The market for books (right after the invention of printing)

Printed books didn't replace hand lettered books and scrolls overnight.

The Boston Globe interviews Andrew Pettegree, a professor of modern history at the University of St. Andrews and author of “The Book in the Renaissance,” the story of the birth of print: The first printed books came with a question: What do you do with these things?

"Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books. The books they knew, manuscript texts, were valuable items and were copied to order. The habit of spending money to read something a printer had decided to publish was an alien one.

Nor was print clearly destined to replace manuscript, from the point of view of the book owners of the day. A few fussy color-printing experiments aside, the new books were monochrome, dull in comparison to illuminated manuscripts. Many books left blank spaces for adding hand decoration, and collectors frequently bound printed pages together with manuscript ones.
...
"As in our own Internet era, culture and commerce went through upheaval as Europe tried to figure out what to make of the new medium and its possibilities. Should it serve to spread familiar Latin texts, or to promote new ideas, written in the vernacular? Was print a vessel for great and serious works, or for quick and sloppy ones? As with the iPad (or the Newton before it), who would want to buy a printed book, and why?
...
"What made print viable, Pettegree found, was not the earth-shaking impact of mighty tomes, but the rustle of countless little pages: almanacs, calendars, municipal announcements. Indulgence certificates, the documents showing that sinners had paid the Catholic church for reduced time in purgatory, were especially popular. These ephemeral jobs were what made printing a viable business through the long decades while book publishers — and the public — struggled to find what else this new technology might be good for.
...
"PETTEGREE: What you’ve got to do once you’ve got 300 identical copies of a book is you’ve got to sell it to people who don’t even yet know they want it. And that’s a very, very different way of selling.

And whereas the printers were taking advice from 15th-century humanist scholars, who said, “Wouldn’t it be good to have this? Wouldn’t it be good to have that?” they weren’t in any position to give them any advice on how to dispose of these 300 copies. And in due course they found that the only way to do this is to create a market which is trans-European.

It’s this classic example of how you get technological innovation without people really being aware of the commercial implications, of how you can make money from it. There’s quite a little similarity in the first generation of print with the dot-com boom and bust of the ’90s, where people have this fantastic new innovation, a lot of creative energy is put into it, a lot of development capital is put into it, and then people say, “Well, yeah, but how are we going to make money from the Internet?” And that takes another 10 years to work out.

IDEAS: The one thing that most early printers seemed to do was to go out of business.

PETTEGREE: And the ones who didn’t were the ones who tended to have a close relationship with official customers. And this really I think is the new part of the story that we’ve been able to put together.

Most narratives of print have relied on looking at the most eye-catching products — whether it’s Gutenberg’s Bible or Copernicus or the polyglot Bible of Plantin — these are the ones which seem to push civilization forward. In fact, these are very untypical productions of the 16th-century press.

I’ve done a specific study of the Low Countries, and there, something like 40 percent of all the books published before 1600 would have taken less than two days to print. That’s a phenomenal market, and it’s a very productive one for the printers. These are the sort of books they want to produce, tiny books. Very often they’re not even trying to sell them retail. They’re a commissioned book for a particular customer, who might be the town council or a local church, and they get paid for the whole edition. And those are the people who tended to stay in business in the first age of print."

Cleaning up the scramble for medical residents with SOAP

Changes are coming in the scramble that follows the medical resident match run by the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). A new, semi-centralized, partially computerized Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP) has been announced, for implementation in March 2010.

If I understand the proposal correctly, residency programs with unmatched positions will be able to submit preference lists of match participants who ended up unmatched, and these preferences will be used to make exploding offers, after which the preference lists and positions will be updated to take account of acceptances (e.g. candidates who accept a position will be removed from other program's preference lists), and new exploding offers will be issued. Unlike in the main match (which these days uses the Roth-Peranson algorithm, but which you can think of as a student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm), applicants will not submit preference lists, but will accept or reject offers as they come in (i.e. they cannot defer acceptances by holding their best offer until they see if any better offers arrive later).

Part of the proposal is to integrate the scramble with the Electronic Residency Application Service (ERAS), which will make some kinds of automatic processing and regulation possible,while some of the proposed regulations may be more challenging to enforce. (Markets that use exploding offers at fixed times have often been subject to cheating of various sorts: here's a paper on the experience of the law clerk market. There are lots of differences in the market culture of doctors and lawyers that may result in different outcomes.)

Here are some of its proposed rules:

• Unmatched applicant and unfilled program information will be released simultaneously.

• There will be a “time out” period during which unmatched applicants can send applications but programs cannot make offers.

• Applicants and programs will be required to send and receive applications only through ERAS.

• NRMP-participating programs that fill positions during Match Week must do so only through the SOAP.

