Stanford Impact Labs announces support for kidney exchange in Brazil, India, and the U.S.

 Stanford Impact Labs has announced an investment designed to help the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation (APKD) increase access to kidney exchange in Brazil, India, and the U.S.  Here are three related web pages...

1. Stanford Impact Labs Invests in Global Collaboration to Increase Access to Kidney Transplants.  $1.5 million over three years will support solutions-focused project led by Stanford’s Dr. Alvin Roth and the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation (APKD)  by Kate Green Tripp

"Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) is delighted to announce a $1.5 million Stage 3: Amplify Impact investment to support Extending Kidney Exchange, a solutions-focused project established to increase access to lifesaving kidney transplants.

"The team, led by Stanford’s Dr. Alvin (Al) Roth, who shared the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics for his work on market design, and the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation (APKD) is working in close partnership with organ transplant specialists and medical centers in Brazil, India, and the U.S., including Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Juiz de Fora, the Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Center and Dr. H L Trivedi Institute of Transplantation Sciences (IKDRC-ITS), and Walter Reed National Military Medical Center.

"Over the course of the next three years, the team aims to increase the number of transplant opportunities available to patients who need them by creating and growing kidney exchange programs in Brazil and India, where millions of people suffer from kidney disease yet exchange is minimal; and explore the effects of initiating donor chains with a deceased donor kidney (DDIC) in the U.S., an approach which could unlock hundreds more transplants each year.

..."

2. How Does Applied Economics Maximize Kidney Transplants? A project aimed at expanding kidney exchange and saving lives puts Nobel Prize-winning matching theory into practice.  by Jenn Brown   (including a video...)

"APKD uses open source software developed by Itai Ashlagi, Professor of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University, to facilitate the matching process for its NEAD chains, and they currently average 5 non-simultaneous transplants per chain.

3. Extending Kidney Exchange

"In Brazil, our team has launched a kidney exchange program within Santa Casa de Misericórdia de Juiz de Fora and Hospital Clínicas FMUSP in São Paulo and aims to expand to facilitating exchanges between these centers and others with the ultimate goal of kidney exchange transitioning from a research project to an officially approved practice in Brazil.

"In India, our team has deployed kidney matching software and resources for growth to the Institute of Kidney Diseases and Research Center and Dr. HL Trivedi Institute of Transplantation Sciences (IKDRC-ITS) to support kidney exchange programs. We aim to develop an evidence base for potential updates to organ transplantation laws that expand criteria for who can give and receive lifesaving kidneys.

"In the U.S., we are working with Walter Reed National Military Medical Center to test the use of deceased donor-initiated chains (DDIC) so as to generate hundreds of additional life-saving transplants each year that are not currently supported by today's practice of utilizing a deceased donor kidney to save the life of a single person on a transplant waitlist. "

 

Call for nominations: Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research.

 Here's the call for the Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research. (I've finished a term and am no longer on the jury...)

THE 2024 CALL IS OPEN!

CALL FOR ENTRIES DEADLINE  APRIL 30, 2024 (10:00 pm UTC) → Submit online

The annual €500,000 Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research in cooperation with the BIH Quest Center for Responsible Research is inviting applications and nominations again. The international award is open to any researcher, or group of researchers, institution, organization, and early career researcher around the globe whose work helps to fundamentally advance the quality, transparency, and reproducibility of science and research. We warmly welcome applications and nominations from marginalized and underrepresented groups. The Award will honor successful candidates in the following three categories:  I Individual Award (€200,000): Individuals or small teams who have outstandingly contributed to fostering research quality can be nominated. Nominators are strongly encouraged to consider a diverse set of criteria, including gender, race/ethnicity, geography, and career stage. II Institutional Award (€200,000): Governmental and non-governmental organizations, institutions, or other entities that have notably enhanced research quality can apply or be nominated. Successful governmental organizations or institutions will not receive any funds in addition to the award itself. III Early Career Award (€100,000): Individuals or teams can submit a project proposal that seeks to foster research quality and value. Eligible candidates must hold a doctorate or have equivalent research experience and should not have been working as an independent researcher for more than five years. In the case of a team entry, the majority must be Early Career Researchers. The deadline for entries is April 30, 2024. The awardees will be announced by the end of 2024. → Learn more about all past winners and finalists here. Selection An international, interdisciplinary, and diverse panel of researchers and research quality activists will evaluate submissions and select awardees. Meet the jury here. For questions, please contact Einstein Foundation Award Coordinator Dr. Ulrike Pannasch.

"Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?" Freakonomics interviews Max Bazerman and others

Below is the latest Freakonomics podcast (and transcript), on fraud in academia.  Those most in the headlines weren't available to be interviewed, but their coauthor (and my longtime HBS colleague) Max Bazerman gives his perspective.

Also interviewed are the Data Colada authors/data sleuths Leif Nelson,  Uri Simonsohn, and Joe Simmons (with some clues about the name of their blog), and Brian Nosek, who founded the prizewinning Center for Open Science (https://www.cos.io/ 

Here it is:

Why Is There So Much Fraud in Academia?  Some of the biggest names in behavioral science stand accused of faking their results. Freakonomics EPISODE 572.

######

And here are two paragraphs from Max's HBS web page (linked above), suggesting more to come:

"I have been connected to one of the most salient episodes of data fabrication in the history of social science – involving the signing first effect alluded to above. I am working on understanding all known social science frauds in this millennium. Social science also struggles with a broader problem, namely the fact that many studies fail to replicate due to faulty research practices that have become common in social science. Most replication failures can be traced back to the original researchers twisting their data to conform to their predictions, rather than from outright fraud. Trying to produce “significant” results, they may run a study multiple times, in a variety of ways, then selectively report the tests that worked and fail to report those that didn’t. The result is the publication of conclusions that do not hold up as accurate. Both problems – outright data fabrication and this reporting bias that shapes results – need to be tackled, so all of us in academia can publish results that are replicable and can help create value in society.

         "The last dozen years have witnessed multiple efforts to reform social science research to make it more credible, reproducible, and trusted. I am writing a book on reforming social science, which will provide an account of recent data fabrications, and highlight strategies to move forward to create more credible and impactful scientific research."

David M. Kreps Symposium: Homo economicus, Evolving. November 17, 2023

Homo economicus, Evolving

The Stanford Graduate School of Business is hosting the inaugural David M. Kreps Symposium, entitled Homo economicus, Evolving.

Inaugural Symposium

David M. Kreps Symposia comprise a series of symposia on topics of broad interest to the faculty of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. The series was created through the generous support of friends and alumni of Stanford GSB, to honor the career of Prof. Kreps.

Date

November 17, 2023

Location

Stanford Graduate School of Business

In orthodox economic models, the individual agent, Homo economicus, is self-interested and rational, with fixed preferences and perfect foresight. However, economists are increasingly modeling individuals who are generous to others, who have preferences that depend on the context and that change, and who have cognitive limitations. This evolving vision of Homo economicus has profound implications for what we learn from economic analyses. The symposium will discuss this continuing evolution of economists’ representations of people’s motives and cognitive capabilities, and the implications of this evolution for specific contexts and public policy and, more broadly, for the discipline.

Registeropen in new window

Featured Speakers

Samuel Bowlesopen in new window

Research Professor and Director of the Behavioral Sciences Program, Santa Fe Institute

Rachel Krantonopen in new window

James B. Duke Professor of Economics, Duke University

Uskali Mäkiopen in new window

Professor of Practical Philosophy, University of Helsinki; Director of TINT - Centre for Philosophy of Social Science

Eldar Shafiropen in new window

Class of 1987 Professor in Behavioral Science and Public Policy; Professor of Psychology and Public Affairs; Inaugural Director, Kahneman-Treisman Center for Behavioral Science & Public Policy, Princeton University

IgNobel Prize celebration today: laugh and think

 I'll be joining an IgNoble event this afternoon at Stanford, everyone is invited.

Ig Nobel Prize face-to-face

Health Data Science Center, Wednesday, March 22, 2023, 1:00pm - 3:00pm PDT

Stanford University Rotunda E241 (Chem-H + Wu Tsai Building)

This event is open to the general public

REGISTER HERE to attend

"Our esteemed founder of the prize (and the journal the Annals of Improbable Research), Marc Abrahams, will take us through the fascinating history of the Ig Nobel Prize, from its inception in 1991 to the present day. We will learn about the inspiration behind the award, the selection process, and his most unforgettable moments along the way.

"We will be joined by Professor Alvin Roth (Nobel Economics Prize 2012) who will share his insights in research and active blogging, as well as Dr. Genie Scott (Public Welfare Medal 2010) on her journey with Ig Nobel and improbable research.

