
Market Design, Reputation Systems, UX, and the Cost of User Time
2:00 pm
Xiao Liu, Tsinghua University
Zhixi Wan, Didi Chuxing Technology Co.
Chenyu Yang, University of Rochester
The Efficiency of A Dynamic Decentralized Two-Sided Matching Market
2:45 pm
Hongyao Ma, Harvard University
Fei Fang, Carnegie Mellon University
David Parkes, Harvard University
Spatio-Temporal Pricing for Ridesharing Platforms
3:30 pm
Break
4:00 pm
Mohammad Akbarpour, Stanford University
Farshad Fatemi, Sharif University of Technology
Negar Matoorian, Stanford University
A Monetary Market for Kidneys
4:45 pm
Alvin E. Roth, Stanford University and NBER
Recent Developments in Kidney Exchange: Market Design in a Large World
5:30 pm
Adjourn
6:30 pm
Dinner
Joya Restaurant
339 University Avenue
Palo Alto, CA
Saturday, October 20
8:30 am
Continental Breakfast
9:00 am
Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University and NBER
Joshua Angrist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Yusuke Narita, Yale University
Parag A. Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Impact Evaluation in Matching Markets with General Tie-Breaking
9:45 am
Yuichiro Kamada, Harvard University
Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University
Fair Matching under Constraints: Theory and Applications (slides)
10:30 am
Break
11:00 am
Tamas Fleiner, Budapest University of Technology and Economics
Ravi Jagadeesan, Harvard University
Zsuzsanna Jankó, Corvinus University
Alexander Teytelboym, University of Oxford
Trading Networks with Frictions
11:45 am
Piotr Dworczak, Northwestern University
Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard University
Mohammad Akbarpour, Stanford University
Redistribution through Markets
12:30 pm
Adjourn  


Participant List
Atila Abdulkadiroglu Duke University and NBER
Nikhil Agarwal Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Mohammad Akbarpour Stanford University
Nick Arnosti Columbia University
Susan Athey Stanford University and NBER
Lawrence Ausubel University of Maryland
Moshe Babaioff Microsoft Research
Aaron L. Bodoh-Creed University of California at Berkeley
Eric Budish University of Chicago and NBER
Jeremy I. Bulow Stanford University and NBER
Gabriel Carroll Stanford University
Yeon-Koo Che Columbia University
Laura Doval California Institute of Technology
Jeremy T. Fox Rice University and NBER
Guillaume Haeringer Baruch College
Jonathan Hall Uber Technologies
John W. Hatfield University of Texas, Austin
Yinghua He Rice University
Ravi Jagadeesan Harvard University
Yuichiro Kamada Harvard University
Yash Kanoria Columbia University
Adam Kapor Princeton University and NBER
Jakub Kastl Princeton University and NBER
Onur Kesten Carnegie Mellon University
Fuhito Kojima Stanford University
Scott Duke Kominers Harvard University
Nicolas S. Lambert Stanford University
Shengwu Li Harvard University
Shuya Li Carnegie Mellon University
Hongyao Ma Harvard University
Mohammad Mahdian Google Research
Negar Matoorian Stanford University
Stephen Morris Princeton University
Yusuke Narita Yale University
Hamid Nazerzadeh University of Southern California
Afshin Nikzad Stanford University
Michael Ostrovsky Stanford University and NBER
Selcuk Ozyurt Sabanci University
Utkarsh Patange Columbia University
Parag A. Pathak Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Ali O. Polat Carnegie Mellon University
Daniel Quint University of Wisconsin
David H. Reiley Jr. Pandora Media, Inc
Alvin E. Roth Stanford University and NBER
Daniela Saban Stanford University
Michael Schwarz Microsoft
Ilya Segal Stanford University
Sven Seuken University of Zurich
Kane Sweeney eBay Research Labs
Steven Tadelis University of California at Berkeley and NBER
Olivier Tercieux Paris School of Economics
Zhixi Wan Didi Chuxing Technology Co.
Robert Wilson Stanford University
Xingye Wu Tsinghua University
Chenyu Yang University of Rochester
Haoxiang Zhu Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER

Thursday, October 18, 2018

Cannabis in Canada--legal since yesterday

Here's yesterday's headline in The Globe and Mail:
Green dawn: The first day of cannabis legalization in Canada, from coast to coast

"From St. John’s to Vancouver, from Southern Ontario to the Far North, Canada’s nearly century-old prohibition on recreational cannabis lifted on Wednesday – and in Ottawa, the federal government is expected to announce how those convicted of possession under the old laws will be able to apply for pardons.