• New functionality will be added to the R3 System to allow programs to offer unfilled positions on the basis of preference lists submitted by the programs.

• Applicants must accept or reject their offer(s) within a specific timeframe; offers not accepted or rejected will expire.

• The R3 System will establish an electronic “handshake” when an applicant accepts a position.

• Positions will be deleted from the dynamic List of Unfilled Programs once an offer has been accepted.

• A program’s unfilled positions will be offered to applicants in order of preference until all positions are filled or the preference list has been exhausted; programs will be able to add applicants to the bottom of their preference lists throughout Match Week.

• The NRMP Match Participation Agreement will be expanded to include Match Week and SOAP, and sanctions will be imposed for improper behavior.
...
Eligible NRMP applicants:


• Must be able to enter GME on July 1 in the year of the Match

• Will be able to apply only to unfilled Match-participating programs during Match Week

􀀹 Access to the List of Unfilled Programs will be restricted by match status (preliminary or advanced)

􀀹 Must use ERAS and will be able to select only unfilled Match-participating programs

􀀹 Cannot use phone, fax, email, or other methods

􀀹 Cannot have another individual/entity contact programs on applicant’s behalf

􀀹 Will be able to accept positions only through SOAP during Match Week

• Can apply to non-Match-participating programs after Match Week

Ineligible NRMP applicants:

• Cannot participate in SOAP

􀀹 Cannot apply to Match-participating programs using ERAS, phone, fax, email, or other methods

􀀹 Cannot have another individual/entity contact Match-participating programs on applicant’s behalf

• Can apply to non-Match-participating programs during Match Week

􀀹 Can use ERAS to select non-Match-participating programs

􀀹 Can use phone, fax, email, or other methods

• Can apply to Match-participating programs after Match Week

Unfilled Programs:

• Must accept applications only through ERAS during Match Week

􀀹 Cannot use phone, fax, email, or personal contacts

• Must fill positions using SOAP during Match Week

􀀹 Cannot offer positions to ineligible applicants during Match Week

􀀹 Cannot make offers outside SOAP during Match Week

􀀹 Are not required to fill positions during Match Week

• Can add applicants to bottom of preference list

If an applicant rejects an offer or allows an offer to expire, no further offers will be made to that applicant by the same program.

Once an applicant accepts an offer, the applicant will not be able to send additional applications via ERAS.

Once a program has filled all of its positions through SOAP, applicants will be unable to send applications to that program via ERAS.

Offers extended by programs and accepted by applicants during the Match Week Supplemental Offer and Acceptance Program (SOAP) will create a binding commitment. Failure to honor that commitment or failure to adhere to SOAP policies will be a violation of the Match Participation Agreement.

Could academic tenure become a repugnant transaction?

In an essay in the NY Times Book Review, Christopher Shea reflects on some recent books that suggest it might: The End of Tenure?

"In tough economic times, it’s easy to gin up anger against elites. The bashing of bankers is already so robust that the economist William Easterly has compared it, with perhaps a touch of hyperbole, to genocidal racism. But in recent months, a more unlikely privileged group has found itself in the cross hairs: tenured ­professors.

"At a time when nearly one in 10 American workers is unemployed, here’s a crew (the complaint goes) who are guaranteed jobs for life, teach only a few hours a week, routinely get entire years off, dump grading duties onto graduate students and produce “research” on subjects like “Rednecks, Queers and Country Music” or “The Whatness of Books.” Or maybe they stop doing research altogether (who’s going to stop them?), dropping their workweek to a manageable dozen hours or so, all while making $100,000 or more a year. Ready to grab that pitchfork yet?

"That sketch — relayed on numerous blogs and op-ed pages — is exaggerated, but no one who has observed the academic world could call it entirely false. And it’s a vision that has caught on with an American public worried about how to foot the bill for it all. The cost of a college education has risen, in real dollars, by 250 to 300 percent over the past three decades, far above the rate of inflation. Elite private colleges can cost more than $200,000 over four years. Total student-loan debt, at nearly $830 billion, recently surpassed total national credit card debt. Meanwhile, university presidents, who can make upward of $1 million annually, gravely intone that the $50,000 price tag doesn’t even cover the full cost of a year’s education. (Consider the balance a gift!) Then your daughter reports that her history prof is a part-time adjunct, who might be making $1,500 for a semester’s work. There’s something wrong with this picture.
...
"The higher-ed jeremiads of the last generation came mainly from the right. But this time, it’s the tenured radicals — or at least the tenured liberals — who are leading the charge. "

He goes on to say that the books he reviews call for a separation of research and teaching, with universities to concentrate only on teaching.

