Black markets in college graduation tickets

Here's a seasonal story, from the Guardian;

Need a college graduation ticket? There's a black market for that
Tickets for New York University’s 2019 commencement ceremony are being advertised for as much as $250

"It’s graduation season in the United States, which means lots of caps, gowns, pomp and circumstance, corny speeches, selfies – and an underground trade in graduation tickets to top off the celebrations.

"Many colleges and universities limit the number of people who can attend a graduation ceremony, providing students with tickets to the event they can distribute to friends and family. These tickets are often transferable, meaning someone can give a ticket to a friend who needs an extra seat. But this also means that students can sell their tickets – though banned by most schools – to get some extra cash.

"This “black market” around graduation has been documented for years, especially with the rise of social media networks. People from schools like Princeton, University of San Francisco and College of Charleston have advertised tickets for hundreds of dollars, the Wall Street Journal reported in 2007. At the University of Virginia, students sold tickets for an average price of $150 for last year’s commencement ceremony in Charlottesville.

"Now at New York University (NYU), tickets for the class of 2019’s commencement ceremony are being advertised for as much as $250."

Surrogacy and citizenship: bringing the babies home isn't always so easy

Even the U.S., which is a center of surrogacy, employs outdated rules to determine which surrogate children born overseas are automatically American citizens.  Here's a story from the NY Times which (among other things) involves reverse fertility tourism. The American male couple had a friend in Britain serve as the surrogate. (Mostly the tourism goes the other way, because British surrogates can't be paid, so they aren't easy to arrange....)

Both Parents Are American. The U.S. Says Their Baby Isn’t. By Sarah Mervosh.

"James Derek Mize is an American citizen, born and raised in the United States. His husband, who was born in Britain to an American mother, is a United States citizen, too.

"But the couple’s infant daughter isn’t, according to the State Department.

"She was born abroad to a surrogate, using a donor egg and sperm from her British-born father. Those distinct circumstances mean that, under a decades-old policy, she did not qualify for citizenship at birth, even though both her parents are American.
...
"The interpretation [of the law] has led the State Department to regard births from assisted reproductive technology as “out of wedlock,” if the source of the sperm and the egg do not match married parents. Such a designation comes with extra requirements for transmitting citizenship, including showing that a biological parent is an American citizen who has spent at least five years in the United States."

California surrogacy

Surrogacy serves all sorts of people, mostly couples who don't have a working womb between them. But, as Jenny Kleeman reports in the Guardian, it also can serve those whose need isn't medical. She interviews the controversial fertility doctor Vicken Sahakian, who is  known among other things for having helped a Spanish woman become the oldest known person to give birth, at 67.  Here's a link with some excerpts from the excellent, long article (read it all for more about the clients and the surrogates).

'Having a child doesn’t fit into these women's schedule': is this the future of surrogacy? 

"His clients are straight, gay, young and old, and they come to him from across the globe, particularly from China, or parts of Europe where surrogacy is either illegal or very tightly regulated. In the UK, surrogacy is legal, but surrogates can claim only expenses for carrying a child for another person. California law allows surrogates to earn a profit, and upholds the rights of intended parents over anyone else who is involved in the creation of their babies. It’s given the state a reputation as the most surrogacy-friendly place in the world.
...
"And as the range of fertility options open to clients has diversified, so have their requests. Now, a growing number of women are coming to Sahakian for “social” surrogacy: they want to have babies that are biologically their own, but don’t want to carry them. There is no medical reason for them to use a surrogate; they just choose not to be pregnant, so they conceive babies through IVF and then hire another woman to gestate and give birth to their baby. It is the ultimate in outsourced labour.
...
"Five years ago, Sahakian says he would preside over a handful of social surrogacy cases a year; now he sees at least 20. “More and more every year. ... It costs $150,000 to have a baby this way. “If social surrogacy was more affordable, more women would be doing it, absolutely. There’s an advantage to being pregnant, the bonding, I understand that, and from experience I can say that most women love to be pregnant. But a lot of women don’t want to be pregnant and lose a year of their careers.”
...
"The typical candidates are models and actors who are doing well but haven’t yet made their name. “They tell me point blank, ‘If I get pregnant, I will lose my part. I work, I don’t have time because of work. I model, I act, I look good like this and I don’t want to disfigure my body.’”
...
"The official guidelines set out by the American Society for Reproductive Medicine (ASRM) say that gestational carriers – surrogates who carry babies conceived through IVF, with eggs from another woman – should be used only when there is a medical need. But Sahakian has no qualms about “defining medical reasons broadly”, as he puts it. “What’s the end result here? Somebody wants to be a parent. I’m facilitating that. I understand that it’s controversial, it’s borderline unethical for some people, but put yourself in the shoes of a 26-year-old model who is making her living by modelling swimsuits. Tell me something – is it that unethical, to say let’s not destroy this woman’s career?”
...
"Sahakian has a reputation for pushing boundaries, and he relishes it: it’s given him a notoriety that drives his business. In 2001, he helped the oldest woman on record in France, Jeanine Salomone, conceive using donor eggs and give birth at 62. A scandal erupted in France – where both surrogacy and artificial insemination of post-menopausal women are illegal – when it emerged that Jeanine’s brother, Robert, was the biological father of the son she gave birth to. ...
The press descended on Sahakian, who said the siblings had presented themselves in his consulting room as a married couple [they had the same last names], and that Jeanine had lied about her age. "

