In-game sports betting is something different

 The NYT has the story:

The Seductive, and Risky, Power of Live Sports Betting
In-game betting is predicted to grow to more than $14 billion by the end of the decade. It’s a huge part of the sports gambling industry. Public health officials worry that it could be increasing the risks for gamblers.  By Jenny Vrentas 

"These bets — known as in-game or live betting — have become ubiquitous and are one of the fastest growing areas of the sports gambling industry in the United States. They range from wagers on the result of a game while it is underway to what are known as microbets on events that are resolved quickly, sometimes in a matter of seconds, like the speed of a baseball pitch. Others are on outcomes of random events — will the halftime point total be an odd or even number, for instance. Once you are on the FanDuel or DraftKings mobile apps, there are scrolls and scrolls of bets, worldwide, day or night.

"For betting companies, or sportsbooks, the popularity of live betting is driving rapid revenue growth. Bets during games accounted for more than half the money wagered on FanDuel and DraftKings in recent quarters 

...

"With artificial intelligence being used to automate and accelerate the creation of more betting markets, in-game betting is expected to continue its rapid growth. Revenues from in-game bets could triple by the end of this decade, to more than $14 billion, according to a report released last October by the investment bank Citizens. That is an amount on par with the total revenue generated by the U.S. sports betting industry last year.

...

"Some professional sports leagues now allow ads for sports betting companies to be integrated into the live action of a game broadcast — as opposed to just during a commercial break. Michael Kay, the Yankees play-by-play announcer, or the N.B.A. commentators Charles Barkley and Kenny Smith will offer odds or set up predictions and direct viewers to a sportsbook that sponsors the broadcast and takes the bets. The N.B.A. and Major League Baseball permit up to two of these integrations per game.

"Streaming, too, has enabled new ways for fans to bet while they watch. Last year, the N.B.A. debuted an optional overlay on its livestreaming platform that displays in-game betting odds. Users can tap to click through to a prefilled bet slip in the DraftKings or FanDuel apps. The N.F.L. has gone a step further, allowing its games to be streamed inside sportsbook apps (and still count toward the Nielsen audience ratings).

"The professional sports leagues also benefit from live-betting revenue through their financial stakes in data providers, like Sportradar and Genius Sports. Those data companies sell the real-time data from games that facilitates live bets to sportsbooks, and they get a portion of the sportsbooks’ gambling revenues. The data companies have said that the percentage they take from in-game bets is higher than from pregame bets. (Chris Dougan, a spokesman for Genius Sports, said its partnership with the N.F.L. enabled legal and fair betting on N.F.L. games."

Repugnance and consequence-insensitivity (in connection to opposition to genetically-engineered food)

 There is a well developed literature on repugnance connected to food, and here is a recent, interesting example that focuses on the relationship between consequence-insensitivity and other correlates of moral outrage.

Inbar, Yoel, Sydney E. Scott, and Paul Rozin. "Moral opposition to genetically engineered food in the United States, France, and Germany." Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences (2025). 

 ABSTRACT: "When people are morally opposed to a practice, they often profess to be consequence-insensitive—that is, they say that they think it ought to be prohibited regardless of the risks and benefits. We investigate consequence-insensitive opposition to genetically engineered (GE) food in France, Germany, and the United States. Using nationally representative samples (total N = 1599), we find that most GE food opponents in all three countries are consequence-insensitive (France: 93.1%; Germany: 87.4%; United States: 81.3%). Consequence-insensitive opponents differ from other opponents in other ways consistent with their holding moral beliefs. They are more likely to display other properties of sacred moral values, like quantity insensitivity and universalism. They also see GE food as more personally important, are less willing to consume it, are more in favor of policies restricting it, and are more willing to engage in activism against it."

 

"In their research on moral GE food opposition in the United States, Scott et al. [15] asked par “It is equally wrong to allow some of this to happen as to allow twice as much to happen. The amount doesn't matter” (quantity insensitivity); and “This would be wrong even in a country where everyone thought it was not wrong” (universalism)ticipants three questions that were originally developed by Baron and Spranca [14] for their research on sacred values (which they call “protected values”). Scott et al.’s primary analyses focused on the consequence-insensitivity question, which asked whether GE food “should be prohibited no matter how great the benefits and minor the risks from allowing it.” Likewise, we here focus on the consequence-insensitivity item and test whether responses to other questions theoretically related to sacred values differ between consequence-sensitive and consequence-insensitive opponents. In the current study, we used two other items related to sacred values that were previously used in Scott et al.: “It is equally wrong to allow some of this to happen as to allow twice as much to happen. The amount doesn't matter” (quantity insensitivity); and “This would be wrong even in a country where everyone thought it was not wrong” (universalism). We also added two new exploratory items that were intended to tap moral outrage at the juxtaposition of secular (financial) considerations with sacred values [19]: “I am offended by the idea of putting a monetary price on allowing this”; and “It is morally wrong to put a monetary price on allowing this practice.” For each of these items, we test whether responses differ between consequence-sensitive and consequence-insensitive opponents. If consequence-insensitive opponents are more likely to display quantity insensitivity, universalism, and moral outrage at sacred-secular tradeoffs than consequence-sensitive opponents, then this would provide further evidence that consequence-insensitive opponents moralize GE food more than consequence-sensitive opponents."
 

