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. "

Psychology and Economics at Stanford SITE: Sept 3-4 (Program)

 Session 18: Psychology and Economics  
Thu, Sep 3 2026, 8:00am - Fri, Sep 4 2026, 7:00pm PDT

Thursday, September 3, 2026

Sep 3

8:00 am - 9:00 am PDT

Check-in and Breakfast

Sep 3

9:00 am - 9:40 am PDT

What do we really know about risk preferences for binary lotteries?

View Paper

Presented by: Charles D. Sprenger (California Institute of Technology)

Camila Farres (California Institute of Technology), Ted O’Donoghue (Cornell University)

We conduct a comprehensive experiment on decision-making for binary lotteries—specifically, lotteries that yield a positive amount or zero. Such lotteries form the basis of many empirical results revealing violations of expected utility (EU) and motivating behavioral alternatives. However, the space of binary lotteries has not been comprehensively explored, and thus the predictions of various behavioral alternatives to EU have not been fully assessed even within this limited domain. We provide this exploration, and discover empirical patterns that stand in stark contrast to the predictions of existing behavioral models. In particular, the data indicate that risk attitudes are driven largely by relative probability comparisons between two options, with absolute magnitudes of probabilities playing a minor role. We show that the data is largely consistent with the model of “upside potential” proposed by McGranaghan et al. (2025).

Sep 3

9:40 am - 10:20 am PDT

The Misallocation of High-Value Work

View Paper

Presented by: Jason Somerville (University of California, Santa Barbara)

Carl Meyer (Stanford University), Germán Reyes (Middlebury College)

Aggregate productivity depends on whether productive inputs are allocated to their highest-value uses. We document a novel form of misallocation within a single individual performing a cognitive task. In an online experiment, participants complete a 30-question mathematics exam with random question order and randomly timed enhanced incentives (“bonus boosts”). Performance falls by 9.5 percentage points from the first to the last question, and 82 percent of participants exhibit a decline. Yet 58.0 percent of participants report no preference over when to receive bonus boosts, and willingness to pay for these boosts is constant across timing options. This indifference is costly: assigning boosts early rather than late raises expected bonus earnings by 9 percent. The misallocation aligns with miscalibrated beliefs about productivity: pre-exam forecasts imply constant performance, and post-exam hindcasts capture only 55 percent of the actual decline. These findings identify miscalibrated beliefs about within-worker productivity trajectories as an under-recognized source of misallocation.

Sep 3

10:20 am - 11:00 am PDT

Break

Sep 3

11:00 am - 11:40 am PDT

Model-Directed Attention and the Persistence of Wrong Mental Models: Evidence from Firm Pricing

Presented by: David Huffman (Cornell University)

Yi Han (Renmin University of China), Yiming Liu (Humboldt University of Berlin)

We show a way that wrong mental models can persist even in data-rich environments, and potentially even resist encounters with peers who have the correct model: by remaining silent about data features they cannot explain, simple wrong models direct attention away from disconfirming patterns and explanations. Field evidence comes from 13,000 gas station managers, 20 percent of whom have a simple model, discounts raise sales, that is silent about intertemporal substitution (IS), evident in the data as sales dips before and after a pre-announced discount. Managers who neglect IS show measurable inattention to these dips, believe fuel demand is more elastic, set lower prices, earn lower profits, andtheir neglect persists with experience. Online experiments on Prolific provide tighter identification and causal evidence: exposure to the simple peer model reduces attention to IS patterns, while a targeted attention intervention raises recognition of those patterns and induces switching to the correct model. Encountering the correct model at a later stage helps correct beliefs, but does not fully undo the impact of having the wrong model first.

Sep 3

11:40 am - 12:20 pm PDT

Beliefs Over Contracts

View Paper

Presented by: Francis Annan (University of California, Berkeley)

Collin B. Raymond (Cornell University)

We study how firms choose among incentive contracts and how accurately managers predict their e!ects. Using a survey of managerial beliefs and a large-scale field experiment, we randomly assign agents at the market level to several widely used, expenditure-equivalent incentive schemes. In the field, the best-performing contract increases agent output and firm revenue by over 20% relative to the status quo, despite being ranked lower by managers, whereas the worst-performing contract performs as predicted. Managers correctly identify underperforming contracts but systematically underestimate top- performing ones. We document the sources of performance differences—labor supply responses rather than selection or pricing and the determinants of managerial predictability: contract complexity and managerial hierarchy. Our results highlight the importance of contract design for firm performance and reveal systematic limits to managerial cognition in shaping incentives.

