Building capacity in science

 Here's a post from Nature about some of the projects highlighted by the recent Einstein Foundation awards for promoting quality in research

Science Should Value Building Research Capacity

T

The Source

Written by Patrick S. Forscher and Moreen Terer

Science values outstanding, already-completed scientific achievements and the people who make them. This priority is illustrated in the profusion of scientific awards, such the Nobel Prize, Fields Medal, and Breakthrough Prize, that reward these accomplishments. However, science places less emphasis on efforts to promote quality within the research ecosystem itself. Nor does science typically recognize the critical capacity-building activities that are necessary to create the robust scientific ecosystems necessary to produce high quality research in the first place.

On November 21, 2021, the Einstein Foundation broke with this trend by issuing a series of awards for efforts to promote quality within the research ecosystem itself. Even more unusually, one of its award categories, the Early Career category, recognized not past achievements but rather outstanding proposed projects that showed special promise in promoting future quality. Four projects were shortlisted for this €100,000 award.

The projects that were shortlisted for the Early Career award shared something in common that may be unexpected: they are unusually focused on building a strong scientific community, especially in groups and settings that science has neglected. Take the first author’s (Patrick Forscher’s) project, for example. This project aimed to grow behavioral science in Africa by building a website, called “Lab in a Box”, to make it easy to set up a new behavioral lab in Africa, enhancing an existing database of measures with existing measures that are adapted to African languages and contexts, and stocking that database with newly translated and adapted measures. These activities are feasible due to Patrick’s position at a research center, the Busara Center for Behavioral Economics, that is both headquartered in Africa and dedicated to advancing behavioral science in the Global South. As Africa currently produces 2% of all research output (Kasprowicz et al., 2020), capacity-building activities such as the ones proposed are critical if behavioral science is to establish a robust presence in Africa.

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Capacity building is important in medicine as well as in science.  Here's a paper on global chains of kidney exchange, that would contribute to building surgical capacity around the world.

Global kidney chains, by Afshin Nikzad, Mohammad Akbarpour, Michael A. Rees, Alvin E. Roth, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Sep 2021, 118 (36) e2106652118; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2106652118

The future pandemic that has already started making an appearance

I never expected the Covid pandemic: I was expecting a different one, coming not from a virus but from an antibiotic-resistant bacteria.  That one is still in our future, but here's an article that indicates that there are many bacterial candidates that could start something big, and taken together they are already starting to loom on the horizon.

In the Lancet (Available online 19 January 2022, In Press, Corrected Proof):

Global burden of bacterial antimicrobial resistance in 2019: a systematic analysis  By the  Antimicrobial Resistance Collaborators 

"Background: Antimicrobial resistance (AMR) poses a major threat to human health around the world. Previous publications have estimated the effect of AMR on incidence, deaths, hospital length of stay, and health-care costs for specific pathogen–drug combinations in select locations. To our knowledge, this study presents the most comprehensive estimates of AMR burden to date.

...

"Findings: On the basis of our predictive statistical models, there were an estimated 4·95 million (3·62–6·57) deaths associated with bacterial AMR in 2019, including 1·27 million (95% UI 0·911–1·71) deaths attributable to bacterial AMR. At the regional level, we estimated the all-age death rate attributable to resistance to be highest in western sub-Saharan Africa, at 27·3 deaths per 100 000 (20·9–35·3), and lowest in Australasia, at 6·5 deaths (4·3–9·4) per 100 000. Lower respiratory infections accounted for more than 1·5 million deaths associated with resistance in 2019, making it the most burdensome infectious syndrome. The six leading pathogens for deaths associated with resistance (Escherichia coli, followed by Staphylococcus aureus, Klebsiella pneumoniae, Streptococcus pneumoniae, Acinetobacter baumannii, and Pseudomonas aeruginosa) were responsible for 929 000 (660 000–1 270 000) deaths attributable to AMR and 3·57 million (2·62–4·78) deaths associated with AMR in 2019. One pathogen–drug combination, meticillin-resistant S aureus, caused more than 100 000 deaths attributable to AMR in 2019, while six more each caused 50 000–100 000 deaths: multidrug-resistant excluding extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis, third-generation cephalosporin-resistant E coli, carbapenem-resistant A baumannii, fluoroquinolone-resistant E coli, carbapenem-resistant K pneumoniae, and third-generation cephalosporin-resistant K pneumoniae.

"Interpretation: To our knowledge, this study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the global burden of AMR, as well as an evaluation of the availability of data. AMR is a leading cause of death around the world, with the highest burdens in low-resource settings. Understanding the burden of AMR and the leading pathogen–drug combinations contributing to it is crucial to making informed and location-specific policy decisions, particularly about infection prevention and control programmes, access to essential antibiotics, and research and development of new vaccines and antibiotics. There are serious data gaps in many low-income settings, emphasising the need to expand microbiology laboratory capacity and data collection systems to improve our understanding of this important human health threat."

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Earlier:

Wednesday, July 15, 2020

The economics of antibiotics

First kidney exchange in Brazil

 A first kidney exchange in Brazil, at Universidade de São Paulo, Hospital das Clínicas da Faculdade de Medicina, São Paulo, SP, Brasil, is briefly reported in the Brazilian Journal of Nephrology?

