Scientific honors and gender gaps

 Changing from an old equilibrium to a new one can involve some actions that may not persist once a new equilibrium is reached.  Here's a paper on the awarding of scientific honors.

Gender Gaps at the Academies by David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk & Nagore Iriberri

NBER WORKING PAPER 30510  DOI 10.3386/w30510  September 2022

"Historically, a large majority of the newly elected members of the National Academy of Science (NAS) and the American Academy of Arts and Science (AAAS) were men. Within the past two decades, however, that situation has changed, and in the last 3 years women made up about 40 percent of the new members in both academies. We build lists of active scholars from publications in the top journals in three fields – Psychology, Mathematics and Economics – and develop a series of models to compare changes in the probability of selection of women as members of the NAS and AAAS from the 1960s to today, controlling for publications and citations. In the early years of our sample, women were less likely to be selected as members than men with similar records. By the 1990s, the selection process at both academies was approximately gender-neutral, conditional on publications and citations. In the past 20 years, however, a positive preference for female members has emerged and strengthened in all three fields. Currently, women are 3-15 times more likely to be selected as members of the AAAS and NAS than men with similar publication and citation records."

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

That paper is a followup to their previous paper on Econometric Society Fellows, which has just come out in the current issue of Econometrica:

ECONOMETRICA: SEP 2022, VOLUME 90, ISSUE 5

Gender Differences in Peer Recognition by Economists

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA18027
p. 1937-1971

David Card, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, Nagore Iriberri

We study the selection of Fellows of the Econometric Society, using a new data set of publications and citations for over 40,000 actively publishing economists since the early 1900s. Conditional on achievement, we document a large negative gap in the probability that women were selected as Fellows in the 1933–1979 period. This gap became positive (though not statistically significant) from 1980 to 2010, and in the past decade has become large and highly significant, with over a 100% increase in the probability of selection for female authors relative to males with similar publications and citations. The positive boost affects highly qualified female candidates (in the top 10% of authors) with no effect for the bottom 90%. Using nomination data for the past 30 years, we find a key proximate role for the Society's Nominating Committee in this shift. Since 2012, the Committee has had an explicit mandate to nominate highly qualified women, and its nominees enjoy above‐average election success (controlling for achievement). Looking beyond gender, we document similar shifts in the premium for geographic diversity: in the mid‐2000s, both the Fellows and the Nominating Committee became significantly more likely to nominate and elect candidates from outside the United States. Finally, we examine gender gaps in several other major awards for U.S. economists. We show that the gaps in the probability of selection of new fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Sciences closely parallel those of the Econometric Society, with historically negative penalties for women turning to positive premiums in recent years.

**********

Update: here's the published version of the NBER paper, in PNAS, JANUARY 24, 2023, VOL. 120, NO. 4:

Gender gaps at the academies

David Card https://orcid.org/0000-0001-6914-6698 card@econ.berkeley.edu, Stefano DellaVigna, Patricia Funk, and Nagore Iriberri

This contribution is part of the special series of Inaugural Articles by members of the National Academy of Sciences elected in 2021. January 19, 2023 120 (4) e2212421120

https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2212421120

The Dr H.L. Trivedi Oration at the Indian Society of Transplantation (ISOT) Meeting 2022

Here's the meeting announcement:

ISOT 2022 NAGPUR

32^nd Annual Conference of The Indian Society of Organ Transplantation
2^nd Mid-term Meeting of Liver Transplantation Society of India
15^th Annual International Conference of NATCO
Dates : 12^th - 16^th October 2022 | Venue : Hotel Le Meridien, Nagpur

My talk, the Dr H.L. Trivedi Oration   is scheduled for 11:00am on Friday the 14th in Nagpur, which means I'll be giving it by zoom tonight, Thursday evening at 10:30 pm Pacific Time.

The presentation, which  will be about "Increasing the availability of transplants in India" is in honor of the late Dr. Hargovind Laxmishanker "H. L." Trivedi (August 1932 – October 2019), who I had the privilege of meeting,

Here's his obituary : 

Kute, Vivek, Himanshu Patel, Pankaj Shah, Pranjal Modi, and Vineet Mishra. "Professor Dr. HL Trivedi pioneering nephrologist and patriot who cared for his country (31-08-1932 TO 2-10-2019)." Indian Journal of Nephrology 29, no. 6 (2019): 379.

*********

Here's my concluding slide:

• India has enormous talent and accomplishment in living-donor transplantation
• To more nearly reach it’s potential, India needs to invest in recovering deceased donor organs.
• In the near term, it can build on it’s accomplishments in kidney transplantation, by 
• establishing national (not just regional) kidney exchange
• Continuing to explore international exchange for the hardest to match pairs
• Reducing restrictions on who can be an exchange donor
• Allowing non-directed donors and chains
• Allowing some chains to begin with a deceased-donor kidney
• Reducing financial barriers by increased investment in public hospitals and government health insurance, for organ donors as well as recipients

***********

Update: 

Attack on Sharif University in Iran: an open letter

 I'm among the signers of yet another open letter protesting events in Iran, this one against violent attacks on peaceful protesters in Iranian universities, related in turn to official violence against women. (click to see all the signers...):

Statement in Condemnation of the Attacks on University Students in Iran

"The recent events surrounding the death of Mahsa Amini in police custody on September 16, 2022, have pained and astounded many Iranians within Iran and abroad, including many students and academics [1]. Mahsa’s death engendered a visceral reaction across Iran. Iranians have raised their voices in protest to demand justice, freedom, and equality for women and beyond [2,3].

"On the evening of October 2, 2022, in brutal response to a protest staged by students at the Sharif University of Technology, one of Iran’s leading universities, various anti-riot forces violently stormed the university campus and surrounding areas. They laid siege to the university’s campus, brutally attacking and arresting students and faculty en masse [4,5]. This attack is followed by attacks on other universities that are continuing as we write this letter, including an attack on Tabriz University.   