"Not everyone who wants to smoke up on the first day will be able to: Relatively few bricks-and-mortar stores are open, and in Ontario, the most populous province, online retail is the only option until physical stores get the go-ahead next year. Retailers are warning of shortages in the first few weeks, and at the production end, suppliers face formidable obstacles to catch up with expected demand."

Here's the story in the WSJ:
Cannabis is now legal in Canada, but pot companies expect a rocky start

"After nearly a century of prohibition, Canada became only the second country in the world, and the only member of the G-7, to legalize the drug for recreational use. Marijuana is officially legal in Canada.
...
"With little history or precedent for Canada to follow, the early months of recreational cannabis sales face ambitious timelines set by the governing party, a different set of laws in each of the country’s 10 provinces, and potential supply shortages as Canada’s federally licensed producers expand production.
...
"There are also a shortage of retail locations. In the country’s most populous province, Ontario, there are no bricks-and-mortar stores open on Wednesday, and won’t be for months. After a new government took power in a recent election, Ontario opted to sell pot online via a government-run store and allow private companies to open up stores on the ground. In Quebec, the second most populous province, there will only be a handful of stores around the two major cities, Montreal and Quebec City."

Wednesday, October 17, 2018

The FATE of technology at Penn, today

Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics are topics on which economics and computer science intersect each other , and some other fields as well:

The “FATE” of Technology: Fairness, Accountability, Transparency and Ethics

October 17, 2018 | Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology
Wednesday, October 17th, 2018
Glandt Forum, Singh Center for Nanotechnology
Celebrating Five Years of the Warren Center
Reception to follow

1:00 pm: Welcome and brief remarks
Michael Kearns, Professor and National Center Chair of Computer and Information Science
Rakesh VohraGeorge A. Weiss and Lydia Bravo Weiss University Professor
1:10 pm: Aaron Roth, Class of 1940 Bicentennial Term Associate Professor of Computer and Information Science
“Ethical Algorithms”
1:30 pm: Annie LiangAssistant Professor of Economics
“Predicting and Understanding Human Behaviors through Machine Learning”
1:50 pm: Sandra González-BailónAssociate Professor at the Annenberg School for Communication
“Digital Technologies and Access to News”
2:15 pm: Break
2:30 pm: Panel with members of the Warren Center
Emily Falk, Associate Professor of Communication, Psychology, and Marketing
Junhyong Kim, Patricia M. Williams Term Professor of Biology
Konrad Kording, Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor of Neuroscience and Bioengineering
3:00 pm: Keynote: Matthew SalganikProfessor of Sociology, Princeton University
“The Fragile Families Challenge”
4:00 pm: Michael Kearns, Professor and National Center Chair of Computer and Information Science
“The AlgoWatch Initiative”
4:30 pm: Concluding remarks by Vijay Kumar, Nemirovsky Family Dean

Tuesday, October 16, 2018

Kim Krawiec on Repugnant Markets

One of my favorite scholars on one of my favorite subjects:


"In this episode, Kimberly D. Krawiec, Kathrine Robinson Everett Professor of Law at Duke University School of Law, discusses her scholarship on "repugnant markets" or "taboo trades," including prostitution and kidneys. Listeners might be interested in her papers "If We Pay Football Players, Why Not Kidney Donors?"; "If We Allow Football Players and Boxers to Be Paid for Entertaining the Public, Why Don't We Allow Kidney Donors to Be Paid for Saving Lives?"; "Repugnance Management and Transactions in the Body"; "Organ Entrepreneurs"; and "Contract Development in a Matching Market: The Case of Kidney Exchange." Of course, there are many more excellent papers on her SSRN page."

On her own blog linking to the podcast, Kim also included links to the following papers:

Monday, October 15, 2018

Quartz writes about Uber and other tech firms that hire economists

Here's the story, which prominently features Uber's Jonathan Hall:

Uber’s secret weapon is its team of economists
By Alison Griswold, October 14, 2018

"Uber is so fond of economists that it employs more than a dozen PhDs from top programs at its San Francisco headquarters. The group acts as an in-house think tank for Uber, gathering facts from quants and data scientists and synthesizing them to arm the lobbyists and policy folks who fight some of Uber’s biggest battles. Officially, this team is known as “Research and Economics.” Internally, it’s also been called Ubernomics.
...
"The Krueger paper was the launch pad Ubernomics needed. Over the next few years, the company landed unpaid collaborations with academics at top US universities, including MIT, NYU, and Yale. Hall started to receive dozens of requests a week from academics about working with Uber’s data. Earlier this year, Richard Thaler, winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, approached Uber about a possible collaboration. Uber turned him down."

Sunday, October 14, 2018

Joshua Gans on blockchains, teams, and the startup (Covee) that wants to combine them

From Joshua Gans, who is one of the most thoughtful commentators on matters digital:

Can the blockchain make teams work?

