Incentives and privacy

A new paper by three computer scientists and an economist reports on some connections between privacy and incentive compatibility.

MECHANISM DESIGN IN LARGE GAMES: INCENTIVES AND PRIVACY
by
MICHAEL KEARNS, MALLESH M. PAI, AARON ROTH and JONATHAN ULLMAN
July 18, 2012


ABSTRACT
We study the design of mechanisms satisfying two desiderata— incentive compatibility and privacy. The first, requires that each agent should be incentivized to report her private information truthfully. The second, privacy, requires the mechanism not reveal ‘much’ about any agent’s type to other agents. We propose a notion of privacy we call Joint Differential Privacy. It is a variant of Differential Privacy, a robust notion of privacy used in the Theoretical Computer Science literature. We show by construction that such mechanisms, i.e. ones which are both incentive compatible and jointly differentially private exist when the game is ‘large’, i.e. there are a large number of players, and any player’s action affects any other’s payoff by at most a small amount. Our mechanism adds carefully selected noise to no-regret algorithms similar to those studied in Foster-Vohra [FV97] and Hart-Mas-Colell [HMC00]. It therefore implements an approximate correlated equilibrium of the full information game induced by players’ reports.
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As I understand it, adding appropriate randomness to regret learning algorithms doesn’t harm their long term equilibration properties, and gives them good privacy properties, which together give them good incentive properties.

Parag Pathak wins Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers

It was announced in Washington today that Parag Pathak (who is in Istanbul giving the Shapley Lecture at the World Congress of the Game Theory Society) is one of the winners of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers: President Obama Honors Outstanding Early-Career Scientists

"President Obama today named 96 researchers as recipients of the Presidential Early Career Awards for Scientists and Engineers, the highest honor bestowed by the United States Government on science and engineering professionals in the early stages of their independent research careers."


I've had lots of occasions to blog about Parag and his work...

Should there be one kidney exchange or many, and which ones, and when?

The July issue of the Nephrology Times carries a story from the recent American Transplant Congress meetings, at which reports were given by the main kidney exchange networks and transplant centers: In National Paired Donation Pilot, Most Match Offers Declined

Ruthanne Hanto reported on the progress of the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) Kidney Paired Donation (KPD) Pilot Program run by UNOS.
"The pilot has made about 240 matches since its first run on Oct. 27, 2010, but about 220 of the offers were declined, and only 19 of the matches led to transplantation."

The pilot program hopes to add bridge donors--donors who temporarily end a chain and donate later--at some future time.

In the meantime, the story covers an ongoing debate about whether having multiple kidney exchange networks is a good thing. There's general agreement that, run well, a larger network creates a thicker market which would produce more transplants. And the support of the OPTN, which deals with the nation's deceased donors, gives the pilot program enormous convening power, since they already have working relations with every transplant center in the country.

Nevertheless, the other programs have been vastly more successful in producing transplants, both for patients in general and for the most highly sensitized patients who now make up the majority of those  in kidney exchange networks. (It's hard to come by exact numbers, but we're talking two orders of magnitude--the pilot program so far accounts for about 1% of the kidney exchange transplants to date.) So the story quotes both Ruthanne Hanto and Stanford surgeon Marc Melcher as saying that, for the moment, it would be premature to try to close any of the successful networks down, not least because they are where the innovation is taking place.
(Melcher: “I think at some point most people agree that we need to have a national program. I think really the question is when, and when have we really learned enough about the right way to go.")


The story also quotes Hopkins surgeon Dorry Segev who reaches the opposite conclusion, and would apparently be glad to close down the independent networks: "There's a tremendous amount of competition among the various KPD providers in this country, and this competition is actually hurting the chances for those hardest-to-match patients.”  
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My recent papers which have some bearing on this controversy, in the sense that they are about best practices pioneered in practice by other exchange networks (namely nonsimultaneous chains), are these:

• Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, ; ''Nonsimultaneous Chains and Dominos in Kidney Paired Donation -- Revisited,'' American Journal of Transplantation, 11, 5, May 2011, 984-994.
• Ashlagi, Itai, Duncan S. Gilchrist, Alvin E. Roth, and Michael A. Rees, "NEAD Chains in Transplantation," American Journal of Transplantation, December 2011, 11:2780-2781.
• Ashlagi, Itai and Alvin E. Roth, "Individual rationality and participation in large scale, multi-hospital kidney exchange," working paper, January 2011. 
• C. Bradley Wallis; Kannan P. Samy; Alvin E. Roth; and Michael A. Rees, "Kidney paired donation," Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 2011, doi:10.1093/ndt/gfr155
• Ashlagi, Itai and Alvin E. Roth, "New challenges in multi-hospital kidney exchange," American Economic Review papers and proceedings, May 2012, 102,3, 354-59.
• Rees, Michael A.,  Mark A. Schnitzler, Edward Zavala, James A. Cutler,  Alvin E. Roth, F. Dennis Irwin, Stephen W. Crawford,and Alan B.  Leichtman, “Call to Develop a Standard Acquisition Charge Model for Kidney Paired Donation,” American Journal of Transplantation, 2012, 12, 6 (June), 1392-1397.
• Ashlagi, Itai, David Gamarnik, Michael A. Rees and Alvin E. Roth, "The Need for (long) Chains in Kidney Exchange," working paper, May 2012.

Don't get sick in July...the market for new medical residents

An experienced nurse reflects on the influx of inexperienced new doctors each July in the U.S.: Don't get sick in July

And in England, Thousands of junior doctors have concerns over patient safety: GMC

"One in seven said they had felt forced to cope with clinical problems beyond their competence or experience, according to a survey carried out by the General Medical Council, with a small proportion saying this happened on “a daily basis”.

Hermit Crab Vacancy Chains

From Scientific American:
On a Tiny Caribbean Island, Hermit Crabs Form Sophisticated Social Networks [Video]

In 2009, Lewis and Rotjan surveyed the entire hermit crab population on Carrie Bow Cay. Many crabs were living in shells that were a tight fit or had one too many holes. As they grow, hermit crabs must move into larger shells, so they are always on the lookout for a more spacious dwelling. And an undamaged shell is preferable to a broken one, even if the shells are the same size. Knowing this, the researchers decided to dramatically change the available hermit crab real estate on Carrie Bow Cay. They placed 20 beautifully intact shells that were a little too big for most hermit crabs at various spots around the island and watched what happened.

When a lone crab encountered one of the beautiful new shells, it immediately inspected the shelter with its legs and antennae and scooted out of its current home to try on the new shelter for size. If the new shell was a good fit, the crab claimed it. Classic hermit crab behavior. But if the new shell was too big, the crab did not scuttle away disappointed—instead, it stood by its discovery for anywhere between 15 minutes and 8 hours, waiting. This was unusual. Eventually other crabs showed up, each one trying on the shell. If the shell was also too big for the newcomers, they hung around too, sometimes forming groups as large as 20. The crabs did not gather in a random arrangement, however. Rather, they clamped onto one another in a conga line stretching from the largest to smallest animal—a behavior the biologists dubbed "piggybacking."

Only one thing could break up the chain of crabs: a Goldilocks hermit crab for whom the shell introduced by Lewis and Rotjan was just right. As soon as such a crab claimed its new home, all the crabs in queue swiftly exchanged shells in sequence. The largest crab at the front of the line seized the Goldilocks crab's abandoned shell. The second largest crab stole into the first's old shell. And so on.

No one had ever documented such well-orchestrated shell swapping before, but similar behavior was not unknown. In 1986, Ivan Chase of Stony Brook University made the first observations of hermit crabs exchanging shells in a "vacancy chain"—a term originally coined by social scientists to describe the ways that people trade coveted resources like apartments and jobs. When one person leaves, another moves in. Since then, several researchers—including Lewis and Rotjan—have studied the behavior in different hermit crab species. Some preliminary evidence suggests that other animals use vacancy chains too, including clown fish, lobsters, octopuses and some birds. As Chase explains in the June issue of Scientific American, vacancy chains are an excellent way to distribute resources: Unlike more typical competition, a single vacancy chain benefits everyone involved—each individual gets an upgrade. So it makes sense that hermit crabs and other animals have evolved sophisticated social behaviors to make the most of vacancy chains.

The orderly vacancy chain that Lewis and Rotjan observed is called a synchronous vacancy chain, which is different from an asynchronous vacancy chain in which a lone crab encounters a shell, claims it and leaves behind its old home, which is later seized by a different crab that never interacts with the first animal. As the above video makes clear, however, synchronous vacancy chains are not always civilized affairs. Sometimes crabs fight each other for the best shell or gather in violent groups. And the exchanges often happen extremely quickly. Lewis and Rotjan had to slow down the footage just to see what was happening and it is still difficult to make out: three hermit crabs crowd a large green shell; the largest claims the green shell and the other two swiftly trade up. Lewis thinks the chain would have been more orderly if the crabs were not disturbed by two biologists filming them.

