Stanford News has the story:
"If designed correctly, auctions can distribute resources fairly, according to Stanford economists Robert Wilson and Paul Milgrom. The pair were awarded the 2020 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences for their improvements to auction theory and inventions of new auction formats."
Here's the video:
Reason magazine has the story:
Canada Inches Closer to Allowing More People To Be Paid for Plasma--For too long, our northern neighbors have depended on plasma imported from the U.S. to meet demand. With the passage of new legislation in Alberta, this may change. by LIZ WOLFE
"Albertans will soon be able to receive payment for their blood and plasma donations. Bill 204, the Voluntary Blood Donations Repeal Act, was introduced by Tany Yao, a member of the legislative assembly for Alberta's provincial government, and passed in the legislature this week. It must now get royal assent—a mere formality—for it to become law. The bill overturns a 2017 prohibition on paid plasma, and will allow private companies to pay plasma donors for their efforts. If they so choose, people will still be able to donate blood and plasma without receiving compensation via Canadian Blood Services.
...
"United Nurses of Alberta's president Heather Smith told Global News that "the government is putting its ideology and desire to support profiteers above what is actually safe for Albertans and Canadians." Elsewhere she said that "donating blood should not be viewed as a business venture."
HT: Peter Jaworski
Colin Sullivan is completing a two-year postdoc at Stanford this year, and is on the job market.
His job market paper is an experiment with an exceptionally creative design. (Spoiler: it involves a cat actually getting a kidney transplant.)
Eliciting Preferences Over Life And Death: Experimental Evidence From Organ Transplantation by Colin by D. Sullivan
Abstract: Optimal allocation of scarce, life-saving medical treatment depends on society’s preferences over survival distributions, governed by notions of equality and efficiency. In a novel experiment, I elicit preferences over survival distributions in incentivized, life-or-death decisions. Subjects allocate an organ transplant among real cats with kidney failure. In each choice, subjects allocate a single organ based on the expected survival of each patient. The survival rates imply a price ratio, allowing me to infer the shape of indifference curves over survival bundles. I find that the vast majority (80%) of subjects respond to increases in total expected survival time, while a small minority display Leontief preferences, providing the transplant to the shortest-lived patient at all price ratios. Hypothetical decisions may not be reliable in this context: a large share (46%) of subjects allocate a hypothetical transplant differently than a real transplant, though estimates of aggregate preferences are the same across incentivized and unincentivized conditions. Finally, I show that aversion to wealth inequality is a good predictor of aversion to survival inequality.
(This human subjects research proto-col was approved by the Stanford University Institutional Review Board (IRB). A discussion of ethical considerations in designing this protocol is included in Appendix A.)
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It's not his first really very creative experimental design: check out is 2019 paper in the AER:
American Economic Review, 2019, Vol. 109 (11): 3713-44. Online Appendix
Abstract: We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called Incentivized Resume Rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding the deception necessary in audit studies. We deploy IRR with employers recruiting college seniors from a prestigious school, randomizing human capital characteristics and demographics of hypothetical candidates. We measure both employer preferences for candidates and employer beliefs about the likelihood candidates will accept job offers, avoiding a typical confound in audit studies. We discuss the costs, benefits, and future applications of this new methodology.
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My advice if you're hiring: check him out.
My advice if you're hiring: check him out.
Here's the press release from the office of the Attorney General of New York:
Attorney General James Stops Three Amazon Sellers from Price Gouging Hand Sanitizer and Recoups Funds for New Yorkers: Sellers to Pay More Than $52,000 in Penalties and Nearly $23,000 in Consumer Restitution--AG James Reminds Sellers Price Gouging is Unlawful During Pandemic
"New York Attorney General Letitia James today announced that she has stopped three Amazon sellers from price gouging hand sanitizer during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) public health crisis, and that she will help deliver tens of thousands of dollars back into the pockets of defrauded New Yorkers. Three sellers — Yvette Chaya d/b/a Northwest-Lux (Northwest-Lux), Mobile Rush, Inc. d/b/a Best_Deals_27 (Mobile Rush), and EMC Group, Inc. d/b/a Supreme Suppliers (EMC) — will pay the state of New York more than $52,000 in penalties and reimburse consumers almost $23,000 for overcharging for hand sanitizer during the pandemic.
