NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, October at Stanford, Preliminary program

 Here's a preliminary program for the October NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting at Stanford

Market Design Working Group Meeting
Organized by Eric Budish and Michael Ostrovsky
October 16-17, 2026

Format: 35 minutes for the presentation, 10 minutes for discussion.
 

Friday, October 16
 
9:00 am    
Personalized Recommendations Without Inducing Congestion: Mitigating Disparities in the NYC High School Match
Erica Chiang, Cornell University
Kenny Peng, Cornell University
Rebecca Lichtenstein, New York City Public Schools
Brielle McDaniel, New York City Public Schools
Kristen O'Neil, New York City Public Schools
Dejaunique Thomas, New York City Public Schools
Lianna Wright, New York City Public Schools
Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University
Eva Tardos, Cornell University
Nikhil Garg, Cornell University
 

9:45 am    
Who Gets What in Education: Can School Matching Improve Student Achievement?
Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Duke University and NBER
Parag A. Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Christopher R. Walters, University of California, Berkeley and NBER
 

10:30 am    
Break
 

11:00 am    
Searchable Menus
Frank Yang, Stanford University
Piotr Dworczak, Northwestern University
 

11:45 am    
Two-Sided Matching with Partial Participation
Assaf Romm, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Ran Shorrer, The Pennsylvania State University
Avinatan Hassidim, Bar-Ilan University

12:30 pm    
Lunch and Conversation with Al Roth about his latest book, "Moral Economics"
 

2:30 pm    
Clearing Multi-Unit Markets with Simple Pricing
Ali Makhdoumi, Duke University
Saša Pekeč, Duke University
Xinchang Wang, Duke University
 

3:15 pm    
Quota Marketplace: Dynamic Pricing for Efficient Allocation of ML Training Resources
Renato Paes Leme, Google Research
Balasubramanian Sivan, Google Research
Mihai Tiuca, Google Research
Ian McFarlane, Google Research
Vasilis Gkatzelis, Drexel University
Nehal Mehta, Google Research
Soheil Hassas Yeganeh, Google Research
Vahab Mirrokni, Google Research
Amin Vahdat, Google Research
 

4:00 pm    
Break
 

4:30 pm    
One-Shot Pricing for Hands-Off-the-Wheel Advertising Markets
Emerson Melo, Indiana University
Matthew Shum, California Institute of Technology
Rakesh Vohra, University of Pennsylvania
 

5:15 pm    
Paying for Information, Not for Clicks: A Block-Level Publisher Content Marketplace for AI Answers
Markus Mobius, University of Michigan
Andras Sari, Central European University
Tanya Rosenblat, University of Michigan
David M. Rothschild, Microsoft Research
Brendan Lucier, Microsoft Research
Nicole Immorlica, Yale University
Oliver Kiss, Spreadmonitor
Jingyi Qiu, University of Michigan School of Information
Colin Watson, Microsoft Research
Ishan Mahajan, Microsoft Research
 

6:00 pm    
Adjourn
6:30 pm    
Group Dinner at Tamarine Restaurant, 546 University Avenue, Palo Alto
 

Saturday, October 17
8:00 am    
Continental Breakfast
 

9:00 am    
Screening for Usage
Justin Hadad, University of Oxford
Kyle Woodward, Assign Group
 

9:45 am    
Pricing the Right to Renege in Search Markets: Evidence from Trucking
Richard Faltings, University of California, San Diego
 

10:30 am    Break
 

11:00 am    
Competition and Welfare in Airport Slot Allocation
Sebastian D. Bauer, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid
 

11:45 am    
Road Pricing under Heterogeneity
Shoshana Vasserman, Stanford University and NBER
Brad Ross, University of Pennsylvania
Adi Shany, Tel Aviv University
Itai Ater, Tel Aviv University
 

12:30 pm    
Boxed Lunch and Adjourn 

Surrogacy (on each side of the Atlantic)

 Crossing the Atlantic today, to return home from Paris, this story in The Atlantic seems apropos:

Mothers for Sale.  Most of Europe bans commercial surrogacy. The United Nations likens it to slavery. But in the United States, business is booming.  By Helen Lewis

"Since the legalization of same-sex marriage, male couples have become the big growth market for American surrogacy, but the practice is booming among aspiring parents—married or single, straight or gay—who can afford the cost of hiring someone else to carry their child. In 2024, 11,821 embryos were transferred to surrogates in American clinics associated with the Society for Assisted Reproductive Technology, up from 8,461 three years earlier, and the United Nations estimates that the global worth of the industry is almost $15 billion. Most surrogacy in America today is commercial, meaning that the carrier is paid, and gestational, meaning that the carrier has no genetic relationship to the child.

