Antitrust and competition in an internet economy: conference at the Stigler Center

Here's where I'll be today (unfortunately only for the first day of a two day conference), speaking about promoting/preserving competition in matching markets:

2018 ANTITRUST AND COMPETITION CONFERENCE - DIGITAL PLATFORMS AND CONCENTRATION

APRIL 19–20, 2018
GLEACHER CENTER, 450 N CITYFRONT PLAZA DRIVE

About the Conference

The economic and societal role of the handful of large companies known as “digital platforms" has grown dramatically in the last decade. Google, Amazon, and Facebook are not only transforming communication, media, and retail but have the potential to transform many other industries. While they invest billions in research and development and propel important innovation, they also raise many policy questions with regard to their dominance in many markets, the vast consumer data they collect and own, and their influence on the markets for news, information, and ideas. On April 19 and 20, 2018, the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business will dedicate its annual Antitrust and Competition conference to the topic of “Digital Platforms and Concentration.”

Issues to be discussed at the conference include, among others:

• The characteristics and market power of two-sided markets 
• How competition can be promoted in a world of network effects 
• The economics of free products and the challenges they pose to antitrust and existing law 
• The collection, monetization, and ownership of personal data 
• Digital companies’ foray into the physical world
• How and to what degree digital companies are involved in political decision making
• How the startup ecosystem is affected by the presence of big players 

The invitation-only conference will bring together approximately 50 economists, law scholars, intellectuals, venture capitalists, and business people for two days of discussion. The keynote speakers will be Makan Delrahim, assistant attorney general of the Department of Justice’s Antitrust Division, Alvin Roth, the 2012 Nobel laureate in economics, and Jean Tirole, the 2014 Nobel laureate in economics.

The conference will be by invitation only. Individuals interested in receiving an invitation, please submit your invitation request here.

Watch Live

The conference will be LIVE-STREAMED. See video link HERE. 

Schedule

Times are listed in Central Time.

Times are listed in Central Time.

Thursday, April 19, 2018

8:00 a.m. – 8:20 a.m.	Breakfast
8:20 a.m. – 8:25 a.m.	Welcome remarks - Guy Rolnik, Conference Organizer, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
8:25 a.m. – 8:30 a.m.	Opening remarks - Daniel Diermeier, Provost, University of Chicago
8:30 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.	The Rise of Digital Platforms The economic and societal role of digital platforms has grown dramatically in the last decade. Are the large Internet companies really “platforms”? Can they have outsized influence in many market and industries? What explains the size and success of these companies? Are they designing their products to be addictive? What are the most important policy questions that these companies raise? Moderator: Patrick Foulis, New York Bureau Chief, The Economist Robert Epstein, Senior Research Psychologist, American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology Tristan Harris, Co-Founder and Executive Director, Center for Humane Technology Kevin Murphy, George J. Stigler Distinguished Service Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Fiona Scott Morton, Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale University School of Management Chad Syverson, Eli B. and Harriet B. Williams Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Ben Thompson, Author and Founder, Stratechery
10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.	Break
10:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.	Big Data: Economic, Ownership, Legal, and Political Aspects User data is arguably digital platforms’ most valuable asset. How data are used has profound economic, social, and political implications. What are these implications? Where along the value chain do data belong? Could reassigning ownership of the data and making it easily available to users promote competition and address privacy concerns? Moderator: Ludwig Siegele, Technology Editor, The Economist Julia Angwin, Senior Reporter, ProPublica Dennis Carlton, David McDaniel Keller Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Richard Schmalensee, Howard W. Johnson Professor of Economics and Management and Dean Emeritus, MIT Sloan School of Management Jonathan Taplin, Director Emeritus, Annenberg Innovation Lab, University of Southern California Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance; Faculty Director, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
11:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.	Break
12:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.	Lunch Keynote - Makan Delrahim, Assistant Attorney General, Antitrust Division, US Department of Justice
1:15 p.m. – 1:30 p.m.	Break
1:30 p.m. – 3:15 p.m.	The Big Five and Political Power The largest technology companies—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Apple—are active political players, using the traditional levers of lobbying and financing of research, think tanks, and political campaigns. However, it is their market power, and leverage over media outlets, that opens up new avenues for these platforms and foreign actors that exploit vulnerabilities in their systems to dominate and control the flow of political information among voters. How do they influence political discourse, the marketplace of ideas, and democracy more broadly? Moderator: Matt Stoller, Fellow, Open Markets Insitute Scott Cleland, President, Precursor LLC Ellen Goodman, Professor of Law, Rutgers Law School and Co-director, Rutgers Institute for Information Policy & Law Barry Lynn, Executive Director, Open Markets Institute Guy Rolnik, Clinical Associate Professor of Strategic Management, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
3:15 p.m. – 3:30 p.m.	Break
3:30 p.m. – 5:00 p.m.	Digital Platforms: Market Power and Market Failures Digital platforms (e.g. Facebook, Google, Twitter) rely on network effects to build vast ecosystems of users, advertisers and third-party developers, and to attain substantive market power. How should that market power be measured and what concerns does it raise for competition and entry? What are the market failures left unaddressed by these digital platforms and how should we expect them to govern their respective ecosystems?  Moderator: Jesse Eisinger, Senior Reporter and Editor, ProPublica Jay Pil Choi, University Distinguished Professor, Michigan State University Andrei Hagiu, Visiting Associate Professor of Technological Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Strategic Management, MIT Sloan School of Management Sarit Markovich, Clinical Associate Professor of Strategy and Associate Chair of the Strategy Department, Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management Fiona Scott Morton, Theodore Nierenberg Professor of Economics, Yale University School of Management Carl Shapiro, Professor of the Graduate School, Haas School of Business and Department of Economics, University of California at Berkeley
5:00 p.m. – 5:30 p.m. 5:30 p.m. – 6:30 p.m.	Reception and dinner Dinner Keynote - Alvin Roth, Nobel Laureate and Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics, Stanford University