Pioneering Experience of First Kidney Paired Donation in Brazil by David José de Barros Machado, William Carlos Nahas, Elias David Neto, Braz. J. Nephrol. • 02 Feb 2022 • https://doi.org/10.1590/2175-8239-JBN-2021-0259

"The supply of kidneys from deceased and living donors in Brazil cannot meet the growing annual demand for transplants1. ABO incompatibility (ABOi) or positive complement-dependent cytotoxicity (CDC) crossmatch between the candidate recipient and the prospective donor is a major obstacle to living donor kidney transplant, and consequently many recipients remain on the waiting list for years.

"Since 2011, we have started the discussion and preparation for the implementation of a local KPD program at the Hospital das Clínicas - FMUSP. We discussed the topic internally with our Bioethics Commission, Medical Ethics Commission, Organ and Tissue Transplant Commission, and Clinical Board. In Brazil, Law No. 9,434 regulates the removal of organs, tissues, and parts of the human body for transplant purposes, without contemplating the activity of paired donation. Therefore, we proposed and obtained ethical approval (CAAE 83469418400000068) for a research project to assess the effectiveness of transplantation in patients with ABOi living donor or positive CDC/flow cytometry crossmatch by donor exchange. At the end of the medical, psychological, social, and immunological evaluation of the pairs and after the consent terms were signed, approval was obtained from the Ethics Committee that evaluates transplants with unrelated donors to perform the paired donation. Subsequently, we also obtained the approvals of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, the judicial approval and that of the General Coordination of the National Transplant System - Ministry of Health, for the first transplant with KPD in Brazil.

"On March 10, 2020, the 38-year-old recipient (recipient 1) with chronic glomerulonephritis, undergoing dialysis treatment, on a deceased transplant waiting list for 8 years and with the previous exclusion of 7 living donors, including his wife (donor 1), because of ABOi, received the kidney of the 45-year-old donor of the second pair. The second recipient, 57 years old, with chronic glomerulonephritis, undergoing dialysis treatment, on a deceased transplant waiting list for 1.9 years, and with exclusion of his only donor, wife (donor 2) because of ABOi, received the kidney from the 39-year-old donor of the first pair (donor 1). Pair anonymity was assured until the time of admission, as was reciprocal compatibility between the pairs and simultaneous surgery in 4 operating rooms, which allowed donors to withdraw consent at any time before anesthesia. After 12 months, recipients had adequate kidney function and their donors were doing well.

"Efforts to increase organ supply have a significant source of potential donors in the paired donation programs. Today, all countries that are world leaders in transplantation are practicing and developing this modality in an attempt to reach more and more recipients because of its excellent results"

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Earlier: 

Sunday, December 26, 2021

A call for kidney exchange in Brazil, in the Brazilian Journal of Nephrology

A Lloyd Shapley tribute, by his niece Deborah Shapley

 Lloyd's niece, Deborah Shapley, is a Washington DC based science writer and activist.  She is developing a website of material about her grandfather (Lloyd's father) Harlow Shapley.

In connection with that, she's published a website about Lloyd, that talks about his life and his work:

Lloyd Shapley - Nobelist

"Lloyd Shapley received the Nobel prize from King Carl XVI Gustaf of Sweden at the annual grand ceremony in December 2012. Among the Nobelists my uncle Lloyd was the tallest. At age 89, he was the oldest. Though wobbly he was dignified and humorous. He also differed from the others by his convention-defying hair - which resembled the mathematical algorithm for which he won science’s highest honor.

"At the time I posted about our family’s glorious days in Stockholm. Now that my writing focuses on high achievement in science, including that of the Shapleys,  I dug a bit into the story of my talkative, funny, floppy-haired uncle."

Access and transparency in transplantation at the TTS 2022 meeting in September

 Covid-permitting, I'll be flying to Buenos Aires in September to participate in person in the 2022 international meeting of The Transplantation Society (TTS), with a focus on access and transparency in transplantation.

Plenary on transparency and access

 Monday, September 12, 2022 – 09:40 to 11:10

Transplantation in a moving world; migrants, refugees & organ trafficking

Dominique Martin, Australia

Short Biography

Steps towards increasing deceased donation worldwide

Beatriz Dominguez-Gil, Spain

Short Biography

How can we optimize local economics to achieve self-sufficiency and ethical transplantation in an unequal global economy

Alvin E. Roth, United States

Short Biography

Stability in Matching Markets with Complex Constraints by H. Nguyen, T. Nguyen, and A. Teytelboym

 Here's a paper motivated in part by the issues that arise in matching refugee families to localities in which to settle (once they have been granted asylum in a particular country).  It's also a good example of the way that operations research methods are playing an increasing role in market design.