...

" many liberal Americans are surprised to discover that their country is an outlier in its enthusiasm for commercial surrogacy. In Britain, where I live, a ban on the practice enjoys substantial support among feminists, who worry about the power differential between paid surrogates and wealthy would-be parents. (Altruistic surrogacy, in which the surrogate carries a baby solely out of generosity, is less controversial and is permitted.) A recent UN report went even further, declaring that commercial surrogacy “constitutes the sale of children, which is a crime,” and that “surrogacy arrangements can amount to or resemble slavery.” 

...

"Because so much can go wrong, every country in the European Union has banned commercial surrogacy. France’s centrist liberal president, Emmanuel Macron, has described the practice as “not compatible with the dignity of women.” Italy’s right-wing populist leader, Giorgia Meloni, has enacted one of the strictest anti-surrogacy frameworks in the world. Not only is domestic surrogacy banned, but any Italian citizen who brings home a baby born to an overseas surrogate risks jail and a fine of up to 1 million euros. Many other developed countries have either tightly restricted surrogacy or chosen, as Britain and Canada have, to allow only the altruistic version. Israel allows surrogacy but imposes a raft of conditions: The commissioning parents must not have more than two children already, must not have serious criminal convictions, and must be of the same religion as the surrogate.

"In general, Europeans think of Americans’ enthusiasm for paid surrogacy the way we regard their fondness for guns and capital punishment: inexplicable. The piquant difference, however, is that surrogacy is a cause of the American left rather than the right. Red states tend to have tighter limits on surrogacy. Louisiana, for example, restricts surrogacy to married heterosexual couples using their own sperm and eggs. By contrast, when New York legalized commercial surrogacy in 2020, LGBTQ activists hailed it as a triumph for “fertility equality.”

The debate cuts across political traditions and defies easy categorization. When surrogacy goes well, the result is a happy family that would not otherwise have existed. When it goes wrong, however, it can do so in unpredictable and emotionally crushing ways. At its core, the ethical question is this: How much physical and emotional risk should individuals be allowed to take on in the name of a commercial transaction? 

...

"America also stands virtually alone as a rich country that permits incoming surrogacy tourism from elsewhere. Many of these international intended parents are from China, where surrogacy is banned and where, until recently, family size was limited by the one-child policy. These customers have exacting standards. 

...

"Look abroad, though, and it’s a different story. Some agencies offer “guaranteed baby” packages for as little as $50,000. Surrogacy destinations pop up anywhere the local laws are lax, such as Northern Cyprus, a territory that exists in a legal limbo and is recognized only by Turkey. (The problem is that babies born there can end up stateless.) For parents from Russia, nearby Georgia is a similar no-questions-asked destination.

"India used to be the most favored low-cost destination, but in 2015, Prime Minister Narendra Modi, citing fears of exploitation, banned commercial surrogacy for foreigners. Ukraine’s appeal as a surrogacy destination has diminished since Russia’s invasion in 2022, although the leading agency there, BioTexCom, told me that the company is still handing off one baby born via surrogacy every day on average, at a cost of about $60,000. A representative of the agency initially told me that it was planning to open a clinic in Kazakhstan, to cater to the growing Asian market. In July, however, that country abruptly banned foreign surrogacy amid concerns about exploitation. " 

 

Xenotransplants will substitute for dialysis before they replace human kidney transplants

Transplants of organs from genetically modified pigs to humans is making progress, but pig organs haven't yet survived long enough to be a viable substitute for human organs.  Kidneys are a good experimental organ to work with, because when the pig organ fails, the patient can go back on dialysis (and continue to wait for a deceased-donor organ transplant).  But if pig organs can last long enough, they might replace dialysis.  The first pig-organ recipient to go straight to a human organ transplant has now been reported, in a press release accompanying the case report.  Below are both the press release and the case report.

