Wednesday, December 31, 2008

College admissions: deadlines and congestion

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One modern convenience for high school seniors applying to college in 2008 is the Common Application, which lets them cut down on the numbe...
1 comment:

Marriage Market among a slice of the wealthy

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The NY Times reports on the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria: Glamour Still Rules, but With Fewer Debutantes . "......
Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Market for honey: "honey laundering"

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'Honey laundering' beats US tariffs on Chinese food products (I couldn't resist a new criminal activity with such a great name....

Marriage market in Iran

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The marriage market in Iran is not proceeding as planned, the Guardian reports: Premarital sex on rise as Iranians delay marriage, survey fi...

Pawn shops attracting wealthier customers

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The WSJ has a story whose title and subtitle sum it up: People Pulling Up to Pawnshops Today Are Driving Cadillacs and BMWs : Well-to-Do Tur...
Sunday, December 28, 2008

Eminent domain

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A story in the NY Times has a striking photo of a private home in Seattle located in a niche in a large commercial building. The large build...

Market for used books

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The easy availability of internet shopping for used books hasn't just affected used book stores , it is having an effect on the sale of ...
3 comments:
Thursday, December 25, 2008

New York City Middle School Choice

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New York City has a centralized school choice process for high schools , but middle schools are another story. The New York Times reports: ...

Charity at a price

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Nicholas Kristof's NY Times column on Christmas day, The Sin In Doing Good Deeds , begins with the question about repugnant transactions...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Markets and fraud

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You can't read the news these days without thinking about fraud, and how market designers should think about it. I don't just mean h...
5 comments:
Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Lifesharers: organ donation as a club good rather than a public good

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My earlier post today drew a comment from the executive director of an organization, LifeSharers , with an interesting approach to promotin...
3 comments:

Incentives for organ donors, continued

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Two eminent transplant docs, Drs. Frank Delmonico and William Harmon, have sent me an open letter expressing their concerns about proposed l...
3 comments:
Sunday, December 21, 2008

The market for economics: what should economists study?

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The Boston Globe has a story in today's Ideas section about whether academic economists will and should redirect their energies to focu...
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Saturday, December 20, 2008

Marriage market: dowries

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The previous post got me thinking about dowries and their role in marriage markets: the paper I like best is " Why Dowries?" Ameri...
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Friday, December 19, 2008

Marriage market: Middle East

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Head of Palestinian clan offers Iraqi shoe-throwing journalist a bride "The head of a large West Bank family wants to reward the Iraqi ...

Repugnant gambles

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Justin Wolfers has a blog post at Freakonomics in which he observes that the Australian Federal Treasurer regards bets about the recession ...
Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Competition among airports

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London's Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted airports are presently run by BAA Ltd , which also runs the Edinburgh and Glasgow airports in S...

Incentives for Organ Donors

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Apologies for this unusually long post: to make sense of this you have to look at bits of Federal legislation. The one sentence summary is t...

Academic marketplace: Recession at Yale

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Yale's president, economist Richard Levin, has written a sensible letter to the Yale community about dealing with the sharp drop in Yal...
Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Bankruptcy

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Contracts are shaped in part by the legal framework that determines what happens when contracts break down. The long time scholar of bankrup...