Remote work and reproduction

 Here's a recent paper indicating that work from home (WFH) may increase fertility, particularly when both partners in a household work from home. The paper suggests that this may be because WFH makes childcare easier. (I'd be glad to see if the effect holds for same-sex couples, as a control for an alternative hypothesis about the mechanism at work.)

Work from Home and Fertility
by Cevat Giray Aksoy, Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, Katelyn Cranney, Steven J. Davis, Mathias Dolls and Pablo Zarate
27 August 2025
 

Abstract: "We establish a positive relationship between work from home (WFH) and fertility, drawing on  our Global Survey of Working Arrangements (38 countries, N=19,241) and our U.S. Survey of  Working Arrangements and Attitudes (N=102,411). Respondents who WFH at least 1 day per  week had more biological children from 2021 to early 2025, and plan to have more children in  the future, compared to observationally similar persons who do not WFH. Respondents whose  spouse or domestic partner works from home also report higher recent and planned fertility. When both partners WFH at least one day per week, our results suggest that total lifetime  fertility is greater by 0.2 children in our global sample (0.18 in our US sample), as compared  to couples where neither partner engages in any WFH. We find qualitatively similar patterns in  our Asian subsample (N= 4,323), but some results are statistically insignificant for Asian  women. WFH is also less common in Asia. Taken together, these findings suggest that current  WFH levels have only small positive effects on fertility in Asia. "

  "Tensions between women’s career goals and childcare responsibilities, and other tradeoffs between fertility and lifestyles for women and men, are a key focus of recent research. Doepke et al. 2023 offers a recent review. Flexibility about when, where, and how to work –or the absence of such flexibility – is one potentially important factor in fertility decisions (Goldin 2014, 2021). Paid work from home (WFH) often brings greater flexibility in these respects, perhaps making it easier and less costly for actual and prospective parents to combine child rearing with employment"

The effect of biological nudges may (also) have been overstated

 There have been a number of recent studies suggesting that the effectiveness of psychological "nudges" may have been substantially overstated. Here's a paper saying something similar about snorting testosterone:

 Dreber, Anna, Magnus Johannesson, Gideon Nave, Coren L. Apicella, Shawn N. Geniole, Taisuke Imai, Erik L. Knight et al. "Investigating the effects of single-dose intranasal testosterone on economic preferences in a large randomized trial of men." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 39 (2025): e2508519122. 

Abstract: "There is conflicting evidence on whether testosterone affects economic preferences such  as risk taking, fairness, and altruism, with most evidence coming from correlational  studies or small testosterone administration studies. To credibly test this hypothesis,  we conducted a large-scale, preregistered, double-blind randomized controlled trial with  1,000 male participants—10 to 20 times larger than typical prior studies. Participants  were randomly allocated to receive a single dose of either placebo or intranasal testosterone, and carried out a series of economic tasks capturing social preferences, competitiveness, and risk preferences. We find no evidence of a treatment effect for any of  our nine primary outcome measures, and no strong evidence of an association between  basal salivary testosterone and economic preferences within men. These results fail to  conceptually replicate previous high-impact publications reporting positive findings in  smaller samples, calling into question the idea that short-term testosterone fluctuations  are important drivers of men’s economic preferences. Our results do not rule out the  possibility that different effects might emerge under alternative dosages, administration  protocols, or task timings, or that behavioral effects differ between men and women. The  potential for developmental or long-term effects of testosterone also remains an open  question for future research, though such effects are ethically challenging to investigate  experimentally in humans." 

 

"The number  of participants in the studies reporting any statistically significant effects has ranged from N = 24 ( 18 ) to N = 118 ( 14 ). It is well  known that small, underpowered studies increase the risk that findings reported as statistically significant are false positives..."

...

"We fail to find evidence of a treatment effect of a single-dose of 
intranasal testosterone on any of our eight primary outcome measures or the hypothesized interaction effect for the ninth primary outcome measure. The 99.5% CI can be used to interpret which  effect sizes in the hypothesized direction we find strong evidence  against, see Figs. 1 – 3 . For our eight main effects primary hypotheses, we find strong evidence against effect sizes between about 0.15 Cohen’s d units (Investor Value and Loss Aversion) and 0.26 Cohen’s d units (Risk Aversion), which are considered small effect  sizes. We thus find strong evidence against the hypothesis that  single-dose intranasal testosterone administration has important  effects on economic preferences or behavior in men for all outcome measures in our study.

...