Patient Who Received Pig Kidney Becomes First To Progress to Human Kidney Transplant
Study shows xenotransplantation can serve as a bridge for patients with end-stage kidney disease
By MASS GENERAL BRIGHAM COMMUNICATIONS September 3, 2026 

 Riella L, Borges T, Rosales I et al.
Porcine kidney xenotransplantation as a bridge to allotransplantation: a first-in-human study
The Lancet, 2026;  

"This case shows that porcine kidney xenotransplantation can provide prolonged renal support and be discontinued without clinically significant allosensitisation or zoonotic infection. Early cellular rejection resolved with treatment, whereas later graft failure was associated with microvascular injury progressing to thrombotic microangiopathy despite a negative donor-specific crossmatch, supporting the possibility that mechanisms beyond conventional antibody-mediated rejection contributed to late graft injury. Kidney xenotransplantation has the potential to provide prolonged dialysis-free support while also serving as a bridge to subsequent human allotransplantation." 

How to Get Away with Merger in a Dialysis Duopoly by T.G. Wollman

 Here's a paper featured by Microeconomic Insights, which shows that in the highly concentrated dialysis market, in which prices are mostly federally regulated, mergers reduce competition on quality.

 Thomas G. Wollmann: How to Get Away with Merger: Stealth Consolidation and Its Effects on US Dialysis 

"This paper studies premerger notification of US dialysis acquisitions from 1996 to 2017. Like many industries, dialysis has consolidated rapidly. During this period, thousands of facilities changed ownership, yet only half were reported to federal antitrust authorities. Unlike most industries, dialysis prices are mostly set by the government, so acquisitions of rival facilities reduce the incentive to compete on quality. Since patients are often already in poor health, preventing stealth consolidation could save lives.

The study combines data on market structure, antitrust enforcement, and patient health. I begin by describing patterns in the data. Next, I estimate a structural model of dialysis competition, enforcement, and agency costs. Finally, I use the estimates to predict what would have happened had all dialysis mergers proposed during the study period been reportable.

Three main findings emerge.

Premerger notification is critical to effective antitrust enforcement. All else equal, exemption reduces the likelihood of enforcement by about 90%.
Exempt acquisitions that concentrate ownership degrade quality, as evidenced by higher postmerger hospitalization and mortality rates.
The benefits of expanding premerger notification exceed the costs by orders of magnitude. This reflects the deterrence effect of antitrust enforcement (i.e., rivals won’t try to merge if they know their deal will be blocked) as well as the efficiency of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which polices billions of dollars of dialysis transactions with very few resources." 

A.I. in health care in Paris

Here's tomorrow's conference agenda for the opening day of the  Redefining Health Care in the Age of A.I. conference in Paris.  Philippe Aghion will speak on "Should we fear AI?"
My talk is about  "Computational Intelligence and Organ Allocation on a Global Scale."

Day 1 – Tuesday 8 September

8:00 am

Opening of the Sorbonne

8:15 am

Attendee registration and welcome coffee with viennoiseries

9:15 am

Introduction by Nature Editors and PITOR Institute
Magdalena Skipper, Joao Monteiro and Alexandre Loupy

9:40 am

Day opening lecture: Should we fear AI?

Philippe Aghion – Nobel Prize Laureate

Chaired by Magdalena Skipper

10:20 am

Keynote: Computational Intelligence and Organ Allocation on a Global Scale

Alvin Roth – Nobel Prize Laureate

Chaired by Alexandre Loupy

11:00 am

Imaging and diagnostic models
Chaired by Alexandre Loupy and Sadra Bakhshandeh

11:00 am

From Pixel to Patient: AI for Multimodal Medical Imaging

Julia Schnabel

11:30 am

Foundation models bridging molecular information and pathology

Guangyu Wang

12:00 pm

Building Trustworthy AI for Clinical Decision-Making

Roxana Daneshjou

12:30 pm

Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)