Tenure is tied up with a different bundle of issues at research universities, but even here it can raise questions, as the Harvard Crimson reports in connection with a recent, widely reported case of academic misconduct (about which relatively little has yet been made public): Hauser Losing Tenure Not Likely, Harvard’s History Shows--A review of recent cases of faculty misconduct reveals tenure termination is rare

Judd Kessler on the roommate problem in 2002

In response to my recent posts on roommate matching for college students, Judd Kessler points me to a newspaper column he wrote in 2002, on roommates, peer effects, and the Harvard housing system: More Than A Bunkmate.

Scott Duke Kominers at Yahoo!

You can see a very short video of Scott , drunk on market design juice, being interviewed at The View from Yahoo! Labs’ Key Scientific Challenges Summit 2010. Here is a direct link to the interview...)

The Craigslist market for erotic/adult services

Scott Cunningham at Baylor, who is a serious student of illicit labor markets (e.g. the market for sex), writes

"Not sure if you saw this or not. Adult services censored on Craigslist

"It's not clear whether Craigslist has shut down the adult services section or not. That it is censored from the US but not from the rest of the country, though, suggests to some maybe.

"You've probably at least been peripherally aware that in the last month, approximately 20 state attorney generals had begun a new public campaign calling for Craigslist to shut down "adult services" altogether. FWIW, I have a chapter entitled "Sex for Sale: Online Commerce in the World's Oldest Profession" (with Todd Kendall) in the 2010 forthcoming book _Crime Online: Correlates, Causes and Controls_ edited by Tom Hold through Carolina Academic Press in which we explore, among other things, what happened the last time Craigslist implemented a major change to its erotic services section (namely, requiring all cities/markets to pay the $5-10 per ad and replacing erotic services with adult services, which was more heavily screened by Craigslist staff to identify prostitution advertisements). There was a temporary drop in ads, but they began to grow again as the weeks and months went on. But more importantly perhaps, there was a sudden spike in prostitution advertisements at a separate classified website operated by Village Voice called "backpage.com". Before Craigslist implemented that policy, backpage was never really used at all, but after that policy, it both saw a shortrun spike, and a longrun trend upwards in terms of daily posts, suggesting if nothing else that the cross-price elasticity of supply for these kinds of ads is not zero in the shortrun, but especially the longrun."

And here's the NY Times story: Craigslist Blocks Access to ‘Adult Services’ Pages, and two further stories that note that it will be easy for prostitution ads to relocate to other sites: How Censoring Craigslist Helps Pimps, Child Traffickers and Other Abusive Scumbags; and  Pimp Mobile--Craigslist shuts its "adult" section. Where will sex ads go now?  More recently, the "censored" label has been removed but the section remains closed: Craigslist Pulls ‘Censored’ Label From Sex Ads Area

Update (Sept. 15): ‘Adult Services’ Closed, Craigslist Says
"Craigslist, for the first time since it unexpectedly blocked sex ads from its site this month, said Wednesday that it had permanently closed its “adult services” section but defended its right to post sex-related ads as well as its efforts to fight sex trafficking.

"William Clinton Powell, director of customer relations and law enforcement relations at Craigslist, made the remarks Wednesday in testimony prepared for a hearing on sex trafficking of minors before the House Judiciary Committee.

“Craigslist has terminated its adult services section,” Mr. Powell said in his prepared remarks. “Those who formerly posted adult services ads on Craigslist will now advertise at countless other venues.”

NSF "Grand Challenge" white paper on market design

The National Science Foundation has asked for two-thousand-word 'white papers' on challenges worth exploring over the next decade.

Here's mine, on Market Design.

Abstract

In the past fifteen years, the emerging field of Market Design has solved important practical problems, and clarified both what we know and what we don’t yet know about how markets work. The challenge is to understand complex markets well enough to fix them when they’re broken, and implement new markets and market-like mechanisms when needed.

Among markets that economists have helped design are multi-unit auctions for complementary goods such as spectrum licenses; computerized clearinghouses such as the National Resident Matching Program, through which most American doctors get their first jobs; decentralized labor markets such as those for more advanced medical positions and for academic positions; school choice systems; and kidney exchange, which allows patients with incompatible living donors to exchange donor kidneys with other incompatible patient-donor pairs.

These markets differ from markets for simple commodities, in which, once prices have been established, everyone can choose whatever they can afford. Most of these markets are matching markets, in which you can’t just choose what you want, you also have to be chosen. One of the scientific challenges is to learn more about the workings of complex matching markets, such as labor markets for professionals, college admissions, and marriage.

Matchmaking at Harvard, the roommate problem

The Crimson reports, In Choosing Roommates, Deans Become Matchmakers.

"The day is June 10, and Resident Dean of Freshmen Sue Brown embarks upon what will be a five-week quest: sorting 398 first-years into rooms in Grays, Matthews, and Weld Halls.