Sep 3

12:20 pm - 2:00 pm PDT

Lunch

Sep 3

2:00 pm - 2:20 pm PDT

Do Firms Know What Workers Want?

View Paper

Presented by: Simon Cordes (University of Bonn)

Max Müller (University of Bonn)

Labor supply depends on wages and amenities, and standard models implicitly assume that firms hold accurate beliefs about workers’ amenity valuations. In a survey with firms and workers in Germany, we measure workers’ valuations of amenities and firms’ beliefs about workers’ valuations. We find that firms systematically underestimate workers’ valuations of all amenities. These misperceptions are driven by interpersonal projection: managers project their own preferences—they value amenities less—onto workers. Through the lens of a simple model of imperfect competition, we show that firm misperceptions result in (i) labor shortages and (ii) excess labor costs for biased firms, and increase the market power of unbiased firms. Empirical tests confirm these predictions: a simple calibration suggests that non-providing firms could reduce their labor costs by 5% by providing amenities.

Sep 3

2:20 pm - 2:40 pm PDT

Insuring Wisdom: Intermediaries in the Market for Medicare Advice

Presented by: Elaine Shen (University of California, Berkeley)

Margaret Kallus (University of California, Berkeley)

Sep 3

2:40 pm - 3:00 pm PDT

Knowledge Transfer and Strategic Similarity

View Paper

Presented by: Joseph Feffer (Stanford University)

Filip Tokarski (Stanford University)

This paper studies when strategic understanding acquired in one mechanism can be transferred to another. We introduce a framework in which agents’ knowledge is represented as a set of payoff comparisons they can make, and use it to formalize what it means to understand that a strategy profile is an equilibrium. We first apply this framework to mechanisms that are strategically equivalent—that is, share the same game form up to relabeling of actions—and show that agents’ understanding of equilibrium transfers across such mechanisms once the relevant action correspondences are explained to them. We then define strategic analogy, a weaker notion that allows not only actions but also types to be remapped, and show that understanding of equilibrium transfers across strategically analogous mechanisms once agents recognize how actions and types correspond. Applications include single item auctions, scoring auctions, and nonlinear pricing with capacity constraints.

Sep 3

3:00 pm - 3:20 pm PDT

Geographic Price Extrapolation, Learning, and Housing Search: Evidence from Danish Movers

Presented by: Matteo Saccarola (University of Chicago)

Using population-wide Danish administrative registers on housing transactions, I document an asymmetric, hockey-stick relationship between origin market prices and overpay- ment for comparable homes. Quantitatively, the elasticity of overpayment with respect to the origin-destination price difference is 3.9 percent (p < 0.01) when movers relocate from more expensive to cheaper housing markets. In contrast, buyers moving to more expensive locations exhibit little systematic overpayment, and their purchase prices are unrelated to prices at origin. I interpret these patterns through a housing search model in which buyers enter with price beliefs anchored in their origin market and update those beliefs gradually during search. Despite homogeneous learning, endogenous stopping generates the observed asymmetry at purchase: buyers predisposed to overpay transact quickly before fully learning the local price level, while those predisposed to underpay search longer and converge toward local prices. The model yields additional predictions that I test using administrative and survey data. The evidence supports origin-based price extrapolation with subsequent learning rather than preference-based explanations such as reference dependence.

Sep 3

3:20 pm - 4:00 pm PDT

Break

Sep 3

4:00 pm - 4:40 pm PDT

Strategically Controlling Worldviews

View Paper

Presented by: Danil Dmitriev (University of Georgia)

Cuimin Ba (University of Pittsburgh), Ziqi Hang (Texas Tech University), Freddie Papazyan (Texas Tech University)

This paper studies persuasive behavior when the sender can control both the information the receiver observes and the model through which it is interpreted (the narrative). Even when the receiver begins with a correctly specified model and understands the sender’s strategic incentives, the sender can manipulate him and often secure her preferred action with probability one. The key mechanism highlights a strong complementarity between strategic communication of information and narratives, allowing the sender to strictly outperform a Bayesian persuader with commitment power. We fully characterize the sender-optimal equilibrium for a broad class of information technologies. Softer information lowers the bar for full manipulation, while harder information expands the set of environments where any manipulation is possible. The results provide a formal foundation for understanding the widespread success of disinformation.

