Micheal Kremer's next (post-Nobel) Act: The World Bank

 Michael Kremer, one of the most  creative and dedicated economists of our time, has found his next act, at the World Bank.  (Sometimes the news is encouraging, even nowadays.)

Here's the press release from the World Bank. 

Michael Kremer Appointed as World Bank Group Chief Economist

"WASHINGTON, September 16, 2026—World Bank Group President Ajay Banga announced that Nobel laureate Michael Kremer has been appointed as World Bank Group Chief Economist and Senior Vice President for Development Economics, bringing one of the world’s foremost development economists to lead the institution’s research, data, and analytical agenda.

"Kremer is known not only for tackling real-world problems through innovative solutions grounded in rigorous research but also for translating his findings into programs that have reached hundreds of millions of people, from expanding vaccine access and school health programs to supporting smallholder farmers." 

Would Jesus like Waymo?

Are robots (and robot cars) repugnant?  To Baptists?  

The Washington Post has the story:

Would Jesus like Waymo? Baptists have thoughts.
As religious groups contend with artificial intelligence, some Baptist pastors are lobbying against a bill that would allow driverless cars to operate commercially in D.C. They say autonomous vehicles are antihuman. By Liam Scott
 

"Would Jesus like Waymo? The Rev. A. Michael Charles Durant doesn’t think so.

“Jesus either walked or rode a beast,” Durant said in an interview at the Tenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, where he serves as pastor. “He would be opposed to technology that was opposed to people, and I believe that this is opposed to people.”

...

"In recent months, Durant has joined local Baptist pastors and other top leaders in the National Baptist Convention — which bills itself as the largest Black religious organization in the United States — in opposing autonomous vehicles, including in the District, where the D.C. Council is weighing a bill that would legalize their commercial operation.

...

“God created us to be interdependent,” Durant said from his green-carpeted office. “The greatest danger is not that humans will be not needed, but that we create an environment where humans don’t need each other.”

"Their opposition to autonomous vehicles comes as religious communities grapple with artificial intelligence and what the technology means for the human condition and all its messy beauty.

“Automation can dehumanize humanity. The Book of Genesis declares that God created man, and then he breathed into man’s nostrils, and man became a living soul,” said C.H. Johnson, the pastor at Christ Missionary Baptist Church in Maryland. “If we’re not careful, technology can rob us of our humanity, can rob God’s creation of our humanity.” 

...

"In his first encyclical, published in May, Pope Leo XIV elevates the ethics of AI to a religious imperative. In “Magnifica Humanitas,” Leo argues that the unconstrained proliferation of AI may threaten humanity and foster inequity.

...

"Not all religious leaders oppose robotaxis. At an April event hosted by the Innovation Majority Institute think tank, the Rev. Thomas Bowen, from Shiloh Baptist Church in D.C., recalled when taxis drove right by him as a Black man in the District and New York years ago. He said he was excited when Uber and Lyft came on the scene but that he has faced similar issues with those services.

“Why should I have to put on a suit to get a taxi?” said Bowen, who is the general secretary of the Washington-based Progressive National Baptist Convention.

...

"For the National Baptist Convention’s annual gathering this week in Florida, Durant, chairman of the group’s board, prepared a video to screen in which he called on his fellow pastors to oppose autonomous vehicles in their communities around the U.S." 

"The single most important quality in a great researcher is to be lucky"

 Here's an interview recorded during my visit to Taiwan this past April.  It begins with my first reply:

"The single most important quality in a great researcher is to be lucky, and to find topics that are worth working on and that yield to investigation."

 

x 

A.I. guardrails: Trump Says “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT" is all that’s needed to rein in A.I.

 The debate over how to regulate, promote, and defend against new developments in A.I. has taken a market design turn, with increased calls for regulation to limit the likelihood of both unintended consequences and malicious use.  This apparently looks to President Trump like an easy problem, already solved.