"Much of this task remains the same as it has been in years past. She sorts freshmen largely by hand, thoroughly reading incoming freshmen’s responses to roommate questionnaires. During the process, her floor is covered with a mass of paper that is eventually divided into nine distinct piles—one of the early steps in the lengthy matchmaking process.

"But in the midst of that process, technology rears its head. In Adobe Acrobat, Brown categorizes freshmen, using colors to sort the incoming students by geography and stamping the freshmen’s rooming surveys with various logos made in Photoshop. A cartoon of a chess piece marks a chess player. A compass is reserved for the “curious and adventurous” freshman, Brown says.

"Emblazoned with colors and cartoons, the surveys are printed out and scattered on a floor in Brown’s residence in Weld Hall. From there, she divides the students into three categories based on students’ self-reported levels of sociability.

"Social tendencies are one of the most important factors in determining roommate compatibility “because it’s going to be something that comes between roommates before they even meet each other,” she says.

"But other factors matter as well, Brown adds. From the sleeping habits freshmen keep and the sports they play, to the neatness they maintain and the number of roommates they want, the resident deans take into account a slew of determinants of each first-year’s personality.

"Some factors, like musical tastes, are often stronger predictors of compatibility than others, according to Brown.
...
"Resident deans often try to place local freshmen with those from outside the area, especially international students for whom going home during vacations is more difficult, according to Dean of Freshmen Thomas A. Dingman ’67.
...
"Every year, a small margin of freshmen—”about half a dozen”—are switched out of their original suites after approaching the FDO, Dingman says. Many more choose to block with and live with others in future years.

...
"After organizing the rooms, the deans turn to assembling the entryways.
“You want it to be a dIverse group, a microcosm of the freshman class,” Brown says.
But at the same time, the entryway can’t be so diverse that a student feels isolated. For example, the FDO tries to avoid placing only one international student in any entryway, Brown says. She also avoids putting two students from the same varsity sport or the same high school in a single entryway."

Somali Pirates

U.S. Forces Free Ship From Somali Pirates

"American officials said the rescue appeared to be the first time the American military had boarded a ship commandeered by Somali pirates, who have been hijacking vessel after vessel off Somalia’s coast and wreaking havoc on some of the busiest shipping lanes in the world.
"The Americans, however, are active in the area. Last year, Navy Seal snipers killed three pirates who were holding an American cargo ship captain in a lifeboat, after he had offered himself as a hostage in exchange for the safety of his crew.
"Despite the intense international naval presence in the region, the pirates are on track to have another banner year, with more than 30 ships hijacked so far in 2010, which has earned them tens of millions of dollars in ransoms. "

However, piracy seems to be becoming fully entrenched in the fabric of Somali political culture: In Somali Civil War, Both Sides Embrace Pirates

"For years, Somalia’s heavily armed pirate gangs seemed content to rob and hijack on the high seas and not get sucked into the messy civil war on land. Now, that may be changing, and the pirates are taking sides — both sides.

"While local government officials in Hobyo have deputized pirate gangs to ring off coastal villages and block out the Shabab, down the beach in Xarardheere, another pirate lair, elders said that other pirates recently agreed to split their ransoms with the Shabab and Hizbul Islam, another Islamist insurgent group.
"The militant Islamists had originally vowed to shut down piracy in Xarardheere, claiming it was unholy, but apparently the money was too good. This seems to be beginning of the West’s worst Somali nightmare, with two of the country’s biggest growth industries — piracy and Islamist radicalism — joining hands."

Dual career couples

Although dual career couples in academia aren't strictly speaking (only) a gender concern, the best collection of resources on academic couples I've found is on a site organized through an NSF program for the advancement of women in science and engineering careers.

It consists of links to reports both on what academic couples do, and on what universities do (or should do) to accomodate them and hire them.  One Stanford report, called Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know surveyed full time faculty at 13 research universities and found that 36% had partners employed in academia. (And of course many other professors are part of two-professional-career households even if their partner isn't an academic.)

So this is a big and growing issue for the academic labor market, likely to play out in different hiring policies, and employment patters for urban and rural universities.

There are obviously some market design issues, as well as strategy issues. For example, there are now legal restrictions on what you can ask a potential employee about her/his marital status. But academic couples also have to decide to what extent to do joint searches that involve/inform the potential employers at an early stage.

The AAUP has just released a set of Recommendations on Partner Accommodation and Dual Career Appointments (2010). Here's an accompanying story from Inside Higher Ed, which outlines some of the contradictory impulses behind the AAUP recommendations (which suggest both that partner hires should not be as adjuncts, nor should they come at the expense of adjunct positions): Doing 'Dual Career' Right.

Here are my earlier posts on couples, including discussion of how the couples match plays out for medical residents (and a link to a recent paper).

