Spam invitation to be featured in a book club

 As the author of a forthcoming book (Moral Economics) I now get book-related emails from publicists, podcasters and others.  But I suspect I was the first human to see the email below, inviting me to be featured in a book club, which began with this sentence:

"I’m writing because "The Nash solution and the utility of bargaining" has stayed with me, thoughtful, layered, and resonant in a way that invites real conversation. It felt like the kind of book our readers would want to spend time with."

 It purported to come from the organizer of an apparently real book club (Bellatrist), but alas the return email didn't pass the smell test (despite coming from such a perceptive reader of the paper below...)

 Roth, Alvin E. "The Nash solution and the utility of bargaining." Econometrica (1978)

 Abstract: "It has recently been shown that the utility of playing a game with side payments depends on a parameter called strategic risk posture. The Shapley value is the risk neutral utility function for games with side payments. In this paper, utility functions are derived for bargaining games without side payments, and it is shown that these functions are also determined by the strategic risk posture. The Nash solution is the risk neutral utility function for bargaining games without side payments."

 

Thoughtful, layered and resonant.   

Kidney donation, in today's NYT

 Here's an article and an argument from a nondirected kidney donor, in today's NYT

 Want to Make a Difference? Donate Your Kidney.  by German Lopez, Feb. 2, 2026, 

"Nearly 50,000 people in the United States die each year because there are not enough kidneys for transplant, which adds up to more than double the number of annual murder victims. Hundreds of thousands more are on dialysis, a lifesaving but time-sucking and physically draining treatment. Humans need only one kidney to live, but we have two. Giving away my kidney, to a 23-year-old woman I didn’t know, has been the most fulfilling experience of my life.

...

"The chain is a wonderful, and fairly recent, innovation that has allowed many more people to get lifesaving transplants. Imagine three people — Patients A, B and C — need kidneys. B’s and C’s spouses are willing to donate, but Spouse B is a match for Patient A and Spouse C is a match for Patient B. They all agree to pull the trigger if a donor can be found for the remaining patient, C. An undirected donor can come in at that point to complete the chain of donations. The largest chain on record led to 126 transplants.

...

"I also learned about some of the health care system’s absurdities. As a gay man, I could donate my kidney but not my blood. The government prohibited blood donations from sexually active gay men until 2023, thanks to outdated fears about H.I.V. My kidney was fine, although the doctors had to inform the receiver that it was “higher risk.” Thankfully, the threat assessment did not deter the recipient from accepting my gay kidney.

...

My donation felt like a rejection of the day’s politics — and not just because it required overcoming some light homophobia. It felt like an act of defiance; I was plugging a small hole in a porous health care system while our leaders’ proposed cuts to Obamacare and Medicaid attempted to open a chasm."   

Tobacco banned in Indian state of Odisha

 Here's the story from the Times of India, Govt notifies ban on all chewable tobacco, nicotine products | Bhubaneswar News - The Times of India.  It remains to be seen how enforceable a statewide ban will be. (Local bans on something as addictive as nicotine are likely to face black markets sourced from neighboring jurisdictions without a ban.)

 

  

 

Tim Harford on British queues (and how queues get long)

 Here's a column in the FT on congestion and growing queue length, which (also) shows why Tim Harford is one of my favorite economics journalists.

How British Queues Got Out of Hand 

[Why are ambulances increasingly delayed?] "The obvious explanation is that there are not enough ambulances, but the deeper problem is that ambulances themselves are being delayed in discharging patients into A&E units, which are themselves often overwhelmed: in the first quarter of 2014, 134 patients waited more than 12 hours in A&E before being admitted; 10 years later the figure was 141,693. The long delays in A&E are in part the result of the hospital beds all being full and that, in turn, is in part because hospitals sometimes struggle to discharge vulnerable patients into an overstretched social care system. All of these problems are a kind of queue and they all interact in a surprising way: you can die waiting for an ambulance because there aren’t enough nursing homes in your area.

...

"when bottlenecks feed into bottlenecks, some strategic thinking is required to fix the system. There is often more than one bottleneck in a congested system and opening that bottleneck will sometimes mean the same queue builds up somewhere else."

Alex Chan on market design and organ transplants (and how to begin a video)

Alex Chan, at HBS:) 

https://youtu.be/8n6A9wO1yt0?si=VsaT0AVNgYc7VdnB

Redesigning transplant and OPO center incentives (Chan and Roth in JAMA; Bae, Sweat, Melcher and Ashlagi in JAMA Surgery)

 

Chan A, Roth AE. Reimagining Transplant Center Incentives Beyond the CMS IOTA Model. JAMA. Published online January 26, 2026. doi:10.1001/jama.2025.26194 

 "On July 1, 2025, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) launched the Increasing Organ Transplant Access (IOTA) model, a national experiment in revising how transplant centers are evaluated and paid.

"For decades, transplant centers were primarily judged by 1-year graft and patient survival for patients who underwent a transplant. That standard, designed to safeguard quality, sometimes constrained access to transplants by rewarding risk avoidance rather than expansion. This contributed to persistent kidney shortages, alongside continued organ nonutilization.1

"The IOTA model marks a deliberate rebalancing. CMS is tying payment not primarily to short-term survival, but to 3 domains: achievement (60 points for transplant volume), efficiency (20 points for kidney offer acceptance), and quality (20 points for graft survival).

...

"A kidney transplant begins with an organ procurement organization (OPO). Yet OPOs remain outside the IOTA payment framework, perpetuating fragmentation between procurement and transplant.

"Recent experience with OPO performance metrics illustrates how narrow incentives can distort behavior. After CMS introduced tier-based OPO evaluations in 2021, lower-performing OPOs increased organ recovery, which also sharply increased discards, reliance on higher-risk organs, and out-of-sequence kidney placements,3 raising concerns about fairness to waitlisted patients.4 

...

"Emerging economic and experimental research suggests that joint accountability—rewarding procurement and transplant entities together for improving population health—can both shift recovery, discard, and transplant numbers and produce improved gains in patient health (Table).1 Without such system-level metrics spanning OPOs and transplant centers, IOTA will operate within a fragmented ecosystem where incentives push procurement and transplant in different, sometimes counterproductive, directions."

############

See also

Bae H, Sweat KR, Melcher ML, Ashlagi I. Organ Procurement Following the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services Performance Evaluations. JAMA Surg. 2026;161(1):97–100. doi:10.1001/jamasurg.2025.5074 

 

Jennifer Mnookin to be Columbia University's next president

Among President Mnookin's many accomplishments is one that I haven't seen mentioned in the announcements of her appointment. 

 Here's the announcement from Columbia:

Columbia University’s Board of Trustees has appointed Jennifer L. Mnookin, a nationally recognized legal scholar who serves as the Chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to be the next president of Columbia University, effective July 1, 2026. 

Here's the NYT:

Columbia Selects University of Wisconsin Chancellor as Its President.
Jennifer Mnookin has led the flagship campus of the state university system since 2022. She takes the helm at Columbia after a tumultuous period.    By Sharon Otterman

 

And here's the very different context in which I first came to know of her:

Father and daughter legal scholars complete successful kidney transplant  By Stephanie Francis Ward  December 15, 2020,

"When Robert Mnookin, a longtime Harvard Law School professor, needed a new kidney, he got some help from another member of the legal academy—his daughter, Jennifer Mnookin, the dean of the University of California at Los Angeles School of Law. "