Same sex marriage comes to Taiwan

Here's the NY Times story on the new law allowing marriage, and on still to be debated issues including family formation (adoption, surrogacy...):

After a Long Fight, Taiwan’s Same-Sex Couples Celebrate New Marriages
By Chris Horton, May 24, 2019

"TAIPEI, Taiwan — Typically drab and nondescript, Taipei’s Xinyi District Household Registration office exploded with life and color on Friday morning.

"Taiwanese and foreign reporters surrounded the office’s main desk to witness history, as Taiwan became first in Asia to legally recognize same-sex marriages.
...
"The registrations came exactly a week after Taiwan’s legislature made headlines worldwide by voting to recognize same-sex marriage.
...
"Mr. Chi said that Taiwan’s separate-but-equal law for same-sex couples was a step in the right direction, but that more work remained to be done. Instead of having a separate law for gay couples, he said, Taiwan’s civil code should be amended to simply include all couples. The issues of transnational couples and full adoption rights also need the be addressed, he said.
...
"The law passed last Friday went beyond what the constitutional court demanded. The 2017 court ruling spoke in terms of the right to equality and freedom of marriage, but it did not address equality with respect to building a family, said Margaret Lewis, a law professor at Seton Hall.

“Now the question is whether the court will be asked to rule on how the constitutional right to equality applies to adoption by married couples of the same sex,” she said. “Other issues of concern include whether to legalize surrogacy and changes to laws related to assisted reproductive technology.”

Matching comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

I rely on comics to let me know important subjects to study (doesn't everyone?). Here's one from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal

Match-Up 2019 in Switzerland, May 26-29

Here's the program. (It contains abstracts following the schedule...)

Sunday, May 26th
14:00 - 14:15    Conference Opening (Bettina Klaus)
14:15 - 14:40“Stability Against Robust Deviations in the Roommate Problem”Daisuke Hirata, Yusuke Kasuya, andKentaro Tomoeda
14:40 - 15:05“Robust   Group   Strategy-Proofness”Steven   KivinenandNorovsambuu Tumennasan
15:05 - 15:30“Robust Design in Monotonic Matching Markets: A Case for Firm-Proposing Deferred-Acceptance”Lars Ehlersand Jordi Masso
15:30-16:00Coffee Break
16:00 - 17:20    Poster Presentation Session 1
“Preprocessing  in  Matching  Problems”  Maxence  Delorme,  Ser-gio  Garc`ıa,  Jacek  Gondzio,  Joerg  Kalcsics,  David  Manlove,  andWilliam Pettersson
“Legal  Assignments,  the  EADAM  (Efficiency  Adjusted  DeferredAcceptance   Mechanism)   Algorithm”   Yuri   Faenza   andXuanZhang
“A General Framework for Stable Roommate Problems: A Preliminary Report”Muge Fidan and Esra Erdem
“Preference Manipulation in Two-Sided Matching - Strategic Behavior and Robustness of Solution Algorithms” Christian Haas
“Practical Issues in Matching - A Case Study on Genetic Counseling Admissions in North America” Jonah Peranson
“Unpopularity Factor in the Marriage and Roommates Problems”Suthee Ruangwises and Toshiya Itoh
“School choice with priority levels:  Constrained Efficient and FairAssignment” Thomas Wouters

Monday,May 27

09:10 CSF Welcome Address

09:25 - 10:10    Invited  Talk“Parameterizing  Stable  Matching  Problems” Ildi Schlotter