" Our study can be considered a highly powered conceptual replication of several previous results reported in high-impact journals, with a 10 to 20 times larger sample size than most previous  randomized controlled studies. However, our study does not constitute a direct replication of any specific previous study as we did  not base our design on one individual previous study ( 66 ). Our  study fails to conceptually replicate the following previous findings  about treatment effects of testosterone: that testosterone increases  offers in the ultimatum game ( 13 ); that testosterone decreases  offers in the ultimatum game ( 12 ); that testosterone decreases trust  in the trust game ( 16 ); that testosterone increases trustworthiness  (backtransfers) in the trust game ( 16 ), and that testosterone  increases risk taking (17). We furthermore fail to conceptually replicate previous correlational results that testosterone is positively correlated with economic risk-taking ( 26 , 29 , 67 ), that  testosterone is positively correlated with generosity in the dictator  game ( 30 ), and that testosterone is positively correlated with the  rejection of unfair offers in the ultimatum game ( 25 )."

Citation laureates in Economics: Autor & Katz, Bertrand & Mullainathan, and Bloom

 Clarivate, the company that now maintains the Web of Science/Science Citation index, annually nominates very well cited economists (and academics in other fields that are celebrated by the Nobel Foundation).  Their idea, aside from celebrating very influential academics, is to perhaps predict who will win a Nobel, if not this year then sometime in the not too distant future.

"Since 2002, the Institute for Scientific Information has identified individuals whose contributions have reshaped their disciplines. Using a data-driven approach grounded in Web of Science citation analysis, we’ve recognized more than 450 Citation Laureates — 83 of whom have gone on to receive the Nobel Prize. Discover the full list of these exceptional researchers." 

 Here are their 2025 laureates in Economics (links on names point to their Web of Science page).  All of them look like worthy candidates for further celebration.

Citation Laureates 2025 in Economics
Celebrating economists whose research has reshaped policy, deepened insights into human behavior, and influenced global economic systems. 

"for seminal analysis of wage structure, earnings inequality, educational advance, and technological change"
 David Autor, United States and Lawrence F. Katz, United States

"for joint research on racial discrimination, corporate governance, and other aspects of labor economics determined by psychology and culture"
 Marianne Bertrand United States, and Sendhil Mullainathan  United States

"for analyzing the impact of economic and political uncertainty on investment, employment and growth"
Nicholas Bloom  United States 

Recommendations From the International Society of Uterus Transplantation Ethics Committee

 The arc of history turns towards technology.

I didn't expect recommendation #2, although I've heard it discussed. 

Evolving Ethical Challenges After a Decade of Uterus Transplantation: Recommendations From the International Society of Uterus Transplantation Ethics Committee
by Wall, Anji E. MD, PhD1; Brännström, Mats MD, PhD2; Lotz, Mianna PhD3; Racowsky, Catherine PhD4; Stock, Peter MD, PhD5; Järvholm, Stina PhD2; Sustek, Petr PhD6; Brucker, Sara MD, PhD7; Tullius, Stefan G.8;  on behalf of The International Society of Uterus Transplantation Ethics Committee and endorsed by The Transplantation Society Ethics Committee*
Transplantation, August 26, 2025. | DOI: 10.1097/TP.0000000000005507 

---

Abstract:Uterus transplantation (UTx) became a clinical reality with the birth of the first baby in 2014. Following increased success, the procedure has now transitioned to clinical practice in many institutions throughout the world. With a rising number of donors, recipients, and babies born from this procedure, and with more institutions offering UTx, ethical challenges have evolved while novel aspects gained prominence. Here, the Ethics Committees of the International Uterus Transplantation Society, a section of The Transplantation Society, summarize current and future ethical challenges in UTx and provide recommendations for addressing these challenges. Ethical considerations covered here span (i) donor and recipient selection, (ii) living versus deceased donation, (iii) use of assisted reproductive technologies, (iv) informed consent, (v) clinical provision of UTx, and (vi) research protocols for further studies of UTx. For each topic considered, ethical analysis and recommendations are offered to ensure the practice of UTx remains within an acceptable foundational ethical framework that balances respect for autonomy, beneficence, and justice.

...

"Recommendation 2: Animal research is needed to determine the feasibility of UTx in, and uterus donation from, transgender patients and UTx in cisgender males who want to experience pregnancy. If medically and surgically acceptable, gender identity and reproductive status should not be exclusionary factors for uterus donation or transplantation." 

Transplants and trust

Much of medicine's effectiveness depends on trust, and that is nowhere clearer than in organ transplantation, which depends on organ donation.  And hearts are uniquely time-sensitive.  Here's a reflection on how to move forward, maintaining trust while promoting efficacy, including by monitoring current policies and carefully analyzing alternatives. (Kurt Sweat is the market design economist on this medical team...) 

