New U.S. rules proposed for organ donor reimbursements and Organ Procurement Organizations

Here's the press release from HHS.gov:
Trump Administration Proposes New Rules to Increase Accountability and Availability of the Organ Supply  December 17, 2019

"The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) today took major steps to increase the availability of organs for the 113,000 Americans on waitlists for lifesaving organ transplants – 20 of whom die each day. As directed by President Trump in his July 10 Executive Order on Advancing American Kidney Health, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is issuing a proposed rule to change the way organ procurement organizations (OPOs) are held accountable for their performance, and the Health Resources and Services Administration (HRSA) is issuing a proposed rule to remove financial barriers to living organ donation.
...
"Removing Financial Disincentives to Living Organ Donation

The President’s Executive Order on Advancing American Kidney Health emphasized that supporting living organ donors can help address the current demand for kidney transplants. HRSA’s proposed rule would expand the scope of reimbursable expenses for living donors to include lost wages, and childcare and eldercare expenses for those donors who lack other forms of financial support. This proposal could increase the number of transplant recipients receiving a better quality organ in a shorter time period from living donors. In general, recipients of kidney transplants from living organ donors have better clinical outcomes than those who continue on dialysis or those who receive a deceased donor kidney transplant. HRSA also is reviewing a notice that would increase the income threshold for living donors eligible for reimbursements.

"Organ Procurement Organization (OPO) Conditions for Coverage Proposed Rule

OPO act as a link between organ donors and organ recipients, procuring organs from hospitals and delivering them to transplant centers. Federal law tasks CMS with conducting inspections (“surveys”) of OPOs and certifying them for participation in Medicare based on whether they meet Medicare’s Conditions for Coverage – which are basic quality and safety regulations – including outcomes and process requirements.

OPOs’ performance is currently assessed through self-reported data based on measures that were last overhauled in 2006. Today, CMS is proposing much needed changes to hold OPOs accountable and incentivize them to actively collect donated organs and improve transplantation rates in their donation service area (DSA).

CMS estimates that if all OPOs were to meet both the donation and transplantation rate measures, the number of annual transplants would increase from about 32,000 to 37,000 by 2026, for a total of almost 15,000 additional transplants in that time.

The proposed rule would improve the current measures by using objective and reliable data, incentivize OPOs to ensure all viable organs are transplanted, and hold OPOs to greater oversight while driving higher OPO performance. To better serve organ transplant recipients and the many people waiting for a transplant, CMS is proposing:

• Donation rate measure: The donation rate would be the number of actual deceased donors as a percentage of the donor potential, which would be defined as total inpatient deaths in the DSA among patients 75 years of age or younger with any cause of death that would not preclude a potential donor from donating an organ.
• Transplantation rate measure: The organ transplantation rate would be the number of organs transplanted as a percentage of the donor potential, which would be defined as total inpatient deaths in the DSA among patients 75 years of age or younger with any cause of death that would not preclude a potential donor from donating an organ.
• Top 25 percent benchmark: CMS is proposing that all OPOs meet the donation and transplantation rates of the current top 25 percent of OPOs, which would be made public.
• 12-month reviews: At the end of each re-certification cycle (every four years), an OPO would have to meet the CMS requirements for both the donation rate and transplantation rate measures. CMS is proposing to review OPO performance every 12 months throughout the four year re-certification cycle to more quickly identify OPOs that need improvement and ensure fewer viable organs are wasted and more timely transplants occur.

Most of the proposed changes would not take effect until 2022. "

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Here are the particular announcements:

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to amend the regulations implementing the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA)

Fact Sheet | December 2019

and

Organ Procurement Organization (OPO) Conditions for Coverage Proposed Rule: Revisions to Outcome Measures for OPOs  Dec 17, 2019 

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Earlier post:

Tuesday, July 16, 2019

President Trump's Executive Order on kidney care

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to amend the regulations implementing the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA)Fact Sheet | December 2019

Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) to amend the regulations implementing the National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 (NOTA)Fact Sheet | December 2019

Market design workshop in Santiago, SUSPENDED

Politics can certainly get in the way of economics, even academic economics, as it turns out.  The organizers of a conference on matching and market design that I had planned to attend prudently decided  several weeks ago to postpone it, in light of the street demonstrations taking place in Chile.

Market Design Workshop, 17 - 20 December, Santiago, Chile: SUSPENDED
Organizers: Itai Ashlagi, José Correa, Juan Escobar

"This workshop is a venue to discuss recent developments and methods in the area of market design, both from a theoretical and applied perspective. Central to the workshop is the multidisciplinary nature of the area so that an important goal is to bring together top researchers from three related scientific communities: Economists, Computer Scientists and researchers from Operations Management."
***********

Some background news:
How a $0.04 metro fare price hike sparked massive unrest in Chile
Thousands of people in Chile have taken to the streets to protest against the government.

and here's a more recent update:
Chile protests: UN accuses security forces of human rights abuses

United frequent flier updates as market design, by Scott Kominers

Scott Kominers, at Bloomberg (possibly written while flying):

United’s Frequent-Flier Program Gets Some Game Theory
The change is a case study in marketplace design.
By Scott Duke Kominers

"In United’s old program, those who reached top frequent-flier status were given a number of upgrade certificates that could be used to boost tickets from one class of service to another, typically from economy to business. 2  Some of these upgrades were regional, meaning that they could only be used on a select set of flights -- mostly all within North America -- whereas others could be used globally. To obtain an upgrade, customers often had to join waiting lists, where priority was determined by a mixture of flier status, ticket type and request date. As a result, plenty of fliers didn’t get the upgrades they wanted.

"The new program replaces the fixed-format upgrades with a currency-like system called PlusPoints, which, like the old certificates, are awarded to those with top status. Different types of flight upgrades now have different PlusPoints costs, at an exchange rate corresponding to the old upgrade format. Many upgrade requests will still be placed on waiting lists, but there's a new option to skip the waiting list if you're willing to pay a large PlusPoints premium.
...
"the change is also likely to reduce congestion in the upgrade market; under the old system, transnational long-haul flights such as those from Boston to San Francisco were frequently glutted with upgrade requests, because they were among the longest flights that qualified for regional upgrades.
...
"There’s also some funny game theory around the option to skip the waiting list. Whereas before everyone ended up on the same upgrade waiting lists, now some people will skip the line. But that means fewer upgraded seats will be available for those on the waiting list, which in turn creates more incentive to jump ahead. So we might see some customers buying the option of skipping the waiting list just to preempt others."

Market design, in Farsi

Here's an article in Farsi, from an Iranian blog:

طراحی بازار؛ حیات جدید اقتصاددانان دنیا

امروزه اقتصاددانان تنها برای تحلیل بازار فراخوانده نمی شوند بلکه از آن ها برای طراحی بازارها نیز کمک می‌گیرند. این نخستین شماره از پرونده راهبرد معاصر در معرفی زوایایی کمتر شناخته شده از دانش اقتصاد است.