Hai Nguyen, Thành Nguyen, Alexander Teytelboym (2021) Stability in Matching Markets with Complex Constraints. Management Science 67(12):7438-7454. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3869

Abstract. "We develop a model of many-to-one matching markets in which agents with multiunit demand aim to maximize a cardinal linear objective subject to multidimensional knapsack constraints. The choice functions of agents with multiunit demand are therefore not substitutable. As a result, pairwise stable matchings may not exist and even when they do, may be highly inefficient. We provide an algorithm that finds a group-stable matching that approximately satisfies all the multidimensional knapsack constraints. The novel ingredient in our algorithm is a combination of matching with contracts and Scarf’s Lemma. We show that the degree of the constraint violation under our algorithm is proportional to the sparsity of the constraint matrix. The algorithm, therefore, provides practical constraint violation bounds for applications in contexts, such as refugee resettlement, day care allocation, and college admissions with diversity requirements. Simulations using refugee resettlement data show that our approach produces outcomes that are not only more stable, but also more efficient than the outcomes of the Deferred Acceptance algorithm. Moreover, simulations suggest that in practice, constraint violations under our algorithm would be even smaller than the theoretical bounds."

"Around 50,000 refugees are resettled to the United States every year. Nine American resettlement agencies coordinate networks of dozens of local communities (which we refer to as localities) that support refugees during their first few years in the United States. Localities are allowed to admit different numbers of refugees and offer different services (e.g., language support, support for large families, support for single parents, etc.) that may or may not match the needs of the refugees (Ahani et al. 2021, Delacrétaz et al. 2019). In order to secure government approval to conduct resettlement, resettlement agencies must aim to maximize the number of refugees who are employed within 90 days of arrival. Some resettlement agencies have begun using integer optimization and machine learning in order to improve refugee outcomes (Bansak et al. 2018, Ahani et al. 2021); however, as far as we know, refugees’preferences over localities are presently not collected anywhere in the world.

...

Our algorithm is a novel combination of Scarf’s Lemma and a rounding procedure. We build on the approach of Nguyen and Vohra (2018); however, we make a number of substantial extensions and modifications. The novelty of our approach is the way we apply Scarf’s Lemma to capture group stability. To use Scarf’s Lemma for stable matching problems, one needs to create a constraint matrix Q, where each column corresponds to a possible blocking coalition. Hitherto, two methods to construct such a matrix have been proposed: first, with columns corresponding to all possible blocking coalitions (Scarf 1967); second, with columns corresponding to small blocking coalitions (a hospital and a doctor or a doctor couple and two hospitals) (see Nguyen and Vohra 2018). Although the method of Nguyen and Vohra only obtains matchings that are immune to deviations by small coalitions, Scarf’s method can, in principle, capture group stability. However, the disadvantage of Scarf’s method is that the resulting constraint matrix is not sparse, which prevents us from guaranteeing small error bounds in the rounding procedure.

"Our main structural contribution is a new way of combining ideas from matching with contracts with Scarf’s method in order to create an appropriate constraint matrix. A contract specifies both agents in the match as well as a “price” for one of the dimensions of the knapsack constraints. Our method allows us to get the best of both methods: the sparsity of our constraint matrix does not change, but the prices specified in the contracts still allow us to capture group stability via pairwise stability."

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Earlier:

Sunday, October 19, 2014

Near Feasible Stable Matchings with Complementarities, by Nguyen and Vohra

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

Herb Scarf, RIP

Thursday, September 3, 2015

Migrants aren't widgets: refugee resettlement is a matching problem

Is applying to college too hard?

 While there are concerns that electronic application services like the common app have led to an explosion of applications, there are also concerns in the opposite direction, that applying to college remains a barrier particularly to students who don't automatically think of college as an option.

Here's a story from the Chronicle of Higher Ed about an initiative to ease the application process.

Rethinking the Act of Applying to College. A tedious process that puts the onus on students may need an overhaul.  By Eric Hoover

"On Thursday, the Coalition for College, a membership group of 162 institutions with a shared online application, announced a plan to ease the challenge of applying. As part of a new partnership, the organization will embed its application process into Scoir, an online college-advising platform used by students at more than 2,000 high schools nationwide.

"Instead of creating a Coalition application and typing information into a separate website, students with a Scoir account will soon be able to apply to any Coalition college by transmitting an admission form prepopulated with information — demographic data, grades, test scores, and so on — that would already reside under the same virtual roof.

...

"The more complex the application process, the less equitable it becomes."

"That was a key line from a report published in January by the National Association for College Admission Counseling and the National Association of Student Financial Aid Administrators. The report, which imagined what the college-application process would look like if racial equity were the main objective, included findings and recommendations drawn from interviews with a panel of admissions and financial-aid experts, as well as students."

Market design at the Econometric Society summer school in Dynamic Structural Econometrics

 Here's an announcement that came by email from the Econometric Society (which reflects the continued evolution of market design):

ECONOMETRIC SOCIETY SUMMER SCHOOL in DYNAMIC STRUCTURAL ECONOMETRICS

Theme: Market Design

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

August 15–20, 2022

APPLY AT http://dseconf.org

DEADLINE: FRIDAY APRIL 1

We are pleased to announce the next event in the sequence of Econometric Society summer schools in Dynamic Structural Econometrics.

