NBER workshop on Market Design: call for papers (October 23-24, in Cambridge)

Mike Ostrovsky and Parag Pathak have announced the following call for papers:

From:  Michael Ostrovsky and Parag Pathak
To:  NBER Market Design Working Group

The National Bureau of Economic Research workshop on Market Design is
a forum to discuss new academic research related to the design of
market institutions, broadly defined. The next meeting will be held in
Cambridge, Massachusetts, on October 23-24, 2015.

We welcome new and interesting research, and are happy to see papers
from a variety of fields. Participants in the past meeting covered a
range of topics and methodological approaches.  Last year's program
can be viewed at:  http://conference.nber.org/confer/2014/MDs14/program.html

The conference does not publish proceedings or issue NBER working
papers - most of the presented papers are presumed to be published
later in journals.

There is no requirement to be an NBER-affiliated researcher to
participate.  Younger researchers are especially encouraged to submit
papers.

If you are interested in presenting a paper this year, please
upload a PDF version by August 1, 2015 to this link:
http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf15

Preference will be given to papers for which at least a preliminary
draft is ready by the time of submission. Only authors of accepted
papers will be contacted.

For presenters and discussants in North America, the NBER will cover
the travel and hotel costs. For speakers from outside North America,
while the NBER will not be able to cover the airfare, it can provide
support for hotel accommodation.

There are a limited number of spaces available for graduate students
to attend the conference, though we cannot cover their costs. Please
email ppathak@mit.edu a short nominating paragraph.

Please forward this announcement to any potentially interested
scholars.  We look forward to hearing from you.

Maclean's review of Who Gets What and Why

In Canada, Maclean's Magazine reviews my new book:

Marketplaces are everywhere—even in online dating
Book review: A look at what makes good market design from game-theory pioneer Alvin E. Roth  by James Brenton, July 9, 2015

The last sentence of the review:
"This book is his way of sharing what he learned along the way, making it an intriguing field guide from a true pioneer."

What do employers learn from interviews? Can they be replaced?

The NY Times had a recent column covering the latest version of this old debate about the informativeness of interviews:

ROBO RECRUITING--Can an Algorithm Hire Better Than a Human?

"A new wave of start-ups — including Gild, Entelo, Textio,Doxa and GapJumpers — is trying various ways to automate hiring. They say that software can do the job more effectively and efficiently than people can. Many people are beginning to buy into the idea. Established headhunting firms like Korn Ferry are incorporating algorithms into their work, too.

"If they succeed, they say, hiring could become faster and less expensive, and their data could lead recruiters to more highly skilled people who are better matches for their companies. Another potential result: a more diverse workplace. The software relies on data to surface candidates from a wide variety of places and match their skills to the job requirements, free of human biases."

Greece and Iran: two very different deadlines

Deadlines are often an important element of economic design, from the design of auctions like eBay's, whose auctions have a well specified deadline after which no more bids are accepted, to negotiations in which e.g. the date at which a labor contract expires may be the deadline for calling a strike.. But the deadlines in the news for a financial bailout of Greece, and Greek banks, is very different from the (repeated) deadlines for nuclear negotiations with Iran.  In the case of Greece, banks will really fail soon without some help--the deadline is real. In the case of Iran, the deadlines are supposed to concentrate the minds of negotiators, but they have already been extended multiple times...

Iran Nuclear Talks Are Extended Once Again

Greece Given Until Sunday to Settle Debt Crisis or Face Disaster

Podcast: Russ Roberts interviews me on EconTalk, about Who Gets What and Why

 Matching Markets: EconTalk Episode with Alvin Roth--Hosted by Russ Roberts, a one-hour podcast/interview about my new book (which you can buy here:)

Tim Harford reviews Who Gets What and Why in the FT

Tim Harford's review in the Financial Times is here: In search of the perfect match

His closing paragraph:
"Economists such as Alvin Roth are like engineers or doctors. They cannot settle for understanding a system in theory; they must solve practical problems too. It’s a hopeful direction for economics — and an essential one, if economists aren’t to be left on the shelf themselves."