10:10 - 10:35“Stable   Noncrossing   Matchings” Suthee   Ruangwises and Toshiya Itoh

10:35 - 11:05    Coffee Break

11:05 - 11:30 “Refugee Resettlement” David Delacretaz, Scott Duke Kominers, and Alexander Teytelboym

11:30 - 11:55 “Matching Problem of Civil Service”Ashutosh Thakur

11:55 - 12:20 “Trading  Networks  with  General  Preferences” Jan  Christoph Schlegel

12:20 - 13:45    Lunch

13:45 - 14:30    Invited Talk “International Kidney Exchange Programmes:  Op-timisation and Games”Peter Biro

14:30 - 14:55 “Pareto Optimal Coalitions of Fixed Size” ́Agnes Cseh,  Tam ́as Fleiner, and Petra Harjan 

14:55 - 15:20 “Balanced Stable Marriage:  How Close is Close Enough?” Sushmita Gupta, Sanjukta Roy, Saket Saurabh, and Meirav Zehavi

15:20 - 15:50    Coffee Break

15:50 - 16:15“Flexibility in House Allocation and Housing Markets” Madhav Raghavan

16:15 - 16:40 “Endowment Manipulations in Probabilistic Assignment Problem”Yuki Tamura

16:40 - 17:05“Equivalent   Choice   Functions   and   Stable   Mechanisms” Jan Christoph Schlegel

17:05 - 17:15    Short Break (no coffee)

17:15 - 17:40 “Centralized  Matching  with  Incomplete  Information” Marcelo Ariel Fernandezand Leeat Yariv

17:40 - 18:05“Simultaneous  Search:   Beyond  Independent  Successes” Ran  I.Shorrer

18:05 - 18:30 “Deferred Acceptance and Regret-free Truth-telling:  A Character-ization Result” Marcelo Ariel Fernandez

 Tuesday, May 28

09:00 - 09:45    Invited  Talk “Balanced  Exchange  in  a  Multi-Object  Shapley-Scarf Market” P ́eter Biro,Flip Klijn, and Szilvia Papai

09:45 - 10:10 “Competing for Priorities in School Choice” Greg Leo and MartinVan der Linden

10:10 - 10:35 “Information  Acquisition  Costs  in  Matching  Markets”  Nicole  S. Immorlica, Jacob D. Leshno, and Irene Y. Lo

10:35 - 11:05    Coffee Break

11:05 - 11:30 “Efficient and (Pretty) Fair Course Assignment with Quotas” Martin  Bichler,  Alexander  Hammerl,  Thayer  Morrill,  and StefanWaldherr

11:30 - 11:55 “An Algorithm for Strong Stability in the Student-Project Alloca-tion Problem with Ties” Sofiat Olaosebikan and David Manlove

11:55 - 12:20“Strategy-Proof  Approximation  Algorithms  for  the  Stable  Mar-riage  Problem  with  Ties  and  Incomplete  Lists”,  Koki  Hamada, Shuichi Miyazaki, and Hiroki Yanagisawa

Wednesday, May 29th

09:00 - 09:45    Invited  Talk “Efficient  and  Incentive-Compatible  Liver  Ex-change” Haluk Ergin, Tayfun Sonmez, andM. Utku Unver

09:45 - 10:10 “Matching  for  the  Israeli  “Mechinot”  Gap-Year  Programs:  Handling Rich Diversity Requirements” Yannai A. Gonczarowski, Lior Kovalio, Noam Nisan, and Assaf Romm

10:10 - 10:35 “Recourse in Kidney Exchange Programs” Valentin Bartier, Yves Crama, Bart Smeulders, and Frits C.R. Spieksma

10:35 - 11:05    Coffee Break

11:05 - 11:30 “Obvious Dominance and Random Priority” Marek Pycia and Peter Troyan

11:30 - 11:55 “Subgame Perfect Equilibria under the Deferred Acceptance Algo-rithm” Keisuke Bando andYasushi Kawase

11:55 - 12:20 “Optimizing Reserves in School Choice:  A Dynamic ProgrammingApproach” Franklyn  Wang,  Ravi  Jagadeesan,  and  Scott  Duke Kominers

12:20 - 13:45    Lunch

13:45 - 14:10 “Strategy-proof,  Envy-free  and  Pareto  Efficient  Online  Mecha-nisms for Fair Division with Additive Valuations” Martin Aleksandrov and Toby Walsh