Google translate: "Market Design; The New Life of World Economists.  Today, economists are not only called upon to analyze the market, but also to help design markets."

Matching in Marathi (the language of Maharashtra)

Ashutosh Thakur points out to me this article in the main Maharashtraian newspaper, ''Loksatta.''

संज्ञा आणि संकल्पना : ..जिथून पडल्या गाठी
अर्थशास्त्रात असलेली, पण आर्थिक व्यवहार नसलेली आपली आजची संकल्पना म्हणजे-मॅचिंग मार्केट्स.

Google translate doesn't make much headway with the top headline, but renders the subheading as
"Matching markets today are our concepts of economics, but not financial transactions."

Skin donation, by the square foot, for New Zealand volcano burn victims

CNN has the story, about a little-publicized part of the market for body parts:

New Zealand has ordered more than 1,290 square feet of skin for volcano victims

"New Zealand has ordered 1,292 square feet of skin to treat patients injured in Monday's volcanic eruption on White Island, authorities said Wednesday.

"A total of 47 people were on White Island, off the coast of North Island, when the eruption occurred. Eight people have been confirmed dead, and more than 20 others are currently hospitalized in critical condition.
...
"The skin is now needed to treat patients severely injured by the volcanic ash and gas. On Tuesday, medical officials said 27 people in hospital had burns to at least 30% of their bodies and many have inhalation burns that require airway support.
...
"We anticipate that we will require an additional 1.2 million square centimeters (1,292 square feet) of skin for the ongoing needs of the patients."

"To put that into context, the average human body has about 11 square feet (1 square meter) to 21 square feet (2 square meters) of skin surface area.

"The skin order has been placed and will come from the United States, Watson said. Skin and tissue banks from neighboring Australia, like the Donor Tissue Bank of Victoria, are also providing skin grafts and supplies.

"The skin grafts come from donors -- like organ donors, skin donors register to donate their skin after death. When skin is donated, usually only a thin layer is taken, like the skin that peels when you are sunburned, according to the Australian government's donation site. The skin grafts are usually taken from donors' backs or the back of their legs.

"The demand for skin is particularly high given the unprecedented number of severe burns to the victims, authorities said Wednesday"
**********

Here's a story with some other detail:
Aussies donate skin for volcano survivors

"The layers that we provide are essentially the epidermis which is the top layer of skin and a small lawyer of dermis underneath the skin," said Dr Stefan Poniatowski, head of the Donor Tissue Bank of Victoria.

"The immune system of the recipient will reject the epidermis layer, but the dermis will actually incorporate and provide a nice healthy wound bed for the patients' own skin to be grown or applied over the top.

"The allograft skin will be rejected, but it becomes a temporary biological dressing."
...
"The allograft skin is stored in liquid nitrogen and safely kept at ultra-low temperatures for up to five years."




HT: Philip Held

Might there be enough deceased donor organs if we used them efficiently?

It's hard to know how many deceased donor organs could be made available if we used them as efficiently as possible. Here's an essay in the WSJ by Stanford pulmonologist Dr. David Weill, who thinks that, with no wastage, the supply might be sufficient to meet the demand.

Supply Isn’t the Problem With Organ Transplants
There are plenty of donors to meet the need, but the system is so inefficient that available organs often don’t reach desperate patients
By David Weill
Dec. 6, 2019
"One of the first things that transplant doctors learn is that there are not enough organs to go around. We repeat it to our patients and ourselves and, in a way, it helps us to temper our expectations of saving every patient on our waiting list. But there isn’t really an organ shortage. We are just failing to make effective use of the organs that we could transplant."


HT: Alex Chan

Matching and market design in the latest issue of Theoretical Economics

Theoretical Economics, Volume 14, Number 4 (November 2019) has several articles on matching and market design

Common enrollment in school choice
Mehmet Ekmekci, M. Bumin Yenmez

Abstract: Increasingly, more school districts across the US are using centralized admissions for charter, magnet, and neighborhood schools in a common enrollment system. We first show that, across all school-participation patterns, full participation in the common (or unified) enrollment system leads to the most preferred outcome for students. Second, we show that, in general, participation by all schools may not be achievable because schools have incentives to stay out. This may explain why some districts have not managed to attain full participation. We also consider some specific settings where full participation can be achieved and propose two schemes that can be used by policymakers to achieve full participation in general settings.


School choice under partial fairness
Umut Dur, A. Arda Gitmez, Özgür Yılmaz

Abstract: We generalize the school choice problem by defining a notion of allowable priority violations. In this setting, a weak axiom of stability (partial stability) allows only certain priority violations. We introduce a class of algorithms called the Student Exchange under Partial Fairness (SEPF). Each member of this class gives a partially stable matching that is not Pareto dominated by another partially stable matching (i.e. constrained efficient in the class of partially stable matchings). Moreover, any constrained efficient matching that Pareto improves upon a partially stable matching can be obtained via an algorithm within the SEPF class. We characterize the unique algorithm in the SEPF class satisfying a desirable incentive property. The extension of the model to an environment with weak priorities enables us to provide a characterization result which proves the counterpart of the main result in Erdil and Ergin (2008).


Full substitutability
John William Hatfield, Scott Duke Kominers, Alexandru Nichifor, Michael Ostrovsky, Alexander Westkamp

Abstract: Various forms of substitutability are essential for establishing the existence of equilibria and other useful properties in diverse settings such as matching, auctions, and exchange economies with indivisible goods. We extend earlier models' definitions of substitutability to settings in which each agent can be both a buyer in some transactions and a seller in others, and show that all these definitions are equivalent. We then introduce a new class of substitutable preferences that allows us to model intermediaries with production capacity. We also prove that substitutability is preserved under economically important transformations such as trade endowments, mergers, and limited liability.

Medically assisted suicide.

Several recent stories caught my eye on the controversial subject of medically assisted suicide, aka death with dignity, medical assistance in dying (MAID), and some other names.

He died by suicide in front of Alberta’s legislature. He said he wanted to bring attention to Medical Assistance in Dying   By Nadine Yousif, Star Edmonton, Sat., Dec. 7, 2019

"In his own final moments, Chan, 62, wanted people to know about the struggles of his loved ones, and how increased access to medical assistance in dying could help many end what may otherwise be a lifetime of suffering."
***********

The Champion Who Picked a Date to Die by ANDREW KEH, NY Times, Dec. 5, 2019

"Knowing she had the legal right to die helped Marieke Vervoort live her life. It propelled her to medals at the Paralympics. But she could never get away from the pain.
Andrew Keh and Lynsey Addario spent almost three years reporting on Marieke Vervoort as she and her parents wrestled with her decision to die by euthanasia. They visited her multiple times at home and in hospital stays in Belgium, and accompanied her on trips to the Canary Islands and Japan."
***********

Aid in Dying Soon Will be Available to More Americans. Few Will Choose It.
By October, more than one in five U.S. adults will be able to obtain lethal prescriptions if terminally ill. But for those who try, obstacles remain.
By Paula Span, July 8, 2019  NY Times

Unraveling has made investment banks the farm teams of private equity...