Sep 3

4:40 pm - 5:20 pm PDT

Deception Aversion

View Paper

Presented by: Evan Friedman (Paris School of Economics)

Béla Elmshauser (Paris School of Economics), Yoon Joo Jo (Texas A&M University)

In communicating private information, opportunities to lie by misreporting the truth also present opportunities to deceive by inducing inaccurate beliefs. While many studies document truth-telling despite material costs—commonly attributed to lying aversion—such behavior may also reflect aversion to deceiving others. Disentangling the two preferences is challenging because deception depends on the sender’s unobserved second-order beliefs. In a novel game, we show theoretically how to identify deception aversion from choice data alone, under minimal assumptions on beliefs. In a laboratory experiment, we find strong evidence of deception aversion: many subjects lie to avoid deception; structural estimates imply that 30% are deception-averse.

Sep 3

5:20 pm - 7:00 pm PDT

Dinner

Friday, September 4, 2026

Sep 4

8:00 am - 9:00 am PDT

Check-in and Breakfast

Sep 4

9:00 am - 9:40 am PDT

Limited Propagation and Contingent Thinking

View Paper

Presented by: Ran Spiegler (Tel Aviv University & University College London)

Andrew Ellis (London School of Economics)

Abstract. We model an agent who updates her beliefs over a set of variables after observing some of them without fully propagating their implications. We provide a representation of updated beliefs that exhibit limited propagation along a directed acyclic graph, and show that it is implemented by a variant on a standard propagation algorithm. Failures of contingent thinking occur when the agent’s inferences travel through fewer graph paths from hypothetical variables relative to given ones. We characterize the model’s relationship to Bayesian updating and familiar non-Bayesian benchmarks. Contingent thinking is necessary for Bayesian updating, and failures cause correlation neglect and violations of iterated expectations. Our frame- work offers a new perspective into experimental evidence on contingent thinking, reinterpreting effects such as the winner’s curse or the Monty Hall fallacy. We illustrate the framework with applications, ranging from public good contribution games to the recreational puzzle Kakuro.

Sep 4

9:40 am - 10:20 am PDT

Intergenerational Race-Based Trauma and Financial Market Participation

Presented by: Vicki Bogan (Duke University)

Lisa A. Kramer (University of Toronto), Chi Liao (University of Manitoba), Alexandra Niessen-Ruenzi (University of Mannheim)

This paper examines whether historical race-based financial trauma shapes current household financial market participation. Our analysis exploits geographic exposure to the Freedman’s Savings Bank (FSB), established in 1865 to encourage Black Americans to save. The bank collapsed in 1874 due to fraud and mismanagement. Using restricted-use Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) data, we link present day stock ownership to historical FSB branch locations. Own, paternal, and grandpaternal FSB-county exposure is associated with lower stock market participation among Black individuals. These effects persist after controlling for socioeconomic and geographic differences, migration, and broader patterns of racial exclusion. Our findings reveal intergenerational transmission of race-based financial trauma and a robust mechanism perpetuating the racial wealth gap.

Sep 4

10:20 am - 11:00 am PDT

Break

Sep 4

11:00 am - 11:40 am PDT

Deadly Stigma

View Paper

Presented by: Manasvini Singh (Carnegie Mellon University)

How harmful is stigma in the “real world”? Answers are elusive because stigma is difficult to measure in observational data, and isolating its effects requires exogenous variation in stigma without variation in the stigmatized trait. This study addresses these challenges by focusing on a widespread form of stigma — weight stigma — in the high-stakes setting of inpatient healthcare. BMI categories are displayed prominently to providers in electronic medical records, and obesity is heavily stigmatized socially. The “obese” cutoff may thus discretely shift stigma while keeping constant the underlying trait. Using a regression discontinuity design that exploits this institutional feature, I find a discontinuous increase in in-hospital mortality at this cutoff, though patient health does not change. Two patterns suggest stigma-based discrimination as the mechanism. First, just-obese patients receive lower diagnostic effort than almost-obese patients. Second, a physician-validated LLM identifies a rise in stigmatizing language in clinical notes at the cutoff — specifically, statements that impose moral judgment, undermine patient credibility, and stereotype patients — that closely tracks mortality effects. Overall, this paper establishes stigma as a powerful social force that can have life-or-death consequences.