14:10 - 14:35 “An Alternative Approach to Asylum Assignment” Gian Caspari

14:35 - 15:00 “Matching  with  Myopic  and  Farsighted  Players” Jean-Jacques Herings, Ana Mauleon, and Vincent Vannetelbosch

15:00 - 15:30    Coffee Break

15:30 - 16:15    Invited Talk “Pareto Optimal Allocation under Uncertain Pref-erences” Haris Aziz,  Peter Bir ́o,  Ronald de Haan,  and Baharak Rastegari

16:15 - 16:40    CSF Award and Algorithms Award

16:40 - 18:00    Poster Presentation Session 2A

ll papers as in Poster Presentation Session 1 (except for Jonah Peranson and Christian Haas).

19:00Dinner

Matching early when information is costly, by Grenet, He, and Kübler

Here's a new paper on school matching that takes preference formation seriously:

Decentralizing Centralized Matching Markets:
Implications from Early Offers in University Admissions
by Julien Grenet, Yinghua He, and Dorothea Kübler
May 2019

Abstract
 The matching literature commonly rules out that market design itself shapes agent preferences. Underlying this premise is the assumption that agents know their own preferences at the outset and that preferences do not change throughout the matching process. This assumption implies that a centralized market where agents receive at most one offer can dominate a decentralized market where multiple offers to agents are possible. Using a quasi-experiment in Germany’s university admissions, we provide evidence against this assumption. We study a centralized clearinghouse that implements the early stages of the university-proposing Gale-Shapley deferred-acceptance mechanism in real time, resembling a decentralized market with continuous offers, rejections, and acceptances. With data on the exact timing of every decision, we show that early offers are more likely to be accepted than (potential) later offers, despite early offers not being made by more desirable universities. Furthermore, early offers are only accepted after some time rather than immediately. These results and direct survey evidence are consistent with a model of information acquisition: it is costly for students to learn about universities and accepting a university that turns out to be inferior causes regret. We discuss and rule out some alternative hypotheses. Our findings motivate a hybrid mechanism that balances centralization and decentralization. By allowing sequential learning, it improves welfare, especially in markets with substantial learning costs.

Vic Fuchs on the problems of employment-based health insurance, in JAMA

Vic Fuchs, the dean of American health economists, argues that employment-based insurance has an assortment problem focused on high income consumers (he compares it to Whole Foods versus Walmart) and a related high cost of administration.

May 9, 2019
Does Employment-Based Insurance Make the US Medical Care System Unfair and Inefficient?
Victor R. Fuchs, JAMA. Published online May 09, 2019. doi:10.1001/jama.2019.4812

"In the United States, the interests of high-income individuals dominate decisions about what medical care is offered and how it is financed. The result is a less efficient and less equitable medical care system than in other high-income countries. Employment-based insurance plays a key role in determining the production and financing of US medical care.
...
"Emphasis is on specialty and subspecialty care, expensive technology, extra capacity to facilitate access (US hospitals have an average occupancy rate of 65% compared with an average of 76% according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), and more and better-quality amenities, including space and privacy in the hospital.3 Architects who build in many countries suggest that design for US hospitals must also include better space for visitors and professional staff. This more costly product mix (specialty care and hospital amenities) is appreciated by patients at all income levels, but higher-income patients would and sometimes do pay extra for them. Many low- and middle-income households would be better off if medical care was less costly, and they had more money for other public and private goods and services.
...
"The preference of high-income patients for a costly product mix also adversely affects the efficiency of research and development in the choice of projects because market size influences the direction of investment in innovation. Almost all private medical research and development is directed toward extending the product mix with few attempts to discover new lower-cost interventions with truly disruptive innovations. The interests of high-income patients not only result in inefficiency in medical care production and innovation, but also adversely affect the way the United States finances health care. The present system, which is a mix of employment-based insurance, other private insurance, numerous government programs, including Medicaid and Medicare, each with its own eligibility rules and payment schemes, and out-of-pocket payments, is extremely costly to administer.4,5 The large role played by private insurance in the United States helps high-income households because the price of the insurance is the same regardless of income, whereas government plans typically require higher-income individuals to pay a larger share of the nation’s medical care bill."

Kidney exchange in India: the legal framework

Last week in Ahmedabad I had a chance to interact with Dr. Vivek Kute and his colleagues at the Trivedi Institute, to better understand the setting of their innovative kidney exchange program.  The legal framework is of course a big part of that environment.