"We will hear from some of the brightest minds in research today as our panelists engage in discussions about the significance of improbable research. Our panelists include Alvin Roth (Economics) and Genie C. Scott (Anthropology), past (Ig) Nobel Prize laureates who have made groundbreaking discoveries in fields such as physics, medicine, economics, public policies, and more. 

"Audience members will also have the opportunity to ask questions and engage in the conversation with our panelists, as well as sign up for a meet-and-greet with Marc after the event. 

"Join us for an unforgettable afternoon of laughs, learning, and thought-provoking discussions at the Ig Nobel Prize face-to-face Event!"

Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design, at Berkeley MSRI, August 21-December 20, 2023 (applications open)

 Apply now to join a semester of interdisciplinary workshops on market and mechanism design, from the point of view of mathematicians, computer scientists, and economists.

Mathematicsand Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, August 21, 2023 to December 20, 2023

 Seeking applications for Research Members and Postdoctoral Fellows:

• Research Members are scholars in economics, computer science, operations research, mathematics, or related fields who have a PhD at the time of application and will be in residence for at least 30 consecutive days of the program.
• Postdoctoral Fellows are scholars in those fields who received their PhD on or after August 31, 2018, and will be in residence for the entire program.

Apply here by December 1, 2022: https://www.msri.org/web/msri/scientific/member-application

 Program Summary:

In recent years, economists and computer scientists have collaborated with mathematicians, operations research experts, and practitioners to improve the design and operations of real-world marketplaces. Such work relies on robust feedback between theory and practice, inspiring new mathematics closely linked – and directly applicable – to market and mechanism design questions. This cross-disciplinary program seeks to expand the domains in which existing market design solutions can be applied; address foundational questions regarding our ways of developing and evaluating mechanisms; and build useful analytic frameworks for applying theory to practical marketplace design.

 https://www.msri.org/programs/333

 Program Organizers:

Michal Feldman (Tel-Aviv University); Nicole Immorlica (Microsoft Research); Scott Kominers (Harvard Business School); Shengwu Li (Harvard University); Paul Milgrom (Stanford University); Alvin Roth (Stanford University); Tim Roughgarden (Columbia University); Eva Tardos (Cornell University)

 About MSRI:

Acknowledged as the premier center for collaborative mathematical research, MSRI  organizes and hosts semester-length programs that become the leading edge in that field of study. Mathematicians worldwide come to the Institute to engage in the research of classical fundamental mathematics, modern applied mathematics, statistics, computer science and other mathematical sciences.

 Questions? See attached flyer, or reach out to mcsorgs@msri.org

**********

This could be a nice way to spend a semester--apply now (MSRI loves company:)

Organ transplants and capital punishment don't go well together

 I recently blogged about a paper by Robertson and Lavee in the American Journal of Transplantation, looking at surgeries conducted in China before 2015, a period in which China acknowledged that most transplants there were conducted with organs from executed prisoners.  Now they summarize their report in a column in the WSJ.

In China, New Evidence That Surgeons Became Executioners. Clinical reports recount scores of cases in which organ donors were alive when operations began.  By Jacob Lavee and Matthew P. Robertson

"The Wuhan doctors write: “When the chest of the donor was opened, the chest wall incision was pale and bloodless, and the heart was purple and beating weakly. But the heartbeat became strong immediately after tracheal intubation and oxygenation. The donor heart was extracted with an incision from the 4th intercostal sternum into the chest. . . . This incision is a good choice for field operation where the sternum cannot be sawed open without power.”

"By casually noting that the donor was connected to a ventilator (“tracheal intubation”) only at midsurgery, the physicians inadvertently reveal that the donor was alive when the operation began.

...

"Our findings end in 2015, but we think the abuse likely continues. Medical papers like those we studied were first unearthed by Chinese grass-roots investigators in late 2014, and it would have been simple to command journals to stop publishing the incriminating details after that. While China claims to have stopped using prisoners in 2015, our previous research raises doubts. In a 2019 paper in the journal BMC Medical Ethics, we used statistical forensics to show that the official voluntary-organ donation numbers were falsified, inflating the success of a modest voluntary organ-donation reform program used to buttress the reform narrative.

"Global medical leaders have largely dismissed such concerns. The World Health Organization took advice from Chinese transplant surgeons in the establishment of its anti-organ-trafficking task force—and then installed them on the membership committee. In 2020, WHO officials joined long-time apologists for China’s transplant system, attacking our previous research showing falsified numbers."

...

"Dr. Lavee is the director of the Heart Transplantation Unit at Tel Aviv’s Sheba Medical Center and a professor of surgery at Tel Aviv University. Mr. Robertson is a research fellow with the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and a doctoral candidate in political science at the Australian National University."