 Skowronski, J., K. Sweat, and M. Farr (2025). In transplant we trust? Perspectives on the erosion of trust in the United States transplant system. Journal of Cardiac Failure

 Here's the concluding paragraph:

"Heart transplantation is both a resource-intensive and symbolically resonant form of organ donation. It is also particularly vulnerable: donor scarcity, limited ischemic time, and increasing utilization and scrutiny of DCD magnify the consequences of every unused heart and every erosion of trust. The controversies facing the broader transplant system—questions of allocation, oversight, and ethics—are felt acutely in heart transplantation. The US has long been a leader in transplantation, and as we move forward, we must sustain excellence in outcomes and volume. Avoidable missteps put those on the waitlist at greater risk of deterioration and death. It is essential that OPOs, transplant centers, and policy makers increase transparency in outcomes and the policymaking process. This would entail prospective policy analyses and improved information sharing through OPO and transplant center dashboards. Enacting these policies is vital to restore and enhance trust in the transplant system. In hearts, ischemic time is short, waitlist mortality is high, and donor utilization is low, presenting an opportunity for especially impactful improvements in procedures. In an era that feels perilous and bleak, enhancements to policymaking procedures and outcome reports can improve trust and save lives." 

The Downside of Fertility by Claudia Goldin---Dads versus duds

 Here's the latest from Claudia Goldin, on dads versus duds.

 The Downside of Fertility  by Claudia Goldin, NBER Working Paper 34268, DOI 10.3386/w34268,  September 2025 

 Abstract: The fertility decline is everywhere in the world today. Moreover, the decline goes decades back in the histories of rich countries. Birthrates have been below replacement in the U.S. and Europe since the mid-1970s, although further declines occurred after the Great Recession. The reasons for the declines from the 1970s to the early 2000s involve greater female autonomy and a mismatch between the desires of men and women. Men benefit more from maintaining traditions; women benefit more from eschewing them. When the probability is low that men will abandon traditions, some career women will not have children and others will delay, often too long. The fertility histories of the U.S. and those of many European and Asian countries speak to the impact of the mismatch on birth rates. The experience of middle income and even poorer nations may also be due to related factors. Various constraints that I group under matching problems have caused fertility to be lower than otherwise and imply that fertility has a “downside.” 

 

"Even though women’s enhanced agency is an important factor in determining fertility in most developed nations today, its role in altering birth rates has depended on a related element. That factor is the ability of women to be assured they can reap the financial and personal rewards from their education while raising their children. The more that men can credibly signal they will be dependable “dads” and not disappointing “duds,”the higher will be the birthrate in the face of greater female agency.
 

"Therefore, even though the major factor in the decline of fertility is increased women’s agency, the real downside or obstacle is the need for husbands and fathers to reliably demonstrate their commitment. I will provide two related models that make the point that the real problem is a mismatch between what women  need to enjoy the fruits of their autonomy and what credible commitments men can make."

Science and politics: Can you fix science by doing much less of it?

 Today's NYT has a long opinion piece about (my former Stanford colleague) Jay  Bhattacharya in his role as the new head of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).  I found it confusing and confused. But the last two paragraphs made some sense.

Jay Bhattacharya Wants to Fix Science.  Is He in Over His Head?  
By Ari Schulman 

Here are the two concluding paragraphs:

"The mRNA vaccine decision was the clearest test case yet of how his idealism will go once released into the wild. In The Washington Post, he acknowledges that the Covid vaccines saved millions of lives without known safety problems. He notes unanswered questions, around dosing and side effects. But when push came to shove, his response to these questions was not, let’s answer them with science, as he told me, but: Shut the science down. It turns out that the power of science to solve problems has limits after all.

"The problem with Dr. Bhattacharya is not that he’s cynical, as his critics say. It’s that his theory is naïve about power, and so could easily become a mouthpiece for it. America’s golden age of innovation, backed by levels of public investment that make us the envy of the world, has been nice while it’s lasted. If we want to keep it going, this moment may call less for a fresh infusion of reason than some new animating spirit, not a new Galileo but a new Robert Moses, Carl Sagan, or J. Robert Oppenheimer. Let us hope that Jay Bhattacharya still has it in him. The country needs it." 

The 2025 Golden Goose awards

 In these difficult times for science funding, the Golden Goose Award is a reminder of its benefits.

 Here's it's backstory. 

Here are the 2025 winners. 

“Nature has all the answers”

How a knack for nature’s oddities improved disease diagnostics & inspired scores of scientists

AWARDEE: Joseph G. Gall 

FEDERAL FUNDING AGENCIES: National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation 

 and

Cisplatin Breakthrough Redefines Testicular Cancer Treatment 

 AWARDEES: Barnett Rosenberg, Loretta VanCamp, Thomas Krigas 

FEDERAL FUNDING AGENCIES: National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation 

 ######### 

 Here are all my posts on the Golden Goose.  (Two of the early awards were for market design:)

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2025, October 17-18, 2025, Cambridge, MA

 

NBER Market Design Working Group Meeting, Fall 2025,  October 17-18, 2025, Cambridge, MA
ORGANIZERS Eric Budish, Michael Ostrovsky, and Parag A. Pathak 

Friday, October 17

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am

The Structure of the Social Organization

Canice Prendergast, University of Chicago

The Impact of Race-Blind and Test-Optional Admissions on Racial Diversity and Merit