Shana Tova, 5771

Calendars both mark the passage of time and help people coordinate their activities. Labor Day is late this year, and the Jewish new year, Rosh HaShana is early, so this week has an unusual coincidence.

The Hebrew Calendar has a complicated relationship with the secular calendar.

Here's hoping that the Author of Peace has peace in store for the coming year, and that the year is a sweet one for you all.

A long non-simultaneous kidney exchange chain

Mike Rees' revolution in kidney exchange--non-simultaneous extended altrusitic donor (NEAD) chains--continues to grow.. Here's a story about a long one, brokered by the National Kidney Registry, that ended recently in San Diego: San Diego couple final link in kidney transplant chain.

"The transplant chain relied on donations involving 21 donors and 21 recipients in seven states. Each person in need of a kidney had a donor partner — a relative, friend, co-worker or possibly a stranger — whose kidney was not a match for them.
...
"The 21-transplant chain began Jan. 20 in New York with a donor whose kidney was given to a patient at the same Bronx hospital.


"That recipient had a partner donor whose kidney was flown to UC San Francisco Medical Center and given to a recipient. That person’s partner donated a kidney that was sent to St. Barnabas Medical Center in New Jersey.

"The chain continued to crisscross the country — including nine surgeries on Tuesday and Wednesday — before finally ending in San Diego...
"The final recipient did not have a donor partner but was on Sharp Memorial’s transplant list.
...
"“This is why we get up and go to work,” said Dr. Barry Browne, who performed the transplants at Sharp Memorial.

“With this new way of facilitating transplants, we can do a lot more,” he said. ...

"There has been no nationwide program for live donor transplants, however, and transplant centers have relied on their own networks to find suitable organs. Donors and patients also have turned to the Internet, with MatchingDonors.com creating the largest online network.


"UNOS started a pilot program this year for kidney paired-donation transplants and five medical centers will participate.
“We expect to have the first of these chains done in the fall,” said UNOS spokeswoman Anne Paschke.

"Browne said the need for kidney transplants is expected to continue growing because the leading causes of kidney failure — including diabetes, high blood pressure and obesity — continue to escalate."

NBER Market Design conference, October 8-9 in Cambridge MA

The conference is organized by Susan Athey and Parag Pathak. Here is a preliminary program:

Friday, October 8

8:30 am Breakfast
8:55 am  Opening Remarks

9:00 am Dynamic Auctions
Should Auctions Be Transparent?
Dirk Bergemann and Johannes Horner, Yale University

Optimal Dynamic Auctions for Durable Goods: Posted Prices and Fire Sales
Simon Board, UC, Los Angeles, Andy Skrypacz, Stanford University

10:30 am Break
10:45 am Auction Design: Theory
Optimal Auctions with Financial Constrained Bidders
Mallesh Pai, University of Pennsylvania and Rakesh Vohra, Northwestern University

Core-Selecting Auctions with Incomplete Information
Lawrence Ausubel and Oleg V. Baranov, University of Maryland

12:15 pm Lunch

1:15 pm Design of Online Markets
Hidden Market Design: A Peer-to-Peer Backup Market
Sven Seuken and David Parkes, Harvard University; Kamal Jain, Denis Charles, and Max Chickering, Microsoft

Engineering Trust: Reciprocity in the Production of Reputation Information
Gary Bolton, Pennsylvania State University, Ben Greiner, University of New South Wales, Axel Ockenfels, University of Cologne

Propose with a Rose? Signaling in Internet Dating Markets
Soohyung Lee, University of Maryland, Muriel Niederle, Stanford University and NBER

3:30 pm Break

3:45 pm Empirical Approaches in Matching Markets
Gaming School Choice Mechanisms
Yinghua He, Toulouse School of Economics

Aggregate Matchings
Federico Echenique. SangMok Lee, and Matthew Shum, California Institute of Technology

5:15 pm Adjourn

Saturday, October 9
8:30 am Breakfast

9:00 am  Applications of Large Matching Markets

Matching with Couples: Stability and Incentives in Large Markets
Fuhito Kojima, Stanford University, Parag Pathak, MIT and NBER, Alvin Roth, Harvard University and NBER

Participation versus Free-Riding in Large Scale, Multi-Hospital Kidney Exchange
Itai Ashlagi, MIT, Alvin Roth, Harvard University and NBER

10:30 am Break
10:45 am Auction Design: Applications

Reserve Prices in Internet Advertising Auctions: A Field Experiment
Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford Univeristy, and Michael Schwarz, Yahoo!