Venture capital and crypto academics join forces to build a lab

 The venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz (also known as "a16z") has recruited a star-studded list of academic researchers to brainstorm about blockchain computer science and economics:

Announcing a16z crypto research

"There is an opportunity for an industrial research lab to help bridge the worlds of academic theory with industry practice, and to help shape crypto and web3 as a formal area of study by bringing together the very best research talent from the various disciplines that are relevant to the space. 

"Today, we’re excited to announce the creation of a16z crypto research, a new kind of multidisciplinary lab that will work closely with our portfolio and others toward solving the important problems in the space, and toward advancing the science and technology of the next generation of the internet. 

******

And here is the leadership and founding team:

"Tim Roughgarden 

"For twenty years, as a researcher and computer science professor at Stanford and Columbia, Tim has led the development of Algorithmic Game Theory, a field that brings together ideas from Computer Science and Economics to solve real-world computing problems. He wrote the definitive textbooks and courses on the field. 

"In recent years, Tim has increasingly focused on research problems in web3. That is no surprise, given how fundamental questions about incentives are in the space. For example, prompted by discussions with Vitalik Buterin and other members of the Ethereum community, Tim published the first formal analysis of the (initially polarizing) fee mechanism that was proposed in EIP-1559. The report helped the community get comfortable with the proposal, and it was subsequently deployed to the Ethereum mainnet in August of last year.

"Besides Tim’s brilliance as a researcher, he’s also a great teacher. The YouTube lectures for his crypto and blockchain course at Columbia, for example, are one of the best and most popular introductions to the space.

"Getting to know Tim over the course of over a year has left us with no doubt that he’s the perfect person to lead a16z crypto research full time. We’re thrilled to announce that Tim has joined us as Head of Research.

"Dan Boneh

"Dan is a professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Stanford University, where he leads the Applied Cryptography, the Stanford Center for Blockchain Research (CBR), and the Computer Security Lab. He is one of the most distinguished cryptographers and computer security researchers in the world, wrote the definitive textbook on applied cryptography, and is also a renowned educator and entrepreneur.

"In recent years, Dan’s work has focused on cryptographic tools for blockchain applications. He co-developed the concept of a verifiable delay function (VDF), and has designed several other cryptographic constructions (like BLS signatures) that have since been widely adopted in web3. His cryptography MOOC, which is free and open to the public, is a popular way to get started with cryptography. 

"For the past four years, Dan has worked closely with us and our portfolio as a Research Advisor. With the creation of a16z crypto research, we’re excited to promote Dan to Senior Research Advisor. His work with us will be integral to setting the direction for the team, while continuing to provide support for founders in our portfolio.

##

"Both Dan and Tim have made countless contributions to their fields, but great researchers never work alone.

"The founding team

"Under Tim’s leadership, we’re bringing onboard a multidisciplinary, all-star founding team of Research Partners. Each member is a leader in their field, has made outstanding research contributions to web3, and has worked toward deploying those contributions in the real world.

"Joseph Bonneau wrote the (text)book on cryptocurrency technologies, and he’s also published work on social networking privacy, cryptographic protocols, side-channel attacks, software obfuscation, and reverse engineering. He has taught cryptocurrency courses at the University of Melbourne, NYU, Stanford, and Princeton, and received a PhD in computer science from the University of Cambridge and BS/MS degrees from Stanford.

"Benedikt Bünz is the Chief Scientist of Espresso Systems and is finishing up his PhD in Dan Boneh’s applied cryptography group at Stanford. His research is focused on the science of blockchains using tools from applied cryptography, game theory, and consensus, and has already had a huge impact in the industry. His work includes Bulletproofs, one of the most widely used zero-knowledge proofs today; and verifiable delay functions, which are a fundamental component of ‘green’ blockchain consensus. 

"Scott Duke Kominers is the MBA Class of 1960 Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School and a Faculty Affiliate of the Harvard Department of Economics. He’s one of the best market design scholars in the world, and also advises a number of companies on real-world marketplace and incentive design, such as building reputation-based systems. He holds a PhD in Business Economics from Harvard.

"Valeria Nikolaenko joins from Novi at Meta, where she was a research scientist and cryptographer for the Diem blockchain, started by Facebook in 2019 as Libra. She specializes in modern cryptography, computer and web security, post-quantum cryptography, and is one of the world’s experts in proof-of-stake blockchain design. She has worked extensively on Schnorr signatures — including half-aggregation, threshold deterministic signing, and study of cryptographic libraries — and long-range attacks on proof-of-stake blockchains. She received a PhD in Computer Science from Stanford University, advised by Dan Boneh."