Sep 4

11:40 am - 12:20 pm PDT

Opt in? Opt out?

View Paper

Presented by: Alex Chan (Harvard University)

Ayush Gupta (Boston University), Yetong Xu (Harvard University)

Cadaveric organ shortages leave thousands without life-saving transplants each year. Countries differ in using opt-in (informed consent) or opt-out (presumed consent) systems for donor registration. Using newly assembled cross-country panel data and an event-study design, this paper provides evidence that presumed-consent laws increase organ donation only when strictly enforced and family veto power is limited; weak opt-out regimes show negligible or even negative effects. A theoretical signaling model provides a plausible mechanism when opt-in or opt-out yields more donations, emphasizing the roles of donation propensity, signaling costs, and the family’s ability to overturn defaults. A large laboratory experiment further tests these mechanisms, showing that opt-in generally produces equal or higher donation rates unless signaling is costly and family veto power is minimal. The results underscore that defaults alone rarely increase donations unless paired with strong institutional enforcement.

Sep 4

12:20 pm - 2:00 pm PDT

Lunch

Sep 4

2:00 pm - 2:40 pm PDT

State Dependence and Commitment: Experimental Evidence from Crop Insurance in Uganda

Presented by: Sili Zhang (Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich)

Lorenzo Casaburi (University of Zurich), Jack Willis (Sciences Po)

According to standard economic arguments, state dependence generates the value of flexibility. This paper proposes that it can instead generate demand for commitment when individuals anticipate that future states will distort their decisions. A conceptual framework models two broad channels—state-dependent valuations (e.g., projection bias) and state-dependent decision mistakes (e.g., scarcity effects)— and shows that sophistication about such future distortions can generate demand for commitment. We test this prediction in a field experiment in Uganda, where we exclude present bias as a source of commitment demand by design. Farmers are offered pay-at-harvest crop insurance for two seasons and can choose upfront whether to commit to second-season insurance or maintain flexibility. Forty percent of farmers choose commitment. An intervention increasing sophistication raises commitment by 11 percentage points. Additional evidence suggests that both channels matter with substantial heterogeneity across farmers. Our results highlight the importance of individuals’ sophistication about future state dependence for welfare analysis and policy design, particularly in environments with high state variability.

Sep 4

2:40 pm - 3:20 pm PDT

Behavioral Inequality: The Contribution of Decision-Making Frictions to Inequality

Presented by: Stefano DellaVigna (University of California, Berkeley)

Tim de Silva (Stanford University), Rohan Jha (University of California, Berkeley)

We provide the first systematic quantification of how decision-making frictions—such as failing to claim government benefits, choosing dominated insurance plans, not saving for retirement, and not quitting smoking—aggregate to affect inequality in income, consumption, and wealth. We review the existing literature and combine it with original analysis of survey data to estimate the prevalence and financial impact of 18 frictions across the income distribution. To make these frictions comparable, we develop a framework in which each friction is characterized by three parameters: the share of the population at risk, the share affected by the friction, and the average loss conditional on being affected. Aggregating across the frictions with dollar-loss estimates, the estimated impact on annual income is 7.8% for the bottom quartile of the income distribution relative to 4.2% for the top quartile; the total loss for low-income households is approximately 7.5 times larger than the impact of a major EITC expansion. We then incorporate these frictions into a life cycle model with realistic institutional features, including tax-advantaged retirement accounts, progressive taxation, portfolio choice, and a social insurance system. The model reveals that removing frictions tends to reduce inequality in lifetime consumption, with the largest effects coming from smoking and attending for-profit colleges. Our results suggest that decision-making frictions are a quantitatively important contributor to inequality in income, consumption, and wealth.