...at least that's the argument made in this article (full of nitty gritty detail) at Vanity Fair:

“IT’S, LIKE, LAWLESS”: HOW PRIVATE-EQUITY HEADHUNTERS ARE BLEEDING WALL STREET
In the battle for young talent, investment banks have been reduced to prep schools for private equity. Inside the cutthroat recruiting process launching the next generation of the superrich—and what it reveals about the status realignment rocking Wall Street.
BY WILLIAM D. COHAN

"The recruitment calendar keeps accelerating. Two years before he started at Morgan Stanley, the former analyst said, the private-equity vultures began circling the investment banks in March. The following year, recruiting began in April. Today, analysts who begin at Morgan Stanley in August are being courted by private-equity firms in mid-September—just weeks after they arrive.

"This super-charged dynamic can make for very odd interviews. “It’s so accelerated. Basically what you’re doing at the private-equity firm is you are saying, First of all, can this person hold a conversation?” the former analyst says. After that, the private equity people want to know what members of the new class are specializing in, and at which Wall Street bank. “Kids that are working in the mergers and acquisitions group at Morgan Stanley are probably going to get a great experience 8 times out of 10,” he explains. “Nine times out of 10. So I will want to interview those people that I consider to be in good groups at strong banks, where I hope and I assume that they are going to get the experience that they need that, by two years from now, when they come in the door, they are educated and their analytical skills and financial skills are up to snuff.”
...
"Somewhat surprisingly, most firms don’t seem to object. Rather, they have come to grips with the reality of the situation, even if they don’t like it, and recognize that they risk not getting the analysts at all if they put up too much of a stink. Some firms even encourage the analysts to go to private-equity firms—because that gives them a better chance of getting the very best college graduates. A partner at one firm even went to bat for one of the analysts who made it through the second round of recruiting at a big private-equity firm, but did not make it to the final round. The partner called up someone he knew at the private-equity firm and got the analyst back into the process. He got the job. “It’s like, I’m going to get you whatever job you want, but you’re going to bust your balls for me for the next two years,” the partner tells me.

"One young banker who got an offer from Blackstone recalled the supportive response when he walked into a partner’s office to share the good news. “He said, ‘That’s great. I’ve got to do a good job training you so that Jon Gray’”—Blackstone’s new president and chief operating officer—“‘thinks that I did a good job with you.’” (There is one exception to this good humor: Goldman Sachs, which has a three-year analyst program. “If they find out you are recruiting, they’re going to fire you,” says one analyst. “It’s official policy.” A Goldman spokesman says while that is true, some of their analysts still get recruited away from the firm.)".
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Earlier post:

Monday, September 23, 2019

Private equity races for young talent even earlier this year

Black markets for drugs in Europe: report of the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction

Here is the 2019 report from the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA) and Europol, the EU's police organization:

EU Drug Markets Report 2019
EMCDDA, Europol, Lisbon, November 2019

Summary: The EU Drug Markets Report 2019 is the third comprehensive overview of illicit drug markets in the European Union by the EMCDDA and Europol. The analysis presented in this report spans numerous topics such as the links between drugs and other crimes, the licit economy and society more generally as well as the processes and players involved in the trade, from production and trafficking to distribution. Taking an evidence-based approach, the report reviews the markets for heroin, cocaine, cannabis, amphetamine, methamphetamine, MDMA and new psychoactive substances. It also provides action points to inform policy development at EU and national level. This publication is an essential reference for law enforcement professionals, policymakers, the academic community and indeed for anyone seeking up-to-date information and analysis on drug markets in Europe.

Here is the full report.

From the Executive Summary:

"The drug market is a major source of income for organised crime groups (OCGs) in the EU, with minimum estimated retail value of EUR 30 billion per year. In addition to the economic impact, drug-related deaths and other harms to public health, there are broader consequences of drug markets, such as links with wider criminal activities and terrorism; the negative impact on the legal economy; violence in communities; damage to the environment; and the increasingly important issue of how the drug market can fuel corruption and undermine governance.
...
" All data indicate that overall drug availability within Europe, for both natural and synthetic drugs,
remains very high. The European drug market is increasingly characterised by consumers having access to a wide variety of high-purity and high-potency products that, in real terms, are usually equivalent in price or cheaper than they have been over the past decade.
...
"Cannabis
Europe’s biggest drug market is for cannabis and significant production of the drug takes place within the EU. With around 25 million annual users, the retail market for cannabis was estimated to be worth at least EUR 11.6 billion in 2017. Around one in seven young adults in the EU reports having used cannabis in the past year, with prevalence rates generally stable but with early signs of possible  increases in some countries.
...
"Herbal cannabis is extensively produced within the EU, with estimates indicating that at least 20 000 cultivation sites are dismantled each year, and is a major source of income for the criminal economy. Despite efforts to counter production, the Western Balkans, and Albania in particular, appear to remain an important source of origin for seized herbal cannabis
...
"Heroin and other opioids
The use of heroin and other opioids still accounts for the largest share of drug-related harms. The retail value of the heroin market in 2017 was estimated to be at least EUR 7.4 billion. There are indications that heroin availability in the EU may increase: recent opium production estimates from Afghanistan, levels of seizures in Turkey and intelligence assessments of activity along the main trafficking routes to Europe are all high, and large consignments of heroin have been detected within the EU.
...
"Cocaine
The cocaine market is the second largest illicit drug market in the EU, with an estimated minimum retail value in 2017 of EUR 9.1 billion. Surveys estimate that about 4 million people in the EU will have used cocaine in the past year. Use is still concentrated in the west and south of Europe but appears to be becoming more common elsewhere.
...
"While Colombian and Italian OCGs have historically played a central role in the trafficking
and distribution of cocaine, increasingly other groups are becoming more significant, including Albanian-speaking, British, Dutch, French, Irish, Moroccan, Serbian, Spanish and Turkish OCGs. At the same time some European OCGs have established a presence in Latin American countries, developing a new ‘end-to-end’ business model for managing the supply chain, with large quantities of cocaine purchased near production areas at lower costs. This may be driving competition and conflict within the cocaine market and leading to increasing cocaine market-related violence and corruption within the EU.
...
" The global market for cocaine appears to be growing and a knock-on effect of this is that the EU appears to be increasingly used as a transit area for cocaine destined for other markets such as Australia, New Zealand, Russia, Turkey and countries in the Middle East and Asia. The cocaine market is increasingly enabled by digital technology, including darknet markets and the use of the surface web, social media and mobile phone apps to advertise and facilitate the delivery of cocaine to consumers. Innovation seen in the supply chain at the consumer level is suggestive of both high
availability and attempts by OCGs to increase market share.
...
"Synthetic drugs: amphetamine, MDMA and methamphetamine
Europe’s synthetic drugs market, particularly in respect to stimulants like amphetamine, MDMA and methamphetamine, is evolving rapidly. Within the stimulant market, these drugs compete for market share alongside cocaine and a number of new psychoactive substances. Of the two closely related stimulants, amphetamine continues to be more commonly used than methamphetamine in most EU countries, though there are growing signs of a gradual diffusion of methamphetamine use. The value of the EU retail market for amphetamines (amphetamine and methamphetamine combined) in 2017 is estimated to be at least EUR 1 billion, and for MDMA EUR 0.5 billion.
...
"New psychoactive substances
Policies relating to new psychoactive substances (NPS) appear to be having some impact, especially those aimed at reducing open trade in the EU as well as measures taken in source countries, such as China. There has been a slow-down in the number of first detections of NPS in Europe. Currently around 50 new substances are reported annually, giving a total of over 730 that have been reported to the EU Early Warning System."