Set Asides and Subsidies in Timber Auctions
Susan Athey, Harvard University and NBER, Dominic Coey and Jon Levin, Stanford University

12:15 pm Lunch

1:15 pm Matching Market Design

Incentive Compatible Allocation and the Exchange of Discrete Resources
Marek Pycia, UC, Los Angeles, Utku Unver, Boston College

Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading Networks
John Hatfield, Stanford University, Scott Kominers, Harvard University,
Alexandru Nichifor, University of Maastricht, Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University, Alexander Westkamp, University of Bonn

2:45 pm Adjourn

7 sessions, 40 minutes per paper, no discussants, 10 minutes for general discussion

THE LAW CLERK HIRING PLAN FOR 2010

Here it is, with today (Sept 7, 2010), being the "First date when applications may be received" for federal judicial clerkships.

Similarly, the "First date and time when judges may contact applicants to schedule interviews" is 10:00 a.m. (EDT), Monday, September 13, 2010, and the
"First date and time when interviews may be held and offers made" is 8:00 a.m. (EDT) Thursday, September 16, 2010.

When we last surveyed the market, there was a lot of cheating in connection with these dates, see
Avery, Christopher, Jolls, Christine, Posner, Richard A. and Roth, Alvin E., "The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" . University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486.


That doesn't mean that the new "system" might not be an improvement on the old unravelling/exploding offer regimes of previous years, see
Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, "The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" University of Chicago Law Review, 68, 3, Summer, 2001, 793-902.
But it will be interesting to see if the level of "non-compliance" will hold steady, or if it will increase until unraveling resumes.

Note that I am not counting exploding offers as non-compliance; they are explicitly allowed, as long as they aren't made before 10am on Sept. 13. The plan states
"Offers may be made as soon as interviews are permitted under the Plan. Generally, it is for the judge to determine the terms upon which an offer is extended. However, judges are encouraged not to require an applicant to accept an offer immediately without reasonable time to weigh it against other viable options that remain open to the applicant. This would not prohibit an applicant from accepting an offer on the spot.


"When setting up an interview with a clerkship applicant, a judge should make clear to the applicant his or her interview and offer policies or practices. For example, a judge may have a policy or practice of making offers and entirely filling his or her clerkship slots, even if more interviews are scheduled for that day. The applicant should be told this in a timely fashion, so that the applicant's decision to accept or decline the interview is appropriately informed. Applicants should also be informed if the judge will ask them to make a decision on the spot.

The law and economics of surrogate motherhood: what contracts should be legal?

Aristides N. Hatzis writes to let me know about his work on the law and economics of surrogacy, and related topics, as follows (I've inserted the abstracts of the two papers):

"I follow religiously your blog and your work after reading your very interesting paper on repugnance and markets. I am also interested in the subject since I am working on the economics of self-ownership. I am sending you two of my published papers you might find of interest:

'Just the Oven': A Law & Economics Approach to Gestational Surrogacy Contracts
Abstract:  Gestational surrogacy is a form of artificial insemination whereby a doctor implants the fertilized eggs of a woman into the surrogate's uterus. Gestational surrogacy contracts are unenforceable almost everywhere in the world. In this paper, we support the thesis that these contracts should be enforceable. Our approach is informed by the economic analysis of contract law and is predicated on the assumption that law should serve social welfare (as a function of individuals' well being). We discuss and rebut the arguments most often invoked against surrogacy: immorality, commodification and exploitation. Finally, we present some legal policy proposals for the regulation of gestational contracts in order to safeguard the best interests of the child, to ensure the informed consent of surrogate mothers and to protect intentional parents from the surrogate's opportunistic or reckless behavior.

From Soft to Hard Paternalism and Back: The Regulation of Surrogate Motherhood in Greece
Abstract: This paper is a critical analysis of the regulation of surrogate motherhood in Greece; I will discuss the way that a consensus reached in the legislative committee among liberal and conservative jurists on the matter of compensation of surrogate mothers was undermined by intra-party populism in the Greek parliament which banned it to avoid commodification; inevitably the law fell into disuse leading to a new law which allowed government-defined compensation, not the one agreed by the parties; the regulation of surrogate motherhood in Greece is a typical example of the deleterious effects of the combination of legal formalism and legal moralism in contemporary Greece.