Sep 4

3:20 pm - 4:00 pm PDT

Break

Sep 4

4:00 pm - 4:40 pm PDT

A Practical Approach to Robust Policy Evaluation with Behavioral Agents

Presented by: Dmitry Taubinsky (University of California, Berkeley)

B. Douglas Bernheim (Stanford University)

Sep 4

4:40 pm - 5:20 pm PDT

What Motivates Partisan Selective Exposure? Experimental Evidence from the 2024 US Presidential Election

Presented by: Matt Gentzkow (Stanford University)

Peter Robertson (Stanford University), Michael Thaler (University College London)

Why do partisans prefer like-minded information sources? They may want to learn the truth and believe these sources are the most accurate. Or, they may prefer them for non-accuracy psychological forces such as confirmation bias. We evaluate these motives in two large-scale experiments in which 3,785 participants choose sources to help them predict swing-state winners in the 2024 US presidential election. Partisans exhibit substantial selective exposure, choosing like-minded sources both among real news outlets and among synthetic sources we construct. This behavior remains essentially unchanged under two treatments: (i) increasing incentives for accuracy and (ii) shutting down confirmation motives by having participants delegate their predictions to sources without seeing sources' content. In contrast, participants respond strongly to experimentally-varied source accuracy, even absent incentives. Our results, interpreted in reduced form and through a discrete-choice model, suggest the selective exposure in our experiment can be almost entirely explained by demand for accuracy.

 

The Economic Science Association celebrates its 40th anniversary, and Jordi Brandts, in Barcelona

 Here's the announcement:

2026 European Meeting of the Economic Science Association (ESA) in Barcelona, September 2-5

"We are delighted to announce that Universitat Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona (Spain) will host the 2026 European ESA Meeting, celebrating the 40th anniversary of the ESA. "

2026 European Meeting - workshop in honor of Jordi Brandts 9/2/2026

 

Keynote Speakers & Special Sessions

Keynote Speakers:

• Antonio Cabrales (Universidad Carlos III)
• Axel Ockenfels (University of Cologne)
• Marta Serra-Garcia (University of California, San Diego)
• Elke Weber (Princeton University)

Special Sessions:

• Session on Cognitive Economics
  • Eric Johnson (Organizer, Columbia University)
  • Thomas Graeber (University of Zurich)
  • Michael Thaler (University College London)
• Panel: 40 Years of ESA - A European Perspective
  • Jordi Brandts (IAE-CSIC)
  • Karim Sadrieh (University of Magdeburg)
  • Arthur Schram (University of Amsterdam)
  • Chris Starmer (University of Nottingham)
  • Andrej Svorencik (UB and UPenn)
  • Marie Claire Villeval (CNRS and GATE Lab)
  • Moderator: Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA-UPF-BSE)
• Session on Editor Perspectives on AI-Assisted Research: Reflections and Suggestions for Authors
  • John Duffy (University of California, Irvine)
  • Arno Riedl (Maastricht University)
  • Marie Claire Villeval (CNRS and GATE Lab)
  • Roberto Weber (University of Zurich)
  • Moderator: Erin Krupka (University of Michigan)
• Across Generations Matching (AGM): Senior Professors and Young Researchers
  • Participants & Details

Organizers

• Anna Bayona (ESADE Business School)
• Rosemarie Nagel (ICREA, Pompeu Fabra University & BSE)
• Daniel Navarro-Martinez (Pompeu Fabra University & BSE)

 

Three takeaways on Moral Economics, with Lynn Thoman

 Lynn Thoman and I discuss three takeaways from Moral Economics (and hers are different than mine):

 You can listen here:

Why Doing the “Right Thing” Can Make Everything Worse 

 and you can watch as well as listen here:

"What can we do when doing the morally “right” thing produces worse outcomes?

And what if some of society’s strongest moral instincts are preventing us from solving problems we all agree are terrible?

Alvin Roth is a Stanford professor and Nobel Prize-winning economist whose work has helped redesign real-world systems, including kidney exchanges and the way doctors are matched with hospitals. His new book, Moral Economics, tackles a harder category of problems: markets and behaviors we find morally objectionable, even when banning them may create consequences we don’t want.

