Market Design Impact Award to Yan Chen

 Here's the announcement from INFORMS:

Announcing the Winner of 2026 Market Design Impact Award

 "The Auctions and Market Design section of INFORMS is pleased to announce that Yan Chen, Daniel Kahneman Collegiate Professor of Information at the University of Michigan School of Information, has been selected as the recipient of the 2026 Market Design Impact Award. The award will be presented at the AMD Business Meeting at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco, tentatively scheduled for Monday, November 2, 6:45–7:45 PM.

Award citation:
"For pioneering behavioral market design-combining theory, digital experiments, and large-scale field experiments-with lasting impact on the practice of market design, including the reform of Chinese college admissions, the organization of gig workers on ride-sharing platforms, and the design of recommender systems that increase contributions to digital public goods."

Now in its second year, the Market Design Impact Award recognizes major contributions to market design-original research from the past fifteen years that has had a lasting impact, directly or indirectly, on the field and/or the practice of market design.

Award Committee:
Eric Budish, The University of Chicago Booth School of Business
Tim Roughgarden, Columbia University
Nicolas Stier, Meta

Conflicts of interest were carefully handled such that they would not influence the committee decision. "

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Here's last year's (inaugural) award:

Friday, October 31, 2025 Market Design Impact Award to Hassidim, Romm, and Shorrer

 

A passionate proponent of transplants is (temporarily) unregistered as a donor: Greg Segal in the NYT

I'm a little shaken to learn that (even*) Greg Segal has temporarily suspended his registration as a potential deceased organ donor.  My registration remains active, but I'm watching with attention the regulatory and other reforms that are being contemplated for the system of deceased donation in the U.S.

What I Found Out About Organ Donation Shocked Me
By Greg Segal
Mr. Segal is the founder and chief executive of Organize, a nonprofit focused on reforming the organ donation system. 

 "I founded Organize, a nonprofit making it easier to register to become an organ donor. In 2015, Organize was selected for a role embedded inside the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, which put us on the radar of whistle-blowers. I soon became inundated with allegations from people working inside the organ donation industry who felt they had nowhere else to turn.

"I know as well as anyone that organ donation saves lives — over 40,000 annually in the United States in recent years. But I was stunned to learn that organ procurement organizations — the federal contractors that coordinate organ donation from the deceased — that made those transplants possible were routinely violating ethical standards and putting patients at risk.

"I heard allegations of negligence and financial fraud, including industry executives’ billing taxpayers for joyrides on private jets meant to transport organs; of organizations performing unnecessary procedures as part of a scheme to overbill Medicare. (Organ procurement organizations are nonprofits, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t trying to maximize financial reimbursements.) I’ve heard of poorer Americans waiting to receive organs passed over in favor of wealthier ones.

"But one case in particular led me to remove myself from the donor registry and testify before Congress."

#######

He goes on to recount one of the most disturbing cases reported recently in the NYT (which I think were at least in part uncovered through the work of his Organization).

See

Friday, June 6, 2025 Disturbing NYT report about an Organ Procurement Organization in Kentucky

 and

Sunday, July 20, 2025  Organ donation after circulatory death: the NYT recounts some disturbing cases

also

*Saturday, August 9, 2025  Withdrawals from deceased donor registries   

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. 

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 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. "