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You can also read the piece on Harford's blog, The Undercover Economist

Straw in the wind: Google's Waze is piloting a ridesharing marketplace in Israel

Ynet has the story:
Google's Waze to start carpooling pilot program in Israel
Mapping company launching RideWith, which will allow commuters to pay fellow drivers a small fee to share rides with the help of Waze's navigation system

"Google-owned online mapping company Waze is launching a carpooling pilot program in Israel where commuters pay fellow drivers a small fee for a ride to and from work.

"The new application, called RideWith, will use Waze's navigation system to learn the routes drivers most frequently take to work and match them up with people looking for a ride in the same direction.
...
""We're conducting a small, private beta test in the greater Tel Aviv area for a carpool concept, but we have nothing further to announce at this time," Waze told Reuters of its foray into the increasingly competitive field of ride-sharing.

Drivers will be limited to just two journeys a day and will not be able to earn a salary from RideWith, a source close to the company said, differentiating it from businesses such as Uber, where drivers can turn a profit.

Should RideWith be rolled out globally, this limitation could help it avoid the backlash Uber is facing in a number of countries that want to protect professional taxi drivers."
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Stay tuned...

New York City’s high school admissions process: an excerpt from Who Gets What and Why, in Chalkbeat

Chalkbeat has a brief excerpt from my new book, Who Gets What and Why:

Here's the link to what they have to say (or rather what they have me saying, in an excerpt from Chapter 9 "Back to School"):
Why New York City’s high school admissions process only works most of the time

Below are two paragraphs from the excerpt, concerning Neil Dorosin, who worked for the NYC Department of Education at the time, and is now the Johnny Appleseed of school choice as the director of the Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice (IIPSC):

One reason that principals gained confidence was that DOE staffers did a good job communicating to them how the new system would work. Crucial in that effort was Neil Dorosin, the DOE’s director of high school operations. The task of informing everyone about the new algorithm fell to Neil and his colleagues in the Office of Enrollment Services. Among those he had to educate was his ultimate boss, Chancellor Joel Klein.

“One day I got called down to talk to him,” Neil recalls. “He was upset because he had a friend whose child didn’t get into their first-choice school. The friend had a cousin whose child had gotten into the school, and it was their last choice. I had to explain why the system had to function that way” (i.e., to make it safe to list true preferences).

The lectures of the The 26th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory "Dynamic Games" - 2015, are available on video

Videos of the lectures are available here:

The 26th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory "Dynamic Games" - 2015

The slides are available here

Journal of Human Trafficking, Issue 1, 2015, on kidneys

Issue 1 of the Journal of Human Trafficking contains this article by Alexander Capron and Frank Delmonico. I've highlighted in the abstract two points worth noting--the first involves some untested, but testable empirical claims about what would happen if countries in the first world allowed compensation for donors. (It would be nice to have some empirical evidence...)  The second point is that it is now agreed by everyone that financial disincentives for donating should be removed. (Let's get organized on that, shall we?)

Preventing Trafficking in Organs for Transplantation: An Important Facet of the Fight Against Human Trafficking