He discusses:

    Why nearly 100,000 Americans can be waiting for a kidney 

    What prohibitions of alcohol and heroin can teach us 

    What happened when Rhode Island accidentally legalized indoor prostitution

    Whether paying kidney donors could save lives without creating an ethically unacceptable market

    Why evidence becomes especially important when reasonable people disagree about morality

    Whether performance-enhancing drugs could eventually become as ordinary as coffee

Some policies sound obviously right when judged by their intentions. But what happens when you judge them by their actual consequences?

Roth pushes into the uncomfortable territory between those two questions: when banning something creates a black market, when changing a rule may save more lives than inventing a new technology, and what we should do when the outcome we believe is morally necessary turns out to be something we cannot actually achieve."

Market design from the Perspective of Theological Anthropology, by Christina McRorie (in the January 2027 ASSA program)

I'm always on the lookout for different perspectives on market design, and here's a paper that caught my eye in the  ASSA Preliminary Program for the January 2027 meetings in Washington DC.

 It's in a session called  What Economic Models Can and Cannot See: Human Flourishing, Freedom, and the Common Good (B4)  Hosted by the Association of Christian Economists 

Can Market Design Make Us More Free? Some Notes on the Use of Experimental Economics from the Perspective of Theological Anthropology  by Christina McRorie, Boston College 

Abstract
Although modern thought tends to construe freedom as freedom from constraint or freedom of choice, Catholic theological anthropology has long defined true freedom as the state of being agentially oriented toward the good. As Servais Pinckaers puts it, it is “freedom for,” rather than “freedom from”—specifically, freedom for living in a Christ-like way, which becomes possible as we come to participate in Christ’s character. This perspective suggests that social influences which encourage our growth in character are not only helping us become more good, but also more free. Moreover, because this conception of freedom is not based in autonomy, this remains true even if these formative influences are not chosen by us, and work on us without our awareness.
Using this concept of freedom, this paper considers the theological implications of experimental research on prosocial behavior in markets. It appears that certain conditions encourage subjects to act with more fairness, trustworthiness, and even generosity than they might under other conditions. (E.g., when market participants can observe each other’s behavior and communicate, and when the social framing of various options emphasizes values, or at least does not emphasize competition or the threat of loss, among other factors.) Insofar as laboratory studies replicate conditions present in actual markets, this indicates that some real markets elicit more moral behaviors than others.
Moreover, because virtue theory assumes that character is built through repeated moral action, markets which encourage individuals to act in prosocial ways can be read as supporting their growth in virtue, insofar as these elicited actions eventually influence individuals’ dispositions and habits. To the extent that this occurs, this paper proposes that good market design can encourage us to become more good, and thus more free. 

This Land is My Brand: From Woody Guthrie to DJ Trump

 President Trump's renaming* of Lake Ontario got me thinking about the famous song by Woody Guthrie, This Land Is Your Land. Its chorus is 

"This land is your land, this land is my land
From California to the New York island,
From the redwood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
This land was made for you and me. "

 

I asked three LLMs to propose Trump versions, and got these three: 

This Land Is My Brand  by Gemini

Chorus
This land is my land, it’s mostly my land,
From Mar-a-Lago to the New York island,
From Lake America to the Gulf of America,
This map was drawn for only me.
########

This Gulf Is My Gulf by Claude:

It's my gulf now, it's my lake now,
Change the name and don't look back now,
One man's word is all it takes now —
This map was made for me alone.
 #########

 This map is my map, by Chat GPT

It’s America’s Gulf, it’s America’s lake,
The greatest new names that a President could make!
They’re beautiful names, everybody agrees—
Ask anybody! Ask anybody! Ask anybody, please!

It’s America’s Gulf, it’s America’s lake,
Tremendous decisions for history’s sake!
The old names were terrible — frankly, a mess—
But these names are the greatest! The greatest! God bless! 

#########

*Names, like language itself, are largely equilibrium phenomena--even for entirely US based names, like Cape Canaveral, which was officially called Cape Kennedy only from 1963 to 1973, when it's earlier name was officially reinstated.