"This unspeakable violence against students is an assault on the sanctity of education, academe, and fundamental human rights. We, the undersigned members of the global community of academics, condemn this attack and severe acts of aggression against universities and students in Iran and demand the immediate release of all arrested students and faculty and their protection against further attacks and arrests. "

"To sign this petition, please fill out this google form:

https://forms.gle/8i2bQrTrTKU45jZD9 

For information, please reach out to: academics-supporting-iranian-students@googlegroups.com 

[1]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/01/women-life-liberty-iranian-civil-rights-protests-spread-worldwide

[2]https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/30/iranian-protesters-are-part-of-a-worldwide-fight-for-womens-rights

[3]https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/iran-lawmakers-chant-thank-you-police-amid-growing-public-fury-over-womans-death-2022-10-02/ 

[4]https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-63111767

[5] https://www.bbc.com/persian/world-63113519

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

Here's a story about the attack on Sharif University, in the NY Times

‘Geniuses’ Versus the Guns: A Campus Crackdown Shocks Iran. Universities across Iran have erupted in protests after more than decade of being politically dormant, with students joining the unrest that has convulsed the country for the past three weeks.  By Farnaz Fassihi

"The scenes that unfolded at Sharif University on Sunday afternoon were some of the most shocking in the three weeks of protests led by women calling for an end to the Islamic Republic’s rule that have convulsed Iran since a 22-year-old woman, Mahsa Amini, died in the custody of the morality police. Security forces have cracked down violently on the protests but they continue."

Sorority rush: the paper and the podcast

 Years ago, my late student Sue Mongell and I wrote a paper about sorority rush:

Mongell, Susan, and Alvin E. Roth. "Sorority rush as a two-sided matching mechanism." The American Economic Review (1991): 441-464.
 

Just over 20 years later, you can listen to a short NPR broadcast about it on Planet Money (which leaves out a few of the details;-)

THE INDICATOR FROM PLANET MONEY

The economics behind sorority rush

October 5, 2022 by WAILIN WONG and ADRIAN MA

8-Minute Listen

"how do new recruits land at their sorority houses?

"The answer lies in a classic economic concept used in contexts ranging from organ donation to New York public high schools. Today, we're exploring matching markets"

Ambivalence on recreational cannabis in Amsterdam

 The Guardian has the story:

Amsterdam considers banning ‘cannabis tourists’ from its coffee shops. Fed up with stoned visitors and worried by hard-drug criminality, the mayor wants to clean up the city. But will it work? by Senay Boztas

Here's one bit that suggests that ambivalence is widespread, and baked into current regulations.

"In April, in a 13-page policy proposal, the mayor asked for the council’s support to temporarily enforce the residents-only law, largely because of concerns about the “criminal back door” of the coffee shops. Smoking and possessing weed for personal consumption are “tolerated”, but commercial growing is not – so coffee shops must buy from criminals. An influential 2019 report on the capital’s “dark side” suggested revisiting the residents-only rule to help tackle this “urban jungle”.

Public Lecture at Iowa State (video): "Who Gets What and Why? Economists as Engineers."

 Iowa State University in Ames Iowa has made available a video of a public lecture I gave there on September 22, called "Who Gets What and Why?  Economists as Engineers."

Black markets in abortion pills

 Americans differ in their opinions about whether American women have a right to end a pregnancy, or whether state legislators have the right to decide the issue for residents of their state.  Six American Supreme Court justices hold the latter opinion, and so overturned the constitutional right defined 50 years ago by the same court in Roe v. Wade.

This means that different states are going to have different laws about abortion. But medical technology is such that abortion pills exist, and can arrive in the mail. So even State laws criminalizing that may not stop it, when abortion and abortion pills remain legal in other states. That is, we're about to see a situation ripe for black markets. We may also see a legal conflict among the states.

The NY Times has a story on that:

Risking Everything to Offer Abortions Across State Lines. Doctors and midwives in blue states are working to get abortion pills into red states — setting the stage for a historic legal clash.  By Emily Bazelon

"When the landscape settles, abortion is likely to be illegal or severely restricted in at least 20 states — where just two years ago, in 2020, about 250,000 people had abortions. It is clear that clinicians in those states will face imminent prosecution if they continue to provide abortions. What is much less clear is what happens if providers in blue states offer telemedicine abortions to women in states where that’s against the law. These clinicians, too, could be arrested or sued or lose their medical licenses. To protect themselves, they may have to give up traveling to certain parts of the country — and it’s still no guarantee.

"In the face of so much uncertainty and an invigorated anti-abortion movement, large organizations and most clinicians are loath to gamble. But Aid Access providers think that the end of Roe calls for doctors to take bold action. Their answer is to mail many more pills to women who otherwise may be forced to carry pregnancies they don’t want.

"The court’s decision overturning Roe last June, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, polarized the public while opening the door to a new threat — a direct clash among the states over abortion law. In jettisoning the single national standard Roe established, the court invited states to pass or enforce their own laws, which could be diametrically opposed to those of neighboring states."

"Sitting in her office in New York, hundreds of miles from states that could go after her, Prine, at 71, was close to retirement and willing to take chances. “I don’t want younger physicians to be embroiled in lawsuits or criminally charged,” she said. “I’m the one that should happen to. Doctors like me who are at the end of our careers, we should be the ones to step up.”

"Article IV of the Constitution, which addresses the relationships among states, says that if a person charged with a crime in one state flees to another, she must be “delivered up,” or extradited, to the first state. If a doctor from Connecticut, for example, went to Texas, performed an illegal abortion there and then went home, Connecticut would have to send that doctor to Texas for prosecution. But courts have held in the past that if the person never set foot in the state that is prosecuting her, then she didn’t flee, and her state of residence has no constitutional obligation to extradite her. 