"You might also find these blogs of interest: http://www.self-ownership.org/ , http://www.economicanalysisoflaw.org/"

Misc. kidney exchanges

The New England Journal of Medicine has created a virtual library of it's kidney transplant articles, I think all of which are now ungated. See e.g.
A Nonsimultaneous, Extended, Altruistic-Donor Chain by Michael A. Rees, M.D., Ph.D., Jonathan E. Kopke, B.S., Ronald P. Pelletier, M.D., Dorry L. Segev, M.D., Matthew E. Rutter, M.D., Alfredo J. Fabrega, M.D., Jeffrey Rogers, M.D., Oleh G. Pankewycz, M.D., Janet Hiller, M.S.N., Alvin E. Roth, Ph.D., Tuomas Sandholm, Ph.D., M. Utku Ünver, Ph.D. and Robert A. Montgomery, M.D., D.Phil.
N Engl J Med 2009; 360:1096-1101March 12, 2009

The University of Michigan performed its first simultaneous 3-pair kidney exchange this summer, on July 21 2010: UM Paired Kidney Exchange Program performs its first triple kidney transplant exchange.
One of the recipients was quoted in a local news story as pointing out another advantage of live donation: ""Nobody else had to die for us to get this"

College admissions statistics, sampled for 2010-11

The NY Times offers a table of statistics (which I can't copy properly for some reason) and an accompanying story about the admissions results from some selective colleges, including information on

Applicants

Admits

Admit Rate

Offered Spot on Wait List

Accepted Spot on Wait List

Wait List Admits

Enrolled

Total Admits Attending (Yield)

The story says "The percentage of students accepted at many of the nation's top institutions hit new lows, while waiting lists reached new heights, says Barmak Nassirian, executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "Mr. Nassirian points to the economic downturn as fueling uncertainty among colleges about how many accepted students would actually attend — the so-called yield. "The underlying method by which families have historically paid for college was basically obliterated by the triple whammy that this recession has delivered,” he says. "As a result, colleges had to hedge their bets this year: some offered a waiting-list spot to more than three times as many students as their entering class, leaving hundreds, even thousands, of students dangling, sometimes into late summer. " Meanwhile, at the University of Iowa, Undercounting Freshmen, Iowa Scrambles for Room "IOWA CITY — Like an airline overselling a flight, the University of Iowa extended admission this year to several thousand more applicants than it could accommodate on campus in this fall’s freshman class. "While nearly every university overbooks each year, relying on sophisticated algorithms that predict just how many admitted students will probably go elsewhere, Iowa officials were surprised to learn this spring how far off they were in their math. This fall’s freshman class is likely to have more than 400 more students than last year’s, an unintended increase of about 10 percent, for a total of just over 4,500. " And at Harvard, Harvard College Admits 12 Fall Transfers "After two years during which no transfer students were admitted, 12 new students have arrived at Harvard as the latest additions to the classes of 2012 and 2013. "Out of 614 transfer applicants, 13 were accepted and 12 decided to attend, according to Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid William R. Fitzsimmons ’67. ... "The students—four sophomores and eight juniors, according to transfer student Sarah L. A. Erwin ’13—come from a variety of universities around the world, including small private schools like 26-student Deep Springs College, research universities like Brown and Georgetown, and international schools such as McGill in Canada and Pontificia Universidad Catolica in Chile."

Ethnic dating sites

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Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate

That's the title of a paper that Judd Kessler and I recently finished, motivated by one aspect of organ donation in Singapore (and recently also in Israel), namely that registered donors receive priority for organs should they need a transplant themselves:
Kessler, Judd B. and Alvin E. Roth, Organ Allocation Policy and the Decision to Donate," June 2010.  (As an added bonus, Judd is on the jobmarket this year.)

Here's the abstract: "Organ donations from deceased donors (cadavers) provide the majority of transplanted organs in the United States, and one deceased donor can save numerous lives by providing multiple organs. Nevertheless, most Americans are not registered organ donors despite the relative ease of becoming one. We study in the laboratory an experimental game modeled on the decision to register as an organ donor, and investigate a variety of strategies for increasing the donation rate. We find that an organ allocation policy giving priority on waiting lists to those who previously registered as donors has a significant positive impact on registration.

And this is from the concluding section
"Before further considering the benefits of the priority rule, it is worth noting that there are other ways to change policy that could positively affect the number of registered organ donors. For example, one proposal that has received a good deal of attention would change the current “opt in” registration method used in the United States to an “opt out” system in which everyone is presumed to be a donor unless he or she actively indicates otherwiseAnother proposal, “mandated choice” would require everyone (e.g. who applies for a driver’s license) to specifically indicate whether they wished to be a donor or not. We want to briefly argue here that the priority rule that we consider may create a more direct link between registration as an organ donor and subsequent successful organ recovery and transplantation than policies that change the procedure by which individuals register as organ donors.

Attempts to increase organ donation rates by changing the default organ registration status (and adopting an “opt out” policy) would surely generate more registered organ donors since those who do not take any explicit action would automatically be registered as donors (see Johnson and Goldstein 2003, 2004, who find direct evidence that registration rates are higher with an “opt out” system).[2] However, such a policy may weaken the link between the registration decision and the legal clarity of the potential donors’ last wishes. Under current United States gift law, changing the default status is likely to have legal consequences that could be detrimental to organ retrieval.

