Morals and the limits of markets, WZB Berlin, 11 - 12 July 2024

 Here's a conference that looks interesting:

Morals and the limits of markets, WZB Berlin, 11 - 12 July 2024

Organizers:  Hande Erkut and Dorothea Kübler

"The workshop will focus on the limits of markets, the morality of decisions in markets, and paternalism. It will bring together scholars from different disciplines (mainly economics, political science, and philosophy) who are working on these topics. The workshop aims to foster discussions across disciplines on the ethical considerations surrounding market activities, repugnant markets, and the government’s role in regulating such markets."

Preliminary Program:Preliminary Program:

Thursday, July 11, 2024

9:00 – 9.30 Registration/ Workshop Opening

9:30 – 10.50 Sandro Ambühl (University of Zurich)  Interventionist Preferences and the Welfare State: The Case of In-Kind Nutrition Assistance

Tammy Harel Ben Shahar (University of Haifa), Lean Out: On the Morality of Participating in Positional Competitions

10:50 – 11:10 Coffee Break

11:10 – 12:30 Benjamin Sachs-Cobbe (University of St Andrews) Taking Jobs and Doing Harm

Colin Sullivan (Purdue University) Paternalistic Discrimination

12.30 – 13:20 Lunch

13:20 – 15:20 Hande Erkut (WZB), Repugnant Transactions: The Role of Agency and Severe Consequences

Erik Malmqvist (Univeristy of Gothenburg)  How Exploitation Harms

Constanze Binder (Erasmus University Rotterdam) Universities and Markets: New Challenges to Academic Freedom

15:20 – 15:50 Coffee Break

15.50 – 17:10 Robert Stüber (NYU Abu Dhabi) Why High Incentives Cause Repugnance: A Framed Field Experiment + Do Prices Erode Values

Aksel Sterri (Oslo Metropolitan University)  Bodily Justice

17:30 Visit to Neue Nationalgalerie

19:00 Conference Dinner

Friday, July 12, 2024

9.30 – 10:50 Axel Ockenfels (University of Cologne)  The Demand and Supply of Paternalism

Søren Flinch Midtgaard (Aarhus University) Reaction Qualifications and Paternalism

10:50 – 11.10 Coffee Break

11:10 – 12:30 Roberto Weber (University of Zurich) What Money Shouldn’t Buy: Aversion to Monetary Incentives for Health Behaviors

Amy Thompson (Oxford University) Defending a Moral Limit to Markets: Beyond a Singular Asymmetry Thesis

12.30 – 13:30 Lunch

13:30 – 15:30 Sili Zhang (LMU Munich)  What Money Can Buy: How Market Exchange Promotes Values

Peter Dietsch (University of Victoria)  The Centrifugal Nature of the Labour Market, Justice, and Public  Policy

Rahel Jaeggi (Humboldt University Berlin)  TBA

15:30 – 16:40 Coffee Break / Poster Session

Miguel Abellán (University Lüneburg) Timo Heinrich (TU Hamburg)

Victor Chung (University of Toronto) Iliana Melero (University of Zaragoza)

Denise Feigl (University of Regensburg) Brandon Long (University at Buffalo)

Ben Grodeck (University of Exeter) Reha Tuncer (LISER)

16:40 – 18:00 Nicola Lacetera (University of Toronto) Save and Let Die? Economic Factors and the Support of Medically Assisted Death

Stefan Gosepath (Frei University Berlin) Containment of the Market

19:00 Farewell Dinner

The Morality of Markets, by Mathias Dewatripont and Jean Tirole, in the JPE

 Are markets moral, immoral, or amoral?  Here's a new entry to that argument.

The Morality of Markets, by Mathias Dewatripont and Jean Tirole, Journal of Political Economy, online ahead of print.

Abstract: "Scholars and civil society have argued that competition erodes supplier morality. This paper establishes a robust irrelevance result, whereby intense market competition does not crowd out consequentialist ethics; it thereby issues a strong warning against the wholesale moral condemnation of markets and procompetitive institutions. Intense competition, while not altering the behavior of profitable suppliers, may, however, reduce the standards of highly ethical suppliers or not-for-profits, raising the potential need to protect the latter in the marketplace."