...

"But there’s a catch. If a provider travels outside her home state while Texas has a warrant for her arrest, another state without a shield law could follow the customary practice of interstate cooperation — and extradite her to Texas. In addition, if an abortion provider in a pro-access state like Connecticut is sued in Texas rather than prosecuted, Article IV requires the states to help enforce a civil judgment. Connecticut would probably be obligated to comply in collecting damages, for example, if a family member of a woman who had an abortion won a lawsuit for the wrongful death of a fetus. To deter these sorts of suits, Cohen, Donley and Rebouché suggest that states that want to shield their abortion providers could authorize them to countersue for interfering with legally protected health care. “If you’re hoping for a $1 million judgment in Alabama, but you know New York will let someone try to get it back from you, maybe you don’t sue in the first place,” Cohen says.

"The closest historical analogy, however imperfect, for the coming clash may be the conflict between Southern and Northern states over fugitive slave laws in the 19th century. “There are genuinely significant differences between slavery and abortion, morally and legally,” says Jamal Greene, a law professor at Columbia University. “But it’s a reasonable starting point for understanding why it’s a problem, in a nation that wants to hold itself together, when individual states are allowed to make policy about basic rights that people feel extremely strongly about, on both sides.”

"Tensions among the states can become corrosive. The framers of the Constitution gave enslavers the power to recapture enslaved people who escaped to free states. As the cause of abolition gained support, some free states passed personal liberty laws that protected Black people from kidnapping. In 1842, in Prigg v. Pennsylvania, the Supreme Court weighed in on the side of the South, striking down the conviction in Pennsylvania of a slave catcher for kidnapping a mother and her children."

This Supreme Court term has many cases on repugnant transactions and controversial markets

 The newly conservative-dominated Supreme Court is ready for its second term, and has a docket full of what readers of this blog know I think of as controversial markets and repugnant transactions.  While previous court decisions have expanded individual rights on these subjects, such as abortion, the present court seems to view them not as individual rights but as States' rights.  But that may be too simple a characterization of this brand of conservative jurisprudence. We're going to learn more about that as the term plays out. (I'm personally most worried about what decisions will be made about election law, because of the effect those decisions may have on future decisions.)

Here's the NYT on the coming caseload:

As New Term Starts, Supreme Court Is Poised to Resume Rightward Push. The justices return to the bench on Monday to start a term that will include major cases on affirmative action, voting and discrimination against gay couples. Several will take on questions about race.  By Adam Liptak

"The last Supreme Court term ended with a series of judicial bombshells in June that eliminated the right to abortion, established a right to carry guns outside the home and limited efforts to address climate change. As the justices return to the bench on Monday, there are few signs that the court’s race to the right is slowing.

"The new term will feature major disputes on affirmative action, voting, religion, free speech and gay rights. And the court’s six-justice conservative supermajority seems poised to dominate the new term as it did the earlier one.

...

"Several of the biggest cases concern race, in settings as varied as education, voting and adoptions.

"They include challenges to the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina. As in last term’s abortion case, Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, longstanding precedents are at risk.

"The court has repeatedly upheld affirmative-action programs meant to ensure educational diversity at colleges and universities, most recently in 2016. In an interview that year, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the issue had been permanently settled.

...

"Mr. Trump went on to name three members of the Supreme Court, including Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who succeeded Justice Ginsburg after her death in 2020.

"Those changes put more than 40 years of affirmative action precedents at risk, including Grutter v. Bollinger, a 2003 decision in which the Supreme Court endorsed holistic admissions programs, saying it was permissible to consider race as one factor among many to achieve educational diversity. Writing for the majority in that case, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor said she expected that “25 years from now,” the “use of racial preferences will no longer be necessary.”

"The court seems poised to say that the time for change has arrived several years early in the two new cases, Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard, No. 20-1199, and Students for Fair Admissions v. University of North Carolina, No. 21-707. They are set to be argued on Oct. 31.

...

"A challenge to the constitutionality of the Indian Child Welfare Act of 1978, which makes it hard for non-Native Americans to adopt Native children, may also turn on whether the court views those safeguards as based on race, making them vulnerable to constitutional review. The law at issue in the case, Haaland v. Brackeen, No. 21-376, was a response to a history of children being removed from their tribes and heritage; arguments will be heard on Nov. 9.

*******

I think the two university affirmative action cases are no longer as closely linked as they were before the appointment by President Biden of Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who has two degrees from Harvard, and may have to recuse herself. See this cryptic note from the Supreme Court's website: 20-1199 STUDENTS FOR FAIR ADMISSIONS V. PRESIDENT AND FELLOWS OF HARVARD COLLEGE

*********

Earlier:

Wednesday, June 8, 2022

What might the assisted reproduction gray market look like, post Roe?

Tuesday, June 11, 2019

Adoption is complex even when it doesn't include State and Tribal rights...

Gay couples, surrogacy, IVF and health insurance

 The Guardian has a story about the obstacles consulting a married gay couple in New York. They have an ongoing lawsuit regarding discrimination in health insurance for IVF. (Much of the article is also about the debate over whether surrogacy is ethical or exploitative):

‘We are expected to be OK with not having children’: how gay parenthood through surrogacy became a battleground  by Jenny Kleeman

"That’s when they first became aware of the eye-watering cost of biological parenthood for gay men. Maggipinto reels off the price list in a way that only someone who has pored over every item could. There’s compensation for the egg donor: no less than $8,000 (£6,600). The egg-donor agency fee: $8,000-10,000. The fertility clinic’s bill (including genetic testing, blood tests, STD screening and a psychiatric evaluation for all parties, sperm testing, egg extraction, insemination, the growing, selecting, freezing and implantation of the resulting embryos): up to $70,000. And that’s if it all goes well: if no embryos are created during a cycle, or if the embryos that are don’t lead to a successful pregnancy, they would have to start again.