Disparate privacy risks from medical AI: a new axis of health inequality

Moritz Knolle, Technical University of Munich (TUM)

12:45 pm

Lunch break

2:15 pm

Meet the Nature editors
Joao Monteiro, Magdalena Skipper, George Caputa, Lorenzo Righetto, Monica Wang, Ananya Rastogi, Sadra Bakhshandeh and Wanying Wang

3:15 pm

Keynote: Towards conversational diagnostic artificial intelligence

Alan Karthikesalingam

Chaired by George Caputa

3:55 pm

Coffee break

4:30 pm

Foundation models and drug discovery
Chaired by Roxana Daneshjou and George Caputa

4:30 pm

Six Aging Clocks Confirmed Biological Age Reversal in Phase IIa Trial of a Novel Therapeutic Discovered Using Aging Research and Generative AI

Alex Zhavoronkov

5:00 pm

Building AI for Biological Reasoning: Towards Biological Artificial Superintelligence

Thomas Clozel

5:30 pm

Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)

When AI meets the emergency department: rethinking how we evaluate clinical AI

Austin Schoeffler, Stanford University

5:45 pm

Short Talk Presentation (selected from submitted abstracts)

Testing levels of LLM agent autonomy in inpatient treatment decisions: a prospective, silent-mode evaluation of vancomycin dosing

Yixing Jiang, Stanford University & Kameron C. Black, Stanford Health Care

6:00 pm

Roundtable: Opportunities and limits in implementing AI in healthcare
Effy Vayena, Demilade Adedinsewo, Jessilyn Dunn, James Zou, and Marco Marsella
Moderated by Alexandre Loupy and George Caputa

7:00 pm

Poster session with wine and cheese

 

Redefining Healthcare in the Age of A.I., Paris, Sept 8-10

 I'm in Paris, for the conference Redefining Healthcare in the Age of AI 

"The Paris Institute for Transplantation and Organ Regeneration (PITOR) is delighted to announce the first Nature Conference in Europe dedicated to artificial intelligence in medicine, taking place in Paris from 8–10 September 2026.

Held under the High Patronage of the President of the French Republic, the conference will bring together 28 leading international experts, including two Nobel Prize laureates, as well as the Editors-in-Chief of Nature, Nature Medicine, Nature Reviews Engineering, Nature Reviews Nephrology, and Nature Health. The meeting will be held in the historic amphitheater of the Sorbonne.

Topics will include:

    Medical imaging and diagnostics
    Ethics and regulation
    Medical robotics and wearable technologies
    Agentic AI and clinical decision support
    Drug discovery and repurposing
 

HHS Announces Winners of the 2026 Prize Challenge to Advance Living Kidney Donation

 Here's the press release:

HHS Announces Winners of the 2026 KidneyX EMPOWER: Living Link Prize Challenge to Advance Living Kidney Donation and Patient-Centered Innovation

WASHINGTON, D.C. — August 27, 2026 — The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today announced the nine winners of the 2026 KidneyX EMPOWER: Living Link Prize Challenge, a $4 million national competition to accelerate innovation supporting living kidney donors and patients who depend on them. The challenge was run through the Kidney Innovation Accelerator (KidneyX), a public-private partnership between HHS and the American Society of Nephrology (ASN).

...

Addressing Critical Gaps in Living Donation

More than a dozen Americans die each day while waiting for a kidney, and nearly 100,000 Americans are currently waitlisted for a kidney transplant. Living kidney donation is one of the most effective treatment options for kidney failure, yet the number of living kidney donors has remained virtually flat for approximately two decades at fewer than 7,000 per year. Significant financial, logistical, educational, and social barriers often limit the number of people able to donate or receive a transplant.

2026 EMPOWER Prize Challenge Winners

...

A total of nine winning teams were recognized for their bold, practical solutions that improve public awareness and mentorship; donor interventions; donor readiness and eligibility; donor-centered outcomes; and donation center practices.

...

To encourage further progress, eight awardees will each receive $375,000, while one distinguished grand prize winner will receive a $1 million award recognizing their exceptional contributions toward enhancing support for donors, patients, and the broader healthcare community.