                                                   

Friday, April 20, 2018

8:00 a.m. – 8:40 a.m.	Breakfast Keynote - Mario Monti, President, Bocconi University; Former Prime Minister of Italy; Former EU Competition Commissioner
8:40 a.m. – 10:00 a.m.	Who’s Benefiting? Revisiting the Innovation and Start-Up EcosystemHow does the dominance of the digital platforms impact the startup ecosystem? As big digital players often scoop up startups or replicate startups’ ideas, what constitutes success for emerging startups? How does acquisition versus IPO serve competition and innovation? Is innovation concentrated mainly in the pre-acquisition phase?  Moderator: Adam Lashinsky, Executive Editor, Fortune Elvir Causevic, Managing Director and Co-Head, Tech+IP, Houlihan Lokey  Matt Perault, Director, Public Policy, Facebook Albert Wenger, Managing Partner, Union Square Ventures Glen Weyl, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research New England and Visiting Senior Research Scholar, Department of Economics and Law School, Yale University
10:00 a.m. – 10:15 a.m.	Break
10:15 a.m. – 11:45 a.m.	Can Government Resist Corporate Influence? The Big Five have met little government intervention as they have gained dominance and brought about market consolidation. Has government treated digital platforms differently than other corporations? Are digital platforms more politically influential than other big corporations and, if so, why? Moderator: Rana Foroohar, Global Business Columnist and Associate Editor, Financial Timesand Global Economic Analyst, CNN Alejandra Palacios, Commissioner and Chair, Mexico Federal Economic Competition Commission (COFECE) Randal Picker, James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law, University of Chicago Law School Daniel Stevens, Executive Director, Campaign for Accountability, Google Transparency Project Tim Wu, Isidor and Seville Sulzbacher Professor of Law, Columbia Law School Luigi Zingales, Robert C. McCormack Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship and Finance; Faculty Director, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business
11:45 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.	Break
12:00 p.m. – 1:00 p.m.	Lunch Keynote - Jean Tirole, Nobel Laureate and Chairman, Toulouse School of Economics
1:00 p.m. – 1:15 p.m.	Break
1:15 p.m. – 2:45 p.m.	The Amazon Phenomenon Amazon has transformed e-commerce and now begins its foray into the physical world with its acquisition of Whole Foods. The giant e-tailer offers a quintessential case study in how digital platforms are reimagining traditional markets and impacting society at large. Who will be “Amazoned” next? What lessons can we learn from Amazon’s experience with antitrust? As Amazon looks to situate its second headquarters, some believe the bid is a race to the bottom. What is the anticipated net impact of hosting the headquarters on a winner city and state? Moderator: David Dayen, Contributing Writer, The Intercept Joshua Gans, Jeffrey S. Skoll Chair of Technical Innovation and Entrepreneurship and Professor of Strategic Management, Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto Austan Goolsbee, Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics, University of Chicago Booth School of Business Lina Khan, Director, Legal Policy, Open Markets Institute Maurice Stucke, Professor of Law, University of Tennessee College of Law and Of Counsel, The Konkurrenz Group Ben Thompson, Author and Founder, Stratechery
2:45 p.m. – 3:00 p.m.	Break
3:00 p.m. – 4:30 p.m.	US vs EU: Antitrust, Data, and Privacy Policy Questions about digital markets and competition have begun gaining prevalence and commanding more regulatory attention. While the EU has taken aggressive measures against the digital platforms, including a €2.4 billion fine on Google and introducing significant privacy laws (GDPR), regulators in the United States have demonstrated a more lenient approach. What are the strengths and weaknesses of the EU versus US policy choices?  Moderator: John O'Sullivan, Economics Editor, The Economist Ariel Ezrachi, Slaughter and May Professor of Competition Law and Director, Centre for Competition Law and Policy, University of Oxford Justus Haucap, Director, Duesseldorf Institute for Competition Economics, Heinrich-Heine University of Duesseldorf William Kovacic, Global Competition Professor and Director, Competition Law Center, George Washington University Law School Gary Reback, Of Counsel, Carr & Ferrell LLP Thomas Vinje, Partner and Chairman, Global Antitrust Group, Clifford Chance LLP
4:30 p.m. – 4:45 p.m.	Closing Remarks - Luigi Zingales, Faculty Director, Stigler Center, University of Chicago Booth School of Business