"The irrelevance result.—We ask: does the combination of unethical (or, more generally, UPI [unethical/present biased/influenceable]) consumers and of suppliers with consequentialist social preferences imply that moral behavior deteriorates under more intense competition? Our answer to this question is no. Indeed, under weak assumptions, the degree of competitive pressure is irrelevant to ethical behavior (moral choices are independent of demand functions) if prices are flexible.

"The intuition behind the irrelevance result goes as follows: when a supplier faces more intense competition (a more elastic demand), raising ethical behavior has a bigger negative impact on the supplier’s market share and is therefore costlier for the supplier; ceteris paribus, this makes suppliers cut ethical corners in reaction to the increase in competition, as indicated in the conventional wisdom. However, next to this first market share effect, there is a second reduced-stakes effect: a more intense competition reduces prices and markups, making supplier ethical concerns loom larger relative to material ones. We show that a sufficient condition for these two effects to exactly offset each other is that suppliers have consequentialist preferences and returns to scale are constant.

"The irrelevance result, which applies as well to ethical or indifferent consumers, is important not only because it sheds light on the validity of the widespread concern about markets expressed by the public opinion, social scientists, politicians, and religious leaders but also because it affects our stance vis-à-vis key competition-enhancing public policies, such as the opening of borders to free trade, competition policy, and the deregulation of industries. The irrelevance result is also in stark contrast with earlier theoretical results on the irrelevance of social preferences in highly competitive environments, in particular, with Dufwenberg et al. (2011) and Sobel (2015): in our case, the social preferences of suppliers and of consumers matter regardless of the competitive pressure, and it is the intensity of competition that is irrelevant. The difference is driven in particular by the fact that in their settings, one can affect others’ utilities only through one’s impact on their quantities traded or the market price, an impact that vanishes under perfect competition. In our setting, an individual may want to change her action just because it is objectionable to herself or others, even if this does not affect their ability to trade, a feature that is widespread in the real world. See the literature review for a detailed comparison."

YingHua He 何 英华 has died.

 Yan Chen passes on the devastating news that YingHua He 何 英华 passed away on Tuesday night, after struggling with kidney cancer.

May his memory be a blessing.

He graduated from college in China in 2001, got an MA at Peking University, received his Ph.D. at Columbia in 2011, taught in Toulouse, and was an associate professor at Rice University when he died.

Here's his CV, and here is his Google Scholar page.  He did important work on market design, including on school choice and kidney exchange.

He was one of the pioneers of empirical market design, combining econometrics with matching theory. 

He had many friends, and I was lucky to be among them. Here's a photo I took of him giving a seminar at Stanford, when he was a visiting scholar in 2014-15

Yinghua He at Stanford, January 2015

Here are some of my blog posts on his work:

Tuesday, January 25, 2022

Multiple offer mechanisms in school choice, when information gathering is costly

Sunday, November 6, 2022

Limiting congestion by limiting applications, or making them costly

Sunday, September 13, 2020

A proposal for non-simultaneous kidney exchange in pairs and chains and with deceased donors...

Friday, May 24, 2019

Matching early when information is costly, by Grenet, He, and Kübler

Kidney Exchange in KSA

 Here's a press release from King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre in Saudi Arabia:

KFSHRC Performs Over 5,000 Successful Kidney Transplants

Published: Jul 01, 2024

RIYADH, Saudi Arabia, July 01, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Centre (KFSHRC) has successfully performed 5,000 kidney transplants since the inception of its Transplant Program in 1981...

...

"Over the past decade, the program has experienced significant growth, with more than 3,000 transplants performed since 2010 and approximately 1,250 transplants in the last three years alone.

"Moreover, the establishment of the Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) program has significantly revolutionised the transplantation landscape by addressing the challenge of compatibility between patients and their donors. This program has helped patients who would otherwise face considerable obstacles in finding suitable matches. :

A proposal to assess public opinion in Europe on compensation for organ donors

 Here's a paper that proposes doing an experiment. Concerning compensation for organ donors. In Europe.  With the hope of influencing policy and reducing the shortage of transplants.  (A very worthy cause, that brings to mind Titian's painting of Sisyphus...)