Is open science just for those with abundant resources?

 I applaud the movement towards open science, to make publications freely available, but I can generally pay the associated publication fees.  If publications free of paywalls become more important, will that work further enhance the benefits of working at wealthy universities?  Should we fund open science differently?

Here are some thoughts on that in Nature by Tony Ross-Hellauer  of the Open and Reproducible Research Group at Graz University of Technology and Know-Center in Austria.

Open science, done wrong, will compound inequities. Research-reform advocates must beware unintended consequences.  by Tony Ross-Hellauer

"Open science is a vague mix of ideals. Overall, advocates aim to increase transparency, accountability, equity and collaboration in knowledge production by increasing access to research results, articles, methods and tools. This means that data and protocols should be freely shared in high-quality repositories and research articles should be available without subscriptions or reading fees.

"Making all that happen is expensive. Wealthy institutions and regions can afford this better than can poorer ones. At my university, in a high-income nation, I know I am privileged. In a collaboration to introduce open science at Ukrainian universities (including those displaced by conflict post-2014), I’ve been privy to difficult conversations about how to pay publication fees that are three times a professor’s monthly salary, and how to meet data-sharing requirements to be eligible for funding when institutional support is lacking. 

...

"A particularly pressing issue is open access (OA) publication fees, in which the benefit of free readership is being offset by new barriers to authorship. To support OA publishing, journals commonly charge authors, and charges are rising as the practice expands. My group and others have found that article-processing charges are creating a two-tier system, in which richer research teams publish more OA articles in the most prestigious journals. "

Promoting Quality in Research: the inaugural Einstein Foundation Awards, 2021

 I had the privilege of being a member of the jury for the Einstein Foundation Awards, which were awarded yesterday for the first time.

Here's the award booklet: 

EINSTEIN FOUNDATION AWARD 2021 PROMOTING QUALITY IN RESEARCH

Individual Award 2021:  Paul Ginsparg

"Preprints have been shared in the physics community since the early 1950s but mostly among well established professors. Physicist Paul Ginsparg, who receives the Einstein Foundation’s Individual Award, set out to democratize access to scientific results. Today, his preprint server arXiv has spread to many other fields—and made science progress more efficient and fairer."

Institutional Award 2021: The Center for Open Science

"Open research is on the rise, but a lot of research information still remains behind closed doors. The Center for Open Science, recipient of the Institutional Award, advocates for more transparency and open access, training scientists, publishers and funders, providing technology and policy recommendations. With this multi pronged approach, it has helped create an open science community which is becoming ever more self-sustaining."

Early Career Researcher Award 2021: "ManyBabies5: Teaming up for Developmental Science → manybabies.github.io/MB5

"Unlike adult subjects, babies cannot tell you what they are thinking. Therefore, researchers studying infant development use looking patterns to understand how babies think and feel about the world. “An overwhelming majority of studies use looking time to make inferences about infant cognition,” comments Martin Zettersten from Princeton University in the United States. But what exactly is it that drives babies to pay attention to different things? To come up with a statistically sound answer to this question, he and his colleague Jessica Kosie initiated ManyBabies5, a large international consortium of infant researchers. “We aim to increase diversity amongst researchers and test subjects alike and collaboratively want to come up with the best test possible on how different factors matter in infant looking time,” Jessica Kosie explains. To that end, the ManyBabies team will put together a diverse and sizeable sample of infants around the world. “To me, team science is a useful tool for producing high quality, robust science,” says Martin Zettersten. “Embracing this approach as a field as many groups are doing right now—that feels revolutionary to me.”