“Price gouging on necessary consumer supplies during an unprecedented public health emergency is absolutely unconscionable and will not be tolerated,” said Attorney General James. “Instead of ensuring individuals could protect themselves from the coronavirus, these businesses operated with dirty hands by charging exorbitant prices on hand sanitizer and other cleansing products. My office will continue to clean up this unlawful practice by using all of the tools at our disposal to prevent price gouging during this pandemic.
...
"The OAG has already issued more than 1,800 cease-and-desist orders to businesses that stand accused of violating New York’s price gouging law.
...
"Sellers should be aware that New York revised its price gouging statute, effective June 6, 2020, to impose increased penalties against those who price gouge essential items during a pandemic."
Speedy transport of transplantable organs is an important part of transplantation. Sometimes the logistics are more exciting than you would like. Here are two news stories:
Donated Heart Survives Helicopter Crash and Being Dropped by Medic--The heart was successfully transplanted moments later. By Loukia Papadopoulos
Italian Police Use Lamborghini To Transport Donor Kidney 300 Miles In Two Hours by Elizabeth Blackstock (HT Scott Kominers)
In academia, Zoom seminars may coexist with in-person seminars long after the pandemic has ended. They aren't as nice as in-person seminars, but they involve much less air travel.
Business meetings too can more easily be conducted remotely these days, through Zoom, Google Meet, Microsoft Teams, etc. Once again, there's something missing compared to in person meetings, but that's counterbalanced by the skipped travel.
Exercise has changed--fewer visits to the gym, but internet companies like Peloton and Mirror combine home gym equipment with workouts in internet gym classes.
Here are some other items that have caught my eye:
Real Estate Transactions Go Virtual--The traditional real estate closings with a room full of people and stacks of documents are becoming a memory, as much of the process is now online. By Sydney Franklin in the NY Times
"Real estate transactions have gone largely digital as the pandemic has disrupted nearly every aspect of home buying, from house hunting to securing a mortgage, getting an appraisal, notarizing documents and signing the final closing documents.
...
"While some clients continue to prefer in-person closings, others are giving their lawyers power of attorney to sign the final documents for them or they’re executing closings on virtual platforms like DocuSign.
...
"By the time New York’s real estate market reopened in June after several months of coronavirus restrictions, most buyers were prioritizing virtual tours before reaching out for an in-person visit.
...
"Since March 31, an executive order by Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo has allowed notaries in New York to sign documents using audio-video technology instead of signing and notarizing documents in person.
"Dawn Pereyo, an underwriter and past president of the New York State Land Title Association, says this work flow is the way of the future. Twenty-nine states, not including New York, have already enacted permanent remote online notarization (RON) legislation. “The executive order has allowed us to start down the road of RON,” she said.
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And this:
20 Ways 2020 Changed How We Use Technology Forever--Our reliance on technology while isolated at home these past months—whether Zooming into weddings or FaceTiming with doctors—has permanently altered our relationship to gadgets. By Matthew Kitchen in the WSJ
"telemedicine and teletherapy visits became the norm. According to a survey by the American Psychiatric Association, the percentage of patients regularly using some form of telehealth with a professional rose from 2.1% pre-pandemic to more than 84.7% as of this summer."
The Guardian has the story, if you're looking for a co-parent rather than a life partner:
"In a world where biological science and equal rights have diversified ways to start a family, platonic co-parenting – the decision to have a child with someone you are not romantically involved with and, in most cases, choose not to live with – remains a relatively new phenomenon.