Allen Sirolly, Columbia University

Hongyao Ma, Columbia University

Yash Kanoria, Columbia University

10:30 am

Break

11:00 am

When Speed is of Essence: Perishable Goods Auctions

Isa E. Hafalir, University of Technology Sydney

Onur Kesten, The University of Sydney

Katerina Sherstyuk, University of Hawaii at Manoa

Cong Tao, University of Technology Sydney

Dynamic Threats to Credible Auctions

Martino Banchio, Bocconi University

Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University

Frank Yang, Stanford University

12:30 pm

Lunch

2:00 pm

Centralizing Procurement: The Roles of Scale, Selection and Variety

Claudia Allende, Stanford University and NBER

Juan Pablo Atal, University of Pennsylvania and NBER

Rodrigo Carril, Universitat Pompeu Fabra

José Ignacio Cuesta, Stanford University and NBER

Andres Gonzalez-Lira, PUC-Chile

Missing Markets for Innovation: Evidence from New Uses for Existing Drugs

Eric Budish, University of Chicago and NBER

Maya M. Durvasula, Stanford University

Benjamin N. Roin, Independent Researcher

Heidi L. Williams, Dartmouth College and NBER

3:30 pm

Break

(30 minutes each)

4:00 pm

The Economics of Large Language Models: Token Allocation, Fine-Tuning and Optimal Pricing

Dirk Bergemann, Yale University

Alessandro Bonatti, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Alex Smolin, Toulouse School of Economics

Truthful Aggregation of LLMs with an Application to Online Advertising

Ermis Nikiforos Soumalias, University of Zurich

Michael J. Curry, Harvard University

Sven Seuken, University of Zurich

Auction Design for Artificial-Intelligence-Based Sponsored Search

Lawrence Ausubel, University of Maryland, College Park

5:30 pm

Adjourn

6:00 pm

Reception and Dinner - Royal Sonesta Hotel (Skyline Room)

Saturday, October 18

8:30 am

Continental Breakfast

9:00 am

The First-Price Principle of Maximizing Economic Objectives

Byeong-hyeon Jeong, University of Zurich

Marek Pycia, University of Zurich

Stable Matchings with Switching Costs

Boris Pittel, Ohio State University

Kirill Rudov, University of California, Berkeley

10:30 am

Break

11:00 am

The Importance of Being Earnest (in Search Markets)

Brendan Daley, University of Colorado, Boulder

Jacob Sagi, Kenan Flagler Business School, UNC Chapel Hill

Intermediaries in Bargaining: Evidence from Business-to-Business Used-Car Inventory Negotiations

Bradley Larsen, Washington University in St Louis and NBER

Carol Hengheng Lu, Amazon, Inc.

Anthony Lee Zhang, University of Chicago

12:30 pm

Adjourn

Stanford celebrates 100 years of GSB

 GSB at 100: A Century of Impact, by Michael McDowell  interviews leading faculty members including

"Susan Athey: The GSB has had so many impacts, but let me just pick one particular issue that’s close to my heart, which is that it’s been several times in its history, it’s really been on the frontier of important ideas. One of the big ideas in the group that I’m in was market design and the use of formal strategic thinking and game theory and information economics to understand real phenomena. And Bob Wilson, who’s one of the grandfathers of the group that I sit in, Economics, he worked with oil companies in 1960s and looked at their bidding data and then developed formal theories that helped understand what was going wrong in those markets and how to fix it. And then later, he advised one of my advisors, Paul Milgrom, and they shared the Nobel Prize for some of their work on market design.

"And so, there’s many different takes on that, but one of my takes was that there was the connection to the world and the fact that the problem they were solving was coming out of a real problem leading to cutting edge theory that then created a field that didn’t exist. More recently, we were on the cutting edge of using machine learning for decision problems and what’s called causal inference, formally, and now Stanford is the best place in the world to do this kind of research. To go from zero in 2012 to best in the world with multiple amazing young scholars doing cutting edge research in 12 years is really stunning. And the GSB really supported us in that endeavor.

"So I think the GSB has been a really fabulous place for helping us stay grounded and really connected to real problems, but also allowing us to hire the kind of talent and giving us the space to do the pure research that doesn’t just solve today’s practical problems, but that actually builds the foundation for many people to solve applied problems."

All's fair in love and sports, from marathons to stone skipping

 It turns out that sports are just war by peaceful means. Incentives matter, and some people play to win.

First, the WSJ writes about qualifying for competitive marathons:

The War Over Downhill Running .  Tempers are flaring over mountain races that produce faster qualifying times for Boston and other marathons; ‘These people should burst into flames.’
By  Sharon Terlep

" a subset of long-distance races ... begin high in the mountains and pitch participants downhill. They’ve exploded, partly as a way for runners to notch quicker times that qualify them for the pinnacle of distance races, the Boston Marathon.

Critics call it a shortcut that edges better runners out of big events. Downhill enthusiasts have a message for them: Get over yourselves, and if you think it’s so easy, try it.

About 2,000 invitees to last year’s Boston Marathon made it in by running races that were at least 2,000 feet downhill.

Boston requires most runners to hit times that vary based on age. Because of the race’s popularity, there are thousands of runners who qualify and still don’t get to be among the 30,000 participants.