The primary focus of DSE summer schools is to provide early-stage PhD students with the tools to carry out research in the rapidly developing area of empirical market design with a strong emphasis on closely integrating economic and econometric theory in empirical work. The school covers the theoretical and methodological foundations in market design, the state-of-the-art methods for estimating models that are fundamental in this literature and providing an overview of open questions. We will use a variety of empirical applications to illustrate how these tools and methods are combined to address important applied questions.

The 2022 Econometric Society DSE summer school consists of 4 days of lectures held in conjunction with the Dynamic Structural Econometrics Conference 2022 (August 19-20). The conference brings together top junior and senior researchers from the field to discuss recent advances in theoretical and applied work. The summer school and the conference are hosted by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Lecturers of the summer school and invited conference speakers include:

• Nikhil Agarwal (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

• Fedor Iskhakov (Australian National University)

• Irene Lo (Stanford University)

• Victoria Marone (University of Texas at Austin)

• Robert A. Miller (Carnegie Mellon University)

• Whitney Newey (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

• Ariel Pakes (Harvard University)

• Parag Pathak (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

• John Rust (Georgetown University)

• Bertel Schjerning (University of Copenhagen)

• Paulo Somaini (Stanford Graduate School of Business)

• Daniel Waldinger (New York University)

Interested students and presenters are invited to submit their applications via the website http://dseconf.org. Application deadline is April 1, 2022.

Interview on market design (in Polish)

I was interviewed by Sebastian Stodolak about market design and repugnance, in the Polish journal https://www.dziennik.pl/tagi/alvin-e-roth. Aside from being in Polish, it's behind a paywall. 

But here's an excerpt on which Google Translate works moderately well (without however giving you the feeling that the original discussion was in English...):

Prohibited activities. They repel, they don't disappear (Zakazane działalności. Odpychają, nie znikają)

"DGP: You design markets. What does that even mean? 

Alvin E. Roth: It's nothing new. People have always designed markets. They must already have been doing this in order to be able to trade stone tools over long distances. For example, they had to agree on the terms of this trade.

And that was designing?

In some sense. Without the design of appropriate rules, banking, auction systems or exchanges that were created during transactions carried out in an informal atmosphere in coffee shops in London or New York would not have been born.

It's just that most of the time people were doing fine without economists, and suddenly you show up with your friends and you even get a Noble for it!

It took a long time for economists to recognize the importance of design. For a long time they thought about markets in a very abstract way, aggregates, they talked about supply, about demand. This was the case until game theorists such as William Vickrey and the recent Nobel Prize winners Paul Milgrom and Bob Wilson appeared in economics. It was only when we started to look more closely at the rules on which the market game takes place that we saw that markets are project-based and how these projects define their functioning.

The black market in looted antiquities

 The market for ancient art has a dark underside, that involves not just the usual shady characters we expect to encounter in black markets.

The Atlantic has the story, focusing on the law enforcement work of the Antiquities Trafficking Unit of the Manhattan District Attorney's office::

THE TOMB RAIDERS OF THE UPPER EAST SIDE. Inside the Manhattan DA’s Antiquities Trafficking Unit. By Ariel Sabar

"When Matthew Bogdanos got a tip about a looted mummy coffin whose corpse had been dumped in the Nile, he approached the coffin’s buyer—the Metropolitan Museum of Art—with few of the courtesies traditionally accorded New York’s premier cultural institution.

...

"Bogdanos’s crackdown comes amid a broader reckoning over the West’s extraction of wealth from poor countries and people of color. The fiercest activists want Western museums to return all antiquities to their homelands, on the grounds that even legal acquisitions were tainted by colonial-era imbalances of money and power. Randall Hixenbaugh, one of Manhattan’s last surviving ancient-art dealers, told me that he has lost sales of well-provenanced objects, in part, he suspects, because sensational news stories have soured collectors on the entire sector. The push to make antiquities “unpalatable,” he contends, has less to do with the law than with an anti-European cultural politics.

"Particularly galling to Bogdanos’s detractors are his seizures of antiquities that have circulated, unquestioned, for decades. Among them is a 2,500-year-old limestone relief of a spear-toting Persian soldier, valued at $3 million. In 2017 Bogdanos removed it from an art fair at the Park Avenue Armory, as its enraged British dealer sputtered curses. The object had been owned by the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts since the 1950s. Spurred by a tip from a scholar, Bogdanos’s team used archival records, decades-old photo negatives, and interviews in five countries to argue that the relief had been filched in the 1930s from an excavation in Iran. The British dealer and a colleague agreed to surrender the relief without admitting guilt, and in 2018, a New York judge ordered its repatriation."

Kim Krawiec interviews me about repugnance on her podcast Taboo Trades

 Kim Krawiec interviews me on her podcast Taboo Trades:

She writes "Al Roth and I discuss hitmen, drugs, kidneys, paid sex, and other repugnances. We’re joined by co-hosts Madison White and Alex Leseney (both UVA 3Ls), with appearances from UVA 3Ls Thalia Stanberry, Caitlyn Stollings, Jackson Bailey, and Autumn Adams-jack. A good time was had by all!"