Frontiers of Market Design at Cornell (joint with EC), June 22

Frontiers of Market Design

The first Frontiers of Market Design workshop will be held in Cornell University, Ithaca, NY on June 22, 2018 in conjunction with the 19th ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC).

Market design is a field of applied and theoretical research that sits comfortably on the intersection of economics and computer science. In recent decades, the theory and applications of market design have blossomed. In this workshop, we will focus on a set of promising, new applications of market design. In particular, we are interested in applications of market design which involve complex allocation constraints, vast datasets, and dynamic pricing issues. We also want to explore problems which, despite receiving ample theoretical attention, have not been implemented in practice. We welcome theoretical and empirical papers that deal with new domains of market design as well as papers that discuss practical aspects of market design.

ORGANIZERS

• Mohammad Akbapour, Stanford University
• Alex Teytelboym, University of Oxford

SCIENTIFIC COMMITTEE

• Amin Saberi, Stanford University
• Shengwu Li, Harvard University
• Piotr Dworczak, University of Chicago

IMPORTANT DATES

• Submission deadline: May 1, 2018 11:59pm PDT.
• Notification: May 13, 2018

Market design as a growing part of computer science

I'm encouraged to see this from Northwestern CS:
SPECIAL QUARTER: DATA SCIENCE & ONLINE MARKETS - APRIL 15 TO JUNE 15

"In recent years many aspects of social engagement has shifted to what can be broadly thought of as online markets. These markets; which include eBay, Uber, Airbnb, Tinder, StubHub, Wikipedia, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, etc.; are run by technology companies and are built by teams of software engineers. The science of designing and optimizing these online markets, however, is underdeveloped.  Designing a marketplace that works well is challenging because the behavior of participants in the market place depends on the design of the marketplace. ..."

Safe exchange zones

Marketplaces aren't just tools to bring potential transactors together, they can also seek to make transactions (physically) safe.  Criminals can lurk among Craigslist buyers and sellers, and so there's been a growth of "safe exchange zones".