"Well established in gay communities, along with egg and sperm donation, it is on the rise among heterosexual singles. Tens of thousands have signed up to matchmaking sites at a cost of around £100 a year. On Coparents.co.uk, which launched in Europe in 2008, two-thirds of its 120,000 worldwide members are straight. Modamily, which launched in LA in 2012, has 30,000 international members, of whom 80% are straight and 2,000 are British. UK-based competitor PollenTree.com has 53,000 members, split 60/40 women to men, and ranks its domestic market as its strongest. During lockdown, the latter two sites reported traffic surges of 30-50%."
Mike Ostrovsky points out that small design decisions can have big consequences, and considers how European regulations have caused search engines to be allocated on Android phones.
CHOICE SCREEN AUCTIONS by Michael Ostrovsky, NBER Working Paper http://www.nber.org/papers/ (a less gated version is here)
"ABSTRACT: Choice screen auctions have been recently deployed in 31 European countries, allowing consumers to choose their preferred search engine on Google's Android platform instead of being automatically defaulted to Google's own search engine. I show that a seemingly minor detail in the design of these auctions—whether they are conducted on a “per appearance” or a “per install” basis—plays a major role in the mix and characteristics of auction winners, and, consequently, in their expected overall market share. I also show that “per install” auctions distort the incentives of alternative search engines toward extracting as much revenue as possible from each user who installs them, at the expense of lowering the expected number of such users. The distortion becomes worse as the auction gets more competitive and the number of bidders increases. Empirical evidence from Android choice screen auctions conducted in 2020 is consistent with my theoretical results."
The auction rules: "In each country auction, search providers will state the price that they are willing to pay each time a user selects them from the choice screen in the given country. The three highest bidders will appear in the choice screen for that country. The provider that is selected by the user will pay the amount of the fourth-highest bid."
...
"In this paper, I show that a seemingly minor detail of the implementation of choice screen auctions plays a major role in their outcomes—and thus in the overall effectiveness of the antitrust remedy. Specifically, while the answer in the Q&A section of the document states that an auction “allows search providers to decide what value they place on appearing in the choice screen and to bid accordingly,” the auction, as implemented, charges these providers not for appearing in the choice screen but for being chosen by a user.
"While the difference may seem to be just a matter of language, it is not. To see the intuition for the difference, consider a version of the auction with just one available spot and two bidders. Bidder A gets revenue $10 from each user who installs its search engine, and if it is shown as an option in the choice screen, then the probability that a user will choose it is 10%. Bidder B gets revenue $20 from each user who installs its search engine, but the probability that a user will choose it (if it is shown as an option in the choice screen) is only 1%. The value that bidder A has for appearing on the screen is therefore $1, and the value that bidder B has for appearing on the screen is $0.20. Thus, if the auction is conducted on the “per appearance” basis, then bidder A will win, will pay $0.20 per appearance, and will have its search engine chosen by users 10% of the time, while the dominant platform’s own search engine will be chosen 90% of the time. If, instead, the auction is conducted as implemented, with bidding and payment on the “per install” basis, then bidder B will win and will pay $10 every time its search engine is chosen (corresponding to $0.10 per appearance). The winner’s search engine will be chosen only 1% of the time, and the dominant platform’s one will be chosen the remaining 99% of the time. Thus, relative to the per appearance auction, the per install auction results in a lower likelihood that an alternative search engine will be chosen by the user (making it correspondingly more attractive to the dominant platform) and gives advantage to search engines that generate higher revenue per user vs. those that are more popular but generate less revenue on a per-user basis. I
The datng site OK Cupid regularly surveys its users, and have just published a summary of recent results:
The Future of Dating--OkCupid Data Predicts 8 Dating Trends Singles Can Expect from 2021
Perhaps the most predictable of the 8 trends they note is this one:
"More than 2 million people answered our question “Do you prefer that your date shares your political views?” with 64% of respondents agreeing: cross-party dating does not work in modern relationships. In 2021, we’re going to see more people are refusing to date outside party lines. Around the world, 5 million daters answered our question “Could you date someone who has strong political opinions that are the exact opposite of yours?”, and there’s been an upward trend in people refusing to date across party lines. In 2019, 53% of respondents said they couldn’t date someone whose political views were the opposite of theirs — and that ratio jumped to 60% in 2020."