DOI:10.1080/23322705.2015.1011491

Alexander M. Caprona & Francis L. Delmonico

pages 56-64

Published online: 28 Apr 2015

Abstract

Most countries now have national legislation that outlaws both human trafficking and organ trafficking. However, international conventions and domestic laws alone have not been enough to stop the trade in organs. As of 2007, a conservative estimate was that 5% of the approximately 100,000 organs transplanted annually were derived from exploiting the poorest and most vulnerable people in society; anti-trafficking efforts have since reduced, though not eliminated, this practice. The Declaration of Istanbul (DoI) was created in 2008 to engage medical professional societies to collaborate with governments and others in combating organ sales, transplant tourism, and trafficking in human organs. In 2010, the Declaration of Istanbul Custodian Group (DICG) was formed to actively promote and to monitor the implementation of the DoI principles. The removal of prohibitions on organ purchases, which is now being promoted in some wealthy nations, is unlikely to shorten transplant waitlists (because organ sales crowd out voluntary, unpaid donation) and would be based on the false view that such sales do not exploit the sellers. To combat such exploitation, the DICG advocates for ratification and enforcement of the new “Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs,” as a complement the Palermo Protocol to the United Nations organized crime convention that prohibits human trafficking for organ removal. To increase ethical organ donation by living related donors, the DICG encourages countries to adopt means to cover donors’ financial costs, which now discourage donation. It also works with the World Health Organization to encourage ministries of health to develop deceased donation to its maximum potential toward the goal of achieving national self-sufficiency in organ transplantation so that patients do not need to travel to foreign destinations to undergo organ transplantation using kidneys and partial livers purchased from poor and vulnerable people. Success in combating human trafficking for organ removal and organ trafficking will be greatly enhanced through organizations like the DICG forging strong relationships with human rights organizations.

An interview in the Times of India, on Who Gets What and Why

A matching market is like marriage — both sides have to choose each other: Alvin Roth
Subodh Varma,TNN | Jul 5, 2015,

Refugee resettlement as a matching problem

There are a lot of displaced people in the world today, both outside their country of origin and within. The conflict in Syria is a big contributor. The poverty in Africa is another. Here's a recent NY Times story, about a UN report, whose headline summarizes the story well:
60 Million People Fleeing Chaotic Lands, U.N. Says

The international refugee accords place most responsibility for resettlement on the "country of first asylum."  If you were smuggling yourself out of Africa, or Syria, you'd have good reason, therefore, to try to get to Sweden before declaring yourself a refugee, but it's a lot easier to get to Turkey or Greece or Italy.  However some classes of refugee can seek resettlement elsewhere, and the U.S. takes a small number of these (around 70,000/year).

American policy is to try to settle refugees across the country, the idea being that this might ease assimilation, and avoid overburdening particular cities and towns. But, of course, once refugees get to the U.S., they are completely free to move around. So there's a matching problem of refugees and cities.

The case of Somali refugees makes this clear: although they've been resettled around the country, many of them quickly move to join the growing community in and around Lewiston, Maine. (Here's a nice story dated 2007...
Letter From Maine: New in Town--Somali refugees began arriving in Lewiston, Maine (pop. 36,000) six years ago. Word spread that Lewiston had good schools, a low crime rate and cheap housing — and the Somalis began arriving in droves.

And here's a Wikipedia page: History of the Somalis in Maine

The point of all this is that people aren't passive, you can't keep them where they are sent if they don't want to stay there (even if moving means giving up various kinds of refugee assistance).

Hillel Rapoport of the Paris School of Economics has been thinking of this in a European context, in which one of the questions is to which countries should refugees be resettled?  How a tradable refugee-admission quota system could help solve the EU’s migration crisis.  Even in Europe, I'm not sure how well refugees can be resettled in the countries to which they are assigned, but the barriers to moving are probably substantially higher than for moves in the U.S.

The EU is thinking about moving refugees, maybe in directions they want to go (although this isn't clear): see e.g. this recent story. EU leaders agree to relocate 40,000 migrants. "EU leaders holding late-night talks in Brussels have agreed to relocate tens of thousands of migrants who have arrived in Italy and Greece." But it's hard, and they aren't really reaching agreement: In Testy Debate, E.U. Leaders Fail to Agree on Quotas to Spread Migrants Across Bloc

So, we have a matching problem here. How to resettle refugees to places that they are willing to stay in, while meeting the other goals that we'd like to achieve?

It's not a bad question to ponder on the 4th of July, for a nation made up of immigrants, many of whom escaped from somewhere to come to the USA.

Podcast interview about Who Gets What and Why

Here's Episode 196 – Alvin Roth from Smartpeoplepodcast.com. The interview starts at around one and a half minutes from the beginning of the audio file.

Arrow Lecture in Jerusalem by Drew Fudenberg - Learning and Equilibrium in Games (video)

Drew begins his general-audience lecture by saying "I can't imagine anyone I would rather give a talk for than Ken Arrow." He then continues with a brief history of game theory.