Ambagtsheer, Frederike, Eline Bunnik, Liset HM Pengel, Marlies EJ Reinders, Julio J. Elias, Nicola Lacetera, and Mario Macis. "Public Opinions on Removing Disincentives and Introducing Incentives for Organ Donation: Proposing a European Research Agenda." Transplant International 37 (2024): 12483.

Abstract: The shortage of organs for transplantations is increasing in Europe as well as globally. Many initiatives to the organ shortage, such as opt-out systems for deceased donation and expanding living donation, have been insufficient to meet the rising demand for organs. In recurrent discussions on how to reduce organ shortage, financial incentives and removal of disincentives, have been proposed to stimulate living organ donation and increase the pool of available donor organs. It is important to understand not only the ethical acceptability of (dis)incentives for organ donation, but also its societal acceptance. In this review, we propose a research agenda to help guide future empirical studies on public preferences in Europe towards the removal of disincentives and introduction of incentives for organ donation. We first present a systematic literature review on public opinions concerning (financial) (dis)incentives for organ donation in European countries. Next, we describe the results of a randomized survey experiment conducted in the United States. This experiment is crucial because it suggests that societal support for incentivizing organ donation depends on the specific features and institutional design of the proposed incentive scheme. We conclude by proposing this experiment’s framework as a blueprint for European research on this topic.

Fairness, efficiency and strategy proofness in assigning indivisible objects: two new papers

 Here are two new papers on the burgeoning literature of matching people to scarce indivisible resources.

First, an experiment by Claudia Cerrone, Yoan Hermstrüwer,  and Onur Kesten.

Claudia Cerrone, Yoan Hermstrüwer, Onur Kesten, School Choice with Consent: an Experiment, The Economic Journal, Volume 134, Issue 661, July 2024, Pages 1760–1805,   https://doi.org/10.1093/ej/uead120

Abstract: Public school choice often yields student assignments that are neither fair nor efficient. The efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism allows students to consent to waive priorities that have no effect on their assignments. A burgeoning recent literature places the efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism at the centre of the trade-off between efficiency and fairness in school choice. Meanwhile, the Flemish Ministry of Education has taken the first steps to implement this algorithm in Belgium. We provide the first experimental evidence on the performance of the efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism against the celebrated deferred acceptance mechanism. We find that both efficiency and truth-telling rates are higher under the efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism than under the deferred acceptance mechanism, even though the efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism is not strategy proof. When the priority waiver is enforced, efficiency further increases, while truth-telling rates decrease relative to variants of the efficiency-adjusted deferred acceptance mechanism where students can dodge the waiver. Our results challenge the importance of strategy proofness as a prerequisite for truth telling and portend a new trade-off between efficiency and vulnerability to preference manipulation.

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And here's a theoretical paper by Xiang Han (韩翔)

Xiang Han, On the efficiency and fairness of deferred acceptance with single tie-breaking, Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 218, 2024, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2024.105842. (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0022053124000486)

Abstract: As a random allocation rule for indivisible object allocation under weak priorities, deferred acceptance with single tie-breaking (DA-STB) is not ex-post constrained efficient. We first observe that it also fails to satisfy equal-top fairness, which requires that two agents be assigned their common top choice with equal probability if they have equal priority for it. Then, it is shown that DA-STB is ex-post constrained efficient, if and only if it is equal-top fair, if and only if the priority structure satisfies a certain acyclic condition. We further characterize the priority structures under which DA-STB is ex-post stable-and-efficient. Based on the characterized priority domains, and using a weak fairness notion called local envy-freeness, new theoretical support is provided for the use of this rule: for any priority structure, among the class of strategy-proof, ex-post stable, symmetric, and locally envy-free rules, each of the above desiderata—ex-post constrained efficiency, ex-post stability-and-efficiency, and equal-top fairness—can be achieved if and only if it can be achieved by DA-STB.