Sunday, March 21, 2010
Congressional briefing, postscript
Thursday, October 21, 2010
NSF ScienceLives interviews me on market design
Economist Finds Best Matches for Students and Schools
By Ellen Ferrante, National Science Foundation
Some of the questions are about market design, and you'll have to click on the link above if you want to read my answers to those. But some of the questions were designed to personalize science, and here are those, and my answers...
"What is the best piece of advice you ever received?
"There’s no limit to what a person can accomplish if he isn’t worried about who gets the credit. "
"What was your first scientific experiment as a child?
"I went to public school in NYC, and as I recall we had science fairs each year starting in grade school. The first projects I recall weren’t experiments; they were demonstrations, little bits of engineering. I remember that I built a carbon arc furnace out of boards, a flower pot, curtain rods and pieces of carbon from the core of a flashlight battery.
"What is your favorite thing about being a researcher?
"You can schedule your own mind. There are plenty of jobs in which a person has an opportunity to solve interesting problems, but a researcher, particularly an academic researcher, gets to choose which problems to work on.
"Who has had the most influence on your thinking as a researcher?
"I think my older brother Ted first persuaded me that science was exciting, and I learned a lot from my Ph.D. advisor at Stanford, Bob Wilson. Over the long term, the group of people from whom I’ve learned the most are my students and post-docs and co-investigators; I’ve been very fortunate in who I’ve been able to work with. "
"If you could only rescue one thing from your burning office or lab, what would it be?
"As often as not there’s a student or postdoc in my office. I’d rescue him or her. "
And here's the picture they ran, over the caption "Al Roth and Marilda Sotomayor photographed with their 1990 book “Two-Sided Matching,” at the conference Roth and Sotomayor: Twenty Years After, held at Duke University in May, 2010. Credit: Marilda Sotomayor"
Monday, December 2, 2013
Compensation for donors: it's not just kidneys
NEW: ISHLT Position on the Trafficking of Donor Organs
"Tales from the Organ Trade” and similar documentaries are reminders that organ trafficking remains an important international problem. In line with the previously stated ISHLT position and in concert with other national and international transplantation societies, the ISHLT strongly and emphatically endorses the Declaration of Istanbul which seeks to abolish the illegal and immoral trade in donor organs which is supported in part by so called “transplant tourism”. As a corollary of which, the Society values and supports every effort to improve the availability of donor organs by legitimate process thereby providing community access to these life sustaining therapies.
They link to their 2007 position statement, reproduced here:
International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation
Statement on Transplant Ethics
Approved April 2007
Thoracic organ transplantation improves the length and quality of life of patients with severe
heart or lung disease. It is a societal endeavour bound by ethical principles. The donation of
organs from a deceased patient must always be made freely and without coercion. The gift
of an organ by a live donor, such as a pulmonary lobe transplant, must be made in the same
fashion and with informed consent. To ensure that these principles are adhered to, the
transplant process must be transparent, legally regulated and open to both national and
international scrutiny.
The ISHLT endorses the view of the World Medical Association that the sale of organs from
both live and deceased donors is unethical and violates the Universal Declaration of Human
Rights.
Obtaining organs for transplantation from the bodies of executed prisoners contravenes the
principle of voluntary donation. A condemned prisoner and his relatives cannot consent
freely. Furthermore, such practices provide a perverse incentive to increase the number of
executions and it lays the judicial process open to corruption.
ISHLT members should discourage patients from seeking transplantation in countries where
transplantation is not open to external scrutiny and the ethical standards of the ISHLT
cannot be assured, regardless of whether payment for organs is involved. ISHLT members
should work with their own governments to ensure that such ‘transplant tourism’ that
contravenes these ethical principles is made illegal.
Members of the ISHLT should not participate in or support the transplantation of organs
from prisoners or the sale of organs for transplantation. Any ISHLT member who has been
found to have contravened this ethical principle may have their rights and privileges as a
member suspended or removed by the ISHLT Board.