Sex, lies, videotape and...blackmail?

The NY Times has a very interesting story about how it, and two very prominent lawyers, became involved with a man who claimed to have access to videotapes of important men having sex with underrage women.  It touches on the subtle difference between blackmail and some kinds of legal settlement.

Jeffrey Epstein, Blackmail and a Lucrative ‘Hot List’
A shadowy hacker claimed to have the financier’s sex tapes. Two top lawyers wondered: What would the men in those videos pay to keep them secret?
*********

Matt Levine over at Bloomberg has an interesting followup article that begins this way:

"The basic “mystery of blackmail” is:

1. If I know that you have done some bad secret stuff, it is totally legal for me to publish that information.
2. It is also totally legal for me to keep it quiet.
3. In general, if it is legal for me to do or not do something, and you’d prefer that I (not) do it, I can ask you for money in exchange for (not) doing it.
4. But if I ask you for money in exchange for not publishing bad stuff about you, that’s blackmail, and it’s a crime.

The mystery is why blackmail should be illegal when its component parts aren’t. But there’s another practical mystery about blackmail, which is:

1. If you have done some bad stuff to me, and no one knows about it, I am once again free to tell everyone, or not.
2. If I go to you and say “give me a million dollars or I will tell people,” that is blackmail and I go to prison.
3. But if I go to you and say “I am going to sue you for doing the bad stuff to me, I am filing my case on Monday, but I am willing to settle for $1 million and sign a nondisclosure agreement in connection with the settlement,” that is fine, that is just how lawsuits work."

****************
Earlier related posts (on blackmail as a repugnant transaction that is sometimes occasioned by the knowledge that the victim has engaged in a different repugant transaction, and that can sometimes be whitewashed by the protected transaction of legal action...):

Monday, November 2, 2009

Blackmail, legal and illegal

Wednesday, July 19, 2017

Blackmail has something in common with transactions that become repugnant when money is added

Testing your own DNA is illegal in France

Statnews.com has the story:

In France, it’s illegal for consumers to order a DNA spit kit. Activists are fighting over lifting the ban  By ERIC BOODMAN

"The French ban on direct-to-consumer genetic testing is part of the country’s bioethics laws, which legislators are supposed to revise every seven years. When those discussions got underway earlier this year, some geneticists expected the National Assembly to relax the rules about commercial DNA analysis. It didn’t. Now, Jovanovic-Floricourt and the other genetics enthusiasts in her education and advocacy group, DNA Pass, are agitating more and more to get some of these tests legalized, contacting lawmakers, chatting up scientists, promising a more vociferous campaign than they’ve waged before.

"But as one of the most vocal pro-legalization advocates, Jovanovic-Floricourt may have found her match in geneticist Guillaume Vogt and his bioethicist postdoc Henri-Corto Stoeklé. Theirs is an unusual standoff, in that they’re all motivated by the same ideas. Both sides hope to protect French genomes from exploitation by foreign companies. Both sides believe that French institutions are the best guardians for the job. They just disagree about how, exactly, to realize that vision. As Vogt, a scientist at the National Center for Human Genomics Research, put it, “Don’t change the law!”

The still struggling legal market for cannabis

Here's an indirect update on the state of the American cannabis market, from the WSJ (hemp is a source for cannabidiol, or CBD):

Farmers Rushed Into Hemp. Now They Face a Glut.
Prices for the crops are falling, and some growers are struggling to unload their product

"A rush of farmers seeking to grow hemp, which became legal to cultivate in the U.S. last year, is creating a glut, damping prices and leaving some farmers struggling to unload their product. It is among the growing pains in the nascent industry for hemp-derived products—a potentially lucrative market, but one beset by regulatory uncertainty, financing constraints and other challenges.
...
"Hemp—which is the same plant species as marijuana, but with a minimal amount of the psychoactive compound in pot—was farmed legally in the U.S. until a 1937 federal law began a period of hemp prohibition. It became legal again because of a provision of the 2018 federal farm bill."

Congestion and competition in college admissions (in the WSJ)

Is college admissions ripe for re-design?  (The problems outlined are real, but I'm skeptical that there's the consensus needed for a major overhaul...)

How to Fix College Admissions
Getting into a top school is a stressful, unpredictable process. Here are 10 ways to make it fairer and more transparent.  By Melissa Korn

"We asked college admissions officers, high school and private counselors, parents, students and others for ways to make the system fairer, more transparent and less painful for everyone involved. Here are 10 of their ideas—some easy to implement, others just meant to start a conversation—to reform the status quo.
...
"2. Limit the number of colleges to which students may apply. Thanks in part to the ease of applying online—especially through the Common Application, which allows applicants to use one basic form for hundreds of colleges—36% of students submitted seven or more applications in 2017, up from 10% in 1995. “The number of clicks you can make on the Common App causes congestion in the system,” says Alvin Roth, a Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University economist who helped to design the system that matches new doctors with residency programs.

"Schools pursue aggressive outreach, urging even fairly unqualified applicants to apply, then boast every spring about how many they rejected, as if exclusivity is proof of quality. Ballooning application numbers, combined with stagnant class sizes, cause acceptance rates to slide even lower into the single digits at places like Columbia and Pomona. As a result, high-school seniors apply to more schools just in case, and the vicious cycle continues—creating havoc for schools that can’t predict their yields. The overall yield rate for new freshmen at U.S. colleges fell to 34% in 2017 from 48% in 2007.
...
"Almost nobody needs to submit 20 applications; a reasonable limit would be as low as a half dozen, assuming that students receive meaningful counseling. High schools could enforce the cap by only agreeing to submit a certain number of official transcripts to colleges. The College Board and ACT could also limit distribution of SAT and ACT results, but they have little incentive to do so, since they make money from sending scores.
...
"9. ...Even more radical, schools could try some version of the algorithm used to determine matches for medical residency programs, which involves programs and medical students ranking one another and then being paired up by a computer system. This would be a heavy lift, however, as colleges would need to coordinate their procedures to rank candidates, run the computer program and inform all parties about the outcomes."