In Vox.EU:
Paul Milgrom, price discoverer and Nobel laureate--Joshua Gans 15 November 2020
"One thing I remember clearly about Paul Milgrom as an advisor is the child-like glee he would exhibit when he had found a new and interesting problem to solve. That happened one day in 1993 when he had been asked to consult on the proposal by the US Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to auction off spectrum for the next generation of mobile phones."
The Guardian has the story:
UAE decriminalises alcohol and lifts ban on unmarried couples living together--Country also ends lenient punishments for ‘honour’ killings as part of reforms by Emma Graham-Harrison and agencies
"The United Arab Emirates has ended lenient punishments for so-called “honour” killings, lifted a ban on unmarried couples living together and decriminalised alcohol, in reforms to personal laws.
...
"The country, where citizens are outnumbered nine-to-one by migrants, has long branded itself internationally as a modern business and tourist destination and has not always strictly implemented its own law.
...
"Emirati judges have until now been allowed to hand down lighter sentences when a woman was attacked or killed by a relative because she has acted in a way he considers to have affected the family reputation, or “honour”. That can include eloping or fraternising with men not related to them.
"Kenneth Roth, the executive director of Human Rights Watch, described the changes as “positive steps for women’s rights” but also raised concerns about the daughters of Dubai’s ruler, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum.
"A UK family court this year found he had orchestrated the abductions of two of his children – one from the streets of Cambridge – and subjected his youngest wife to a campaign of “intimidation”.
...
"The reports did not mention other behaviour outlawed by Emirati law, which has previously landed foreigners in trouble, including homosexual relationships, cross-dressing and public displays of affection.
"Although alcohol is available for sale in restaurants and bars in Emirati cities, individuals needed a licence to buy booze or keep it in their homes. The new laws would apparently allow Muslims, who have not been able to get licences, to drink alcoholic beverages freely."
Here's a paper that tells us something about stable college admissions, and also something more general about large cores in matching with contracts.
Need versus Merit: The Large Core of College Admissions Markets*
by Péter Biró, Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Romm, Ran I. Shorrer, Sándor Sóvágó
Abstract: This paper studies the set of stable allocations in college admissions markets where students can attend the same college under different financial terms. The stable deferred acceptance mechanism implicitly allocates funding based on merit. In Hungary, where the centralized mechanism is based on deferred acceptance, an alternate stable algorithm would change the assignment of 9.3 percent of the applicants, and increase the number of assigned applicants by 2 percent. Low socioeconomic status applicants and colleges in the periphery benefit disproportionately from moving to this non-merit-based algorithm. These findings stand in sharp contrast to findings from the matching (without contracts) literature.
The NY Times has the story about another last minute cancellation of a "deaccessioning" sale by an art museum:
"The Baltimore Museum of Art is pausing its plan to sell three major paintings from its collection. A Sotheby’s sale of works by Brice Marden, Clyfford Still and Andy Warhol was estimated to bring in $65 million to fund acquisitions of art by people of color and staff-wide salary increases.
"The decision, on the day of a planned auction of two of the works, came after weeks of criticism from people who opposed the sale and hours after a conversation between leaders of the museum and the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional organization advancing best practices for art museums.
...
"In April, the association loosened its strict deaccessioning guidelines for the next two years to help museums under financial stress from the pandemic by allowing them to sell works to fund direct collection care, not just the acquisition of other artworks. While the Baltimore Museum has a balanced budget, its director, Christopher Bedford, said earlier this month he saw an opportunity to create an endowment for collection care that would then free up money for salary increases — a vision-based initiative in line with his efforts to bring greater equity to both its collections and workplace culture."
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Recently:
The NY Times has the story:
"A powerful gene-editing tool called Crispr-Cas9, which this month nabbed the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for two female scientists, can cause serious side effects in the cells of human embryos, prompting them to discard large chunks of their genetic material, a new study has found.