 Sara Lewis and Randi Rotjan 

HT: Benjamin Kay

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Update: here's another video https://www.facebook.com/video.php?v=844190408934712 (HT: Yingua He)
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And on YouTube (HT Joshua Gans)

Chain of lives: kidney exchange in Forbes

Itai Ashlagi and David Gamarnik in Forbes: Kidney Transplants: How To Extend A Chain of Life

"What is the best way to use the kidney of an altruistic donor so that the greatest number of patients get transplants?

"To answer this question, we gathered data from a kidney exchange clearinghouse. Included was detailed information about patients’ blood and tissue types, which told us how hard it would be to find matches for them. We analyzed the data using the tool of graph theory, an approach used in mathematics and computer science to understand relationships among pairs of objects. This tool is used to find the largest number of matches achievable in each exchange program. Working with us were two pioneers of kidney exchange, Michael Rees, a transplant surgeon at the University of Toledo, and Alvin Roth, an economics professor at Harvard Business School.

"We found that long chains and long cycles of donations are essential to helping the greatest number of patients. This is especially true for patients whose blood or tissue types make them difficult to match. The percentage of hard to match patients in kidney exchange programs is very high since easy to match patients can often find a donor without the aid of the exchange program (even when enrolling the program they can be matched quickly while hard to match patients accumulate over time). But lengthy chains will benefit hard to match patients while not harming easy to match patients who are in kidney exchange programs, we found."

Here's the paper reporting the results in detail:
Ashlagi, Itai, David Gamarnik, Michael A. Rees and Alvin E. Roth, "The Need for (long) Chains in Kidney Exchange"

Matching in Europe

Estelle Cantillon draws my attention to the new website of the network of European researchers in matching and market design, with concentration on school choice and labor markets:
Matching in Practice--European network for research on matching practices in education and early labour markets

Their membership list is a Who's Who of European researchers in the area:

Jorge Alcalde-Unzu	Department of Economics, Public University of Navarra, Spain
Rebecca Allen	Department of Quantitative Social Science, Institute of Education University of London, UK
Haris Aziz	Department of Computer Science, TU Munchen, Germany
Sophie Bade	Research Unit Martin Hellwig, Max Planck Institue for Research on Collective Goods, Germany
Péter Biro	Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
Francis  Bloch	Department of Economics, Ecole Polytechnique, France
Simon Burgess	Department of Economics, University of Bristol, UK
Caterina Calsamiglia	Departament d’Economia i Història Econòmica. Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona. Spain
Emilio Calvano	Innocenzo Gasparini Institute for Economic Research, Università Commerciale Luigi Bocconi, Italy
Andrea Canidio	Central European University,Hungary
Estelle  Cantillon	ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Katarina Cechlarova	Institute of Mathematics, Univerzita Pavla Jozefa Šafárika, Slovakia
Melvyn Coles	Department of Economics, University of Essex, UK
Nadja Dwenger	Research Unit: Public Economics, Max-Planck-Institut for Tax Law and Public Finance, Germany
Jan Eeckhout	Department of Economics, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Spain
Aytek Erdil	Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, UK
Tamas Fleiner	Department of Operations Research, Eötvös Loránd University, Hungary
Alfred Galichon	Economics Department, Ecole Polytechnique, France
Thomas  Gall	Department of Economics, University of Bonn, Germany
Guillaume Haeringer	Departament d'Economia i d'Historia Economica, Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona,Spain
Yinghua He	Toulouse School of Economics, France
Maria  Humlum	Aarhus University, Denmark
Elena Inarra	Faculty of Economics, University of the Basque Country, Spain
Rob Irving	School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK
John Kennes	Department of Economics, University of Copenhagen, Denmark
Sofya Kiselgof	Higher School of Economics, Russia
Bettina Klaus	Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC), University of Lausanne, Switzerland
Flip Klijn	Institute for Economic Analysis, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Laszlo Koczy	Institute of Economics, Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Hungary
Dorothea  Kuebler	Research Unit: Market Behavior, WZB, Germany
Alexey Kushnir	Institute for Empirical Research in Economics, University of Zurich, Switzerland
Patrick Legros	ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
François Maniquet	Département des sciences économiques, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
David Manlove	School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK
Jordi Masso	Departament d'Economia i d'Història Econòmica, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona,Spain
Ana Mauleon	Department of Economics, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Belgium
Luca Merlino	ECARES, Universitè Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium
Antonio Miralles	Department of Economics, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain
Elena Molis	Center for Research in Economics, Facultés Universitaires Saint-Louis, Belgium
Daniel Monte	Simon Fraser University, Canada
Kurino Morimitsu	Department of Economics, Maastricht University, Netherlands
Heinrich Nax	Oxford, UK
Alexandru Nichifor	Department of Economics, Maastricht University, Netherlands
Antonio Nicolo	Department of Economics , University of Padua, Italy
Gregg O'Malley	School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow, UK
Joana Pais	Research Unit on Complexity and Economics, Universidade Técnica de Lisboa, Portugal
Katarzyna Paluch	Institute of Computer Science, University of Wroclaw, Poland
Agnes Pinter	Department of Economic Analysis, Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, Spain
Salmai Qari	Research Unit: Public Economics, Max-Planck-Institut for Tax Law and Public Finance, Germany
Eve Ramaekers	Center for Operations Research and Econometrics, Université Catholique de Louvain, Belgium
Antonio Romero	Departamento de Economía, Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain
Ildiko Schlotter	Department of Computer Science, Budapest University of Technology and Economics, Hungary
Olivier Tercieux	Centre national de la recherche scientifique, Paris School of Economics, France
Norovsambuu Tumennasan	Aarhus University, Denmark
Rune Veijlin	Aarhus University, Denmark
Alexander Westkamp	Department of Economic Theory II, University of Bonn, Germany