See e.g. this recent story from New Jersey, where the police department set up a safe exchange zone following a robbery/murder:

Online shoppers urged to use safe exchange zones for transactions

"Passaic Mayor Hector Lora says that his town installed the zones inside and outside of the police station after a series of robberies and scams related to online sales.

“The biggest difference that it makes is that it provides a safe area for individuals to make these transactions and be able to make it back home,” Lora says.

“We have 24 hour surveillance, 24 hour staffing, and it's round the clock,” says Deputy Chief Christopher Storzillo.

"Lora says that he hopes that other towns follow suit and add their own safe exchange zones.

"But until other towns have these zones, officials urge anyone who is buying or selling items online to meet in a public, well-lit place and to call authorities if anything seems suspicious."

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It turns out that safe exchange zones are a thing, here are some databases to help locate one near you:

Safe Deal Zone - Safe Transaction Zone Locator

SafeTrade Stations

Conduct your in-person transactions safely at your local police station.

More Backpage (.com) news

From the Washington Post:
Backpage CEO Carl Ferrer pleads guilty in three states, agrees to testify against other website officials
"Carl Ferrer, the chief executive of Backpage.com whose name was conspicuously absent from an indictment of seven other Backpage officials unsealed Monday, has pleaded guilty in state courts in California and Texas and federal court in Arizona to charges of money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution. In addition, he agreed to testify against the men who co-founded Backpage with him, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, who remained in jail Thursday in Arizona on facilitating prostitution charges.

Backpage, in addition to hosting thinly veiled ads for prostitution since 2004, was accused of hosting child sex trafficking ads on its site and even assisting advertisers in wording their copy so they didn’t overtly declare that sex was for sale, federal investigators allege. In a remarkable three-paragraph admission in his federal plea agreement, Ferrer wrote that “I conspired with other Backpage principals … to find ways to knowingly facilitate the state-law prostitution crimes being committed by Backpage’s customers.

...

"Ferrer’s sudden capitulation launched a wild seven days for Backpage. A day after Ferrer’s first secret plea, the federal government arrested seven of Ferrer’s former colleagues, including Lacey and Larkin, and shut down Backpage’s websites in the U.S. and around the world. ...

"Then on Wednesday, President Trump signed into law “FOSTA,” the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act, a bill inspired by the stories of children being prostituted on Backpage..."

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And here's a story from Quartz that follows the work of economists researching the (not all bad) effects of internet marketplaces for prostitution.

The unintended consequences of a crackdown on sites selling sex work

Are financial markets too fast? A discussion of high speed trading (with Eric Budish)

"On this episode of The Big Question, Chicago Booth Review's Hal Weitzman talks with Chicago Booth professor of economics Eric Budish, Chicago Trading Company's Steve Crutchfield, and former Commodity Futures Trading Commission commissioner Sharon Bowen about how speed affects financial markets and what, if anything, we should do about it."

Eric points out that competition among exchanges has worked well in driving down trading fees, and poorly in selling access--"co-location"--since each exchange has a monopoly on selling speedy access to its data.

Market design conference at Columbia

COLUMBIA MARKET DESIGN CONFERENCE
Friday, April 13, 2018 - Saturday, April 14, 2018

April 13, 2018

8:00-8:25 Breakfast & Registration

8:25-8:30 Introduction by Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia University)

Session 1:

Chair: Guillaume Haeringer (Baruch College)

8:30-9:30  Yusuke Narita (Yale University), “Regression Discontinuity Design Meets Market Design”

9:30-10:30 Yinghua He (Rice University), “A Pigouvian Approach to Congestion in Matching Markets,” (joint with Thierry Magnac).

10:30-10:45 Coffee Break

Session 2:

Chair: Jay Sethuraman (Columbia University)

10:45-11:45 Ran Shorrer (Penn State University), “Need vs. Merit: The Large Core of College Admissions Markets,” (joint with Avinatan Hassidim, Assaf Romm).

11:45-12:45 Olivier Tercieux (Paris School of Economics),  “Top Trading Cycles in Prioritized Matching: An Irrelevance of Priorities in Large Markets,” (joint with Yeon-Koo Che).