Seema Jayachandran on the Banerjee, Duflo, Kremer Nobel, in the NYT

The Economic View column of the NY Times, by someone who knows the subject, and the subjects very well:

When a Disappointment Helped Lead to a Nobel Prize
The winners of this year’s Nobel in economics did pioneering field experiments that sometimes didn’t work as expected.  By Seema Jayachandran

"The negative finding about textbooks was important in the development of Mr. Kremer’s career. “I’m happier when I find that something works,” he said. “But I’m not in despair if I don’t — the key thing is listen and learn from it.”

Who is a refugee? Remembering U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees Sadako Ogata

The Lancet recalls the life and work of Sadako Ogata, born 16 September 1927; died 22 October 2019.

Sadako Ogata
"Sadako Ogata began to transform UNHCR, the UN Refugee Agency, almost as soon as she became UN High Commissioner for Refugees in 1991. At the time, the Gulf War had displaced more than a million Iraqi Kurds and thousands were blocked from crossing into Turkey. They were in desperate need just inside the Iraqi border. Ogata quickly sought to expand UNHCR's rules to allow it to provide aid not only to refugees but also to people displaced within their own country. “Most of the senior leaders in UNHCR were against providing assistance to those Kurdish refugees because they were inside Iraq”, said Izumi Nakamitsu, who was based in Turkey at the time for UNHCR and accompanied Ogata on her first mission as High Commissioner to visit the displaced Kurds. “The refugee law says that you're not a refugee until you cross the border and senior officials advised her against providing protection and assistance. But she instinctively felt this was wrong”, said Nakamitsu, who is now a UN Under-Secretary-General and High Representative for Disarmament Affairs. Ogata's insistence that UNHCR provide aid to people who are internally displaced is one of her lasting legacies."
**************

And from the Guardian:

Sadako Ogata obituary
Independent-minded head of the UN agency for refugees, who expanded its role to help millions more displaced people

Divorce as a repugnant transaction

A recent obituary reminds me that divorce used to be a repugnant transaction, to which there were barriers even when both partners in a marriage were eager to end it on agreed upon terms.  It was a repugnant transaction because of the way we regard marriage as a protected transaction.

Jerome Wilson, Key in Revamping New York Divorce Law, Dies at 88
As a legislator in 1966, he led a commission that pushed to broaden the legal grounds for divorce. New York had been the last state to recognize only adultery.

"Jerome L. Wilson, a former Democratic state senator from Manhattan who helped liberalize a rigorous 18th-century law that had left New York as the sole state that required a spouse to prove adultery as the only legal ground for divorce, died on Friday
...
"The amended act, which took effect on Sept. 1, 1967, added four other grounds for divorce: cruel treatment, abandonment for two years, the sentencing of a spouse to prison for five years or more and a couple’s living voluntarily apart for at least two years.
...
"In the second year after the law went into effect, the number of divorces granted in New York ballooned to 18,000 in all five categories, compared with 4,000 granted only for adultery during the last year that the old law was in effect.

"Supporters of the changes said the new law also reduced instances of perjury (because so many estranged spouses had to lie about allegations of adultery) and end runs by wealthier couples who could afford to fly to Mexico or Nevada and remain there for two weeks to qualify for a divorce.
...
"Mr. Wilson’s first marriage, in 1957 to Frances Roberts, ended in divorce."

Video: Big Data and Global Kidney Matching

Here's a talk, just recently posted on the web, that I gave in China at the Luohan Academy in Hangzhou, in June 2019.

Paying participants in economic experiments, in Ireland, in jeopardy

On Wednesday I received some email correspondence about a difficulty being faced by experimental economists in Ireland, who may be forbidden from paying participants in experiments, at least if the money comes from research grants

The issue has to do with this sentence on page 6 of the research grant guidelines of the Irish Research Council.
"Participants in surveys/focus groups/workshops or other such project related activities may not
be paid..." although their travel expenses can be reimbursed.

I dashed off the following statement in support of efforts to make sure that this policy isn't interpreted as preventing standard economics experiments.

“Laboratory experiments in Economics largely depend on specifying precisely and attempting to measure or  control  the incentives of the participants in an experiment. Almost always this involves paying the participants in ways that conform to the incentives the experimenter is trying to create.  [Paying subjects] is a well established and almost universal practice in experimental economics, and often necessary for publication in internationally recognized economics journals.”

Regulations gone awry -- an example from transplantation

A general lesson of market design is that participants have big strategy sets, so any given set of rules can have unanticipated undesirable consequences.  Here's an example from transplantation. Transplant centers are regulated in part based on their one-year survival rate.

Here's a story from the BMJ:

US hospital is accused of keeping vegetative patient alive to boost its transplant survival rate

"Federal agents are investigating a New Jersey hospital accused of keeping a patient with catastrophic brain damage alive for a year and barely consulting his family, in order to keep its one year transplantation survival rate from falling to a level where the programme’s Medicare certification might be withdrawn.

"The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, which has its own law enforcement agency, will lead the investigation into Newark Beth Israel Medical Center. The hospital has launched its own internal probe.
...
"Newark Beth Israel’s heart transplantation programme is among the top 20 in the country by volume. A banner on the hospital’s facade says, “1000 hearts transplanted. Countless lives touched.”

"But in 2018, its one year survival rate fell significantly below the 91% national average. Young’s death would bring the average down to 81%, which staff feared would trigger sanctions from the public payer."

HT: Alex Chan

Academic (computer science) conferences as marketplaces

Eppstein and Vazirani propose a centralized marketplace for computer science conferences:

A Market for TCS Papers??
November 19, 2019 by Kevin Leyton-Brown

By David Eppstein & Vijay Vazirani

"No, not to make theoreticians rich! Besides, who will buy your papers anyway? (Quite the opposite, you will be lucky if you can convince someone to take them for free, just for sake of publicity!) What we are proposing is a market in which no money changes hands – a matching market – for matching papers to conferences.

"At present we are faced with massive inefficiencies in the conference process – numerous researchers are trapped in unending cycles of submit … get reject … incorporate comments … resubmit — often to the next deadline which has been conveniently arranged a couple of days down the road so the unwitting participants are conditioned into mindlessly keep coming back for more, much like Pavlov’s dog.

"We are proposing a matching market approach to finally obliterate this madness. We believe such a market is feasible using the following ideas. No doubt our scheme will have some drawbacks; however, as should be obvious, the advantages far outweigh them.

"First, for co-located symposia within a larger umbrella conference, such as the
conferences within ALGO or FCRC, the following process should be a no-brainer:

1). Ensure a common deadline for all symposia; denote the latter by S.

2). Let R denote the set of researchers who wish to submit one paper to a symposium in this umbrella conference – assume that researchers submitting more than one paper will have multiple names, one for each submission. Each researcher will provide a strict preference order over the subset of symposia to which they wish to submit their paper. Let G denote the bipartite graph with vertex sets (R, S) and an edge (r, s) only if researcher r chose symposium s.

3). The umbrella conference will have a large common PC with experts representing all of its symposia. The process of assigning papers to PC members will of course use G in a critical way.