“To find out that there are people who will maybe bump me off the race who ran 6,000 feet downhill kind of pisses me off,” said Chrysostom, who finished the Myrtle Beach Marathon in under three hours and figures he’s on the cusp of getting into Boston. "

########

And here's another shocker, from the BBC:

Cheating scandal rocks world stone skimming championships  by Benjamin Russell 

"The world stone skimming championships have been rocked by a cheating scandal, after several competitors were disqualified for tampering.

More than 2,200 people, from 27 countries, attended this year's event on the tiny island of Easdale off the west coast of Scotland.

Rules state that stones must come from naturally occurring island slate, however some were found to have been ground into a "suspiciously circular" shape to help them bounce on water.

Organiser Dr Kyle Mathews told BBC News that the offenders had "held their hands up" and apologised."

Recent good looking market design papers I hope to read (on auctions, unraveling, and interviews)

There was a time when I could reasonably hope to have read market design papers before they appeared in print, but now there are many fine papers that I'll never have a chance to read. (I'm sure that's just because the field is growing so much...)  I haven't given up, however...   Here are three that recently caught my eye.

Hu, Edwin, and Dermot Murphy. "Vestigial tails? Floor brokers at the close in modern electronic markets." Management Science (2025).

 Abstract: The closing auction is an increasingly important trade mechanism due to the rise of passive funds that require closing price execution. We study differences in auction mechanism design on NYSE and Nasdaq that may affect closing price efficiency. Unlike Nasdaq, NYSE allows late auction orders through its floor brokers, providing traders with more flexibility to mitigate or create large last-minute auction imbalances. Price changes in the closing auction are more likely to reverse on NYSE compared with Nasdaq, suggesting greater price inefficiency in NYSE closing auctions. Larger last-minute abnormal imbalances on NYSE, particularly in stocks where auction competition may be inhibited by relatively high floor broker auction fees, explain these stronger reversals. Evidence from the NYSE floor closure during the COVID-19 pandemic supports a causal interpretation. Our results highlight an important tradeoff between auction flexibility and price efficiency.

######

Stable Matching with Interviews, by Itai Ashlagi, Jiale Chen, Mohammad Roghani, Amin Saberi

    Part of: Volume: 16th Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS 2025)
    Series: Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs)
    Conference: Innovations in Theoretical Computer Science Conference (ITCS)  

Abstract: "In several two-sided markets, including labor and dating, agents typically have limited information about their preferences prior to mutual interactions. This issue can result in matching frictions, as arising in the labor market for medical residencies, where high application rates are followed by a large number of interviews. Yet, the extensive literature on two-sided matching primarily focuses on models where agents know their preferences, leaving the interactions necessary for preference discovery largely overlooked. This paper studies this problem using an algorithmic approach, extending Gale-Shapley’s deferred acceptance to this context.
Two algorithms are proposed. The first is an adaptive algorithm that expands upon Gale-Shapley’s deferred acceptance by incorporating interviews between applicants and positions. Similar to deferred acceptance, one side sequentially proposes to the other. However, the order of proposals is carefully chosen to ensure an interim stable matching is found. Furthermore, with high probability, the number of interviews conducted by each applicant or position is limited to O(log² n).
In many seasonal markets, interactions occur more simultaneously, consisting of an initial interview phase followed by a clearing stage. We present a non-adaptive algorithm for generating a single stage set of in tiered random markets. The algorithm finds an interim stable matching in such markets while assigning no more than O(log³ n) interviews to each applicant or position."

############
Deadlines and matching, by Garth Baughman, Journal of Economic Theory, Volume 228, September 2025
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jet.2025.106065

Abstract: Deadlines and fixed end dates are pervasive in matching markets. Deadlines drive fundamental non-stationarity and complexity in behavior, generating significant departures from the steady-state equilibria usually studied in the search and matching literature. I consider a two-sided matching market with search frictions where vertically differentiated agents attempt to form bilateral matches before a deadline. I give novel proofs of existence and uniqueness of equilibria, and show that all equilibria exhibit an “anticipation effect” where less attractive agents become increasingly choosy over time, preferring to wait for the opportunity to match with attractive agents who, in turn, become less selective as the deadline approaches. When agents are patient, a sharp characterization is available: at any point in time, the market segments into a first class of matching agents and a second class of waiting agents. This points to a different interpretation of unraveling.

Who pays for (first) dates?

 There's matching, and then there's matching with sidepayments.  

For dating, some decisions were easier in the dinosaur age: in theory at least, only the man could propose a date, and he paid. But times have changed.

Here's an opinion piece in the WSJ:

How to Find Love When Dating Has Gotten So Expensive
Young adults, faced with economic anxiety, are re-evaluating the way they search for romantic partners
By  Cordilia James

"To some extent, traditional thinking about date etiquette hasn’t changed: According to the LendingTree survey, 32% of Gen Z believe that the man should pay for the first date in a heterosexual relationship, while 18% think the person who asks should pay. (Nearly 31% think the cost should be split.)

...