The Amsterdam court rules on school choice

Hessel Oosterbeek sends the following update on the school choice court case seeking to allow the exchange of school places that were allocated by a deferred acceptance algorithm with multiple tie breaking.  He writes: 

"Attached is a link to the decision of the judge in Amsterdam. Important considerations for the judge are that: i) trading would harm students who have a higher position on the waiting lists, and ii) allowing trade this year makes the system unusable in the future. The judge also writes that the rules were clear.

Overall it reads that the judge is well informed."

Google Translate allows you to make reasonable sense of the judge's decision in English...
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Here is a blog post, also in Dutch, but Google Translate does a good enough job so that you can see that this is a pretty detailed discussion of various algorithms, strategy-proofness, the judge's decision, etc. It seems that the public discussion is going on at a pretty high level: 
Schoolstrijd in Amsterdam
Waarom ruilen niet mag, ook niet als beide partijen er beter van worden
(School Fight in Amsterdam

Why should not change, even if both parties are better off)

Video conversation about Who Gets What on Yahoo! Finance

Below is a link to a Yahoo! Finance video interview (about 5 minutes), made when I was in NYC for the launch of  Who Gets What and Why the first week in June. Unlike most of the interviews I've done, this one has video footage added, so instead of always looking at me and the interviewer, there are scenes of things that we're talking about--the stock exchange, an Amazon warehouse, etc..

Nobel Prize-winning economist on the elusive factors that make markets work

Scott Kominers on market design (and a conference in August)

INTERVIEWS

Prof. Scott Duke Kominers: ‘There are many new areas of market design worth exploring’

BY  EDITORIAL STAFFON JUNE 18, 2015

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Prof. Scott Duke Kominers is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows, a Research Scientist at the Harvard Program for Evolutionary Dynamics, and an Associate of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society. He also will be a General Co-Chair at AMMA 2015, The Third Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications. We talked with him about the upcoming conference and about the most interesting potential areas in market design and the challenges this field will face in the near future.

AMMA 2015 will be held August 8-9, 2015 in Chicago. What will the main focus of the conference be?

AMMA focuses on the theory and practice of market design, at the intersection of economics, computer science, operations research, and applied math.

What are, in your opinion, interesting potential areas researchers in the field of market design should take into account?

Prof. Scott Duke Kominers, General Co-Chair at AMMA 2015

Market design has already proven useful in addressing real-life problems in settings like school choice, entry-level labor markets, kidney exchange, and auction design. Financial market design has flourished recently, as has the design of intellectual property markets. Personally, I am especially excited about “generalized matching,” which blends together ideas from matching and auction theory to show how markets with complex contract structure can be cleared using relatively simple mechanisms. I think there’s a lot of potential for generalized matching mechanisms to be useful in new real-world applications. In addition, there are many new areas of market design worth exploring: market designers are starting to think about the structure of healthcare marketplaces and adoption services. And of course, online platforms are everywhere. Furthermore, a popular press book on market design has just been published: http://www.hmhbooks.com/whogetswhat/index.html.

What challenges do you expect market design will face in the near future?

I think one of the greatest challenges going forward is about translation: we need to find good ways of teaching what we know about marketplace design to policymakers, entrepreneurs, and other practitioners. In some cases, there is work to be done in understanding how to simplify our mechanisms in ways that would make them more accessible to their users. Meanwhile, on the research side, market design has traditionally mixed powerful theory with empirical analysis, experiments, and computational methods. As we build more and more technical facility with our existing tools, and as we add new approaches to our toolkits, it is increasingly challenging – but also increasingly important – to make sure that we let real-world structure guide our methodological choices in applied work.

Changes in repugnance over time

Bloomberg news has some animated graphics showing the change over time in repugnance--as measured by laws at the state level--for six issues that were or are controversial in America: interracial marriage, prohibition, women’s suffrage, abortion, same-sex marriage, and recreational marijuana.

This Is How Fast America Changes Its Mind, By Alex Tribou and Keith Collins

All of those have now had Federal rulings, except for recreational marijuana, which as of this writing has been legalized only in Colorado, Washington, Oregon and Alaska.  Stay tuned...