Administered to cells to repair a mutation that can cause hereditary blindness, the Crispr-Cas9 technology appeared to wreak genetic havoc in about half the specimens that the researchers examined, according to a study published in the journal Cell on Thursday.
"The consequences of these errors can be quite serious in some cases, said Dieter Egli, a geneticist at Columbia University and an author of the study. Some cells were so flummoxed by the alterations that they simply gave up on trying to fix them, jettisoning entire chromosomes, the units into which human DNA is packaged, Dr. Egli said."
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Previous post:
One reason lies spread faster than true stories on social media is that lies can be designed to be clickbait, while the truth is constrained by the facts. This has been notably true with stories about election fraud, but it is by no means confined to lies originating at the top.
The Washington Post has the story:
"President Trump tweeted that America’s election was being stolen, and Twitter put labels over his lies over a dozen times and counting. “This tweet is disputed and might be misleading,” it warned.
...
"But as tech products, the labels were too little, too late. There’s scant evidence that labels make a lick of difference to viewers. Moreover, they didn’t stop the flow of toxic election content on social media. That’s because social media’s business model is toxic content.
...
"when we look back on the 2020 election, we’ll remember it for the domestic disinformation campaigns and alternate-reality bubbles that grew, in part, because of technology designed to amplify them. This was the year where some 70 candidates for office embraced at least parts of the wacky QAnon online conspiracy theory, and one of them — Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — got elected to Congress.
...
"There is one way labels could definitely be effective, disinformation experts agree: by making it physically harder to share misinformation — adding speed bumps to the information superhighway.
"Facebook said Friday it had added a mini speed bump: forcing people to look at an additional message before they could share a flagged post.
"Twitter was the only one that made a significant speed bump effort on election night. Trump’s tweets covered by warning labels had to be clicked on to be seen, and didn’t show retweet and like counts. And they couldn’t be shared without adding your own context on top.
The Financial Times has the story:
"Japan has spent 50 years fretting about its low birth rate and declining population but new prime minister Yoshihide Suga has hit on a different solution: fertility treatment.
"In his leadership campaign, Mr Suga called for in vitro fertilisation to be covered on national health insurance. The prime minister wants to make it affordable in a country where the average age of first-time mothers is now above 30 and nearly one in five couples has had tests or treatment for infertility.
"Mr Suga hopes the policy will raise Japan’s fertility rate, which stood at 1.36 children per woman in 2019. The fertility rate has been below the replacement level of 2.1 since the 1970s, locking in decades of future population decline with profound consequences for Japan’s society, economy and national security.
"But while subsidies for fertility treatment reflect a slow shift in Japan towards supporting parents rather than criticising the childless, experts said it still did little to address the economic insecurity and gender inequality that discouraged marriage and raising children."
Here are three interviews conducted by the journalist Kohei Takeda for the Japanese economic magazine DIAMOND WEEKLY, on their website DIAMOND ONLINE.
Here are the headlines and beginnings via Google Translate.
The essence of the Nobel Prize in Economics "Game Theory", explained by a former colleague of the award winner--Interview with Fuhito Kojima, Professor of the University of Tokyo, Director of Market Design Center, University of Tokyo by Kohei Takeda : Reporter
The interview begins with these opening words from Fuhito:
"Eight years ago, when Al (Professor at Alvin Roth Stanford University), who I had been taught, received the award, we held a grand celebration and press conference. I thought I couldn't do that this year due to the spread of the new coronavirus infection, but in the evening of the award day (October 12), planned by him and his wife Emily, in the garden of Al's house. A small celebration was held while keeping a certain distance from each other.
"At universities in the United States, teachers and students tend to live very close to the campus, so fellow researchers have more relationships with their neighbors. I still lived near the university, so I received an invitation email from Emily on the day and participated in the celebration. ...
"To me, Paul was a colleague at the university, but he is also like a mentor. After I got a job at Stanford University about 10 years ago, my research field was the same "market design" in the Faculty of Economics (Editor's note: one of the research fields of game theory) , and sometimes I wrote a co-authored paper. , I was able to build a good relationship.