THE JURY The Einstein Foundation Council has convened an outstanding group of scholars representing the natural sciences, the humanities, and the social sciences. The international jury is presided over by Dieter Imboden and both defines the objectives of the award and selects the awardees. The following jury members have been appointed for the first three year term: DIETER IMBODEN (President), PhD, Theoretical Physics; Professor Emeritus of Environmental Physics, ETH Zürich; DOROTHY BISHOP, PhD, Neuropsychology; Professor of Developmental Neuropsychology, Oxford University; ALASTAIR BUCHAN, MD, PhD, Medicine; Professor of Stroke Medicine, Oxford University; MICHEL COSNARD, PhD, Computer Science; Professor Emeritus of Informatics, Université de Côte d’Azur; LORRAINE DASTON, PhD, History of Science; Director Emerita of the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin; MOSHE HALBERTAL, PhD, Philosophy; Professor of Jewish Thought and Philosophy, Hebrew University; LENA LAVINAS, PhD, Economics; Professor of Welfare Economics, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro; JULIE MAXTON, PhD, Law; Executive Director of the Royal Society, London; MARCIA MCNUTT, PhD, Geophysics; President of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States; EDWARD MIGUEL, PhD, Economics; Professor of Environmental and Resource Economics, University of California, Berkeley; ALVIN ROTH, PhD, Economics; Professor of Economics, Stanford University; SOAZIC ELISE WANG SONNE, Economist, World Bank Group; PhD Fellow, United Nations University; SUZY STYLES, PhD., Psychology; Professor of Psycholinguistics, Nanyang Technological University; E. JÜRGEN ZÖLLNER, Dr. Dr. h.c. mult., Medicine; Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Stiftung Charité, Senator (ret.), Berlin

**************

Here's my earlier description of the award:

Saturday, December 12, 2020

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research (apply or nominate now...)

Symposium on Research Integrity: Replicability and outright malfeasance. November 24 in Berlin

 Research integrity has been in the news lately, concerning low levels of replicability in some kinds of research, together with more intentional (but probably/hopefully less widespread) problems.  Here's a forthcoming symposium:

Symposium on Integrity in Research

Place and time: hybrid event on November 24, 2021.

"Symposium topic: Research Integrity is a controversial topic within academia, but also in public discourse. Prominent cases of scientific misconduct capture the limelight, but recently a multitude of issues beyond the classical triad of plagiarism, falsification, and fabrication have taken center stage, many of which concern the quality and rigor of research and further challenge the trustworthiness of science. These include selective publication and file-drawer problems, various biases, as well as the general reproducibility or robustness of research results. At the same time, open, inclusive, and creative cultures of research in teams and organizations have been threatened by practices that prioritize outputs, as demonstrated by numerous examples of insufficient mentoring, unfair authorship practices, or intransparency about career progress for younger researchers. All these issues have long histories of discussions about improving scientific methods, however, views differ on how important these issues are, and whether all disciplines are affected equally. While some argue that there is only one scientific method, requiring universal standards for robust evidence, others emphasize the diversity of research cultures and the mutual criticism and learning that can result from this diversity.

"As scientific expertise becomes more important in and for the public, it becomes apparent that scientific findings are often provisional, subject to correction, and scientific experts may disagree. There are no simple either-or answers. While it seems indisputable that scientific evidence should be subject to the highest possible standards and be appropriate to the context, it is nevertheless necessary that these standards evolve as scientific methods and research questions progress. For urgent societal problems - such as pandemics - we may even be willing to lower these standards. For new problems, appropriate standards will only emerge after much experimentation and debate. The need for such constant debate is familiar to scientists, but can be disconcerting to the public. Standardization - both in the sense of setting standards and in the sense of homogenization - of research can therefore run the risk of undermining, rather than securing, the progress of knowledge. As a result, the integrity of research must remain a topic for debate, as it is expected to ensure both the robustness and innovation of research while meeting the expectations of different research cultures and the public.

"As a contested topic, research integrity encompasses a wide range of actors, platforms and organizations, policies and measures. The symposium will bring together participants from research, practice and policy to map this heterogeneous field, provide evidence of its effectiveness and analyze its (future) development.

"Keynotes and formats

"The symposium is organized as a hybrid event and will include keynotes by Professor Lorraine Daston (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science Berlin / University of Chicago) and Professor Dava J. Newman (Massachusetts Institute of Technology / MIT Media Lab).

"Other international and national experts will be invited together with the event's guests to discuss and reflect on the current state of research integrity and its future development. Interactive and inclusive formats connecting on-site participants and digital guests worldwide will ensure a sustained exchange on a topic of central importance for the future of science.

The symposium is organized in concurrence with the Einstein Foundation Berlin’s “Einstein Award for Promoting Quality in Research” that will take place later the same evening.

Registration, access and program

Participation in the symposium is free of charge. Further details on registration, access and the program of the event will be published on this page soon.

Contact  Nele Albrecht, Scientific Coordinator for Research Quality  Email: core@berlin-university-alliance.de 

Ramesh Johari's course on Platform and Marketplace Design, starts tomorrow

Take the class, or you can also scroll down and see the syllabus with links to the papers.