"Then there’s the cost of a surrogate (called a “gestational carrier” when they carry embryos created from another woman’s eggs). Maggipinto and Briskin were told agency fees alone could stretch to $25,000, and the surrogates themselves should be paid a minimum of $60,000 (it is illegal for surrogates to be paid in the UK, but their expenses are covered by the intended parents). “That payment doesn’t include reimbursement for things like maternity clothing; lost wages if she misses work for doctors’ appointments or is put on bed rest; transportation; childcare for her own children; [or] lodging.” It takes 15 minutes for Maggipinto to run me through all the expenses they could incur if they tried to have a child genetically related to one of them. The bottom line? “Two hundred thousand dollars, minimum,” he says.

...

"Briskin used to work for the City of New York as an assistant district attorney, earning about $60,000 a year. His employment benefits had included generous health insurance. But when they read the policy, they discovered they were the only class of people to be excluded from IVF coverage. Infertility was defined as an inability to have a child through heterosexual sex or intrauterine insemination. That meant straight people and lesbians working for the City of New York would have the costs of IVF covered, but gay male couples could never be eligible.

...

"There’s a stark contrast between American and Ukrainian surrogates, Maggipinto says. “Here you have to be a woman who has already had children, who is over a certain age, who can prove that she is independently financially capable of sustaining herself without her surrogate compensation. You effectively cannot be a poor surrogate.” He is referring to the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s guidelines, but with no official regulation in the US, there’s no compulsion for anyone to follow them.

...

"The EEOC will rule on whether the terms of Briskin’s health insurance were discriminatory within a few weeks. The City of New York has so far defended its policy. The couple’s attorney, Peter Romer-Friedman, tells me: “They say their healthcare plan doesn’t provide surrogacy for anyone, so it’s not discrimination to deny it to Corey and Nicholas.” Just like everyone else, the city’s first response was to assume this was all about access to surrogacy."

Open letters--democracy and academic freedom, in Iran and Turkey

 Around this time of year I think of the various open letters I sign, from among many that I'm invited to sign.  (I try to avoid signing letters in which it might appear that I'm offering expertise where in fact I don't have any--e.g. letters that make macroeconomic predictions or prescriptions.)  But some of the letters I end up signing protest injustices of various sorts, and seem to require only the kind of expertise that comes with being a citizen in a democracy or a professor at a university.

Here are two that I've recently signed.

The first concerns widely reported events in Iran.

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE PEOPLE OF IRAN. Over 120 Nobel Laureates from around the world stand in solidarity with the calls for justice and freedom in the wake of the death of 22 year-old Mahsa Amini.

Here's the beginning:

"Nobel Laureates from around the world stand in solidarity with the courageous actions of the people of Iran and join them in their calls for justice and freedom, and for the protection of human rights for all citizens of the country.

"Nobel laureates condemn the Iranian authorities’ violence against women and protestors.

“We condemn these barbaric actions toward women and protesters in Iran,” said laureate Dr. Shirin Ebadi, Nobel Peace Prize Laureate 2003. “Women should be free and there must be removal of all legal discriminations against women.”

***********

The second concerns a colleague at a Turkish university:

Prof. Dr. Ünal Zenginobuz’un ve Boğaziçi Üniversitesi’nin yanındayız.  We stand by Prof. Ünal Zenginobuz and Boğaziçi University.

The International Academics’ Statement:

"We are outraged by the suspension of Prof. Ünal Zenginobuz from teaching at Boğaziçi University for a period of three months, thereby preventing his academic and educational activities, on grounds of an investigation into actions conducted while he held the position of Department Head.

...

"Cutting Prof. Zenginobuz off from the academic world will harm his students, his university, his country, and the international academic community. This is simply unacceptable. What makes this unjust decision even more grave is that this is a continuation of developments at Boğaziçi University since January 2021 that have been in violation of academic autonomy and merit. Boğaziçi University enjoys success and worldwide renown thanks to values including academic merit, democratic governance, and dedication to public service, which Prof. Zenginobuz represents at its best.

"We stand by Prof. Zenginobuz and Boğaziçi University."

Machine learning plays the ultimatum game via sentence completion by Large Language Models

 One currently growing class of artificial intelligence, machine learning models are Large Language Models, which are trained on potentially all the text on the internet to do sentence completion, i.e. to pick the next words in a sentence. In this way they can generate texts that may be hard to distinguish from human texts, and engage in conversations that may be hard to distinguish from human conversations.

Here's a paper that uses LLM's to (among other things) play the responder in ultimatum games, by varying offers made by a proposer, and information about the proposer and responder, and then having it complete the sentence "[the responder] decides to ___", where valid completions begin with "accept" or "reject".

Using Large Language Models to Simulate Multiple Humans by Gati Aher, Rosa I. Arriaga, Adam Tauman Kalai

Abstract: "We propose a method for using a large language model, such as GPT-3, to simulate responses of different humans in a given context. We test our method by attempting to reproduce well-established economic, psycholinguistic, and social experiments. The method requires prompt templates for each experiment. Simulations are run by varying the (hypothetical) subject details, such as name, and analyzing the text generated by the language model. To validate our methodology, we use GPT-3 to simulate the Ultimatum Game, garden path sentences, risk aversion, and the Milgram Shock experiments. In order to address concerns of exposure to these studies in training data, we also evaluate simulations on novel variants of these studies. We show that it is possible to simulate responses of different people and that their responses are largely consistent with prior human studies from the literature. Using large language models as simulators offers advantages but also poses risks. Our use of a language model for simulation is contrasted with anthropomorphic views of a language model as having its own behavior."