Here's India's Transplantation of Human Organs and Tissues Act (THOA), 2014 (scroll down for the English language version).

As in other places, much of the law is shaped by  repugnance towards kidney sales. To this end, the law requires that an Authorisation Committee approve donation from someone who is not a "near relative," in the immediate nuclear family.

"Authorisation Committee.
(3) When the proposed donor and the recipient are not near relatives, the Authorisation Committee shall,- 
(i)evaluate that there is no commercial transaction between the recipient and the donor and that no payment has been made to the donor or promised to be made to the donor or any other person; 
(ii)prepare an explanation of the link between them and the circumstances which led to the offer being made;"

In the case of kidney exchange, only a near relative may serve as the intended donor (i.e. no uncles, aunts, cousins, etc.).

"(4)Cases of swap donation referred to under subsection (3A) of section 9 of the Act shall be approved by Authorisation Committee of hospital or district or State in which transplantation is proposed to be done and the donation of organs shall be permissible only from near relatives of the swap recipients."

The present law also does not allow nondirected donors.
***********

Here are some related earlier posts:

Tuesday, May 21, 2019 Robot-assisted kidney transplantation in Ahmedabad, India.

Monday, July 2, 2018

Kidney exchange in all its aspects: a view from India

Monday, May 14, 2018

Kidney Exchange in India: current conditions and recommendations for the future

Robot-assisted kidney transplantation in Ahmedabad, India.

I just returned from a very interesting visit to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, part of which was at the Trivedi Institute of Transplantation Sciences. There I had the privilege of sitting in on a robot-assisted kidney transplant operation conducted by Dr. Pranjal Modi. In the picture below, Dr. Modi is seated at the robot, that he operates with his hands and feet, while I watch on a screen, behind which is the patient (surrounded by doctors maintaining the various instruments inside him, through small incisions).

Dr. Pranjal R. Modi at the robot controls, while I watch him perform a kidney transplant.

Below is the two-dimensional image in which I followed what he was doing (but when he looks through the binoculars of the robot, he sees it in very clear 3 dimensions).

The high magnification is apparently a big aid to fast and precise surgery, which (together with small incisions) is one of the attractions of robotic surgery.

The robot was made by Da Vinci.
I think this is the patient-facing part of the particular robot being used:

Management Science’s 65th Anniversary Conference, May 20-21, Boston University

Management Science’s 65th Anniversary Conference
May 20 – 21, 2019
Boston University Questrom School of Business

"2019 marks the publication of the 65th volume of Management Science. To celebrate this anniversary, the editorial board is organizing a conference at Questrom School of Business, Boston University, from May 20th to May 21st, 2019. The focus of the conference is “Innovations in the Science and Practice of Management,” with an emphasis on integrating theory and practice. "

Here's the conference program.  It appears it will be a single stream, without parallel sessions.

It includes some talks explicitly labelled as market design, including, on Monday,
10:30 – 11:15 am Market Design, Behavioral and Experimental Economics and Management
Prof. Yan Chen, University of Michigan
Prof. Peter Cramton, University of Maryland
Prof. Axel Ockenfels, University of Cologne

And my talk on Tuesday,
Operational aspects of market design: the case of kidney exchange
By Itai Ashlagi and Al Roth

Gail Cornwall responds to the recent NY Times story on SF schools

Gail Cornwall, who follows San Francisco schools, replies to a recent article in the NY Times:

A cautionary tale about linking school choice and segregation

"Late last month, New York Times’ national education reporter Dana Goldstein wrote about public school choice and segregated schools in San Francisco. Headlined San Francisco Had an Ambitious Plan to Tackle School Segregation. It Made It Worse, the story hits several nails squarely on the head.

...

"But there are several important weaknesses in Goldstein’s article that could mislead parents, readers, and policymakers.

"The piece lays blame for segregation at the feet of San Francisco’s citywide public school choice system. It oversimplifies the views and priorities of lower-income non-white families. And, though Goldstein told me it wasn’t meant to, the article seems to endorse a controversial return to a restriction of choice in favor of a form of neighborhood attendance zones."

**********
Here's my earlier post on the NY Times article:

Tuesday, May 7, 2019

School choice in San Francisco--update in the NYT

I've blogged about other articles by Ms. Cornwall.

Yale SOM celebrates Vahideh Manshadi on the benefits of scale in kidney exchange

In Yale Insights (from Yale SOM):

Kidney Exchange Registries Should Collaborate to Save More Lives
VAHIDEH MANSHADI

"The results were surprising, says Manshadi. “We didn’t find any evidence that higher-frequency match runs were reducing the overall number of transplants by depleting the pool of potential donors. The total number of transplants remained stable.”