"Once papers are reviewed by PC members and external reviewers, each symposium will rank its submissions using its own criteria of acceptance. We believe the overhead of ranking each paper multiple times is minimal since that is just an issue of deciding how “on-topic” a paper is – an easy task once the reviews of the paper are available.

4). Finally, using all these preference lists, a researcher-proposing stable matching is computed using the Gale-Shapley algorithm. As is well-known, this mechanism will be dominant strategy incentive compatible for researchers." 

"With a little extra effort, a similar scheme can also be used for a group of conferences at diverse locations but similar times, such as some of the annual summer theory conferences, STOC, ICALP, ESA, STAC, WADS/SWAT, etc.

The future of economic design: a book of short essays, edited by Laslier, Moulin, Sanver, and . Zwicker

Here's a new book that I haven't seen yet, except on the internet. There's a long table of contents at the link, and you can click on the chapters to read an abstract. It looks like most essays are four or five pages, by many distinguished authors.

The Future of Economic Design
The Continuing Development of a Field as Envisioned by Its Researchers
Editors: Jean-François Laslier, Hervé Moulin, M. Remzi Sanver, and William S. Zwicker

Matching officers to branches at West Point

West Point grads get assignments through new branching system
By Brandon OConnor

"During a ceremony Nov. 13, 1,089 members of the Class of 2020 at the U.S. Military Academy received their assignments for which branch of the Army they will start their careers in upon graduation.
...
"This year marked the first time West Point has assigned branches using the Army's new Market Model Branching System, which will be rolled out to ROTC next year. The new model paired cadets with a branch by considering how they ranked the 17 branches as it has in years past, but for the first time the commandants of each branch also had a vote in which cadets received their branch.

Following branch week in September, the cadets in the Class of 2020 locked in their branch preferences for the sixth and final time. They each ranked the branches one through 17, or one through 15 for female cadets who opted out of armor and infantry. Each cadet was also ranked as most preferred, preferred or least preferred by each branch based on their branch resumes and interviews, which cadets were given the option to take part in for the first time this year.

Before locking in their preferences, cadets were given information about how each branch ranked them as well as the results from a simulation using their fifth branch preference list which showed them where they would have been placed. The cadets then had the chance to use that information to adjust their preferences before locking them in for the final time.

Sunsdahl said they saw movement within the cadets' top four preferences following the simulation as cadets moved up the branches they had a better chance of receiving based on the commandant's feedback and moved down branches where their chances were lower.

"That was the market working, which helped branches get who they wanted as well," Sunsdahl said. "We talk cadet preference a lot, but branches got more of the people they wanted this year than they have in past years. That's where that commandant vote meant something. Now when somebody goes into a branch, the cadet wants to be there, and the branch wants them. It's a win-win."

Following the application of the matching algorithm, which was adapted from the medical residency matching program, and final adjustments made by West Point's branching board, 96% of the cadets in the class were placed into one of their top three preferences.

Overall, 80% of the class was placed into a combat arms branch, a 5% increase over last year. For the first time, cyber was considered a combat arms branch along with infantry, armor, engineer, air defense, field artillery and aviation. The 40 cyber spots, up from 25 last year, accounted for almost the entirety of the increase in combat arms spots."

First kidney exchange in Denmark

The first Danish incompatible patient-donor pair has received a transplant in an exchange with a pair in "another Scandinavian country."

Mette skaffede sin mand en nyre ved at sende sin egen til en fremmed
Første dansker har fået en nyre takket være nyt nyrebyttesystem.
[Google Translate: Mette obtained her husband a kidney by sending her own to a stranger
First Danes have got a kidney thanks to a new kidney replacement system.]

"At the Kidney Association, there is great enthusiasm about the new method in kidney transplantation.

- I would go so far as to say that it is a revolution in living organ donation, says the association's vice-president, Malene Madsen.

Right now, there are approximately 400 patients at home who are on a waiting list for a new kidney. And for them it will have a huge effect if the donor chains really get going."

HT: Lise Vesterlund
*************
See also Nyresyge bytter nyredonorer
19.11.2019
Den første dansker har gennem et nyudviklet skandinavisk nyreudvekslingsprogram fået en ny nyre fra en nærtstående til en anden nyresyg person

"The kidney exchange program STEP (ScandiaTransplant Kidney Exchange Program) is a collaboration between the Scandinavian transplant centers in the organization Skandiatransplant. The first transplants in the kidney exchange program were performed at transplant centers in Sweden in autumn 2018. Here, a chain of three kidney transplants was performed simultaneously.

"Aarhus University Hospital works systematically to increase the number of transplants through the use of live donors and in collaboration with the Danish Center for Organ Donation and the intensive care units in Jutland to increase the number of deceased donors. Still, about 100 kidney patients are on the waiting list for a kidney transplant in Aarhus.
**************

and see this earlier post:

Thursday, December 13, 2018

Kidney exchange looks imminent in Sweden

Kidney exchange in Time Magazine

Time celebrates kidney exchange:

Kidney Swaps Are Revolutionizing a Broken Organ-Donation System in the U.S.

"While kidney swaps can be performed at most transplant centers across the U.S., the majority are facilitated by the National Kidney Registry. Other swaps are organized by the United Network for Organ Sharing, the Alliance for Paired Kidney Donation, or arranged in-house at the transplant center itself with incompatible patient pairs."

Harvey Prize to Christos Papadimitriou

The Technion's 2018 Harvey Prize prize, to Christos Papadimitriou, has been only recently announced: it will be awarded this month.

From Columbia University:
Professor Christos Papadimitriou Awarded the 2018 Harvey Prize
OCT 08 2019

"The Harvey Prize for Science and Technology for 2018 is awarded to professor Christos Papadimitriou for his work on the theory of algorithms and computational complexity and its application to the sciences. Papadimitriou will receive the award at a ceremony at the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology. Technion first presented the award in 1972 and two awards are given yearly. The scientists behind the genome editing technology CRISPR/Cas9 are also awardees this year.

“Professor Papadimitriou is considered the founding father of algorithmic game theory, defining key concepts, formulating key questions and proving basic results,” said Peretz Lavie, professor and president of the Technion. “He is a pioneer in the application of algorithms and complexity to other fields, including economics, biology and more.”

********
And here's the entry at the Harvey Prize link:

The Harvey Prize, established in 1971 by Leo M. Harvey of Los Angeles, is awarded annually at Technion for exceptional achievements in science, technology, and human health, and for outstanding contributions to peace in the Middle East, to society and to the economy.

PROF. CHRISTOS H. PAPADIMITRIOU

Leo M. Harvey (1887-1973) was an industrialist and inventor. He was an ardent friend and supporter of Technion and the State of Israel.

Over the years, more than a quarter of Harvey laureates have subsequently won the Nobel Prize.

The award ceremony will take place in November 2019 at Technion.