***********

Here's a sample prompt for the ultimatum game:

Here is a graph of the results: a simple language model (LM-1) predicts flat acceptance or rejection regardless of offers, but the larger model LM-5 predicts that the probability of acceptance grows with the offer, in a way comparable to some human data. (The learning models LM-1 to LM-5 are increasingly large versions of GPT-3.)

I guess we'll have to add participation in experiments to the job categories threatened with takeover by AI's...

Choosing (as if) from a menu (by Gonczarowski, Heffetz and Thomas; and by Bó, and Hakimov)

What makes serial dictatorship so obviously strategy proof is that it gives each participant the opportunity to choose from a menu, and get what he/she picks.  So the dominant strategy is to pick what you want (and if you have to delegate the decision by submitting a list of preferences, it is a dominant strategy to state your true preferences.

Here are two papers differently inspired by that thought, which seek to reformulate matching mechanisms so that they look to each player like choice from a menu.

Strategyproofness-Exposing Mechanism Descriptions by Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Ori Heffetz, Clayton Thomas

Abstract: "A menu description defines a mechanism to player i in two steps. Step (1) uses the reports of other players to describe i's menu: the set of i's potential outcomes. Step (2) uses i's report to select i's favorite outcome from her menu. Can menu descriptions better expose strategyproofness, without sacrificing simplicity? We propose a new, simple menu description of Deferred Acceptance. We prove that -- in contrast with other common matching mechanisms -- this menu description must differ substantially from the corresponding traditional description. We demonstrate, with a lab experiment on two simple mechanisms, the promise and challenges of menu descriptions."

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

Pick-an-object Mechanisms by Inácio Bó, Rustamdjan Hakimov

Abstract: "We introduce a new family of mechanisms for one-sided matching markets, denoted pick-an-object (PAO) mechanisms. When implementing an allocation rule via PAO, agents are asked to pick an object from individualized menus. These choices may be rejected later on, and these agents are presented with new menus. When the procedure ends, agents are assigned the last object they picked. We characterize the allocation rules that can be sequentialized by PAO mechanisms, as well as the ones that can be implemented in a robust truthful equilibrium. We justify the use of PAO as opposed to direct mechanisms by showing that its equilibrium behavior is closely related to the one in obviously strategy-proof (OSP) mechanisms, but implements commonly used rules, such as Gale-Shapley DA and top trading cycles, which are not OSP-implementable. We run laboratory experiments comparing truthful behavior when using PAO, OSP, and direct mechanisms to implement different rules. These indicate that agents are more likely to behave in line with the theoretical prediction under PAO and OSP implementations than their direct counterparts."

Return to previous school assignment policies (in some respects) under New York City's new mayor

 In NYC, the pendulum is still swinging between inclusive admissions as measured by demographics and determined by lottery, and meritocratic admissions as measured by tests and grades.

The NYT has the story:

In a Reversal, New York City Tightens Admissions to Some Top Schools. The city loosened selection criteria during the pandemic, policies some parents protested as unfair and others hoped would reduce racial disparities. By Troy Closson

"New York City’s selective middle schools can once again use grades to choose which students to admit, the school chancellor, David C. Banks, announced on Thursday, rolling back a pandemic-era moratorium that had opened the doors of some of the city’s most elite schools to more low-income students.

...

"New York City has used selective admissions for public schools more than any school district in the country. About a third of the city’s 900 or so middle and high schools had some kind of admissions requirement before the pandemic disrupted many measures to sort students by academic performance.

...

"Selective high schools will also be able to prioritize top-performing students.

"The sweeping move will end the random lottery for middle schools, a major shift after the previous administration ended the use of grades and test scores two years ago. At the city’s competitive high schools, where changes widened the pool of eligible applicants, priority for seats will be limited to top students whose grades are an A average.

...

"The announcement came as New York City’s education officials are confronting multiple crises in the wake of the pandemic, complicating a dilemma that has bedeviled previous administrations: how to create more equitable schools, while trying to prevent middle-class families from abandoning the system.

"State standardized test scores released Wednesday showed that many students fell behind, particularly in math, and that many Hispanic, Black and low-income students continue to lag far behind their white, Asian and higher-income peers. At the same time, the district is bleeding students: Roughly 120,000 families have left traditional public schools over the past five years. Some have left the system, and others have gone to charter schools."

*****

And here's the Washington Post:

New York City, embracing merit, rolls back diversity plan for schools By Laura Meckler

"New York City schools announced Thursday they would allow middle schools to consider academics in admitting students to some of the city’s most sought-after programs, unraveling pandemic-era rules aimed at injecting racial and economic diversity into a segregated system.

"High schools would also rely more heavily on merit and less on the luck of a lottery under the new plan, reversing the previous administration’s direction as a new mayor takes command of the nation’s largest school system.

...

"In San Francisco, admissions into the elite Lowell High School were converted from merit-based into a lottery system. As in New York, though, the change was reversed — in this case, after several school board members were recalled, in part over this issue.

"In Northern Virginia, Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology also shifted from an admissions test to a “holistic review” that considers several factors, a move that is being challenged in court and has faced resistance from the Republican governor and his administration.

...

"In New York, the debate is particularly fiery because students are required to apply to middle and high school, and before the pandemic, about a third of the city’s 900 middle and high schools included requirements for admission — such as grades, test scores, attendance and behavior records. 

...

"That system was largely converted into a lottery under Mayor Bill de Blasio.

"For high school, applicants were put into tiers based on their grades. But the top tier included about 60 percent of all students, who had the first crack at the top schools. Competitive schools drew acceptances randomly from this group.

...

"Now, under the new system announced Thursday, it will be harder to get into the top tier, though once in that group, it will still be a lottery. To get into the top tier, students must be in the top 15 percent of their school or of the city overall, and they must have at least a 90 percent on grades.

"Test scores, which had been used for years but also criticized as biased, will not be considered. Banks said exam scores are a flawed measure but grades are “still a very solid indicator of how you are showing up as a student,” even for students who face hardships at home."