MS&E 336: Platform and Marketplace Design

Course time

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00-11:50 AM

Instructors

Ramesh Johari

Associate Professor

Management Science and Engineering

Electrical Engineering (by courtesy)

Huang Engineering Center, Room 311

E-mail: ramesh.johari@stanford.edu

Office hours: TBA, Huang 311

Additional office hours by appointment

Nick Arnosti (TA)

Management Science and Engineering

E-mail}: narnosti@stanford.edu

Office hours: TBA

Course website

The course website will be accessible through CourseWork.

Catalog course description

The last decade has witnessed a meteoric rise in the number of online markets and platforms competing with traditional mechanisms of trade. Examples of such markets include online marketplaces for goods, such as eBay; online dating markets; markets for shared resources, such as Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb; and online labor markets. We will review recent research that aims to both understand and design such markets. Emphasis on mathematical modeling and methodology, with a view towards preparing Ph.D. students for research in this area.

Detailed course description

Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the “right” partner. The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea of change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants.  Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants.  As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.

This course is intended to prepare students for research on online and platform markets.  The course was inspired by the following observation: in the last decade, a wide range of graduates with quantitative backgrounds have been put into positions where they are effectively designing markets every day.  Often this is a side effect of being thrust into a software engineering, product development, or regulatory role: for example, a new hire might be asked to change how users browse through search results on eBay or Airbnb.  As is immediately apparent to a market designer, small changes to that basic infrastructure---the search engine---can radically alter the behavior of the market itself.  The goal in the class is to prepare students to be able to think conceptually about these market design challenges.

With that motivation in mind, we have three main goals for the quarter:

1. Problems.  The first goal is to use the quarter to identify open research directions that have risen to the forefront with the rise of online platforms.  We live in an exciting time for market design, with great interest in the fundamentals, as well as a rich set of applications that motivate research directions, and provide data and testbeds for validation.  A key emphasis in this part of the class is to focus on “levers” that affect the information that market participants obtain about each other in a variety of ways.
2. Tools. The second goal is to ensure students have access to a basic set of tools with which to reason about such markets.  The course assumes students have already had prior exposure to game theory and economic modeling.  In this course, we will focus on a set of tools that have specifically proven helpful in studying platform markets, and the effects of design interventions on these markets.  A key emphasis is on large market models.
3. Applications.  Along the way, we hope to learn about how the research questions we identify and the tools we learn are relevant to specific marketplaces.  This will be through a mix of mathematical modeling, empirical research, as well as anecdotal evidence.

The course will be taught using a mix of lecture format and seminar-style guided discussion. Much of what we will discuss is active research, so the reading material will be drawn from relevant papers in the literature; this material will be available from the course website. The focus will be on encouraging discussion of both open theoretical questions and modeling issues. This is particularly important since the course content draws from a range of disciplines (operations research, computer science, economics, etc.). The course should provide a unique forum for a lively exchange of ideas across these boundaries.

Evaluation

Your grade in the course will be based on two components.

1. Participation in lecture [ 40% of course grade ]. You will be expected to read papers and actively participate in lectures.  To help make sure this happens, for at least four of the weeks of the quarter, you will have to choose one paper that you need to read and prepare a “mini-review”.  The mini-review consists of answers to the following three questions, in 100 words or less each:
1. What is the paper about?
2. What are the strengths of the paper?
3. What are the weaknesses of the paper?

Each mini-review will be graded credit/no-credit, i.e., you will receive full credit for this

component if you satisfactorily complete each mini-review.

2. Course project [ 60% of course grade ]. A course project is the main evaluation component of the class.  The course project is meant to get you thinking actively about research problems in the market design problems represented by the course material.  The project will culminate in a presentation to your fellow students, and a written report (due by March 20, 2015).
   I will distribute more details on the project in the first week of lecture.

Course outline

Note: The content described on the course outline below will take up the first 14 lectures of the quarter.  (This is why each lecture is 110 minutes, instead of the usual 75 minutes.)  The remainder of the quarter will be used for guest speakers and discussion and presentation of course projects.

Part 1 (2 lectures): Introduction to platforms

We introduce platforms, and cover some of the relevant economics literature that defines and analyzes two-sided platforms.

Topics of interest:

1. What is a (two-sided) platform?
2. What is the objective of the platform operator,
   what information does she possess, and
   what tools does she have to acheive these objectives?
3. What are the objectives of platform participants,
   what information do they possess,
   and what actions are available to them?