The podcast starts with a cold open, drawn from the body of the interview, in which I ask her co-hosts to help me hire a hitman to rub out a negative referee.  But mostly we talk about transactions that have no easily measurable negative externalities, yet that third parties nevertheless object to.

The market for hitmen

Why are laws against hitmen more effective in most of the world than laws against drug dealers?  Yesterday's post was about a paper that models this, but that paper didn't try to look empirically at hitmen.  

The model suggests that the different availability of hitmen and heroin dealers might have something to do with how you would react if I asked you where I could buy heroin or where I could hire a murderer. In both cases I would expect  you to tell me what a bad idea that was...but you might proceed differently after that.  I think it is unlikely that you would call the police to report that I asked about buying heroin, but you might well call the police if I asked about murder. (And the police would likely react differently to the two potential calls.)

Over the course of writing our paper, I collected news stories that featured  attempts to hire a hitman, many of  which went wrong from the very beginning. The search for a hitman often ends with finding an undercover policeman.  The rest of this post consists of those news stories. (This isn't meant to substitute for serious empirical work; it's just a rouges' gallery of news stories...)

Here's an example from the U.S., where the police were immediately brought in:

‘Help me kill my wife,’ Monroe man accidentally texts to his former boss

"A 42-year-old Monroe man apparently thought he was texting a hit man when he offered to split a $1.5 million life-insurance payout for killing his wife and young daughter, according to Snohomish County prosecutors.

But the text addressed to “Shayne” was actually sent to the man’s former boss, who called 911 Tuesday evening and showed the message to sheriff’s deputies, says a statement of probable cause outlining the case against the suspect."
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Here's another:  Woman charged in Craigslist plot to kill Israeli ex-husband

"The affidavit said a person who responded to the ad contacted the FBI after meeting with Layman at a coffee shop in May. The affidavit said Layman used a PowerPoint presentation called "Operation Insecticide" and that the person who responded to the ad provided the written instructions to the FBI."
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And here's another:
Woman sentenced to prison after allegedly trying to hire hitman
"A District woman who was charged this summer with trying to hire someone to kill her estranged husband was sentenced to a year in prison Friday after she later pleaded guilty to attempted assault with a dangerous weapon.

Prosecutors say 39-year-old Brandi Myles of the District agreed to pay a man about $25,000 to kill her estranged husband ...

"The unidentified man notified authorities of Myles’s plan. Detectives then orchestrated an undercover operation in which Myles allegedly agreed to pay the man to kill her husband last November. The killing never occurred."

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and another
Oklahoma Dentist Accused of Killing Mistress' Baby Now Charged with Ordering a Hit on Mother
"KOCO News 5 reported Franklin approached an inmate being held at Oklahoma County Jail about the possibility of killing a witness in the murder case against him. The inmate was an informant for police, unbeknownst to Franklin."
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On the other hand, there are places where there are a lot of murders. Colombia was once one, when Pablo Escobar paid a bounty on policemen. Mexican journalists are now particularly vulnerable, see this NY Times story:
In Mexico, ‘It’s Easy to Kill a Journalist’

The story makes clear that journalists who run afoul of either corrupt politicians or drug gangs are often murdered.
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And in Ukraine, as told to the WSJ:
Requiem for a Hit Man
A doomed hired gun unburdens himself in a jailhouse interview that sheds light on the shadow battle between Russia and Ukraine

"Ukraine has become a magnet for hired guns as Kiev tries to fight its former master Moscow’s bid to reassert control. With a stalemate on the battlefront between Russian-backed rebels and the government, Moscow and Kiev appear to have turned to contract killings to settle scores and winnow the ranks of commanders in the war, Western diplomats say.
...
"In Kiev, many of the triggermen appear to be freelancers, moonlighting from their jobs in the Ukrainian armed forces or police, say law-enforcement officials and Western diplomats.
...
"Mr. Makhauri came to Ukraine, he said, to hunt down the agents Moscow sent to eliminate opponents abroad. He said the killings ordered by Russia came from two distinct directions—from Moscow’s federal security services, as well as the Russian-backed Chechen leader, Ramzan Kadyrov.

“I know who to look for and to stop them before they do anything,” he said from under a mop of long black hair, speaking politely in a vernacular Russian that earned him the nickname “Zone,” referring to someone from a penal colony. “There is a small number who do this kind of thing.”
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And from the NY Times:
Russia Ordered a Killing That Made No Sense. Then the Assassin Started Talking.

"Assassinations happen frequently enough in Ukraine that they are often just blips in the local news cycle. In 2006, Russian President Vladimir V. Putin signed a law legalizing targeted killings abroad, and Ukrainian officials say teams of Russian hit men operate freely inside the country.