"What the researchers did find, however, was an unexpectedly high number of patients in both programs whose antibodies made them hard to match—what are called sensitized patients.

“The majority of patients in these programs are sensitized,” Manshadi says. “These patients have such high levels of antibodies in their blood that they are more likely to reject a donor organ. Frequent or infrequent matching will have little effect on them because it’s so much harder to find a donor whose kidney they can accept.”

"The best way of improving the outlook for these patients, says Manshadi, is to ensure they are prioritized when searching for matches. That, and find new ways of increasing—and diversifying—the number and range of donors coming into exchange programs. "
*********

And here's the original paper:

Effect of match‐run frequencies on the number of transplants and waiting times in kidney exchange
Itai Ashlagi  Adam Bingaman  Maximilien Burq  Vahideh Manshadi  David Gamarnik  Cathi Murphey  Alvin E. Roth  Marc L. Melcher  Michael A. Rees, American Journal of Transplantation, Volume18, Issue5, May 2018, Pages 1177-1186
First published: 31 October 2017 https://doi.org/10.1111/ajt.14566

Abstract
Numerous kidney exchange (kidney paired donation [KPD]) registries in the United States have gradually shifted to high‐frequency match‐runs, raising the question of whether this harms the number of transplants. We conducted simulations using clinical data from 2 KPD registries—the Alliance for Paired Donation, which runs multihospital exchanges, and Methodist San Antonio, which runs single‐center exchanges—to study how the frequency of match‐runs impacts the number of transplants and the average waiting times. We simulate the options facing each of the 2 registries by repeated resampling from their historical pools of patient‐donor pairs and nondirected donors, with arrival and departure rates corresponding to the historical data. We find that longer intervals between match‐runs do not increase the total number of transplants, and that prioritizing highly sensitized patients is more effective than waiting longer between match‐runs for transplanting highly sensitized patients. While we do not find that frequent match‐runs result in fewer transplanted pairs, we do find that increasing arrival rates of new pairs improves both the fraction of transplanted pairs and waiting times.

Repugnant phrasing

Japan's labor and immigration policies have been more restrictive than welcoming to an immigrant/migrant labor force.  So one can imagine a cheerful headline saying that was about to change, something along the lines of the final paragraph quoted below.  I don't think the following WSJ headline quite does the trick:

Japan Aims to Hire Foreigners for Nuclear Cleanup
The country’s largest utility is working to decommission the Fukushima plant amid radiation risks at the site of the 2011 disaster

"TOKYO—Japan’s largest utility is looking to foreign blue-collar workers to help decommission its Fukushima Daiichi nuclear-power plant amid a labor shortage exacerbated by radiation risks at the site of the 2011 nuclear disaster.

"Tokyo Electric Power Co. , or Tepco, said Thursday it has informed dozens of contractors that foreigners could qualify for a new type of visa that allows manual workers to stay in the country for five years. Workers who enter areas with elevated radiation would need sufficient Japanese-language skills to comprehend radiation levels and safety instructions, a Tepco spokeswoman said.

"The move is a shift in strategy for Tepco, which hasn’t employed large numbers of blue-collar foreigners at the Fukushima plant. As of February, there were 29 foreign workers, the spokeswoman said.

"Under a new law that went into effect this month, Japan plans to open its doors to about 340,000 workers over the next five years to help fill job vacancies in chronically understaffed industries such as construction and nursing care. The new law also creates another type of visa for higher-skilled blue-collar workers who can stay indefinitely."

Market design workshop, NBER October 18-19, 2019 in Cambridge.

Here's the call for papers

To:     NBER Market Design Working Group
From:   Michael Ostrovsky and Parag Pathak

The National Bureau of Economic Research workshop on Market Design is
a forum to discuss new academic research related to the design of
market institutions, broadly defined.
The next meeting will be held in Cambridge, MA on October 18 & 19, 2019.

We welcome new and interesting research, and are happy to see papers
from a variety of fields. Participants in the past meeting covered a
range of topics and methodological approaches.
Last year's program can be viewed at: http://papers.nber.org/sched/MDf18.

The conference does not publish proceedings or issue NBER working
papers - most of the presented papers are presumed to be published
later in journals.

There is no requirement to be an NBER-affiliated researcher to
participate. Younger researchers are especially encouraged to submit papers.