Financial support for organ donors in New Zealand? A new bill proposed...

New Zealand's parliament will debate a bill to increase the financial support offered to organ donors.

Member’s Bill will boost financial support for organ donors Thursday, 25 June 2015, 2:43 pm Press Release: New Zealand National Party

Chris Bishop

National List MP based in the Hutt Valley

25 June 2015

Member’s Bill will boost financial support for organ donors

Chris Bishop, National List MP based in the Hutt Valley, is delighted the Financial Assistance For Live Organ Donors Bill, a Member’s Bill in his name, has been drawn from the ballot and will be debated by Parliament.

The purpose of the Bill is to increase the financial assistance provided to people who, for altruistic reasons, donate kidney or liver tissue for transplantation purposes.

The Bill will increase the support for donors from the equivalent of the sickness benefit to the equivalent of 80 per cent of the donor’s pre-operation earnings – the same formula applied to income support for ACC recipients. The Bill also provides for the payment of childcare assistance for those who require it during their convalescence.

“I was inspired to pick up this Member’s Bill, which was originally put forward by Hon Michael Woodhouse, after talking to Sharon van der Gulik at one of my first meetings as a candidate in the election last year,” Mr Bishop says. “She had been living with renal failure for more than two years and needed 15 hours of dialysis a week – before her son donated one of his kidneys to her.

“At the public meeting, Mrs van der Gulik spoke of the financial hardship that her son faced in the six weeks he spent recovering from the procedure. She argued he deserved more. I agree.

“If this Bill passes into law, greater support will be available to people like Mrs van der Gulik’s son.

“Organ donation rates in New Zealand are improving, but are still too low. It’s important they increase - live kidney donation is the least expensive form of treatment for end-stage renal failure, and significantly improves life expectancy.

“This Bill is a small but important and helpful step to increasing the number of people who donate organs.

“Wider work to increase the number of donors is being led by the Minister of Health. Budget 2014 allocated $4 million over four years to set up a National Renal Transplant Service to increase the number of live kidney donor transplantations. The funding covers donor liaison co-ordinators and continuation of the New Zealand Kidney Exchange programme. Last year's funding increase builds on the $4 million invested in Budget 2012 to raise awareness and encourage more people to donate organs,” says Mr Bishop.

Elias, Lacetera and Macis on the repugnance of paying for organs or prostitution: a survey experiment

Markets and Morals: An Experimental Survey Study
Julio J. Elias , Nicola Lacetera , Mario Macis

PLOS One. Published: June 1, 2015DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0127069

Abstract: Most societies prohibit some market transactions based on moral concerns, even when the exchanges would benefit the parties involved and would not create negative externalities. A prominent example is given by payments for human organs for transplantation, banned virtually everywhere despite long waiting lists and many deaths of patients who cannot find a donor. Recent research, however, has shown that individuals significantly increase their stated support for a regulated market for human organs when provided with information about the organ shortage and the potential beneficial effects a price mechanism. In this study we focused on payments for human organs and on another “repugnant” transaction, indoor prostitution, to address two questions: (A) Does providing general information on the welfare properties of prices and markets modify attitudes toward repugnant trades? (B) Does additional knowledge on the benefits of a price mechanism in a specific context affect attitudes toward price-based transactions in another context? By answering these questions, we can assess whether eliciting a market-oriented approach may lead to a relaxation of moral opposition to markets, and whether there is a cross-effect of information, in particular for morally controversial activities that, although different, share a reference to the “commercialization” of the human body. Relying on an online survey experiment with 5,324 U.S. residents, we found no effect of general information about market efficiency, consistent with morally controversial markets being accepted only when they are seen as a solution to a specific problem. We also found some cross-effects of information about a transaction on the acceptance of the other; however, the responses were mediated by the gender and (to a lesser extent) religiosity of the respondent—in particular, women exposed to information about legalizing prostitution reduced their stated support for regulated organ payments. We relate these findings to prior research and discuss implications for public policy.