" Tiffany Aliche, founder of Budgetnista, a financial-education firm, ... says that since the asker sets the terms of the date, that person is responsible for picking an activity they can afford.
...
"Some of my friends disagree with that strategy. One female friend, for instance, told me that she expects the guy to pay to show that he’s comfortable being a provider, regardless of who proposes the date. One male friend told me he prefers to split the check or take turns paying to show mutual interest. Another female friend says she has noticed that more of her dates have asked her to split the bill lately—a sign, she says, of the new dating math."

Where snitches make pitches--Corporate hotlines for ethics violations

 The WSJ has this story on the business of corporate hotlines for whistleblowers to report potential ethics violations.

Sex Scandals. Accounting Fraud. It’s All Showing Up on the Corporate Hotline.
A tip left on such a hotline led to the ouster of the Nestlé CEO. For affairs or minor office annoyances, operators are standing by.
By  Lauren Weber, Margot Patrick,  and Chip Cutter

"It’s an industry operating under the premise that companies run better when workers can safely sound the alarm on everything from bad breath to bribery. The task is often farmed out to third parties with names like SpeakUp, Navex and EQS.

"SpeakUp, based in Amsterdam, helps operate Nestlé’s line. In 2024, it handled 3,218 calls and messages with allegations ranging from bullying and harassment to fraud and conflicts of interest at Nestlé and its suppliers. Nestlé says it substantiated 20% of them, and 119 people left their jobs as a result.

“Hotlines are magic,” said Raheela Anwar, president and CEO of Group 360 Consulting, a Chicago-based corporate advisory firm. “Because people are willing to tell the truth.”

"At public companies, they’re also required. The post-Enron Sarbanes-Oxley financial reforms passed in 2002 mandated that companies have a process for whistleblowers to report potential ethics violations. A 2019 European Union directive does the same. More than 90% of U.S. firms with at least 1,000 employees provide a hotline for workers, according to HR Acuity, a company that helps employers track internal investigations and includes employee hotlines among its offerings. "

The black market in stolen homing pigeons

 Below are some excerpts from a long interesting story in the Washington Post, about how a boom in pigeon racing in China led to a rash of pigeon thefts in Belgium, and how problems in identifying recovered pigeons can (probably) be expeditiously addressed.

the Pigeon Heist.  How million-dollar pigeons became the target of organized crime.  By Kevin Sieff

"Beginning in around 2019, wealthy Chinese industrialists started spending millions on Belgian pigeons. That year, a pigeon named Armando sold for $1.4 million at an auction outside Brussels. In 2020, another bird named New Kim sold for $1.9 million. Pigeon races in major Chinese cities became opulent symbols of China’s economic boom, with purses over $100 million — exceeding most of the world’s major sports.

...

" a rash of pigeon thefts ... swept through Belgium and the Netherlands in 2024 and 2025. Dozens of pigeon lofts were raided; hundreds of pigeons were taken. “A crisis,” said the Belgian pigeon fanciers’ association in an alert to its members. 

...

"By 2023, China’s Ministry of Public Security began prosecuting cases of illegal gambling on pigeons. Last September, Ding Tao, the director of the Tengzhou Pigeon Association in a city about 350 miles south of Beijing, admonished his fellow pigeon enthusiasts in a speech, published by the city’s sports bureau, for engaging in “illegal profit-making activities.” 

...

"The thefts across Belgium were often focused on a particular commodity, police said. One gang exclusively took racing bicycles. Another targeted construction cranes. One stole dozens of expensive trumpets.

"The investigators knew how Chinese demand had led to the skyrocketing value of pigeons. It seemed possible that European organized crime groups could target the birds with an intention to resell them on the black market in Asia, allowing them to skirt the Chinese government’s scrutiny.

,,,

"The rescued pigeons were transported in cages to a loft run by the Belgian pigeon association outside Brussels. Their identification rings had been cut off. The police planned DNA tests to confirm which birds were registered with which owners. Victims of the thefts were invited to see if they could identify their birds.

 ...

 "Many of the recovered birds have still not been matched to their owners, most likely because they were taken in thefts not recorded by the Belgian police.

"It is increasingly likely, investigators say, that there will be only one way to reunite the birds to their owners: They will open the cages and hope that the birds still remember how to fly home."

Kidney exchange in Operations Research (and elsewhere)

 Kidney exchange is an important medical innovation that has given rise to literatures not only in medicine but in economics, computer science and operations research. (That diversity of literatures is related to the interdisciplinary growth of market design.)

Here's a new survey of the OR literature on kidney exchange.

Mathijs Barkel, Rachael Colley, Maxence Delorme, David Manlove, William Pettersson, Operational research approaches and mathematical models for kidney exchange: A literature survey and empirical evaluation,  European Journal of Operational Research, 2025, ISSN 0377-2217, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ejor.2025.08.059.