Your digital trail, in cyberspace and in public spaces

 Here are two recent privacy-related stories about how the digital trails we leave can be combined in surprising ways.

From the NYT a story about an artist who became a digital sleuth, to capture people working hard to take casual-seeming Instagram photos of themselves in famous locations.

This Surveillance Artist Knows How You Got That Perfect Instagram Photo. A tech-savvy artist unearthed video footage of people working hard to capture the perfect shot for Instagram. It is a lesson in the artifice of social media and the ubiquity of surveillance.  By Kashmir Hill

"The 24/7 broadcast that Mr. Depoorter watched — titled “Live From NYC’s Times Square!” — was provided by EarthCam, a New Jersey company that specializes in real-time camera feeds. EarthCam built its network of livestreaming webcams “to transport people to interesting and unique locations around the world that may be difficult or impossible to experience in person,” according to its website. Founded in 1996, EarthCam monetizes the cameras through advertising and licensing of the footage.

"Mr. Depoorter realized that he could come up with an automated way to combine these publicly available cameras with the photos that people had posted on Instagram. So, over a two-week period, he collected EarthCam footage broadcast online from Times Square in New York, Wrigley Field in Chicago and the Temple Bar in Dublin.

"Rand Hammoud, a campaigner against surveillance at the global human rights organization Access Now, said the project illustrated how often people are unknowingly being filmed by surveillance cameras, and how easy it has become to stitch those movements together using automated biometric-scanning technologies."

******

From the Washington Post, a story about how data from health apps makes its way to advertisers and others, with device identifiers (e.g. with the identity of your phone...):

Health apps share your concerns with advertisers. HIPAA can’t stop it. From ‘depression’ to ‘HIV,’ we found popular health apps sharing potential health concerns and user identifiers with dozens of ad companies  By Tatum Hunter and Jeremy B. Merrill 

"several popular Android health apps including Drugs.com Medication Guide, WebMD: Symptom Checker and Period Calendar Period Tracker gave advertisers the information they’d need to market to people or groups of consumers based on their health concerns.

"The Drugs.com Android app, for example, sent data to more than 100 outside entities including advertising companies, DuckDuckGo said. Terms inside those data transfers included “herpes,” “HIV,” “adderall” (a drug to treat attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder), “diabetes” and “pregnancy.” These keywords came alongside device identifiers, which raise questions about privacy and targeting."

Dating and (or versus) the search for lasting relationships

 Two related  stories caught my eye this week. One lamented the difficulty of making a meaningful match through online dating, and thought about what is lost from the older (but less mobile) tradition of matchmaking by family, friends, and even professional matchmakers. The other concerns a newish internet tool that is meant to help people introspect about what is important to them, and match accordingly.

Here's the first, from a NYT opinion piece:

Dating Is Broken. Going Retro Could Fix It. By Michal Leibowitz

"There are elements of traditional dating culture that can provide solutions not just to the way we find people to date but also to the way we navigate relationships. Through conversations with traditional and secular daters, I’ve come to see three practices as particularly promising for people who are looking for committed, long-term relationships: meeting partners through friends, family or matchmakers rather than online; early, upfront communication around long-term goals and values; and delaying sexual intimacy.

"It’s worth asking: Is it time to court again?"

********

And here's an article from the Stanford Daily, about the continuing evolution of the Marriage Pact, which began as a very popular once-a-year matching event at Stanford, spread to other campuses, and is now seeking a place in the set of modern relationship tools:

Marriage Pact secures $5 million in seed funding. By Matthew Turk

"Marriage Pact, a research-based matchmaking company founded at Stanford, received $5 million in seed funding from Bain Capital Ventures and other investors. The money could scale the platform considerably, potentially leading to a larger user base and new relationship technology.

...

The Marriage Pact releases an annual survey for college students with around 50 questions designed to capture their personal convictions and life philosophy. Marriage Pact’s software then algorithmically pairs respondents to maximize their compatibility. 

...

"The Marriage Pact survey and matchmaking “will always be free” but paid additions to the existing services are in development, McGregor wrote to The Daily. “Ultimately, we’re building a transformative startup in social tech. We’ll get there by designing further experiences that create so much value in your life that they’re worth paying for,” he wrote.

"Until 2018, the software behind the matching optimization was based on the deferred-acceptance algorithm. Now, the algorithm is proprietary"

*******

Related earlier post:

Friday, August 9, 2019

Coupling up with the help of the internet

What is needed to gain support for effective algorithms in hiring, etc?

 Here's an experiment motivated in part by European regulations on transparency of algorithms.

Aversion to Hiring Algorithms: Transparency, Gender Profiling, and Self-Confidence  by Marie-Pierre Dargnies, Rustamdjan Hakimov and Dorothea Kübler

Abstract: "We run an online experiment to study the origins of algorithm aversion. Participants are either in the role of workers or of managers. Workers perform three real-effort tasks: task 1, task 2, and the job task which is a combination of tasks 1 and 2. They choose whether the hiring decision between themselves and another worker is made either by a participant in the role of a manager or by an algorithm. In a second set of experiments, managers choose whether they want to delegate their hiring decisions to the algorithm. In the baseline treatments, we observe that workers choose the manager more often than the algorithm, and managers also prefer to make the hiring decisions themselves rather than delegate them to the algorithm. When the algorithm does not use workers’ gender to predict their job task performance and workers know this, they choose the algorithm more often. Providing details on how the algorithm works does not increase the preference for the algorithm, neither for workers nor for managers. Providing feedback to managers about their performance in hiring the best workers increases their preference for the algorithm, as managers are, on average, overconfident."