Individuals submitting data about clinical transplantation, or the use of human tissue, for
presentation at any of the ISHLT’s meetings, to the Society’s Registry or for publication in
the Journal of Heart and Lung Transplantation will be asked to sign a personal statement
confirming that the principles of both the Declaration of Helsinki formulated by the World
Medical Association and of this ethical statement by the ISHLT have been adhered to.
References
Rothman DJ, Rose E, Awaya T, Cohen B, Daar A, Dzemeshkevich SL, Lee CJ, Munro R,
Reyes H, Rothman SM, Schoen KF, Scheper-Hughes N, Shapira Z, Smit H. The Bellagio Task
Force report on transplantation, bodily integrity, and the International Traffic in Organs.
Transplant Proceedings 1997; 29: 2739-45. Also available at the International Committee of
the Red Cross web-site:
http://www.icrc.org/Web/Eng/siteeng0.nsf/iwpList302/87DC95FCA3C3D63EC1256B66005B3
F6C (accessed 1st May 2007)
Declaration of Helsinki. http://www.wma.net/e/policy/pdf/17c.pdf (accessed 1st May 2007)
Friday, September 10, 2010
Dual career couples
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).
Saturday, December 31, 2016
NSF grant on collaborative kidney exchange: final report
Here is the link to the page on which you can find the report by searching for Federal Award ID Number 1061932 (that takes you to a page that has found the grant, and then you have to click on the number to get the report--your government dollars at work as we used to say:)
For some reason, the final report is missing many of the publications reported in the annual progress reports...but it gives an idea of what we were thinking when we began this leg of the work, and some of the different directions in which we were led.
A more comprehensive list of publications from this work in the period 2011-16 is below, I may have more to say about them in the future.
Saturday, January 29, 2011
SBE 2020: Future Research in the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences
I earlier blogged about the subset of 48 Economics "Grand Challenge" white papers posted by the American Economic Association, which includes some related to market design.
Sunday, January 31, 2010
A LEAP forward at Harvard
I am writing to introduce the Lab for Economic Applications and Policy
(LEAP) at Harvard. The mission of LEAP is facilitate policy-relevant applied research, with the ultimate aim of injecting scientific evidence into policy debates.
LEAP has three components. First, we fund faculty and student research, such as pilot field experiments or empirical studies that could not be easily or quickly funded through the NSF or other grant agencies. The LEAP executive committee (Larry Katz, Guido Imbens, Brigitte Madrian, and myself) will review applications on a rolling basis and authorize funding within 4-6 weeks. The application form is available at our temporary website:
http://economics.harvard.edu/leap. Please spread the word about these new funding opportunities among your graduate students.
Second, we run a visitor program that brings in two leading researchers every semester to visit the department and teach short topics courses related to their research. This year’s visitors are Jon Skinner, Stephen Coate, Doug Staiger, and Richard Blundell.
Finally, we have a cluster of offices on the 2nd floor of Littauer that includes a lounge to facilitate interaction among faculty and students.
This space includes visitor offices as well as a rotating office used by junior faculty at HKS and HBS. We plan to hold a small inaugural reception in the lounge at 3:15 on Wed Feb. 10 before the labor/pf seminar, and invite you to join us then to learn more about LEAP.
We look forward to working with you at LEAP!
Raj Chetty
Guido Imbens
Larry Katz
Brigitte Madrian
Monday, September 13, 2010
NSF "Grand Challenge" white paper on market design
Here's mine, on Market Design.
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.