12:45-1:45 Lunch

Session 3:

Chair: José Montiel Olea (Columbia University)

1:45-2:45 Mohammad Akbarpour (Stanford University), “Credible Mechanisms,” (joint with Shengwu Li).

2:45-3:45 Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft Research),  “Optimal Data Acquisition for Statistical Estimation,” (joint with Yiling Chen, Brendan Lucier, Vasilis Syrgkanis, Juba Ziani).

3:45-4:00 Coffee Break

Session 4:

Chair: Yash Kanoria (Columbia University)

4:00-5:00 Alfred Galichon (New York University), “A Model of Decentralized Matching without Transfers,” (joint with Yu-Wei Hsieh).

5:00-6:00 Josh Mollner (Northwestern University), “Lottery Equilibrium,” (joint with Glen Weyl).

6:30 Dinner (off campus)

April 14, 2018

8:00-8:30 Breakfast & Registration

Session 1: 

Chair: Xiaosheng Mu (Harvard University)

8:30-9:30 Juan Carlos Carbajal (University of New South Wales), “Selling Mechanisms for a Financially Constrained Buyer,” (joint with Ahuva Mu’alem).

9:30-10:30 Ben Brooks (University of Chicago) “Optimal Auction Design with Common Values: An Informationally Robust Approach,” (joint with Songzi Du).

10:30-10:45 Coffee Break

Session 2:

Chair: Qingmin Liu (Columbia University)

10:45-11:45 Philipp Strack (Berkeley),  “A Theory of Auctions with Endogenous Valuations,” (joint with Alex Gershkov, Benny Moldovanu).

11:45-12:45 Jacob Leshno (Columbia University),  “Monopoly without a Monopolist: An Economic Analysis of the Bitcoin Payment System,” (joint with Gur Huberman, Ciamac C. Moallemi).

Re-transplanting an organ that survives its recipient

From UCLA (where Dr. Jeff Veale is innovating):
‘Re-gifting’ of previously transplanted kidneys extends life for new recipients
Approach could help people who might not otherwise receive a transplant

"Typically, previously transplanted kidneys are lost to future use when the first recipient dies. But Dr. Jeffrey Veale, a transplant surgeon at Ronald Reagan UCLA Medical Center who has performed the rare surgery three times, maintains that re-donating previously transplanted kidneys should become standard practice.
...
"Veale sums up the re-gift this way: One kidney helped three people live.

“In the United States about 25 percent of those who receive a donated kidney die while their kidney transplant is still functional,” said Veale, director of the UCLA Kidney Exchange Program. “Re-gifting that viable organ to another patient on the waiting list gives new hope to patients who otherwise may not be considered for a transplant.”

With a re-gifted kidney, people who had been reliant on dialysis for years could live normal lives, spending time with their loved ones, traveling or doing anything else that people who aren’t on dialysis may take for granted.

Each year in the U.S., less than 20 percent of patients on the United Network for Organ Sharing kidney transplant waiting list will receive a transplant, and 13 people on that list die each day. If transplanting kidneys a second time were standard practice, it would open up a currently unutilized pool of donors."

Backpage.com, seized by the FBI and indicted by the Department of Justice

The latest development in the legal battle of Backpage.com, an online marketplace for sex and, apparently, trafficking in women and children, has resulted in the closing of the site.

On April 6 2018 the content of the site was replaced with a notice beginning “backpage.com and affiliated websites have been seized as part of an enforcement action by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. Postal Service Inspection Service, and the Internal Revenue Service Criminal Investigation Division, with analytical assistance from the Joint Regional Intelligence Center.” 
The accompanying indictment (https://www.justice.gov/file/1050276/download )suggests that the proprietors of Backpage.com may have helped write the site’s content, and thus not be protected by the 1996 Communications Decency Act. 

In a parallel development, in March (of 2018) the Senate passed (by a vote of 97 to 2) and forwarded to the President for signature the Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act of 2017, as previously passed by the House of Representatives. It amends the Communications Act of 1934, “to  clarify  that  section  230  of  such  Act  does  not  prohibit  the  enforcement  against providers and users of interactive computer services of Federal and State criminal and civil law relating to sexual exploitation of  children  or  sex  trafficking…” https://www.congress.gov/115/crpt/hrpt572/CRPT-115hrpt572-pt1.pdf .  