Abstract: Kidney exchange is a transplant modality that has provided new opportunities for living kidney donation in many countries around the world since 1991. It has been extensively studied from an Operational Research (OR) perspective since 2004. This article provides a comprehensive literature survey on OR approaches to fundamental computational problems associated with kidney exchange over the last two decades. We also summarise the key integer linear programming (ILP) models for kidney exchange, showing how to model optimisation problems involving only cycles and chains separately. This allows new combined ILP models, not previously presented, to be obtained by amalgamating cycle and chain models. We present a comprehensive empirical evaluation involving all combined models from this paper in addition to bespoke software packages from the literature involving advanced techniques. This focuses primarily on computation times for 49 methods applied to 4320 problem instances of varying sizes that reflect the characteristics of real kidney exchange datasets, corresponding to over 200,000 algorithm executions. We have made our implementations of all cycle and chain models described in this paper, together with all instances used for the experiments, and a web application to visualise our experimental results, publicly available.
Keywords: Combinatorial Optimisation; OR in health services; Kidney paired donation; Cycle packing; Computational experiments
 

Congestion in the job market, AI version

 The Atlantic has this story on the job market, that contains a nice line...

The Job Market Is Hell.  Young people are using ChatGPT to write their applications; HR is using AI to read them; no one is getting hired.   By Annie Lowrey

“ What Bumble and Hinge did to the dating market, contemporary human-resources practices have done to the job market. People are swiping like crazy and getting nothing back.”

How to make a racehorse fast? (a new punchline...)

 The old punchline is "don't feed him."  The new punchline is "CRISPR."

Here's a news story from Nature:

First CRISPR horses spark controversy: what’s next for gene-edited animals?  Horses with genomic edits to make them run faster have been banned from polo, but a zoo of CRISPR-edited animals is gaining acceptance in agriculture.  By Katie Kavanagh 

"The horses are clones of the prize-winning steed Polo Pureza, but they have a tweak to myostatin — a gene involved in regulating muscle development — that is designed to quicken their pace. CRISPR was used in fetal fibroblasts (connective tissue cells) to generate embryos through cloning, and then the embryos were implanted into mares.

"The development of these five CRISPR-edited horses ten months ago, by the non-profit research organization Kheiron Biotech in Buenos Aires, is proving controversial among horse breeders in Argentina, where polo is extremely popular, Reuters reported on 30 August.

"Critics are concerned that the technology threatens people’s livelihoods and that it will compromise the tradition of using selective breeding to generate elite horses. The Argentine Polo Association has now banned the use of gene-edited horses in the sport, following the lead of similar organizations such as the International Federation for Equestrian Sports1, which banned the practice in 2019."

Politics and science disagree about drinking and climate change...

 It turns our that worries about drinking were just as woke about worries about climate change.

The NYT has the story on drinking, CBS on climate change:

Federal Report on Drinking Is Withdrawn
The upcoming U.S. Dietary Guidelines will instead be influenced by a competing study, favored by industry, which found that moderate alcohol consumption was healthy. 

"The Department of Health and Human Services has pulled back a government report warning of a link between cancer and drinking even small amounts of alcohol, according to the authors of the research.

Their report, the Alcohol Intake and Health Study, warned that even one drink a day raises the risk of liver cirrhosis, oral and esophageal cancer, and injuries. The scientists who wrote it were told that the final version would not be submitted to Congress, as had been planned." 

##########

Here's CBS's story on climate change:

More than 85 climate experts say Energy Department report on greenhouse gases is "full of errors"

"An international group of more than 85 climate experts on Tuesday published a 439-page review arguing that a report by the Trump administration's Energy Department fails to "adequately represent the current scientific understanding of climate change," and it "exhibits pervasive problems" by misrepresenting scientific literature and cherry-picking data.

"The Department of Energy's 151-page report, "A Critical Review of Impacts of Greenhouse Gas Emissions on the U.S. Climate," was written by five authors who were hand-selected by Energy Secretary Chris Wright, a former fossil fuel executive. It included a controversial conclusion that "carbon dioxide-induced warming appears to be less damaging economically than commonly believed," and it states that "aggressive mitigation strategies" to address greenhouse gas emissions "could be more harmful than beneficial" — a statement that supports the oil and gas industry."

######

That has sparked a lawsuit by the Environmental Defense Fund.

Matching Senators to committees: a(nother) party divide, by Ashutosh Thakur

 Here's an innovative paper by Ashutosh Thakur that does for legislative matching of senators to committees what the study of matching and market design has long been doing in economics, which is discovering and analyzing the underlying institutional mechanisms that make things happen.

Thakur, Ashutosh. "A matching theory perspective on legislative organization: assignment of committees." Political Science Research and Methods (2025): 1-25. 

Abstract: How legislatures allocate power and conduct business are central determinants of policy outcomes. Much of the literature on parties and the committee system in legislatures examines which members serve on which committees. What has received less attention are the mechanisms by which parties allocate members to committees. I show that parties in the US Senate use matching mechanisms, like those used in school choice and the medical residency match. Republicans and Democrats use two distinct matching mechanisms, such that canonical theories of parties cannot apply equally to them. The Republican mechanism is strategyproof, whereas the Democrat mechanism incentivizes politicians to manipulate their reported preferences. Leveraging matching theory, I make theoretical predictions; corroborating them with archival correspondence and committee requests/assignments data.