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Mechanism design conference (virtually) at Pitt, April 15-17, with keynotes by Tuomas Sandholm and Utku Unver
Here's the announcement: the conference is sponsored by the NBER
Mechanism Design for Vulnerable Populations
Thurs Apr 15- Sat Apr 17, 2021
Graduate School of Public and International Affairs (GSPIA)
University of Pittsburgh
"We are delighted to share that the NSF/CEME Decentralization 2021 conference, which had to be postponed from 2020 due to COVID-19, will take place virtually on April 15-17 this year! This conference series is funded by the National Science Foundation and is administered through the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). This is the 50th anniversary of the Decentralization conference - the first Decentralization Conference was held at UC Berkeley in 1971.
"The goal of this year's conference is to apply and extend mechanism design to the practical needs of institutions that serve vulnerable populations. These populations pose conceptual and technical challenges for the designer due to the high stakes decision making environments, complex constraints on agents’ action space, and the cumulative effects of disadvantaged participation in previous mechanisms. We are excited to have Tuomas Sandholm (Carnegie Mellon University) and M. Utku Unver (Boston College) as keynote speakers.
"Talks (including discussions) are 30-45 minutes and spans general mechanism design theory as well as topics such as matching and assignment problems in foster care, refugee resettlement, low-income housing, affirmative action, and criminal justice. Each talk will be followed by an open chat with the audience and two discussants - for session #2-5 this will be an academic and a practitioner. Breakout groups at the end of each module allows for more substantial engagement with each topic."
Saturday, November 13, 2010
Economics "Grand Challenge" white papers
"Grand Challenge" White Papers for Future Research in the Social, Behavioral & Economic Sciences
There are 48 short papers, from Acemoglu to Weir, two with market design in the title:
Cramton, Peter Market Design: Harnessing Market Methods to Improve Resource Allocation
Roth, Al Market Design: Understanding markets well enough to fix them when they’re broken
Thursday, February 4, 2010
Mentoring (and a pet peeve: maybe women should be athena-ed?)
This is the idea behind the recent NBER report Can Mentoring Help Female Assistant Professors? Interim Results from a Randomized Trial
by Francine D. Blau, Janet M. Currie, Rachel T.A. Croson, Donna K. Ginther
Abstract: "While much has been written about the potential benefits of mentoring in academia, very little research documents its effectiveness. We present data from a randomized controlled trial of a mentoring program for female economists organized by the Committee for the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and sponsored by the National Science Foundation and the American Economics Association. To our knowledge, this is the first randomized trial of a mentoring program in academia. We evaluate the performance of three cohorts of participants and randomly-assigned controls from 2004, 2006, and 2008. This paper presents an interim assessment of the program’s effects. Our results suggest that mentoring works. After five years the 2004 treatment group averaged .4 more NSF or NIH grants and 3 additional publications, and were 25 percentage points more likely to have a top-tier publication. There are significant but smaller effects at three years post-treatment for the 2004 and 2006 cohorts combined. While it is too early to assess the ultimate effects of mentoring on the academic careers of program participants, the results suggest that this type of mentoring may be one way to help women advance in the Economics profession and, by extension, in other male-dominated academic fields. "
On a less serious note, I've always wondered whether "mentor" was the right word for an advisor for female professors, particularly if the advisor is also female. The reason is that Mentor is a male character in Homer's Odyssey who only appears to give advice in the beginning of the story. In fact, the goddess Athena is giving the advice, disguised as Mentor (presumably because advice from someone with a grey beard was given more weight in those days than from someone advising while female, however divine). So maybe, nowadays, female professors should be athena-ed?
Thursday, January 23, 2020
Conference on Mechanism design for vulnerable populations in April at Pitt--call for papers: Update--Postponed!