“For the intelligence services, as bad as this sounds, murdering people is just part of the work flow,” said Oleksiy Arestovych, a retired officer in Ukraine’s military intelligence service. “They go to work, it’s their job. You have a work flow, you write articles. They have a workflow, they murder people.”
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It's not clear whether the hitmen are part of a for-hire marketplace, or if they are simply employees of the politicians and drug gangs.
Judging from cases in which organized crime hitmen turn state's evidence against their bosses, hitman is a job description for some American organized crime outfits as well. See e.g.
How An Infamous Mafia Hitman Rebuilt His Identity From Scratch
Heinous Boston mob killer became government informant
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And even if you find someone who says he's a hitman, there's a good chance you are talking to a policeman:

Ex-escort gets 16 years for trying to have husband killed
By TERRY SPENCER, ASSOCIATED PRESS WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — Jul 21, 2017,
"Circuit Judge Glenn Kelley imposed the sentence on Dalia Dippolito, who was convicted last month of solicitation of first-degree murder. She was recorded on video and audio in 2009 as she plotted to have Michael Dippolito killed, telling an undercover detective she was "5,000 percent sure" she wanted her husband dead."

‘$500 and he’s a ghost’: Man accused of enlisting white supremacists to kill his black neighbor
"A South Carolina man tried to enlist a white supremacist group to kill his black neighbor and burn a cross in that person’s front yard, authorities say.

Federal investigators say they learned of Brandon Cory Lecroy’s plan in March after a confidential informant told them that the 25-year-old had reached out to a white supremacist organization and said he needed help to kill his neighbor, a federal complaint says. The following day, March 20, an undercover FBI agent spoke with Lecroy, who offered payment for the job."



Amateur hour (with low quality amateurs):  Florida mom killed in case of mistaken identity in murder-for-hire love triangle

"Lopez-Ramos, 35, is accused of hiring Alexis Ramos-Rivera, 23, and his girlfriend Glorianmarie Quinones-Montes, 22, to murder the woman.

On Jan. 7 and the early morning hours of Jan. 8, the suspects planned the robbery and murder, and mistook Zengotita-Torres for their intended victim when she left a store at a shopping center Sunday night.

The suspects then followed her home, kidnapped her and forced her into her own car before driving away, Gibson said. They then made Zengotita-Torres give them her ATM card and pin number and used it to withdraw money, he said.

During the incident, Lopez-Ramos and Ramos-Rivera “realized that they had mistakenly taken the wrong person,” he said."
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Doctor who ran a drug ring in collaboration with a motorcycle gang (and apparently succeeded in hiring a hitman from the gang)
Doctor accused of arranging wife’s killing to protect his drug ring is found dead in apparent suicide
"Kauffman, 68, of Linwood, a small town outside Atlantic City, was charged with first-degree murder this month, more than five years after his wife, local radio personality April Kauffman, was found dead inside their home. Ferdinand Augello, who prosecutors said was a co-conspirator, is also charged with first-degree murder.
...
"Prosecutors later outlined the prescription drug ring they said James Kauffman and Augello ran out of Kauffman’s office with the help of the Pagan Outlaw motorcycle gang.
...
"Augello was solicited by James Kauffman to kill his wife, and he found another man, Francis Mullholland, a cousin of a Pagan associate and a member of the drug enterprise, to do the deed, officials said.
...
"Prosecutors said they think Mullholland shot April Kauffman and was paid for the job.

"The drug enterprise, meanwhile, continued for years after the killing, until James Kauffman’s June arrest.

"Mullholland died after what officials say was an accidental overdose in 2013, NJ.com reported."
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Here's a case of successfully hiring a hitmen from former army colleagues:
Former Army Sniper, 2 Other Ex-Soldiers Accused of Becoming Hitmen
Published on Apr 3, 2018
"A former U.S. Army sniper and two other ex-soldiers have gone on trial in New York on charges they became contract killers for an international crime boss.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Patrick Eagan said in opening statements Tuesday that Joseph Hunter recruited the others for a cold-blooded hit on a real estate agent in the Philippines in 2012.

Defense attorneys said in their openings that evidence against them was too weak to convict them. All three have pleaded not guilty to murder conspiracy.

The case is expected to offer a window into the clandestine world of private mercenaries willing to kill for money. The trafficker has pleaded guilty and agreed to testify for the government."

More from the NY Times
New York Trial Will Explore the Secret World of Mercenary Soldiers
By ALAN FEUERAPRIL 2, 2018

"Joseph Hunter, 52, a former United States Army sergeant with Special Forces training, stands at the center of the trial, accused of planning the murder of the Filipino woman, Catherine Lee, while serving as the chief of security for a globe-trotting criminal named Paul Le Roux.

 

U.S. Reveals Criminal Boss’s Role in Capturing a Mercenary FEB. 1, 2015

In Real Life, ‘Rambo’ Ends Up as a Soldier of Misfortune, Behind Bars DEC. 20, 2014

Ex-Army Sniper Gets 20-Year Sentence in Murder-for-Hire Scheme

By Benjamin Weiser May 31, 2016

"In late 2012, as part of the sting operation, Mr. Hunter began assembling a security team for what he had been led to believe were Colombian narcotics traffickers but were actually confidential sources working under the direction of the D.E.A., the government has said. "

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Here's a case of a woman jailed for trying to hire her handyman to kill her husband (the handyman turned her in) now trying to hire a fellow inmate to kill the handyman:
Woman accused of hiring hit men to get out of her hit-man-related troubles
By Alex Horton March 11  (Washington Post)