The Federal Law Clerk Hiring Plan is pretty much over

...and acknowledged to be over.

In October 2011 I wrote this post:

Another year of the judicial clerkship market: maybe the last one under the current system?

Stanford Law School has issued a memo to the legal community, dated July 17, 2012 (reporting on a June 29 letter to the Judicial Conference), saying that they will now freely communicate, before the dates allowed under the plan, with judges who do not stick to the hiring plan.  The reason? Every other law school is doing it, and so it makes sense to do it openly...

Here are my papers on that market...

• Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, "The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" University of Chicago Law Review, 68, 3, Summer, 2001, 793-902.(online at SSRN)
• Haruvy, Ernan, Alvin E. Roth, and M. Utku Unver, “The Dynamics of Law Clerk Matching: An Experimental and Computational Investigation of Proposals for Reform of the Market,” Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control, 30, 3 , March 2006, Pages 457-486. 
• Avery, Christopher, Jolls, Christine, Posner, Richard A. and Roth, Alvin E., "The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" . University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486.

Match-Up 2012 in Budapest, July 19-20

MATCH-UP 2012:  the Second International Workshop on Matching Under Preferences

Here's the conference program: Match-Up 2012, and here are the proceedings.

Getting into Harvard the hard way, by transferring

College admissions consists of lots of parts: early, regular, waiting lists, z-lists, transfers... It doesn't appear that transfers are a big part of Harvard's admissions strategy.

The Real 1%: Harvard Admits 15 Transfer Students...from a pool of 1,448 applicants.


"Mascolo said that the College, still within memory of its two-year moratorium on all transfer admissions, will probably accept a similarly tiny number of transfer students again next year."

Centralized application systems: more consolidation

One of the ways the internet is changing job markets has to do with making it easier to transmit job market materials. (This becomes even more important as the internet makes it easier for job candidates to apply to a larger number of jobs.) Competing services have sprung up to serve this need, and as the market matures we are starting to see some consolidation.

In the humanities, Interfolio seems to be consolidating its position, with a recent endorsement from the Modern Language Association, which will integrate the service with its Job Information List:
 Dossier and Search-Management Services Available through the JIL

"Job seekers will be able to apply for positions directly from advertisements in the JIL by creating a free Interfolio account
...
"All departments that place ads in the 2012–13 JIL will be able to use Interfolio’s suite of online search-management tools, called ByCommittee. ByCommittee provides a single secure Web interface for departments to manage search-committee memberships for multiple searches and to receive candidate applications, dossiers, and other materials."
...
"Letter writers receive requests for letters directly from a candidate’s Interfolio account and submit their letters to Interfolio’s centralized dossier service."
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In Economics, some preliminary discussions have taken place about the possibility of a similar kind of integration between the job listing service Job Openings for Economists (JOE) and the application-materials aggregator Econjobmarket.org. but it remains for at least another year to see whether these discussions will be fruitful.
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Previous related posts:
Academic letters of reference;

Consolidation and competition among economics jobs aggregators

The university (Stanford) as a marketplace of ideas and innovation

Writing in the New Yorker, Ken Auletta thinks about what makes Stanford the heart of silicon valley, and whether this is an entirely good thing... Get Rich U.: There are no walls between Stanford and Silicon Valley. Should there be?

"Innovation comes from myriad sources, including the bastions of East Coast learning, but Stanford has established itself as the intellectual nexus of the information economy.
...