Call for papers: 2020 NSF/CEME Decentralization Conference
Mechanism Design for Vulnerable Populations
April 17-19, 2020
University of Pittsburgh
The field of mechanism design has played a significant role in designing public sector allocative mechanisms, making important contributions to the FCC spectrum auctions, the creation of electricity markets, school matching algorithms, and more. Recently, scholars have begun to apply the tools of mechanism design towards institutions that serve vulnerable populations such as the construction of social safety nets. This endeavour will be challenging. Whether it is families facing housing insecurity, returning veterans, or the previously incarcerated, the daily struggles of these individuals are often unobserved by the designer, making it difficult to form accurate assumptions about agent types, action spaces, or perceptions of the mechanism. For vulnerable populations, small behavioral deviations or changes in allocations can result in dramatic differences, e.g. a missed car payment resulting in a job loss. In addition, marginalization is often the cumulative outcome of a sequence of mechanisms: the housing market affecting a child's school choice, which constrains his options in the job market, which in turn affects his outcome in the criminal justice system.
For the conference, we seek theoretical and empirical papers that try to bridge the gap between mechanism design theory and the needs of vulnerable population. Topics could include (but are not limited to):
* General theoretical papers on behavioral mechanism design and robust mechanism design
* Social work: service referral, adoption / foster care, transition to workforce, substance abuse treatments, mentoring programs
* Basic needs: low-income housing, housing integration by income and identity, food banks
* Education (school matching), transportation (route selection, transport markets) and criminal justice
* Public goods, participatory democracy and budgeting mechanisms
Submissions will be accepted until Friday, January 31th, 2020. Full papers are preferred, but extended abstracts will also be considered. Please email all submissions to jinyong.jeong@pitt.edu with the subject line Decentralization Submission. We will announce the conference program by Friday, February 14, 2020. All participants should confirm their attendance by Friday February 21, 2020.
Organizers:
Sera Linardi (University of Pittsburgh)
Jinyong Jeong (University of Pittsburgh)
Rediet Abebe (Harvard University)
Yan Chen (University of Michigan)
Selman Erol (Carnegie Mellon University)
Osea Giuntella (University of Pittsburgh)
Daniel Jones (University of Pittsburgh)
John Ledyard (California Institute of Technology)
Irene Lo (Stanford University)
Adam Kapor (Princeton University)
Luca Rigotti (University of Pittsburgh)
Utku Unver (Boston College)
Richard Van Weelden (University of Pittsburgh)
M. Bumin Yenmez (Boston College)
Sunday, December 8, 2013
EC14, now called Economics and Computation, at Stanford June 8-12 (submission deadline is Feb 11)
Two related conferences will be coordinated at Stanford at the same time, the NBER market design conference, and the NSF Decentralization conference (see the announcement here).
You can also see how closely interwoven computer science and economics/market design have become by looking at the program committee, which includes both computer scientists and economists mixed up (or maybe mixed up computer scientists and economists):
Workshop Chair:
Robert Kleinberg, Cornell University
ec14-workshops-chair@acm.org
Larry Blume, Cornell University
Aaron Bodoh-Creed, UC Berkeley
Felix Brandt, TU Munich
Shuchi Chawla, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Edith Elkind, Oxford University
Joan Feigenbaum, Yale University
Michal Feldman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem
Drew Fudenberg, Harvard University
Nicole Immorlica, Northwestern University and Microsoft Research
Anna Karlin, University of Washington
David Kempe, University of Southern California
Scott Kominers, Harvard University
Ron Lavi, Technion - Israel Institute of Technology
Vahab Mirrokni, Google Research
Utku Unver, Boston College
Artificial Intelligence and Applied Game Theory SPC:
Itai Ashlagi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Yiling Chen, Harvard University
Arpita Ghosh, Cornell University
Kate Larson, University of Waterloo
Kevin Leyton-Brown, , University of British Columbia
David Pennock, Microsoft Research
Ariel Procaccia, Carnegie Mellon University
Tuomas Sandholm, Carnegie Mellon University
Eric Budish, University of Chicago
Yan Chen, University of Michigan
Ben Edelman, Harvard University
Ashish Goel, Stanford University
Muthu Muthukrishnan, Rutgers
Denis Nekipelov, UC Berkeley
Sid Suri, Microsoft Research
Steven Tadelis, UC Berkeley
Yoav Shoham, Stanford University