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Here's the career of a prolific hitman, who seems to have been a contractor for rather than employee of drug cartels:
The Life Of One Of America’s Bloodiest Hitmen
https://www.buzzfeed.com/jessicagarrison/martinez-hitman-cartel-black-hand-mano-negra-contract-killer
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Here's the story of a successful amateur hit
Texas teen, girlfriend hired gunman to kill man's jeweler father, police say
"Nicholas Shaughnessy allegedly asked multiple people whether they would be willing to get paid to kill someone in the months before the shooting, investigators said. "
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There are scam sites that advertise hitmen:
https://allthingsvice.com/2016/05/14/the-curious-case-of-besa-mafia/
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And here's a parody site that got some serious looking inquiries and forwarded them to law enforcement: https://rentahitman.com/ 
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Here's a story of a "successful" murder, but the hitmen were caught...
A veteran pulled over to help a stuck truck. Its driver was a hit man hired to kill him. Washington Post, Sept 7, 2018, By Taylor Telford

"McFoley was a “thug of thugs,” Chitwood said, with a lengthy criminal record that showed his capacity for violence. After the road-rage incident, McFoley was charged with aggravated assault and unlawful possession of a firearm by a felon. He was slated to go to trial in early December 2017. To avoid going back to prison, Capt. Brian Henderson said, McFoley hired someone to take Cruz-Echevarria out.

"That’s where Benjamin Bascom came in. The 24-year-old had a reputation as a killer, Henderson said, adding that investigators have tied him to open murder cases in Orange County, Fla. Bascom and McFoley were “criminal associates,“ investigators said, and McFoley reached out over the phone, offering Bascom money to silence Cruz-Echevarria."
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Hit Men and Power: South Africa’s Leaders Are Killing One Another, NY Times, September 30, 2018, By Norimitsu Onishi and Selam Gebrekidan

"Political assassinations are rising sharply in South Africa, threatening the stability of hard-hit parts of the country and imperiling Mr. Mandela’s dream of a unified, democratic nation.

"But unlike much of the political violence that upended the country in the 1990s, the recent killings are not being driven by vicious battles between rival political parties.

"Quite the opposite: In most cases, A.N.C. officials are killing one another, hiring professional hit men to eliminate fellow party members in an all-or-nothing fight over money, turf and power, A.N.C. officials say."
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Polish diplomat admits ordering hit on wealthy mother of his partner
Wojciech Janowski confesses to being behind killing of billionaire after years of denial
At a 2018 trial in France for a 2014 hit. There are 10 defendents, including the two accused hitmen and an intermediary.
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July 2019 Atlantic Magazine
People Who Pay People to Kill People
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The trial of the alleged Dan Markel gunman and bag woman begins.
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Guardian, Oct 22, 2019
The five reluctant hitmen of China: group jailed over botched contract killing
Court hears job was outsourced repeatedly before fifth hitman offered to stage the death and pocket the payment

200万雇凶杀人层层转包后成10万！“杀手”与被害人演戏……判了！

GT: "2 million hired murderers will be subcontracted into 100,000! The "killer" acted with the victim... sentenced!"

someone was trying to buy a hit for 2 million yuan, but after a chain of brokers, the killer only got paid for 100k. And the killer eventually thought it was not worth it and didn't carry out the crime. It is interesting that in the end, the original buyer was sentenced for the longest time, and the sentence decreased going down the chain. You may be able to read it yourself if you use google translate: https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/87651845

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Washington Post Jan 22, 2020
Zookeeper who killed tigers and tried to have rival murdered is sentenced to 22 years in prison
"An Oklahoma City jury found him guilty of twice trying to hire hit men to kill the activist.
One of the men Maldonado-Passage tried to commission was an undercover agent for the FBI...
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2 Attorneys Arrested In Alleged Murder For Hire Plot
They're accused of hiring an undercover police officer to kill another attorney.
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Ex-Lesotho PM paid gang to murder his wife, police say
Thomas Thabane and his current wife allegedly agreed to pay hitmen $179,485 to carry out killing
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/jun/11/ex-lesotho-pm-paid-gang-to-his-wife-police-say-thomas-thabane

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Washington Post, Feb. 2, 2021

A Louisiana man hired hit men to kill a woman accusing him of rape, police said. Instead, they allegedly killed his sister.    By Andrea Salcedo

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NY Times, Feb 5, 2021

N.Y.P.D. Officer Accused in Plot to Kill Husband Will Plead Guilty

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Washington Post, Feb 9, 2021

Journalists thwarted a murder-for-hire plot while reporting a story, prosecutors say

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People: (March 18, 2021): https://people.com/crime/father-ambushed-shot-9-times-knew-ex-wife-sent-hit-man/ 

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Washington Post May 10, 2021 :

A paroled murderer called himself a ‘good dude’ — before hiring a hit man to kill an ex, feds say  By 

Jaclyn Peiser

"Three months after he was released from prison on parole, Derrick D. Jackson parked his tan sedan on a residential street in Detroit and met with a man he hoped could solve a problem for him — Jackson wanted his ex-girlfriend dead, according to an affidavit.