If the Ivy League was the breeding ground for the élites of the American Century, Stanford is the farm system for Silicon Valley. When looking for engineers, Schmidt said, Google starts at Stanford. Five per cent of Google employees are Stanford graduates. The president of Stanford, John L. Hennessy, is a director of Google; he is also a director of Cisco Systems and a successful former entrepreneur. Stanford’s Office of Technology Licensing has licensed eight thousand campus-inspired inventions, and has generated $1.3 billion in royalties for the university. Stanford’s public-relations arm proclaims that five thousand companies “trace their origins to Stanford ideas or to Stanford faculty and students.” They include Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo, Cisco Systems, Sun Microsystems, eBay, Netflix, Electronic Arts, Intuit, Fairchild Semiconductor, Agilent Technologies, Silicon Graphics, LinkedIn, and E*Trade.
...

"But Stanford’s entrepreneurial culture has also turned it into a place where many faculty and students have a gold-rush mentality and where the distinction between faculty and student may blur as, together, they seek both invention and fortune. Corporate and government funding may warp research priorities. A quarter of all undergraduates and more than fifty per cent of graduate students are engineering majors. At Harvard, the figures are four and ten per cent; at Yale, they’re five and eight per cent. Some ask whether Stanford has struck the right balance between commerce and learning, between the acquisition of skills to make it and intellectual discovery for its own sake."

Kidney broker sentenced to prison in New Jersey

Kidney Broker Sentenced To Prison As Donor Recalls Doubts

"In the first criminal organ-trafficking case in the U.S., Quick took the witness stand at the sentencing of Levy Izhak Rosenbaum, a Brooklyn, New York, man who pleaded guilty to brokering black-market sales of human kidneys to three Americans. After hearing Quick’s account of how Rosenbaum paid him $25,000 for a kidney, U.S. District Judge Anne Thompson sentenced Rosenbaum to 2 1/2 years in prison.

“It’s a kind of trading in human misery,” Thompson said of the black-market kidney trade. Rosenbaum “charged a fee” for kidneys while using “a complicated web of transactions” to finance his trade, she said. “He corrupted himself.”

See earlier posts on this case here, and yesterday's story about a conviction in Japan here.

Jail for Japanese kidney buyer

Kidney-buying doc's jail term upheld

"Presiding Judge Shoji Ogawa said the two defendants had damaged public trust in the organ transplant system, noting Horiuchi procured a kidney solely through financial means
...
"The 1997 Organ Transplantation Law bans all trade in organs, while the ethical guidelines of the Japan Society for Transplantation only permit live organ donation between family members to prevent illegal harvesting. The Japan Organ Transplant Network is the only entity permitted to act as an intermediary for organ transplants.

"The law also forbids anyone from either requesting or promising payment for organs and from receiving commissions for mediating illegal transplants, to ensure a level playing field for potential recipients and to encourage voluntary donations from healthy citizens.

"The doctor allegedly tried to sidestep the law by technically adopting the donor "

The political economy of organ transplantation in the U.S.

Ricky Vohra has an interesting post called $’s and Kidneys in which he notices that surgeons may have a financial interest in opposing a monetary market for kidneys, and provides some interesting background links.

The following paper discusses the roles and relationships of the Department of Health and Human Services, the Organ Procurement and Transplant Network (OPTN), the Organ Procurement Organizations (OPOs) and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), as determined by the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 and its subsequent interpretations. Its focus is the debate over the different waiting times to receive a deceased donor organ in different regions of the country, resulting from the regional (as opposed to national) allocation of organs, based on how many deceased donors are in each region (and not on how many patients):

THE PUBLIC ADMINSTRATION OF ORGAN ALLOCATION: MAINTAINING THE PUBLIC – PRIVATE PARTNERSHIP  by Stosberg and Gimbel
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And here's  a news story about Tampa General Hospital's active transplant programs. It details some of the revenues:

"The revenues a transplant program can generate are also significant. For example, the average estimated hospital admission fee nationwide for a heart transplant patient in 2011 was $634,300, according to the United Network of Organ Sharing. The nonprofit network helps the federal government manage the nation’s organ transplant system.
The average hospital admission fee for a single lung transplant in 2011 was $302,900, the network estimates. Other average estimates from the network: A liver transplant was $316,900; a pancreas was $108,900; and a kidney transplant was $91,200."

Report on Denver School Choice--first year

A Denver organization, A+ Denver,  reports on the first year of Denver's new school choice system, which seems to have gone well.