If you are interested in presenting a paper this year, please upload
a PDF version by August 1, 2019 to this link:
http://papers.nber.org/confsubmit/backend/cfp?id=MDf19.

Preference will be given to papers for which at least a preliminary
draft is ready by the time of submission. Only authors of accepted
papers will be contacted.

For presenters in North America, the NBER will cover the travel and
hotel costs. For speakers from outside North America, while the NBER
will not be able to cover the airfare, it can provide
support for hotel accommodation.

There are a limited number of spaces available for graduate students
to attend the conference, though we cannot cover their costs. Please
email ppathak@mit.edu a short nominating paragraph.

Please forward this announcement to any potentially interested
scholars. We look forward to hearing from you.

Finding out what employers value in a candidate, without deception, by Kessler, Low and Sullivan

Many experiments designed to detect how employers evaluate applications employ deception: artificial applications are sent to employers in response to advertisements of job openings, and the responses are recorded. This involves deception (to get employers to devote resources to fake applications).  Here's a design that seeks the same information without deception.

Incentivized Resume Rating: Eliciting Employer Preferences without Deception

Judd B. Kessler, Corinne Low, Colin Sullivan

NBER Working Paper No. 25800
Issued in May 2019 

"We introduce a new experimental paradigm to evaluate employer preferences, called Incentivized Resume Rating (IRR). Employers evaluate resumes they know to be hypothetical in order to be matched with real job seekers, preserving incentives while avoiding the deception necessary in audit studies. We deploy IRR with employers recruiting college seniors from a prestigious school, randomizing human capital characteristics and demographics of hypothetical candidates. We measure both employer preferences for candidates and employer beliefs about the likelihood candidates will accept job offers, avoiding a typical confound in audit studies. We discuss the costs, benefits, and future applications of this new methodology."

Randomization in Economics: a history, by Julian Jamison

Randomized experiments have a long history:

The Entry of Randomized Assignment into the Social Sciences

By:Julian C. Jamison

JOURNAL OF CAUSAL INFERENCE

Volume: 7,  

Issue: 1 MAR 2019

Abstract

Although the concept of randomized assignment in order to control for extraneous confounding factors reaches back hundreds of years, the first empirical use appears to have been in an 1835 trial of homeopathic medicine. Throughout the 19th century there was a growing awareness of the need for comparison groups, albeit often without the realization that randomization could be a clean method to achieve that goal. In the second and more crucial phase of this history, four separate but related disciplines introduced randomized control trials within a few years of one another in the 1920s: agricultural science; clinical medicine; educational psychology; and social policy (specifically political science). This brought increasing rigor to fields that were focusing more on causal relationships. In a third phase, the 1950s through 1970s saw a surge of interest in more applied randomized experiments in economics and elsewhere - both in the lab and especially in the field.

PBS on Uber's economists

Paul Solman interviews Uber economists (John Hall and others) and other economists (Susan Athey and Paul Oyer) on what economists do at Uber:

UNOS proposal for public comment: Eliminate the use of DSAs and regions from kidney and pancreas distribution

Public comment solicitation is a lengthy process--and this proposal has solicited many lengthy comments (for which you'll have to scroll down at the link...)

Proposal Overview

Status: Public Comment

Sponsoring Committee: Kidney Transplantation Committee & Pancreas Transplantation Committee

Strategic Goal 2: Provide equity in access to transplants

Read the concept paper (PDF; 1/2019)

Contacts: Scott Castro and Abigail Fox

View dashboard of proposed kidney distribution circles

Data request from the OPTN Kidney Transplantation CommitteeProvide simulation data on effect of removing DSA and region from kidney/pancreas/kidney-pancreas organ allocation policy

• View kidney pancreas analysis (PDF; 12/2018)
• Access kidney pancreas results (XLSX; 12/2018)

Executive summary

The Final Rule (hereafter “Final Rule”) sets requirements for allocation polices developed by the Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network (OPTN) and the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), including the use of sound medical judgement, achieving the best use of organs, preserving the ability for centers to decide whether to accept an organ offer, avoiding wasting organs, avoiding futile transplants, promoting patient access to transplantation and promoting efficiency. The Final Rule also includes a requirement that policies “shall not be based on the candidate’s place of residence or place of registration, except to the extent required” by the other requirements of the Final Rule.