• Grand Prize Winner: Richard Horsley, LivingLink: A full-stack, open-source platform built on HL7 FHIR R4 that integrates natively into commonly used electronic health records (EHR) systems.
• Columbia University Irving Medical Center/New York-Presbyterian, DonorForward: Turning unused donor readiness into non-directed kidney transplants. A structured identification and decision aid system to expand the living donor pool.
• Dartmouth Transplant, A Rural Living Donor Tele-Navigation Hub: A telehealth-enabled care model shifting testing and care coordination closer to home to reduce travel barriers for rural donors.
• Kidney Connective, Best-fit routing for donors and their pairs: A donor and pair-facing best-fit routing experience that helps a donor and their recipient find the transplant center where they’re both eligible.
• MedStar Georgetown Transplant Institute, Expanding Living Kidney Donation in Adults 65 and Older: Replaces fixed criteria with an individualized, age-adjusted, and risk-stratified evaluation framework.
• National Kidney Donation Organization, The NKDO Living Link Network: A national model connecting prospective donors and patients with trained living donor mentors and moderated peer discussions.
• NYU Langone Health Transplant Institute, CADENCE: A virtual program employing trained lay navigators to deliver the "Live Donor Champion" program, equipping families to act as advocates.
• Regenstrief Institute, LIVINGkidney: A standalone mobile app and website providing structured guidance and AI knowledge assistance.
• Virginia Commonwealth University, The KHCP Living Link Pathway: An EHR-enabled care model that uses rule-based chronic kidney disease identification and predictive risk equations to activate donors early.

Learn more about the winners here.

Advancing Living Kidney Donation

The winning solutions demonstrate how lived experience, technical innovation, clinical approaches, and community-based support can help address barriers across the living donation journey. By advancing innovations in these areas, the 2026 EMPOWER Prize Challenge emphasizes living donation as a critical pathway to improving outcomes and saving lives while ensuring that living donors are supported before, during and after donation.

...

The award-winning teams will be honored during the KidneyX EMPOWER Winners Showcase on September 10, 2026. Winners will present their innovative strategies and solutions aimed at expanding living kidney donation.

Privacy, A.I. and the backlash against Flock license-plate readers

 Privacy while driving seems to be more important than privacy while surfing the internet, to judge from recent reactions to automated license-plate readers produced by the company Flock Safety.

Here's the story from the Atlantic: 

Why the Flock Backlash Has Gotten So Intense
The sudden anger about these cameras seems to reflect more than just wariness about the surveillance system.  By David A. Graham 

"As corporate names go, Flock is cleverly flexible. It evokes the many cameras that compose the company’s surveillance system and also a group of sheep, protected by a watchful shepherd. The recent backlash against the company, however, more closely resembles a flight of starlings, seeming to erupt out of nowhere and move as one unified body. 

...

"Flock is useful because it is ubiquitous. Reforms such as strict data-retention limits would only marginally answer privacy concerns, and anything more drastic would undermine the system’s efficacy. As National Review’s Charles C. W. Cooke noted, no one doubts that Flock works. “Lots of things would reduce crime if implemented,” he wrote. “That doesn’t mean that those things are necessarily a good idea in a free republic.” Impositions on privacy to reduce crime are a particularly tough sell when crime is dropping sharply: Recently released FBI statistics show that violent crime dropped nearly 10 percent last year, part of a consistent trend since it spiked in 2020 and 2021. Preliminary statistics suggest that 2026 might be even safer. When safety is a less urgent concern, people are less willing to sacrifice privacy for security.

"Moreover, the Flock backlash fits into a broader moment of anger—at corporations in general, and at tech companies and artificial intelligence in particular. “Americans feel they have less and less control over their own lives, and they increasingly blame large corporations,” the Financial Times columnist Rana Foroohar recently wrote. Anxiety about AI and surveillance is big and abstract, and the companies and people pushing these anxieties are far away from most Americans. Polls show widespread apprehension about the growth of AI—a Gallup poll this summer found that about half of Americans think AI will do as much harm as it will good; another 39 percent said that it’s mostly bad. But people don’t have a lot of ways to communicate those fears. "