Vanderbilt market design conference

Vandebilt hosted a market design conference this past weekend:
Vanderbilt Market Design Conference April 7-8, 2018

Saturday, April 7

Opening Remarks 8:15-8:30 am. John Weymark (Vanderbilt University)

Session 1 8:30 - 10:00 am. Chair: Myrna Wooders (Vanderbilt University)

• "The Design of Teacher Assignment: Theory and Evidence," Julien Combe (University College London), Olivier Tercieux* (Paris School of Economics), and Camille Terrier (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• "Information Acquisition and Provision in School Choice: An Experimental Study," Yan Chen* (University of Michigan) and Yinghua He (Rice University)

Coffee Break 10:00 - 10:20 am

Session 2 10:20 - 11:50 am. Chair: Greg Leo (Vanderbilt University)

• "Manipulability and Tie-Breaking in Constrained School Choice," Benoit Decerf (University of Namur) and Martin Van der Linden* (Utah State University)
• "Financial Aid in College Admissions: Need-Based versus Merit-Based," Eun Jeong Heo (Vanderbilt University)

Lunch 11:50 am - 1:10 pm

Session 3 1:10 - 3:25 pm. Chair: Eun Jeong Heo (Vanderbilt University)

• "Minimizing Justified Envy in School Choice: The Design of New Orleans' OneApp," Atila Abdulkadiroglu* (Duke University), Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia University), Parag A. Pathak (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Alvin E. Roth (Stanford University), and Olivier Tercieux (Paris School of Economics)
• "Top Trading Cycles in Prioritized Matching: An Irrelevance of Priorities in Large Markets," Yeon-Koo Che* (Columbia University) and Olivier Tercieux (Paris School of Economics)
• "(Il)legal Assignments in School Choice," Lars Ehlers* (University of Montreal) and Thayer Morrill (North Carolina State University)

Coffee Break 3:25 - 3:45 pm

Session 4 3:45 - 5:15 pm. Chair: Antonio Nicolo (University of Padova and University of Manchester)

• "Optimal Dynamic Matching," Mariagiovanna Baccara (Washington University in St. Louis), SangMok Lee* (Washington University in St. Louis), and Leeat Yariv (Princeton University)
• "Dynamic Refugee Matching," Tommy Andersson* (Lund University), Lars Ehlers (University of Montreal), and Alessandro Martinello (Lund University)

Sunday, April 8

Session 5 8:30 - 10:00 am. Chair: Olivier Tercieux (Paris School of Economics)

• "Strategy-Proofness, Investment Efficiency, and Marginal Returns: An Equivalence," John William Hatfield* (University of Texas, Austin), Fuhito Kojima (Stanford University), and Scott Duke Kominers (Harvard University)
• "Matching with Partners and Projects," Antonio Nicolo* (University of Padova and University of Manchester), Arunava Sen (Indian Statistical Institute), and Sonal Yadav (University of Padova)

Coffee Break 10:00 - 10:20 am

Session 6 10:20 - 11:50 am. Chair: Tommy Andersson (Lund University)

• "Fair Matching under Constraints," Yuichiro Kamada (University of California, Berkeley) and Fuhito Kojima* (Stanford University)
• "Effcient and Incentive-Compatible Liver Exchange," Haluk Ergin (University of California, Berkeley), Tayfun Sonmez (Boston College), and M. Utku Unver* (Boston College)

Does binding early admissions violate antitrust laws?

The DOJ seems to be looking into early decision in college admissions. Inside Higher Ed has the story, which makes it sound as if the investigation is focused on whether colleges (still) announce their early-decision admissions to their competitors, who then refrain from admitting those students.