Aiming for diversity in Brooklyn schools

The Washington Post  has the story:

What happened when Brooklyn tried to integrate its middle schools  By Laura Meckler

"New York City, with more than 1 million students, is far and away the nation’s largest school district — and one of its most segregated. Resistance to integration dates to the 1950s, when mothers in Queens staged an early demonstration against busing.

"Now, in fits and starts, the city is becoming a laboratory of experimentation, examining whether it’s possible to tackle the stratification that courses through urban districts.

"First, Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) tried — and has so far failed — to overhaul the admissions process for eight elite specialized high schools, which admit few black or Hispanic students. He is now considering a recommendation for a citywide plan to eliminate most gifted and talented programs, which attract a disproportionate number of white and Asian students.
...
"Under the old system, criteria set by each school played a big role in deciding who went where. Certain middle schools required high test scores and excellent behavior ratings from elementary school, and affluent families gravitated to them. Over time, various schools won reputations for excellence, and with each passing year, their incoming classes grew whiter and wealthier.
...
"Under the new plan, family preference still matters, but 52 percent of sixth-grade seats at each school are reserved for children from poor families or for those learning English, reflecting the demographics of the district as a whole. The city’s goal is for each school to include 40 percent to 75 percent priority-group students by the program’s fourth year.
...
"This sort of plan is possible only because a significant number of middle-class and wealthy families live in the area covered by the integration plan, Kahlenberg said. If there are too many poor kids, he said, meaningful integration is not possible. By Kahlenberg’s calculations, integration is possible in nine of the city’s 32 school districts.

Others caution that it won’t work anywhere if affluent parents leave the public schools. When Mike Bloomberg was mayor, he worked to attract and keep these families by giving them considerable control over school placement. If you take that power away, these parents may choose private schools or to move, said Joel Klein, schools chancellor under Bloomberg.

“If you look at many urban school districts, you will find they are overwhelmingly minority because the middle class has already moved out,” Klein said."

NYC school choice: long lines for high school tours (and some confusion about first choices)

The high school choice process in New York City uses an algorithm that makes it safe for families to list high schools in their order of preference over them.  But forming well-informed preferences is no easy task.

The NY Times has a story about long lines forming for tours of a desirable public high school:

Why White Parents Were at the Front of the Line for the School Tour
The high stakes of high school admissions in New York — and the lengths some go to get any small advantage.  By Eliza Shapiro

"Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours.

"On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour.

"Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.
...
"Many New Yorkers cannot leave work in the middle of the afternoon, and some students surely did not know that the open house — or even the school — existed in the first place."
**********

The story goes on to talk about the matching system for high schools, which uses a deferred acceptance algorithm.  Parag Pathak points out to me that one paragraph contains a sentence that is easy to interpret incorrectly:

"Beacon, unlike Stuyvesant, does not have an admissions test. But to win a spot, students must have high standardized test scores and grades, along with a strong portfolio of middle school work and admissions essays. Students are much less likely to be accepted if they do not list Beacon as their top choice." (emphasis added)

Parag writes about this line: "while factually correct, the statement creates a misleading impression: a student is only less likely to get Beacon if they didn't list it as their top choice in the case that they were assigned their first choice school instead.  And most people who apply to Beacon list it first because it's their top choice. "

The manner in which the deferred acceptance algorithm (with students proposing) makes it safe for families to state their true preferences can be summarized this way: If you list Beacon as your second choice, and don't get your first choice, then your chance of admission to Beacon is the same as if you had listed it as your first choice.

Of course, even with that guarantee, a family's choice may not be simple if they would have liked to rank order 15 schools, and are only allowed to list 12. Then they have to consider whether, if they are rejected by their first choice, they are likely to be accepted by Beacon, or whether rejection from their first choice is a signal that they might not be competitive at Beacon either. (In which case, listing Beacon as first choice wouldn't have helped...)

See my recent post:

Thursday, November 14, 2019

Correlation Neglect in Student-to-School Matching, by Rees-Jones, Shorrer, and Tergiman

Milgrom Marshall Lectures at University of Cambridge

Paul Milgrom will be giving the 2019-2020 Marshall Lectures at Cambridge today and tomorrow.  Here's a video abstract by Paul:

2019-20 Marshall Lecture by Professor Paul Milgrom

Paul Milgrom is best known for his contributions to the microeconomic theory, his pioneering innovations in the practical design of multi-item auctions, and the extraordinary successes of his students and academic advisees. According to his BBVA Award citation: “Paul Milgrom has made seminal contributions to an unusually wide range of fields of economics including auctions, market design, contracts and incentives, industrial economics, economics of organizations, finance, and game theory.” According to a count by Google Scholar, Milgrom’s books and articles have received more than 90,000 citations. - Professor Milgrom's Personal Site >>

 Professor Paul Milgrom
(Stanford Department of Economics)
will give two lectures on,
"Market Design When Resource Allocation is NP-Hard"

Venue: Lady Mitchell Hall

Tuesday 19th November 2019
5.00pm to 6.00pm
and
Wednesday 20th November 2019
5.00pm to 6.30pm
*********
I'll update when Paul's lectures are available.
(In the meantime, here are my 2013-2014 Marshall Lectures on "Matching Markets and Market Design"  )
************
Update: Both lectures are now available at the Marshall Lectures site.

Interview with Parag Pathak on schools, and market design

From Business Insider:
Parents choosing high schools for their kids place more value on the students already enrolled than on the school's effectiveness, according to a study by MIT economist Parag Pathak

"A solution to school matching might be attainable, but the bigger challenge remains. "It's a success in terms of matching systems getting out there," Pathak said. "But it shines a spotlight on bigger problem - the scarcity of good schools."
...
"The rise of "market-design economics" has attracted a new type of person to the profession, he said. "Our folks are much more humble. We really like to get our hands dirty from very real problems," he added. "The mindset is more of an engineer — how would we put those ideas to use in actually building something in society?"

Liver Paired Exchange: Ready for Prime Time in North America?

An editorial in the November 2019 Liver Transplantation considers, among other things, how liver exchange might be more coercive than live liver donation, because real or imagined incompatibilities might no longer serve to excuse an ambivalent donor from going through with the donation. (I recall discussions like this at the outset of kidney exchange, and my sense is that, in those days, the doctors thought that they could still excuse ambivalent donors by indicating that they weren't healthy enough to donate...)