"Our experiments are motivated by the recent debates in the EU over the legal requirements for algorithmic decisions. Paragraph 71 of the preamble to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requires data controllers to prevent discriminatory effects of algorithms processing sensitive personal data. Articles 13 and 14 of the GDPR state that, when profiling takes place, people have the right to “meaningful information about the logic involved” (Goodman and Flaxman 2017). While the GDPR led to some expected effects, e.g., privacy-oriented consumers opting out of the use of cookies (Aridor et al. 2020), the discussion over the transparency requirements and the constraints on profiling is still ongoing. Recently, the European Parliament came up with the Digital Services Act (DSA), which proposes further increasing the requirements for algorithm disclosure and which explicitly requires providing a profiling-free option to users, together with a complete ban on the profiling of minors. Our first treatment that focuses on the workers aims at identifying whether making the algorithm gender-blind and therefore unable to use gender to discriminate, as advised in the preamble of the GDPR and further strengthened in the proposed DSA, increases its acceptance by the workers. The second treatment is a direct test of the importance of the transparency of the algorithm for the workers. When the algorithm is made transparent in our setup, it becomes evident which gender is favored. This can impact algorithm aversion differently for women and men, for example if workers’ preferences are mainly driven by payoff maximization.

"The treatments focusing on the managers’ preferences aim at understanding why some firms are more reluctant than others to make use of hiring algorithms. One possible explanation for not adopting such algorithms is managerial overconfidence. Overconfidence is a common bias, and its effect on several economic behaviors has been demonstrated (Camerer et al. 1999, Dunning et al. 2004, Malmendier and Tate 2005, Dargnies et al. 2019). In our context, overconfidence is likely to induce managers to delegate the hiring decisions to the algorithm too seldom. Managers who believe they make better hiring decisions than they actually do, may prefer to make the hiring decisions themselves. Our paper will provide insights about the effect of overconfidence on the delegation of hiring decisions to algorithms. Similar to the treatments about the preferences of workers, we are also interested in the effect of the transparency of the algorithm on the managers’ willingness to delegate the hiring decisions. Disclosing the details of the algorithm can increase the managers’ trust in the algorithm."

Spain's stolen babies (from the NY Times)

The sale of babies is widely regarded as repugnant, but it has been used for political purposes in the dark days of Spain, and Argentina.  Here's a story from the Sunday NY Times recounting some of the history, focusing on one woman's search for her birth mother.

 Taken Under Fascism, Spain’s ‘Stolen Babies’ Are Learning the Truth. Thousands of Spanish children were taken from hospitals and sold to wealthy Catholic families. By Nicholas Casey, Sept. 27, 2022

"Up to the early 1930s, Spain had been among Europe’s most progressive countries, allowing for married couples to divorce and women to seek abortions. Under Franco, those rights were swiftly rescinded. Contraception was outlawed, adultery was criminalized and women lost the right to vote. Newspapers were censored, and many books were banned altogether, including those of Federico García Lorca, Spain’s most renowned poet and playwright. (Lorca had already been murdered by Nationalists during the civil war.) 

...

"But one of the most lasting abuses of the era was borne by children. ... Franco’s men soon began the abductions on a large scale. They targeted children orphaned by Franco’s firing squads and took newborns belonging to women who had given birth in jail as political prisoners. All were sent to be raised by regime loyalists. The era of the “stolen babies” had begun.

...

"Some nuns — aided by doctors, nurses and midwives — began to abduct babies to meet demand. In certain cases, the nuns still managed to persuade mothers to give up their children willingly, though many say they were coerced into surrendering their newborns. Others say they were sedated in the delivery room and then told, when they woke up, that their babies had died. In reality, the children had been sold to other families.

"Franco’s regime was not the only one to use the theft of children as a political weapon. In Argentina, as many as 30,000 people were “disappeared” by a military junta that ruled from 1976 to 1983 and gave their orphaned children to right-wing families, prompting decades of protests and demands that the government investigate. In Spain, people often refer to the Argentine cases as offering a precedent. But unlike Argentina, Spain never established a truth-and-reconciliation commission. In fact, the country did the opposite, passing a broad amnesty law in the years following Franco’s death that absolved members of the regime of most of their past crimes. While those responsible for the abductions were not explicitly granted amnesty, the policy did reflect a consensus that had emerged in post-Franco Spain — to avoid confronting the dark legacy of the dictatorship. The agreement even had a name: the Pact of Forgetting. Spain’s leaders, on both the right and left, espoused the need for peaceful democracy, even if it meant sacrificing popular calls for justice. “Let’s not disturb the graves and hurl bones at one another — let the historians do their job,” said José María Aznar, a former prime minister, in a speech years later.

...

"In 2004, the conservative government was defeated by José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, a Socialist who came into office with plans to address the taboos of the past.... at Zapatero’s urging, Spain passed its historical memory law in 2007, which condemned the crimes of the Franco era and recognized its victims for the first time.

"A new generation of victims began to emerge — this time led not by the mothers who had lost their babies but by their children, now grown, who were seeking their biological parents. They formed grass-roots organizations like the National Association for Irregular Adoption Victims, which estimated that as many as 15 percent of the adoptions in Spain from 1965 to 1990 were performed without consent of the birth parents."

Where do professors come from?

 A news article in Nature summarizes two research articles into the makeup of the American professoriate.  Professors tend to have gotten their PhDs from prestigious American universities, and to have grown up in families with college educated parents, some with advanced degrees.

Most US professors are trained at same few elite universities  by Anna Nowogrodzki

"One in eight US-trained tenure-track faculty members got their PhDs from just five elite universities: the University of California, Berkeley; Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts; the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor; Stanford University in California; and the University of Wisconsin–Madison."

...

"This picture of elitism is bolstered by a study published last month in Nature Human Behaviour2, showing that almost 25% of faculty members in the United States have at least one parent with a PhD (in the general population, less than 1% of people have a parent with a PhD).

...