Papers:

1. Rochet and Tirole (2003), Platform competition in two-sided markets
2. Rochet and Tirole (2006), Two-sided markets: A progress report
3. Armstrong (2006), Competition in two-sided markets
4. Caillaud and Jullien (2003), Chicken & egg: Competition among intermediation service providers
5. Parker and van Alstyne (2005), Two-sided network effects: A theory of information product design

Part 2 (2 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- pricing

We consider what the introductory papers might have missed, focusing on pricing strategies.  The emphasis is on operational details of platform behavior.

Topics of interest:

1. Pricing usage
1. Membership fees and subscriptions
2. Usage-based fee with flat fee per transaction/match
3. Usage-based fee with volume-based fee per transaction/match
2. Pricing visibility: paying for preferential access to the other side of the market
3. Pricing transaction risk: paying for reduced uncertainty of trade

Papers:

1. Gomes and Pavan, Many-to-Many Matching and Price Discrimination
2. Einav, Faronato, Levin, Sundaresan, Sales mechanisms in online markets: What happened to Internet auctions?
3. Celis, Lewis, Mobius, Nazerzadeh, Buy-it-Now or Take-a-Chance: Price Discrimination through Randomized Auctions

Part 3 (3 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- reputation and feedback

We study the role of reputation systems used by online platforms to help participants judge trading partners they have never met.

Topics of interest:

1. Examples of reputation and feedback systems
2. What incentives do particular systems provide to market participants?
3. How do we design systems that incentivize honest feedback?
4. How should the platform use the feedback system as a “lever” to improve market performance?

Papers:

1. Resnick, Kuwabara, Zeckhauser, Friedman (2000), Reputation systems
2. Cabral and Hortacsu (2010), The dynamics of seller reputation: Evidence from eBay
3. Dellarocas and Wood (2007), The Sound of Silence in Online Feedback: Estimating Trading Risks in the Presence of Reporting Bias
4. Bolton, Greiner, and Ockenfels (2013), Engineering Trust: Reciprocity in the Production of Reputation Information
5. Horton and Golden, Reputation Inflation in an Online Market
6. Fradkin, Grewal, Holtz, Pearson, Bias and Reciprocity in Online Reviews: Evidence from Field Experiments on Airbnb
7. Nosko and Tadelis, The Limits of Reputation in Platform Markets: An Empirical Analysis and Field Experiment

Part 4 (3 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- search

We discuss how the platform can mediate matches by directing the search effort of each side of the market.

Topics of interest:

1. How do market participants cope with the search frictions of finding trading partners?
2. What information should the platform share with market participants about potential matches?
3. What mechanisms can the platform provide to participants to improve the signals they send each other?

Papers:

1. Coles et al. (2010), The job market for new economists: A market design perspective
2. Lee, Niederle, Kim, Kim, Propose with a rose? Signaling in Internet dating markets
3. Halaburda and Piskorski, Competing by Restricting Choice: The Case of Search Platforms
4. Arnosti, Johari, and Kanoria, Managing Congestion in Dynamic Matching Markets
5. Tadelis and Zettelmeyer, Information Disclosure as a Matching Mechanism: Theory and Evidence From a Field Experiment
6. Horton and Johari, At What Quality and What Price? Inducing Separating Equilibria as a Market Design Problem

Part 5 (4 lectures): Modeling tools

In this part of the course we will cover some tools that have proven helpful in modeling and analyzing operational aspects of two-sided platforms.  We emphasize the use of large market models.

Topics of interest:

1. Large market models of static markets
1. Directed search and decentralized matching
2. Double auctions
2. Large market models of dynamic markets
1. Repeated (dynamic) auctions
2. Dynamic matching models

Papers of interest:

1. Rogerson, Shimer, Wright, Search-theoretic models of the labor market: A survey
2. Burdett, Shi, Wright (2001), Pricing and Matching with Frictions
3. Eeckhout and Kircher (2010), Sorting and decentralized price competition
4. Iyer, Johari, Sundararajan, Mean field equilibria of dynamic auctions with learning
5. Bodoh-Creed, Optimal Platform Fees for Large Dynamic Matching Markets
6. Besbes, Balseiro, Weintraub, Repeated Auctions with Budgets in Ad Exchanges: Approximations and Design
7. Duffie, Malamud, Manso, Information percolation with equilibrium search dynamics
8. Arnosti, Johari, and Kanoria, Managing Congestion in Dynamic Matching Markets