Evaluation of Denver’s SchoolChoice Process for the 2011-12 School Year
Prepared for the SchoolChoice Transparency Committee at A+ Denver
by Mary Klute, U. of Colorado, Denver

and

Assessment of Assignment Tool
by Dr. Gary Kochenberger, U. of Colorado, Denver

See also Diving deep into SchoolChoice by Robert Reichardt 
"The new choice process consolidated over 60 different processes into one.  A computer program was used to assign students to schools based on student preferences, number of available seats, and school preferences (e.g. siblings, residents, or auditions for Denver School of the Arts). A second round  is open now through August 31, 2012 for students who are not happy with their current assignment or did not enter the first round.

"A Transparency Committee of DPS administrators and principals along with community stakeholders was selected by A+ Denver to receive and interpret an evaluation report on thecomputer program used to make the assignments and a second on the information created by the choice process.  A+ Denver also provides spreadsheets of choice data by school.  

...

"The choice process worked. DPS was able to collect over 20,000 hand-written choice requests and implement a complex computer program to assign students to schools.

"There are huge differences in demand for schools. The differences are largest in high schools: Denver School of Science and Technology, Stapleton, had 8.2 first choice requests per available seat compared to Denver Online High School which had .01 first choice requests per seat.  This is a difference of 82,000%."

Denver school choice is an IIPSC project, see my earlier blog posts.

Living donors' stories

Narrative Inquiry in Bioethics (2, 1, Spring 2012) is devoted to a Narrative Symposium: Living Organ Donation

"As Elisa Gordon notes, the collection of stories represent the experiences of liver and kidney donors; donors whose organ was successfully and unsuccessfully transplanted into a recipient; related and unrelated donors; and donors who had overwhelmingly positive experiences, mixed experiences, and negative experiences. In these stories we read about a wide variety of motives for donation and concerns with the donation experience. We hope that the collection of personal narratives and commentaries by Drs. Dianne LaPointe Rudow and Paul Root Wolpe will lead to a better understanding of the current living donation process as well as improvements in that process for future donors."

Living Organ Donors’ Stories: (Unmet) Expectations about Informed Consent, Outcomes, and Care

pp. 1-6 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0001

Elisa J. Gordon

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Living Organ Donation

pp. 7-37 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0002

Laura Altobelli, Sherri Bauman, Janice Flynn, Andy Heath, Joseph Jacobs, Tim Joos, Amy K. Lewensten, Donna L. Luebke, Sarah A. McDaniel, Donald Olenick, Laurie E Post, Vicky Young

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An Altruistic Living Donor’s Story

pp. 7-10 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0018

Laura Altobelli

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Surgery for the Soul

pp. 10-11 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0008

Sherri Bauman

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Kidney Donation Story

pp. 11-14 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0010

Janice Flynn

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The Essence of Giving—A Transplant Story

pp. 14-17 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0012

Andy Heath

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Love—the Risk Worth Taking

pp. 17-19 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0014

Joseph Jacobs

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My Donation Journey

pp. 19-21 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0016

Tim Joos

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A Life For A Life: My Gift To My Dad

pp. 21-24 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0017

Amy K. Lewensten

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Lessons Learned: The Realities of Living Organ Donation

pp. 24-26 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0007

Donna L Luebke

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Sarah’s List Exchange Experience

pp. 26-29 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0009

Sarah A. McDaniel

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Accelerated Living Donation

pp. 29-31 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0011

Donald Olenick

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Liver Donor Nightmare

pp. 31-34 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0013

Laurie E Post

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Adrift After Donation

pp. 34-37 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0015

Vicky Young

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Personal Narratives: Living Organ Donation (Web Only Content)

Getting Our Child Off Dialysis

p. E1 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0019

Blake Adams

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A Living Donor’s Journey

pp. E2-E6 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0020

Anonymous One

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The Spare Kidney

pp. E6-E9 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0021

Michael Sauls

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Living Donors are People Too

pp. E9-E11 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0022

Christine Wright

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Gifts and Obligations: The Living Donor as Storyteller

pp. 39-44 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0003

Paul Root Wolpe

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The Gift of Life—Walking by Faith

pp. E11-E14 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0023

Shannon D. Wyatt

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Journey of an Altruistic, Non–designated Living Donor

pp. E14-E16 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0024

Cara Yesawich

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Experiences of the Live Organ Donor: Lessons Learned Pave the Future

pp. 45-54 | DOI: 10.1353/nib.2012.0004

Dianne LaPointe Rudow

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Who Gets What: the new economics of matchmaking and market design: Public Lecture

Sydney Ideas (Public Lecture): Who Gets What: the new economics of matchmaking and market design


What are markets and marketplaces? How do they work? How do they fail? How can we fix them when they’re broken? In recent years economists have stepped forward as market designers to try to craft answers to these questions. These questions are particularly difficult for matching markets, which are markets in which you can’t just choose what you want, but also have to be chosen. If a market has an application or selection procedure, it’s a matching market, and matching markets determine some of the most important transitions in life. Who goes to which schools and universities? Who gets which jobs? Who gets scarce organs for transplant? Professor Alvin Roth illustrates with examples of recent market designs, in school choice, labor markets and kidney exchange in the US.