Liver Paired Exchange: Ready for Prime Time in North America?
Talia B. Baker M.D

"The evolution of kidney paired exchange (KPE) in the United States has expanded transplant options for ABO‐incompatible and human leukocyte antigen–incompatible living donor pairs.1 The success of KPE has prompted consideration of liver paired exchange (LPE). Although the idea seems promising, its application has been limited to a handful of centers in Asia.2-4
...
"In the United States, approximately 3,000 patients are removed from the liver waiting list each year because they become too ill or die prior to transplant.7 Although living donor liver transplantation (LDLT) is established as the primary source of donor allografts in many parts of Asia, it constitutes approximately only 4% of liver transplants in the United States.7 The potential number of living donor and recipient pairs that might be suitable for LPE in the United States is unknown and largely unexplored.
...
"The indications for LPE are more complex than in KPE where immunological factors drive the process. In LPE, anatomical factors, such as hepatic mass (ie, graft‐to‐recipient weight ratio and percent of future liver remnant), and anatomical considerations, such as arterial and biliary variants, will also importantly be considered.
...
"coercion, which remains one of the greatest ethical concerns for the evaluation of any living donor, will have to be considered in a more robust manner. Concerns about coercion may be exacerbated by indirect exchanges, such as in LPE, because a reluctant or hesitant donor may no longer be able to invoke ABO incompatibility, size, or anatomical incompatibility as a reasonable and accepted way to withdraw from consideration as a living donor.9 ...
"Often, transplant centers are able to select the most willing donors based on their commitment to step forward, expressing unwavering interest and determination to donate. This system inherently allows willing, but ambivalent, donors to be excused based on objective medical measures (most commonly ABO incompatibility or anatomical issues) without having to admit their ambivalence. In contrast, LPE may remove or limit this potential by offering alternative options for exchanges, thereby inadvertently exposing or subjugating ambivalent donors. "

Is repugnance to foie gras contagious?

The Guardian has the story from the UK, focusing on a particular restaurant, and its proprietor, who has withstood protests:

Pressure grows on British chefs after New York bans foie gras
Restaurateurs and MPs are turning against the delicacy after years of intense animal rights protests

"New York’s authorities have decided to ban shops and restaurants from selling it and campaigners want London – indeed, the whole of Britain – to follow suit.

“Banning it is a fad,” he says. “New York is just following a fad, going with the flow. If it is ethically raised, then I don’t see a problem. If they are [forcibly] fed on an industrial scale, I think that’s wrong. But the foie gras we serve comes from a family who look after their geese.”

"His stance is not one that most animal welfare campaigners agree with. Making foie gras generally relies on force-feeding ducks or geese for about two weeks, causing their livers to expand dramatically. Some farmers claim force-feeding – known as gavage – is unnecessary, but in France, where 98% of the foie gras eaten in Britain is made, a pâté can only be called foie gras if gavage is used."
**************

Recent related post:

Friday, November 1, 2019

No more foie gras in New York City

Controversial markets: Seminar at Pitt

I'll be speaking at Pitt today, in the experimental/behavioral seminar:

Controversial Markets

11:30 a.m. to 1 p.m., 4940 Posvar Hall

Sponsor: Experimental/Behavioral Seminar

Correlation Neglect in Student-to-School Matching, by Rees-Jones, Shorrer, and Tergiman

Suppose it is costly to apply to schools (perhaps because you are only allowed n applications, and have a larger set of schools you are interested in.)  Now suppose that your first choice is Yale and your second is Harvard. Should you apply to both?  How about if it is the case that, if Yale rejects you, Harvard probably will too?  That turns out to be harder for many people to figure out than you might think...

Correlation Neglect in Student-to-School Matching
Alex Rees-Jones, Ran I. Shorrer, and Chloe Tergiman

Abstract
A growing body of evidence suggests that decision-makers fail to account for correlation in signals that they receive. We study the relevance of this mistake in students' interactions with school- choice matching mechanisms. In a lab experiment presenting simple and incentivized school-choice scenarios, we find that subjects tend to follow optimal application strategies when schools' admissions decisions are determined independently. However, when schools rely on a common priority — inducing correlation in their decisions — decision making suffers: application strategies become substantially more aggressive and fail to include attractive "safety" options. We document that this pattern holds even within-subject, with significant fractions of participants applying to different programs in mathematically equivalent situations that differ only by the presence of correlation. We provide a battery of tests suggesting that this phenomenon is at least partially driven by correlation neglect, and we discuss implications that arise for the design and deployment of student-to-school matching mechanisms.

Controversial markets, from kidneys to marijuana at the SF Surgical Society

This evening I'll speak at the meeting of the San Francisco Surgical Society:

November Meeting – Controversial Markets: from Kidneys to Marijuana, by Professor Alvin Roth, 2012 Nobel Laureate in Economics.
November 13 @ 6:30 pm - 9:30 pm PST
Family Club
545 Powell Street
San Francisco, CA 94108

Economics and Computation: EC'20 call for papers

Mike Ostrovsky writes:

The Twenty-First ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC'20) will be held on July 13-17, 2020 in Budapest, Hungary. The main conference will take place on July 14-16, 2020 with tutorials on Monday, July 13 and workshops on Friday, July 17. The conference is co-located with the Sixth World Congress of the Game Theory Society.

We solicit paper submissions for presentation in the technical program. The deadline for submissions is February 12, 2020 at 3pm EST.  

Note that EC’20 is continuing and expanding the forward-to-journal option that was piloted by EC’19; new partner journals include Artificial Intelligence, Marketing Science, Naval Research Logistics, RAND Journal of Economics, and the Review of Economic Studies. In addition, the new feature-at-INFORMS option allows authors to have their accepted EC submissions automatically considered for presentation at the INFORMS Annual Meeting.

For more details, please refer to the full call for papers and the list of program committee members. 

We hope to see you in Budapest!

Best regards,

Michael Ostrovsky and Ariel Procaccia

EC'20 Program Chairs

Debate on kidney exchange in Germany

On Friday in Berlin I found myself in a debate with the chairman of the Research Committee of the Bundestag, the German Parliament, about legalizing kidney exchange in Germany. I proposed that a minimal amendment of the law, which now only allows close relatives to donate, would be to also allow them to be the intended donors of their close relatives in kidney exchange.  However it doesn't seem as if this is going to happen anytime soon (it looks like only the Free Democratic Party in inclined to support it...)

The medical newspaper ärztezeitung has the story
Transplantation
Lebendspende breiter aufstellen
Beim Thema Organspende rücken die Lebendspenden zunehmend in den Fokus. Ein Nobelpreisträger befeuert die aufkommende Debatte.
[Widen living donation
With regard to organ donation, living donations are increasingly coming into focus. A Nobel Prize winner fuels the emerging debate.]

"Nobel laureate Professor Alvin Roth submitted on Friday morning a proposal on how the living donation of kidneys in Germany could be broadened. Instead of considering only first and second degree relatives, spouses, registered partners and close friends as potential donors in the transplantation law, the pair organ exchange of living donors should also be possible, he said at the Nobel Prize Dialogue of the Leopoldina in Berlin. The aim of this model is to increase the chances of being able to mediate compatible organs to dialysis-dependent patients.

"The chairman of the Research Committee of the Bundestag, Ernst Dieter Rossmann (SPD) advised in his reply to not overburden the population in Germany. First, the contradiction solution must be introduced and its effect on the donor numbers to be waited, he warned.

"At the end of October, the Greens warned against commercialization and organ trade if the so-called cross-donation was introduced. At the FDP, the considerations have fallen on fertile ground."