Justice Department Investigates Early-Decision Admissions

"The Justice Department has started an investigation into whether some colleges' early-decision admissions programs violate federal antitrust laws through agreements among institutions or through the sharing of information about accepted applicants.
...
"The Justice Department letter does not detail what agreement or practices are being investigated. But the letter gives some indication, by outlining the documents that colleges are being required to maintain. These are:

"Agreements, both formal and informal, to exchange or otherwise disclose the identities of accepted students with persons at other colleges or universities.
Communications with persons at other colleges or universities relating to the transmission of identities of accepted students, including the justifications for such transmission.
Internal documents relating to the transmission of identities of accepted students to or from persons at other colleges or universities.
Communications in which identities of accepted students are sent to or received from persons at other colleges or universities.
Communications with persons at any other college or university relating to any student accepted at the college or university.
Records of actions taken or decisions made based in whole or part on information received from another college or university about the identities of accepted students.
Admissions records of any individual identified in any transmission as accepted by another college or university, including applications from, internal analyses of, and communications with the applicant."

Update on Martin Van Buren high school in NYC

One goal of the school choice program in NYC is to allow students to avoid failing schools, to which no one can be assigned unless they specifically include it on their preference list.  The idea is that these schools will become smaller, which might allow them to be fixed.  This is what has happened with Martin Van Buren High School (named after the 8th President of the U.S.):

Martin Van Buren High School is off receivership, in “good standing:” elected officials
"The state Department of Education made the announcement that Van Buren High was also in good academic standing and would be removed from the Priority School List, which gives schools three years to improve in English Language Arts and mathematics. The state also requires schools to have a 60 percent graduation rate.

"From 2014-2015 Van Buren’s graduation rate was 55 percent, but as of the 2016-2017 school year, it had risen to 67 percent."
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See my previous posts on Van Buren HS:

Saturday, May 17, 2014

Martin Van Buren High School, in New York City

Monday, May 19, 2014

Credentials and degrees (and, I'm now almost a high school grad)

School choice in Chicago and in D.C.

Here's some news about the new school choice system in Chicago.
Here's the press release from Chicago Public Schools:
Overwhelming Majority of CPS Students Receive Offers to Preferred School Choices Through GoCPS High School Application Process 
81 Percent of Students Will Receive Their First, Second or Third Choice; More Than 26,909 Incoming Freshmen Participated in GoCPS

And here's some background information from GoCPS
Round 1 high school offers were officially released to 8^th grade students and families by Chicago Public Schools (CPS) this afternoon via the new single application system—GoCPS.

Last spring, the Chicago Board of Education voted unanimously in favor of moving to a single application for all public high schools in the district. The decision was a historic shift that solved a major pain point for families and students who, until now, had to navigate more than 290 schools and program options.

New Schools for Chicago and Kids First Chicago have worked diligently alongside community partners, schools, students, parents, and district leaders to ensure successful implementation in the first year of GoCPS. Together with CPS, we are excited to highlight some results of the Round 1 application period:

• 93% of 8th graders successfully submitted applications to high school through the new GoCPS system.
• 92% of students who applied were matched to a school.
• 81% of students were matched to one of their top 3 choices.

Compared to other urban districts, these participation and match results in GoCPS’s first year are exceptional. For example, Denver Public Schools uses a similar system and their highest participation rate is 84% after many years of implementation.

With the right support and plan for continued improvement, Chicago could emerge as the leader not only in universal enrollment, but also in the adoption of modern systems and processes to better serve large, complex student populations.

More Information

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OUR WORK TO SUPPORT CHILDREN, FAMILIES & THE DISTRICT

• Free enrollment support to families, communities, and schools via our Kids First Chicagoinitiative. 
• Ongoing parent focus groups on the GoCPS application process. Working in partnership with CPS, we have polled parents at each stage of the new enrollment process to gain insightful user feedback. 
• Work directly with the district in creating and distributing clearer and more effective information on school quality for parents and students as they prepare to apply to and accept their school options.

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Here's a story from D.C. that highlights that even a good school choice enrollment system doesn't create enough good schools to accommodate all the children, so that until we have enough good schools, school choice will be "playing the lottery" for some families. (But a good system allocates places more efficiently...)
The D.C. lottery is intended to give all kids a fair shot at a top school. But does it?

"Before the District implemented a lottery system using a single application in 2014, parents had to keep track of about 30 lottery deadlines and applications. Charter schools operated their own lotteries, and the traditional public school system ran separate lotteries for lower and upper grades. Chaos ensued. Parents often had to go to each school to submit a lottery application.