"He is a major researcher I have known since I was a student... Bob taught both Al and Paul, so academically I'm also Bob's "grandson."
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2020 Nobel Prize Winner "Auction Theory for Business" Special Lecture--Interview with Professor Emeritus of Robert Wilson Stanford University by Kohei Takeda : Reporter
The first thing Bob was asked to explain was his work on the winner's curse:
"I started working in this area in the 1960s. The background to this was the issue of oil drilling rights among US oil companies at that time. They had very incomplete information about what their oil reserves were. From the size of the oil field to whether or not it was filled with hydrocarbons, there were many things we didn't know. Oil companies were under pressure to estimate their reserves in such an unknown environment.
"When auctioning under these circumstances, each participating player tends to overestimate in order to win the bid. In this case, each estimate is a function to increase the likelihood of bidding, but oil companies face the challenge of significantly lower rates of return after investing in oil rigs. Was there.
"Eventually, this is (in a situation where each player does not have the same information, the information is asymmetrical, and the player eventually chooses the less valuable one in an attempt to maximize his or her profits). (Adverse selection) ”was recognized as a problem. In other words, there was a tendency to win bids only when overestimating.
"What I have built is a theory for bidding various things in the best possible way, taking into account the situation of such adverse selection. This achievement has attracted a great deal of attention and is one of my early achievements in research. The negative effect of overestimating what is being bid on and winning the auction has been called "Winner's Curse". However, the best bidding strategy takes its existence into account, so you won't suffer from the curse of the winner."
Nobel laureate in economics "Matching theory that can be used in business" --Interview with Professor Alvin Roth Stanford University by Kohei Takeda : Reporter
Flags flew at half staff in Virginia last month, marking the death of Bernard Cohen, and also marking how much has changed in Virginia and the U.S. since he argued in the Supreme Court against the Virginia law that forbid inter-racial marriage. (The legalization of same sex marriage was still decades in the future.)
Va. flags to be half-staff Friday in memory of late Bernard Cohen, lawyer in Loving v. Virginia case by MATTHEW BARAKAT, AP
"Cohen and legal colleague Phil Hirschkop represented Richard and Mildred Loving, a white man and Black woman who were convicted in Virginia in 1959 of illegally cohabiting as man and wife and ordered to leave the state for 25 years.
"Cohen and Hirschkop represented the Lovings as they sought to have their conviction overturned. It resulted in the Supreme Court’s unanimous 1967 Loving v. Virginia ruling, which declared anti-miscegenation laws unconstitutional."
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In a 1963 appeal, the Virginia trial judge declared:
“Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, Malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with His arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages,” the judge wrote in upholding the sentence. “The fact that He separated the races shows that He did not intend for the races to mix.”
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Here's the Supreme Court decision
LOVING v. VIRGINIA , SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES, 388 U.S. 1
June 12, 1967, Decided
"Marriage is one of the "basic civil rights of man," fundamental to our very existence and survival. To deny this fundamental freedom on so unsupportable a basis as the racial classifications embodied in these statutes, classifications so directly subversive of the principle of equality at the heart of the Fourteenth Amendment, is surely to deprive all the State's citizens of liberty without due process of law. The Fourteenth Amendment requires that the freedom of choice to marry not be restricted by invidious racial discriminations. Under our Constitution, the freedom to marry, or not marry, a person of another race resides with the individual and cannot be infringed by the State.
"These convictions must be reversed."
The Guardian has the story:
"New Zealanders have voted to legalise euthanasia for those with a terminal illness, in a victory for campaigners who say people suffering extreme pain should be given a choice over how and when to bring their life to a close.
"The decision on whether to legalise euthanasia appeared as a referendum question on the 17 October general election ballot paper, alongside a second referendum question on whether to legalise cannabis – which did not succeed, according to preliminary results.
"The results of the euthanasia referendum are binding and will see the act come into effect 12 months from the final results – on 6 November 2021. Assisted dying will be administered by the Ministry of Health.
...
"The vote makes New Zealand only the seventh country in the world to legalise assisted dying."
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