"For context, here is the problem Covee are trying to solve. When you have teams of knowledge workers who need to come together for a project, we rely on businesses to manage and coordinate those teams. This is because you need to find the right people to perform the team’s tasks and then you need to ensure that everyone does what they are supposed to. Businesses solve that problem by making team members employees and learning about them. They can then use this to review performance and reward or punish them as need be. Covee wants to take the business out of the equation and, as much as possible, replace it with an algorithm on the blockchain. In doing so, it has to automate what the businesses were doing."

Saturday, October 13, 2018

Child marriage in the United States

The Washington Post has the story:

"Between 2000 and 2010, an estimated 248,000 children were married, most of whom were girls, some as young as 12, wedding men. Now, under pressure from advocates and amid a nationwide reckoning over gender equality and sexual misconduct, states have begun ending exceptions that have allowed marriages for people younger than 18, the minimum age in most states. Texas last year banned it, except for emancipated minors. Kentucky outlawed it, except for 17-year-olds with parental and judicial approval. Maryland considered increasing the minimum marrying age from 15, but its bill failed to pass in April. Then in May, Delaware abolished the practice under every circumstance, and New Jersey did the same in June. Pennsylvania, which may vote to eliminate all loopholes this autumn, could be next."



Friday, October 12, 2018

Coffee for personal data

Inside Higher Ed has the story:
Café Swaps Espresso for Personal Info
A Japanese café chain plans to spread among Ivy League and other top campuses, offering free coffee and tea in exchange for students' personal information and consent to be contacted by companies.

"The cashless Shiru cafés give out handmade coffee and tea drinks for free. In exchange, students flash a university ID and, in the bargain, hand over a small cache of personal information: name, age, email address, interests, major and graduation year, among other details. They also agree to be contacted by Shiru’s corporate sponsors, who underwrite all those cappuccinos, matcha lattes and iced Americanos.
...
"Starbucks, meet LinkedIn … with extra foam.
...
"[at Brown University]...“I don’t get the feeling from my classmates that they’re trying to reduce their data footprint.”

Thursday, October 11, 2018

An online spot market for lawyers

Need a lawyer, but not a big law firm?  A Britain-based firm, Lexoo, will recommend lawyers they think are appropriate for your case, and let you get bids from them online:

"Lexoo is an online platform for businesses, that lets you easily source and compare quotes from our curated network of specialised commercial lawyers and quality boutique firms, worldwide. Our team of ex-City lawyers with over 45 years of combined legal experience, ensure you only receive proposals from the most suitable lawyers for your work."

Wednesday, October 10, 2018

Faculty openings at Stanford Management Science and Engineering

Faculty Openings in MS&E


Position Title
Tenure-track Assistant Professor/Untenured Associate Professor
Position Description
We invite applications from individuals working at the frontiers of Management Science and Engineering, broadly defined, including candidates from engineering and the mathematical, computational, medical, physical, and behavioral and social sciences.
Appointments are to tenure-line junior faculty positions at the Assistant or untenured Associate Professor level. Please visit our website for more information about the MS&E Department at:
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/MSandE.
Qualifications
An earned PhD, evidence of the ability to pursue a program of research, and a strong commitment to graduate and undergraduate teaching are required. A successful candidate will be expected to teach courses at the graduate and undergraduate levels and to build and lead a team of graduate students in PhD research.

Tuesday, October 9, 2018

Family consent and opt-in versus opt-out organ donation

Here's a contribution to the discussion on how opt-out versus opt-in deceased donor laws might impact transplantation (as opposed to just registration) in countries in which family consent is needed before a deceased person's organs are donated.

 2018 Aug 16. doi: 10.1037/xap0000183. [Epub ahead of print]

Underlying wishes and nudged choices.

Abstract

Is the inferred preference of a deceased relative to donate his or her organs stronger when the choice was made under a mandated rather than under an automatic default (i.e., nudged choice) legislative system? The answer to this is particularly important, because families can, and do, veto the choices of their deceased relatives. In three studies, we asked American and European participants from countries that have either a default opt-in or a default opt-out system to take on the role of a third party to judge the likelihood that an individual's "true wish" was to actually donate his or her organs, given that the decedent was registered to donate on the organ donation register. In each study participants were randomly assigned to one of four organ donation legislative systems (default opt-in, default opt-out, mandated choice, mandatory). Overall, regardless of which country participants came from, they perceived the donor's underlying preference to donate as stronger under the default opt-in and mandated choice systems as compared with the default opt-out and mandatory donor systems. We discuss the practical issues that result from using default systems in the domain of organ donation and propose potential ways to ameliorate the uncertainty around inferences of underlying preference from a nudged choice. 
*****************
HT Axel Ockenfels