“I just want head shots, just quick,” Jackson told the man, court documents said.

"Jackson, a convicted murderer, was looking for revenge on the woman, who lived in Ohio, claiming she stole money and drugs from him.

"He didn’t know it at the time, but the man Jackson was arranging to pay $11,000 for a murder-for-hire was an undercover special agent from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

"And the agent was wearing a wire."

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From Alex Chan:

There is this one newspaper article:

https://washingtoncitypaper.com/article/208854/straight-dope-how-many-people-get-killed-for-money-each/

that used some extrapolations with violations of "chapter 18, section 1958 of the U.S. code" (The "murder-for-hire" statute, 18 U.S.C. § 1958, was enacted as part of the Comprehensive Crime Control Act of 1984) and claimed that there are approximately 416 hits done by hitman in the US.

and an analysis of online/dark web ads: https://cina.gmu.edu/wp-content/uploads/2020/07/An-Assessment-of-Hitmen-and-Contracted-Violence-Providers-Operating-Online.pdf

Seems like there is a NYTIMES pieces commenting on it (this paper) too:

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/04/technology/can-you-hire-a-hit-man-online.html

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A Michigan woman tried to hire an assassin online at RentAHitman.com. Now, she’s going to prison. By Jonathan Edwards, Washington Post,  November 22, 2021  

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At Last, Girlfriend in House of Gucci Murder Drama Speaks Out. Sheree McLaughlin had a years-long affair with Maurizio Gucci, which gave him the courage to leave his marriage with Patrizia Reggiani. It was a decision that would get him killed.

"The story of Maurizio Gucci and his untimely death is infamous in Italy—and will soon be viewed by audiences around the world as it’s retold by director Ridley Scott in the film House of Gucci. Adam Driver plays Maurizio, and Lady Gaga portrays Patrizia, the glamorous wife who was eventually convicted of paying a hit man to have him killed. 

...

"Maurizio had been killed by a hit man as he walked up the steps of his office building in Milan. Two years later, Patrizia was arrested for hiring the killer, after a tipster went to the police. Judge Renato Samek, when issuing her sentence in November 1998 after a five-month trial, said that Maurizio had died not for who he was but for what he had: a formidable patrimony and an internationally recognized name. “Patrizia Reggiani did not intend to give these up,” said Samek, looking out over the courtroom. She was sentenced to 26 years in prison and released on parole after 18 years."

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If you got this far, you might also be interested in listening to this podcast:

Friday, February 4, 2022

Kim Krawiec interviews me about repugnance on her podcast Taboo Trades

Forbidden Transactions and Black Markets

 Here's a paper that was just published early online. (Only now do I see that I left out the middle initial I always use, but I'm one of the coauthors...)  

The idea of the paper is to understand when a repugnant transaction can be effectively banned, versus when a ban will lack sufficient social support to succeed. We present a simple to state (but tricky to analyze) model of conditions in which banning a market is likely to lead to a difficult to extinguish black market.

Two prominent examples are narcotic drugs (big black market) and hired killers (not so much, at least in the U.S.).  So we could have called the paper Heroin and Hitmen. (Hitmen were little more than a metaphor in this paper, but I expect to say a bit more about the actual market for hitmen in tomorrow's post.)

 Chenlin Gu, Alvin Roth, Qingyun Wu (2022) Forbidden Transactions and Black Markets. Mathematics of Operations Research  Published online in Articles in Advance 28 Jan 2022  . https://doi.org/10.1287/moor.2021.1236  (It's an open access article, so you can read the full paper: here's the pdf.)

 Abstract: "Repugnant transactions are sometimes banned, but legal bans sometimes give rise to active black markets that are difficult if not impossible to extinguish. We explore a model in which the probability of extinguishing a black market depends on the extent to which its transactions are regarded as repugnant, as measured by the proportion of the population that disapproves of them, and the intensity of that repugnance, as measured by willingness to punish. Sufficiently repugnant markets can be extinguished with even mild punishments, while others are insufficiently repugnant for this, and become exponentially more difficult to extinguish the larger they become, and the longer they survive."

Here are the first two paragraphs of the introduction:

"Why are drug dealers plentiful but hitmen scarce? That is, why is it relatively easy for a newcomer to the market to buy illegal drugs but hard to hire a killer? Both of those transactions come with harsh criminal penalties, vigorously enforced: in the United States, almost half of federal prisoners have drug convictions,1 and murder for hire2 is treated as a federal crime for both the buyer and the hitman.3

More generally, many transactions are repugnant, in the specific sense that they meet two criteria: some people want to engage in them, and others think that they should not be allowed to do so (Roth [48]). But only some repugnances become enacted into laws that criminalize those transactions, and only some of those banned markets give rise to active, illegal black markets. Only some of those black markets are so active yet so difficult to suppress that the laws banning them are eventually changed so as to allow the transactions that cannot be suppressed to be regulated. Laws that exact harsh punishments but are ineffective at curbing the transactions that they punish may come to be seen as causing harm themselves. Some well-known examples include Prohibition era laws against selling alcohol in the United States or laws in much of the world that once banned homosexual sex (and, in some places, still do)."