The NYT has the story: 

Trump Says a Smart President Is All That’s Needed to Rein In A.I.
The president again rejected calls to try to regulate the industry, even as some of its leaders are speaking more openly about the risks of rapidly developing artificial intelligence.   
By Jonathan Swan Sept. 14, 2026


"President Trump on Monday rejected calls from leading artificial intelligence executives for new limits on the technology, writing on social media that the only guardrail the industry needed it already had: “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”

Congestion (and lawsuits) in applications for medical residency

  The figure below is a slide from a lecture I once gave about the transition from medical school to medical residencies in the U.S.  The lower row (in brown) represents the Match, which arose in the 1950's to deal with congestion in processing offers and acceptances. (Since 1998 it's been doing that successfully using the Roth-Peranson algorithm).  However the advent of electronic application systems has led to congestion in the application and interviewing process (top row, in blue).  And now that has led to lawsuits.

 

 Here's the story of one lawsuit:

 Residency Software Developer Sues Doctor Who Helped Launch a Competing Product
— AAMC-partnered Thalamus goes after key players in ResidencyCAS   by Rachael Robertson, MedPage Today, September 10, 2026 •

"The graduate medical education (GME) software company Thalamus filed a lawsuit against its competitor Liaison International and ob/gyn leader Maya Hammoud, MD, MBA, over alleged anticompetitive conduct.

"Thalamus brought the suit in July, claiming that the defendants "engaged in a coordinated effort to unfairly compete in the residency application market through anticompetitive means." Specifically, it alleges that Hammoud violated a non-disclosure agreement signed when she was evaluating its technology for a different project -- before she helped launch a competing product. 

########

 And here's the story of another:

Doctor Sues Over Residency Application System— Arizona wound care physician calls ERAS a monopoly that's gouging applicants  by Kristina Fiore,  MedPage Today, September 1, 2026  

"A physician is bringing antitrust claims against the Association of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) for what she alleges is a monopoly over the residency application process that's gouging doctors. 

...

"Hilgers PLLC, the Dallas law firm representing Buhrke, filed a similar suit against AAMC last year, alleging its medical school application service, AMCAS, was overcharging students. It made similar allegations against the law school application process.

...

"The current complaint alleges that AAMC makes a substantial part of its income from ERAS fees -- about $120 million annually, from about 64,000 applicants.

"Applicants often apply to dozens of programs in order to have a better shot at ensuring a residency position, at an average cost of about $1,800 per person. Buhrke submitted 81 applications through ERAS, paying $1,691 in total, according to the complaint.

"The vast majority of physicians use ERAS to apply, as it has only two competitors: ResidencyCAS for ob/gyn and emergency medicine, and SF Match for ophthalmology and plastic surgery.


"AAMC also took an equity stake in competitor Thalamus so that it wouldn't be a threat to its monopoly, the complaint alleged. "

Experimenting on the psychology of LLMs

 As LLMs become increasingly important, we're starting to see experiments that explore their psychology.

(I expect that   Susan Calvin, who was Isaac Asimov's fictional robopsychologist from the1950 short story collection I Robot, will soon have scientists following in her footsteps.)

Note that experiments intended to explore A.I. psychology need not necessarily resemble those intended to explore human psychology.

Here's an example,  from the journal Artificial Intelligence and the Law:
Human realignment: An empirical study of LLMs as legal decision-aids in moral dilemmas  by Christoph Engel · Yoan Hermstrüwer · Alison Kim
 

Abstract: Recent advances in AI make it conceivable to delegate legal decision-making to machines, or to enhance human adjudication through AI assistance. Using classic normative conflicts — the trolley problem and comparable moral dilemmas — as a proof of concept, we examine the alignment between AI legal reasoning and human judgment. In our baseline experiment, we find a pronounced mismatch between decisions made by GPT and those of human subjects. This misalignment raises substantive concerns for AI-powered legal decision-aids. We investigate whether explicit normative guidance can address this misalignment, with mixed results. GPT-3.5 is susceptible to such intervention, but frequently refuses to decide when faced with a moral dilemma. GPT-4 is outright utilitarian, and essentially ignores the instruction to decide on deontological grounds. GPT-o3-mini faithfully implements this instruction, but is unwilling to balance deontological and utilitarian concerns if instructed to do so. We replicate the experiment with four LLMs from different providers. Claude-sonnet-4.6 comes closest to human respondents. Gemini-2.5-flash-lite is most sensitive to normative instructions. Llama-4-scout and Mistral-nemo have a strong utilitarian bias, and do not strongly respond to normative interventions. At least for the time being, explicit normative instructions are not fully able to realign AI advice with the normative convictions of the population, or the legislator deciding on its behalf.

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