And here's the press release: Harvard expert on making life changing markets work

Here's your invitation.

• Date: Tuesday 10 July, 2012
• Time: 6.00pm to 7.30pm
• Venue: Law School Foyer, Eastern Avenue, the University of Sydney (Click here for venue information)
• Cost: This event is free and open to all, with no ticket or booking required. Seating is unreserved and entry is on a first come, first served basis.
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Indian surrogates bearing British babies

The Telgraph reports: how more and more Britons are paying Indian women to become surrogate mothers.

"There are now up to 1,000 clinics, all entirely unregulated, in the country, many specialising in helping Britons become parents.

"Couples and single people are paying an average of £25,000 a time to have children, getting around rules in the UK which make commercial surrogacy illegal.

"It is estimated that 2,000 births to surrogate mothers took place in the country last year, with most experts agreeing that Britain is the biggest single source of people who want to become parents in this way. Britain may account for as many as 1,000 births last year in India. In contrast there were 100 surrogate births recorded in Britain last year.
...
"Dr Sharma has chaired a committee which has drawn up proposals for industry standard. It would guarantee safety standards for the first time, outlaw sex selection, forbid women capable of childbirth making use of surrogacy and set up the first register of clinics, with a regime of inspections and sanctions for those which fail them.
...
"However the legislation has yet to be considered by India’s parliament and it could be many years before it becomes law. Dr Sharma’s committee has called for urgent action.
...
"Clinics in India offer fertility treatments which would-be parents in Britain would either be unable to have for legal reasons, or would face lengthy waits on the NHS to obtain.
...
"One clinic in New Delhi, The Birthplace of Joy, said that their patients were “100 per cent foreign” and estimated that as many as half of them were homosexual couples wanting to become parents."

College admissions exams in China

The NY Times reports: Test That Can Determine the Course of Life in China Gets a Closer Examination


"In a country where education is so highly prized, the score that a student earns after the days of testing at the end of high school is believed to set the course of one’s life. The score determines not just whether a young person will attend a Chinese university, but also which one — a selection, many Chinese say, that has a crucial bearing on career prospects.

"But debate appears to have grown more heated lately over the value of the gaokao (pronounced gow-kow). Critics say the exam promotes the kind of rote learning that is endemic to education in China and that hobbles creativity. It leads to enormous psychological strain on students, especially in their final year of high school. In various ways, the system favors students from large cities and well-off families, even though it was designed to create a level playing field among all Chinese youth.

"Last month, a 12-minute television segment railing against the exam by Zhong Shan, a well-known talk show host in Hunan Province, gained popularity on the Web and became a focal point for fury against the gaokao in particular and the Chinese educational system in general. Also widespread on the Internet were photographs taken in a Hubei Province classroom of students hooked up to intravenous drips of amino acids while cramming.

Will circumcision become a repugnant transaction in Germany?

A court in Germany has ruled that circumcising young boys for religious reasons amounts to bodily harm.

Earlier attempts to ban circumcision in California lost support because of the “grotesque anti-Semitic imagery" employed by activists in favor of the ban.

HT: Sven Seuken

Priority for _live_ organ donation in Israel

 I've recently posted about the new Israeli organ donation law which gives priority for deceased donor organs to those who have signed deceased donor cards themselves (see here and here and, earlier, here). However there's no provision to give priority to people who have made live donations (typically of a kidney).  Here's an article (in Hebrew) about a proposal to change that: 

http://www.ynet.co.il/articles/0,7340,L-4243900,00.html

Ron Shorrer provides a translation (he says he 'upgraded' the Google translation):

"The health Committee of the Knesset approved today (Monday) for the first reading the bill allowing prioritizing transplants to living organ donor, even if they donated to a relative. So far only ADI card holders  who needed a transplant received priority , but those who donated to their relative  remained outside the scope of the law, not winning this priority.

·  Living donors - to sign an ADI card, click here 

"These livedonors go through a process so difficult," said the discussion MK Gal-On (Meretz), who initiated the bill along with committee chairman MK Haim Katz (Likud). "There is no difference in suffering between those who donated to a stranger and those who donated to a family member. "Galon stressed that the bill has the support of the government.