Monday, October 8, 2018

2018 Exeter Prize to Shengwu Li (and a very strong shortlist)

On a day when it's likely that another prize in Economics will be announced (but before it has been), I'm happy to note the following announcement on the ESA googlegroup:

We are happy to announce the winner of the 2018 Exeter Prize for the best paper published in the previous calendar year in a peer-reviewed journal in the fields of Experimental Economics, Behavioural Economics and Decision Theory.
The winner is Shengwu Li (Harvard University) for his paper “Obviously Strategy-Proof Mechanisms”, published in the American Economic Review.
The paper proposes and analyzes a desirable property for mechanisms implementing social outcomes. A mechanism is a game whose rules are designed by a social planner for the purpose of implementing a certain desirable social outcome (e.g., efficiency or fairness). Such mechanisms are always designed under the assumption that the parties involved will play an equilibrium outcome. Strategy Proof mechanisms received special attention in the literature, because they implement an outcome that is not only an equilibrium, but also one with dominant strategies, i.e., no player can do anything better than playing the strategy that leads to the socially desirable outcome, no matter what other people are doing. Yet as experimental and empirical results have shown, in real life, strategy proof mechanisms don’t always guarantee that players will do what they are expected to do. This is mainly because the reasoning behind the “right thing to do” is often complicated even in cases that admit a dominant-strategy equilibrium (one prominent mechanism of this sort is the second-price auction). Li’s paper proposes a concept of “obvious mechanisms.” This mechanism not only admits a dominant-strategy equilibrium, but also guarantees that it is cognitively simple to confirm that playing anything else is irrational. Li’s approach allows us to make mechanism design theory more applicable, and closer to reality. It warns us against choosing social mechanisms that we as game theorists hold to be secure, but when applied in the real-world will prove to be too complicated for people to do the right thing.
The winning paper was selected by the panel of Rosemarie Nagel (Pompeu Fabra University), Michel Regenwetter (University of Illinois) and Eyal Winter (Hebrew University of Jerusalem)
Shengwu will be visiting the University of Exeter to receive the award and give a public lecture.
This year was again exceptionally competitive with a large number of excellent nominations. In addition to the winner, this year’s shortlist was:
Chew, Soo Hong, Bin Miao, and Songfa Zhong. "Partial ambiguity." Econometrica 85.4 (2017): 1239-1260.
Glover, Dylan, Amanda Pallais, and William Pariente. "Discrimination as a self-fulfilling prophecy: Evidence from French grocery stores." The Quarterly Journal of Economics 132.3 (2017): 1219-1260.

Kessler, Judd B. "Announcements of support and public good provision." American Economic Review 107.12 (2017): 3760-87.

Sunday, October 7, 2018

Universal enrollment--embracing both district and charter schools--was once on the agenda in NYC

One cause of congestion in school choice systems is that if some students receive multiple offers of admissions, other students must wait for admission to a school they want, particularly if the system is so decentralized that a student is only discovered to have rejected an admissions offer after he or she doesn't show up for the first week of class. So a lot of the school choice work that Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak, Neil Dorosin and I have done through IIPSC is aimed at 'universal' enrollment systems, in which all schools take part.

This hasn't happened yet in NYC. So it is interesting that a lawsuit has brought to light emails which suggest that universal enrollment was as one point seriously considered by the city.

Chalkbeat has the story:

Mayor de Blasio almost proposed a universal enrollment system for district and charter schools, emails show  BY ALEX ZIMMERMAN

"Common — sometimes known as “universal” — enrollment systems exist in cities from Newark to Indianapolis. Backers of the approach argue it can simplify the often complex and time-intensive process required to apply to either district or charter schools in cities that allow parents to choose among both. Streamlining the process can put parents on equal footing instead of allowing those with more time, knowledge or resources from automatically getting a leg up
...
"Common enrollment systems have gained traction in recent years as some cities have embraced a “portfolio model” of schools, a new way of organizing school districts that has developed strong backing. This enrollment approach is central in New Orleans and Denver, which received input from Neil Dorosin, who created and once ran New York City’s high-school application system."

Saturday, October 6, 2018

Free versus predatory prices

Here's a new paper exploring the anti-competitive effects of giving things away for free:

An Introduction to the Competition Law and Economics of 'Free'

Forthcoming, Antitrust Chronicle, Competition Policy International
Many of the largest and most successful businesses today rely on providing service at no charge to at least a portion of their users. Free services often delight users, yet also create a series of challenges for competition policy, including impeding entry, inviting overproduction on quality, and increasing the risk of deception and overpayment. This short paper presents these problems, examines the strategies that entrants can attempt when competing with free service, and considers possible regulatory responses.