Adding to the confusion, charter schools informed parents of the lottery results at different times, which resulted in parents enrolling their children in the first school they heard back from and then, when they received a slot at a more desirable campus, enrolling them there, too.

When Scott Pearson took over the D.C. Public Charter School Board in 2012, he met with Kaya Henderson, who was chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, and they pushed for a unified lottery system. Denver, New Orleans and New York had already streamlined the process, so the technology and precedent were there.

By spring 2014, My School DC was ready for use. Schools aren’t required to enlist in the common lottery, and Pearson said it wasn’t an easy sell.

He worked on convincing the big charter networks, including KIPP and Democracy Prep, to participate, and most other schools followed.

“We had a target customer in mind, and it was a single mom living east of the river who was unbelievably burdened and often locked out of the ability to participate in school choice,” Pearson said.

The engineering behind My School DC is based on the algorithm that earned the 2012 Nobel Prize in economics for formulas that matched thousands of medical residents with hospitals, kidney donors with recipients and New York students with high schools.

Neil Dorosin, executive director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice, which develops lottery algorithms, said parents can’t cheat the system, and schools can’t sift through applicants to choose who they want.

Software assigns participants a number that sticks with them until they are matched with a school. Children then get to enroll in that school while remaining on the wait list for any school that a family ranked higher but did not get into.

“All the algorithm is doing is just implementing what that city’s rules are,” Dorosin said. “If you are looking for unfairness, it is not in the algorithm.”

"

Market Design: Public lecture at Reed College

I'll speak today at Reed College in Portland OR:

Matching Markets and Market Design

Markets and marketplaces, which are ancient human artifacts and ubiquitous modern ones, come in many varieties. Roth will speak about some unusual marketplaces he's helped design, including the National Resident Matching program through which most American doctors get their first jobs, school choice, and kidney exchange.

Alvin Roth is the Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and the George Gund Professor Emeritus of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard. Roth shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. His work is in game theory, experimental economics, and market design.

Free and open to the public. Sponsored by the economics department.

 Friday, April 6 at 4:15pm

 Vollum College Center, Vollum lecture hall 

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Update: here's an account of the day (in Portugese) by my host, Carol Franceschini:

Querido diário: Um dia (surreal) com Alvin Roth, Nobel em Economia 2012

Cursing sex traffickers in Nigeria

In some religious traditions, curses are performative, i.e. performing a curse is thought to have consequences for those cursed.  In Nigeria, a traditional leader is applying this to public policy.

The NY Times has the story:
A Voodoo Curse on Human Traffickers

"On March 9, Oba Ewuare II, the traditional ruler of the kingdom of Benin, in southern Nigeria, put a voodoo curse on anyone who abets illegal migration within his domain. At the same time, he revoked the curses that leave victims of trafficking afraid that their relatives will die if they go to the police or fail to pay off their debt.

"Before being smuggled into Europe, women and girls in the area, which falls in present-day Edo State, are made to sign a contract with the traffickers who finance their journey, promising to pay them thousands of dollars. The agreement is sealed with a voodoo, or juju, ritual, conducted by a spiritual priest, known here as a native doctor.
...
"Edo is not one of Nigeria’s poorest states. But in the early 1980s women there started traveling to Italy to trade in gold and beads, and “saw a thriving market in prostitution,” said Kokunre Agbontaen-Eghafona, a professor at the University of Benin and a researcher for the International Organization for Migration. She believes this “founders factor” is the main reason Edo has become such a center of human trafficking."

Universidade de São Paulo celebrates Marilda Sotomayor

Marilda Sotomayor

Especialista fala de trajetória na Teoria dos Jogos e “Matchings”

Em evento da série “USP Lectures”, Marilda Sotomayor falou de Teoria dos Jogos, suas experiências e contato com laureados do Nobel

[G.translate: Specialist talks about trajectory in Game Theory and "Matchings"

In an event of the "USP Lectures" series, Marilda Sotomayor spoke about Game Theory, her experiences and contact with Nobel laureates]