"It took hard rehabilitation over three months," said Dina Abecassis Committee, which donated a kidney to her brother patient 15 years ago. "Family members should be encouraged to donate organs, since there is 99% match. I say that the Benefit also should apply retroactively to everyone who donated organs years ago, like me, not only from the entry into force of the law".

"Today people are donating to family members in the lack of choice," said Amos wing debate, Israel's national chairman kidney transplant patients. "They do it because there is hardly no donations from the dead . We need to reward even more the  family members who donate. "

"Representative of the Ministry of Health, Mr. Meir Broder praised the bill and noted that an organ donor is at health risk and therefore should be provided with a safety net as suggested in this amendment.

"Hundreds of Israeli patients are waiting right now  for an organ donation and the bill that we submitted  may encourage family members to pitch in and contribute," said committee chairman MK Haim Katz. "Later we will discuss the application of the legislative process to the benefit of family members who donated in years past."

Hannan Lecture at the Econometric Society Australasian Meeting ESAM12

Session 36: E.J. Hannan Lecture
 Session Chair: Nejat Anbarci, Deakin University
Session type: invited
Date: July 5, 2012 Time: 11:00 - 12:15
Location: Ballroom

 E.J. Hannan Lecture
Alvin Roth
Harvard University
  Kidney Exchange: Accomplishments and New Challenges

One of the interesting recent applications of market design has been to Kidney Exchange, which allows incompatible patients and their donors to exchange kidneys with other such pairs. Kidney exchange now takes place in the U.S., Europe, Asia, and Australia. It has grown as market design solutions have been found to various obstacles. However obstacles remain to further growth. Some of them are new: as kidney exchange has grown, it has become possible for hospitals to free ride on the public good it creates. I’ll discuss the history of kidney exchange from a market design perspective, and the current challenges.

 

Melbourne is a Centre for Market Design

I will be bringing coals to Newcastle when I speak tomorrow about market design at the Econometric Society meetings in Melbourne, July 3-6.

See the announcement below about the new centre. (One of its first activities will be a short course by Tayfun Sonmez.)

Official Launch of Centre for Market Design

Event	Official Launch of Centre for Market Design
Date	7th Jun 2012 5:00pm
	The Centre for Market Design is a collaboration between the University of Melbourne, the Commonwealth Treasury, and the Victorian Department of Treasury and Finance. Drawing on well established expertise in areas of economic design, and research strengths in the underlying disciplines of mechanism design, information economics, structural econometrics and experimental economics, the Centre will provide an institutional framework to build research capacity and to support ongoing policy collaboration. Queries to be directed to Preeta Philip, 03 8344 5290.

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And here's a news story on the Centre: Unique new centre launched

Econometric Society Australasian Meeting (ESAM12) July 3-6

In Melbourne, Australia...

Keynote Speakers
Jean Charles Rochet, University of Zurich, Presidential Address Dale Mortensen, Northwestern University (2010 Nobel Prize Winner in Economic Sciences) Alvin Roth, Harvard University Dani Rodrik, Harvard University Jeffrey Wooldridge, Michigan State University

The program

How should we pay for kidney exchange?

Rees, Michael A.,  Mark A. Schnitzler, Edward Zavala, James A. Cutler,  Alvin E. Roth, F. Dennis Irwin, Stephen W. Crawford,and Alan B.  Leichtman,“Call to Develop a Standard Acquisition Charge Model for Kidney Paired Donation,”American Journal of Transplantation, 2012, 12, 6 (June), 1392-1397.


Abstract:  We propose a Medicare Demonstration Project to develop a standard acquisition charge for kidney paired donation. A new payment strategy is required because Medicare and commercial insurance companies may not directly pay living donor costs intended to lead to transplantation of a beneficiary of a different insurance provider. Until the 1970s, when organ procurement organizations were empowered to serve as financial intermediaries to pay the upfront recovery expenses for deceased donor kidneys prior to knowing the identity of the recipient, there existed similar limitations in the recovery and placement of deceased donor organs. Analogous to the recovery of deceased donor kidneys, kidney paired donation requires the evaluation of living donors prior to identifying their recipient. Tissue typing, crossmatching and transportation of living donors or their kidneys represent additional financial barriers. Finally, the administrative expenses of the organizations that identify and coordinate kidney paired donation transplantation require reimbursement akin to that necessary for organ procurement organizations. To expand access to kidney paired donation for more patients, we propose a model to reimburse paired donation expenses analogous to the proven strategy used for over 30 years to pay for deceased donor solid organ transplantation in America.