In the past year, the United States Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) received critical comments regarding the OPTN/UNOS’s compliance with the National Organ Transplant Act (NOTA) and the Final Rule with respect to the geographic units used in lung and liver distribution. The OPTN/UNOS made rapid changes to eliminate using donation service area (DSA) and OPTN/UNOS regions (regions) in lung and liver distribution, respectively. Furthermore, the OPTN/UNOS Executive Committee directed the organ-specific committees to analyze their distribution systems and replace DSAs and regions with more rational units of distribution.

Policy 8: Allocation of Kidney and Policy 11: Allocation of Pancreas, Kidney-Pancreas, and Islets currently use DSA and region as geographic units of distribution. These are poor proxies for geographic distance between donors and transplant candidates because the disparate sizes, shapes, and populations of DSAs and regions result in an inconsistent application for all candidates. As noted in Department of Health and Human Services Administrator Sigounas’s letter to the OPTN/UNOS President, “DSAs and Regions have not and cannot be justified” under the regulatory requirements of the Final Rule.

Members of the OPTN/UNOS Kidney Transplantation Committee, joined by members from the OPTN/UNOS Pancreas Transplantation Committee and the OPTN/UNOS Pediatric Transplantation Committee, created the Kidney/Pancreas Workgroup (hereafter “the Workgroup”) in order to remove DSA and region from kidney and pancreas allocation policies. The Workgroup reviewed OPTN/UNOS data on current distribution practices, engaged Workgroup members on their collective clinical experience, and utilized the OPTN/UNOS Board of Directors’ “Geographic Organ Distribution Principles and Models” to develop five potential allocation options that would eliminate DSA and region from kidney and pancreas allocation policies.

The five variations that the Workgroup chose to model are:

1. A fixed concentric circle framework with a 150 nautical mile (NM) small circle and a 300 NM large circle
2. A fixed concentric circle framework with a 250 NM small circle and a 500 NM large circle
3. A fixed concentric circle framework with a single 500 NM circle
4. A hybrid framework with a single 500 NM circle that utilizes a small number of proximity points inside and outside of the circle, and
5. A hybrid framework with a single 500 NM circle that utilizes a large number of proximity points inside and outside of the circle.

These variations will be more comprehensively outlined in this paper’s “What Concepts Are Being Considered?” section. The Workgroup is not limiting itself to consideration of solely these five variations, but rather used these variations as choices to model in the Kidney/Pancreas Simulated Allocation Model (KPSAM) in order to most strategically determine what could be the ideal variation. The Workgroup understands that, given community feedback and additional evidence gathered, it is possible that the framework and variation ultimately selected by the Workgroup may be a combination of these variations, or perhaps a new variation, such as a single-circle hybrid with a smaller concentric circle.

The Workgroup is currently considering these five variations for modifying kidney and pancreas allocation policy to be more consistent with the Final Rule and to provide more equity in access to transplantation regardless of a candidate’s place of residence or registration, except to the extent required by §121.8 (a)(1)-(5) of the Final Rule. The Workgroup requests community feedback in order to better inform the evidence-gathering and decision-making processes.

Feedback requested

How are American transplant centers regulated? How does this influence treatment decisions?

Here's a NYT oped about the fact that transplant centers are regulated based on their one-year graft survival statistics--i.e. on how often the transplant (and the patient) lasts 12 months:

When Is a Transplant Worth It?
A year in a hospital bed is a “success” while dying after 11 months is failure.
By Daniela J. Lamas
Dr. Lamas is a pulmonary and critical care physician.

"The single-minded focus on staying alive for a year begins at the time of a transplant program’s initial certification by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. If the program’s one-year mortality rate is higher than expected, possibly because surgeons are giving transplants to people who are too sick, that program could be put on probation or lose its certification. That metric is equally important to the United Network for Organ Sharing, which allocates donor organs. A patient looking for information might happen upon the Yelp-style transplant center rankings developed by the Scientific Registry of Transplant Recipients — also based on one-year mortality, particularly for lung transplant programs.
...
"The focus on one-year mortality isn’t necessarily what patients want, and it can have unintended consequences. Dr. Richard Formica, a kidney transplant specialist at Yale-New Haven Hospital, noted that with mortality as the metric of success, surgeons might be apt to discard riskier transplant organs because they worry about their numbers. The concern about program numbers — and the potential repercussions for other patients if a center loses its certification — also might influence the choice of who gets a transplant in the first place. “Do we deny patients who have an increased risk of mortality in the first year?” Dr. Formica asked. “Yes, we do.”