"Depending on the field, only 5–23% of faculty members worked at an institution more prestigious than the one at which they earned their PhD, according to the analysis. Fields with the least ‘upward mobility’ included classics and economics, whereas those with the most included animal science and pharmacology."

Sources:

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention by K. Hunter Wapman, Sam Zhang, Aaron Clauset & Daniel B. Larremore  Nature (2022)

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty by Allison C. Morgan, Nicholas LaBerge, Daniel B. Larremore, Mirta Galesic, Jennie E. Brand & Aaron Clauset ,Nature Human Behaviour (2022)

Job swaps in the Air Force

 Here's the story, from Air and Space Forces Magazine:

Bass Announces Changes to Assignment Policies—Including Job Swaps Sept. 21, 2022 | By Greg Hadley

"The Air Force is poised to revamp how it does assignments, Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force JoAnne S. Bass announced Sept. 21—including a policy allowing Airmen to swap assignments with each other.

...

"The changes to enlisted assignments are the result of recommendations from the Enlisted Assignment Working Group, Bass said. The working group, which she first announced in April 2021, was tasked with making the assignment process more flexible and transparent, with an eye toward how assignments should look in 2030 and beyond.

...

Perhaps the biggest round of applause, however, came after Bass teased a new “assignment swap policy.”

The Air Force previously had an assignment exchange program for Airmen in the continental U.S. Enlisted and officers could find other Airmen with the same grade and speciality and apply to swap assignments.

The program was shut down, however, when it was determined to be “unfair,” according to an Air Force Personnel Center post on Facebook. Because Airmen had to cover their own moving expenses, some in the lower ranks couldn’t afford to participate. All told, less than 5 percent of Airmen took advantage of the program.

Bass declined to share any details on the new assignment swap policy, and an Air Force Personnel Center spokeswoman told Air & Space Forces Magazine that the service is still “in the early stages of establishing” program, with no set start date established.

“We are working with our partners to build out the process and identify business rules to make the program more inclusive with minimum restrictions,” the spokeswoman added."

********

Earlier: 

Tuesday, December 1, 2020

The labor market that is the military: a report from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine

Dismantling kleptocracy

 USAID has published a guide to combating kleptocracy--i.e. government by thieves.

DEKLEPTIFICATION GUIDE. Seizing Windows of Opportunity to Dismantle Kleptocracy

“And we’re going all in on dekleptification. Today, I’m announcing the creation of a new dekleptification guide—a handbook to help countries make the difficult transition from kleptocracy to democracy. This guide, drawn from previous democratic openings in Romania, Dominican Republic, and South Africa, provides advice to reformers on how to root out deeply entrenched corruption and technical advice on how to implement radical transparency and accountability measures, how to stand up new anti-corruption structures. Moving rapidly and aggressively in historic windows of opportunity will make these reforms harder to reverse.”  -USAID Administrator Samantha Power, remarks delivered on June 7, 2022.

********

Here's the full report.

********

"The Kremlin’s most common method of closing other countries’ reform windows is covertly bankrolling opposition political parties. The Russian Federation has gotten caught deploying financial interference in elections more than 100 times over the past decade.124 Until 2014, the targets were mostly limited to the former Soviet bloc. For example, Ukraine’s Orange Revolution and Georgia’s Rose Revolution ended when Russia-backed oligarchs funded pro-Russian candidates who became presidents and rekleptified the two countries.  Over the decade ending in 2014, Putin felt increasingly rebuffed by Western politicians who would not stand for his violations of the sovereignty of neighboring countries.126 His relations with the West came to a head when Ukrainians opened their dekleptification window in 2014. Since then, the Kremlin has dramatically expanded the target surface of its financial interference in elections, deploying covert foreign money all over the world, often to close windows or prevent them from opening (see Figure 7).

***********

"CONCLUSION The ultimate objective of dekleptification is to help nations that endeavor to adapt their social contract away from kleptocracy and toward new social norms about the government’s duties and the public’s intolerance for corruption. Such adaptations take many years or decades, sustained by virtuous circles of institutions that prove effective and popular enough to withstand efforts to undermine them and restore kleptocratic rule. Exceptional institutional and societal resilience is needed in strategically contested countries, where the influence of foreign kleptocracies and the pathways of transnational corruption provide enormous resources to corrupt elements seeking to undermine reform.

"The most important and essential precondition for a virtuous circle is very broad and highly mobilized demand throughout the society, driving powerful domestic political action that ushers in a window of opportunity to roll back kleptocracy. Amid those pivotal openings, reformers urgently call for rapid responses from the international donor community. They need everything from fastmoving funding to targeted communications to in-kind technical expertise. When deciding how to build cutting-edge institutions to deliver transparency, accountability, and inclusion, reformers benefit greatly from lessons learned during similar windows in other countries.

"This guide captures those insights. It draws from USAID experts who were on the ground during the windows of Georgia 2004-2012, Romania 2004-2018, Egypt 2011-2013, Brazil 2013-2019, Ukraine 2014-present, Guatemala 2015-2017, Armenia 2018-present, South Africa 2018-2019, Malaysia 2018-2020, Sudan 2019-2021, Moldova 2021-present, Bulgaria 2021-present, the Dominican Republic 2020-present, and Zambia 2021-present. USAID partnered with reformers who forged inclusive institutions that were radically transparent and aggressively accountable, generating models for other countries confronting kleptocracy and strategic corruption. These reformers tried to establish anti-corruption institutions rapidly enough to seize and sustain fleeting windows of political will. And they scoped the policy details to be far more transparent, independent, and inclusive than is common elsewhere. This a not apolitical and technocratic work; it requires overwhelming public demand, timely political analysis, vibrant civil society, well-coordinated donors and interagency partners, and Missions highly attuned to the fluid and intense political dynamics of dekleptification.

"This comprehensive approach to rolling back kleptocratic structures is central to the modern pursuit of development, democracy, and peace."