Since the Uniform Anatomical Gift Act of 1968 (UAGA), an individual can make his or her own legally binding decision to be an organ donor after death, which does not require the consent of next of kin (Glazier 2009). However, a donor symbol on a driver’s license has not been considered sufficient evidence of the deceased’s intent to donate in order to proceed without permission from the next of kin. Aside from the fact that the driver’s license is often not available in a timely way, the law allowed that a registered donor could have changed his or her mind about donation subsequent to the issuance of the driver’s license (Glazier 2006).

In recent years, computer registries have allowed for fast checks of organ registration status. They also provide individuals with a way to easily change their organ donor status online, which allows the presence in the registry to be interpreted as intent to donate. The legal status of the anatomical gift has meant doctors can recover donated organs without receiving explicit permission the next of kin (see Glazier 2006). In contrast, a donor registration that does not reflect a positive decision to donate (as under an “opt out” policy) may not be taken as evidence of the deceased’s intent in the legally compelling way that registration does currently. Under an opt out policy, approval from next of kin might again become necessary for an organ to be transplanted.[3]

A "mandated choice" system would also change the way in which individuals became registered donors (see Thaler and Sunstein 2008 and Thaler 2009). Under “mandated choice,” every individual who registered for a driver’s license (or potentially other state or federal documentation) would be required to indicate that he will be an organ donor or that he will not. While there is evidence that a “mandated choice” policy would (like “opt out”) generate more registration of organ donors (Johnson and Goldstein 2003, 2004), similar concerns arise about whether a change to mandated choice would lead to more donated organs and transplants. While the UAGA makes registering to be a donor legally binding under an “opt in” policy, failing to register as an organ donor is not a legally binding decision, whereas registering as a person who declines to donate would likely be legally binding on the next of kin. Discussions with the staff at the New England Organ Bank suggests that they are able to recover organs from about half of all non-registered potential donors in New England by approaching next of kin. This means that more than half of the people who are not currently registered under “opt in” would need to choose “yes” in mandated choice to increase the recovery rate.[4] Consequently, it remains an empirical question whether a change to “mandated choice” would generate more organ transplants.

Even though registration under “opt out” and “mandated choice” systems may raise legal concerns about the intent of registrants under the UAGA, changing the procedure by which individuals register as donors may still be a fruitful avenue to pursue to increase organ donation and recovery.[5] Gift laws can also potentially be changed to address any legal concerns that might arise from new policies. We simply see these legal issues as additional hurdles to monitor and overcome in successfully implementing a change in registration policy. One attraction of the priority rule is that it seems to avoid these additional hurdles since it preserves the current donor registration process as is (and thus is consistent with current United States law regarding donor intent at time of death).

While comparing the different mechanisms in our experiment, the priority rule, rebate, and discount all generate an incentive to donate that offsets the costs of donation. But the priority rule has two advantages over the rebate and discount both inside and outside of the laboratory. First, the simplicity and elegance of the priority rule (as suggested by its outperformance of the rebate and discount at the start of the game) suggests that its benefits are particularly clear and salient. Second, and more importantly, the priority rule is feasible to implement and can be implemented without any additional costs to the system. In contrast, decreasing the costs of registering to be an organ donor is difficult (it is difficult to both understand the costs and to decrease them) and providing a rebate through the form of monetary incentives is not currently allowed by the U.S. National Organ Transplant Act and by similar legislation in many countries.

...

The priority rule used in Singapore appears to be a powerful policy tool. Results from this experiment suggest that it performs as well as or better than discounts and rebates that are of a similar magnitude to the benefits of priority. It is a plausible mechanism to increase rates of registration, and policy makers should consider allocation policy along with other policies to generate more organ transplants."

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The wheels of justice and Ladies' Nights

A year ago today I blogged about a lawyer who objected to differential pricing for the two sides of a matching market: he didn't like "ladies' nights" at bars, and brought suit to end them.

Today, over at the Volokh Conspiracy, chief conspirator Eugene Volokh points us to the resolution of the case, which was rejected by the district court, and has now been confirmed on appeal to the Second Circuit. Here's the court's opinion.

The opinion begins "The facts of the case are straightforward. During “Ladies’ Nights,” several New York City nightclubs (“Nightclubs”) charge males more for admission than females or give males less time than females to enter the Nightclubs for a reduced price or for free. Den Hollander, who was admitted to the Nightclubs under this admission regime, attributes these pernicious “Ladies’ Nights” to “40 years of lobbying and intimidation, [by] the special interest group called ‘Feminism’ [which] has succeed in creating a customary practice . . . of invidious discrimination of men.” Den Hollander filed suit, on behalf of himself and others like him, alleging violation of his equal protection rights pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1983."

As it happens, the case doesn't depend on any economic arguments, but on the fact that nightclubs aren't state actors...