Morally contested markets on NPR's Planet Money (including kidneys, revenge and insider trading)

 The NPR show Planet Money discusses kidney sales, revenge, and insider trading. The hosts are enthusiastic about at least thinking about all of these.* 

They start with a discussion of organ transplants, and in the first 9 minutes of the show you can hear some parts of an interview with me, discussing tradeoffs (and possible titles for a book I'm working on).  Then they talk to Siri Isaksson about retaliation, and after that to Chester Spatt about insider trading.

Morally questionable, economically efficient

FEBRUARY 7, 2024 

By 

Mary Childs

, 

Greg Rosalsky

, 

Jess Jiang

, 

Willa Rubin

24-Minute Listen

• Download

 

They write:

"There are tons of markets that don't exist because people just don't want to allow a market — for whatever reason, people feel icky about putting a price on something. For example: Surrogacy is a legal industry in parts of the United States, but not in much of the rest of the world. Assisted end-of-life is a legal medical transaction in some states, but is illegal in others.

"When we have those knee-jerk reactions and our gut repels us from considering something apparently icky, economics asks us to look a little more closely.

"Today on the show, we have three recommendations of things that may feel kinda wrong but economics suggests may actually be the better way. First: Could the matching process of organ donation be more efficient if people could buy and sell organs? Then: should women seek revenge more often in the workplace? And finally, what if insider trading is actually useful?"

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*In their enthusiasm, they mis-state how few kidney exchanges were done before my colleagues and I got involved. (There weren't many, but more than two...)

As it happens, earlier this week I blogged about another interview, in the NYT, by Peter Coy (in print, not audio) that focused on kidney exchange:

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Kidney exchange (and other bits of market design) in the New York Times

Update (5pm): now I see that on the Planet Money site there's a transcript.  Here's the part that I participated in:

SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF COIN SPINNING)

MARY CHILDS, HOST:

A couple decades ago, Al Roth was working on solving this problem - people who needed kidneys weren't getting matched effectively with people who had kidneys to donate.

AL ROTH: Part of the kind of work I do is called matching theory.

GREG ROSALSKY, HOST:

Al helped create this, like, beautiful, elegant algorithm that would match kidney donors with recipients.

CHILDS: You obviously won a pretty big prize for this work.

ROTH: I did. I recommend it.

CHILDS: OK. Yeah (laughter). You like the prize. It's a good prize.

ROTH: Yeah.

CHILDS: That's good to know.

ROTH: A week long of parties.

CHILDS: The prize he won? - it was the Nobel Prize in economics.

ROSALSKY: As you might know, Al's matching work vastly improved the way people get kidneys and saved literally thousands of lives. Like, in the year 2000, before Al's work, there were only two paired kidney transplants - two. Thanks to Al's algorithm, there are now about a thousand per year.

CHILDS: But, Al says, his Nobel Prize-winning algorithm - it isn't even the best way to get people kidneys. Technically, he says, the best way is to grow kidneys in a lab, so it's not even the second-best way.

I'm just envisioning you doing all this matching work knowing that this is, like, a little goofy. Like...

ROTH: Oh.

CHILDS: ...There's a easier way.

ROTH: I hope it's a lot goofy...

CHILDS: (Laughter).

ROTH: ...The work I'm doing, anyway.

CHILDS: (Laughter).

ROTH: No, no. That's right. So could we figure out a way to have more donors to have fewer deaths? I bet we could.

ROSALSKY: OK, so there is a much easier, more efficient way to get people kidneys. It's the way people get most things - with money. Like, what if we could just buy and sell organs?

ROTH: Oh, we'd have a lot more organs. That's how we get most of our stuff. There's a famous passage quoted from Adam Smith, which I'm going to paraphrase, but it says something like, it's not through the generosity of the butcher and the baker that you get your food. You buy it from them. It's how they - that's how they sustain their families - is by selling you food. And that's how you get food, and that's why there's enough food.

CHILDS: Right. The kidney market already has supply and demand. It just doesn't have prices to balance them because buying and selling kidneys is illegal in basically the entire world. So here we are. We don't have enough kidneys. We desperately need more, and yet, we refuse to pay more than $0 for them.

ROSALSKY: And as Al saw while working on kidneys, people had moral objections to the idea of paying for organs. They had concerns that just didn't really make sense to him as an economist.

ROTH: But when I started to look, it turns out there are lots of markets like that.

CHILDS: Lots of markets where people just don't want to allow a market. They feel icky about putting a price on something. Al has a list - for example, surrogacy - a legal and flourishing industry in much of the U.S., not in much of the rest of the world; assisted end of life - perfectly fine medical transaction in Oregon, illegal where I am in Virginia.

ROSALSKY: Al is actually working on a book about all of this.

ROTH: Its working title is "Repugnant Transactions And Controversial Markets." And the idea is that sometimes economists have perfectly good ideas that other people don't think are perfectly good.

ROSALSKY: Al has sort of made his own little subdiscipline in economics about this.

ROTH: "Ickonomics" (ph), "Yuckonomics" (ph) - you know, I trade in book titles. I'm open to suggestions.

CHILDS: You can email Al with your book title suggestions, though honestly, that's kind of hard to beat. In the meantime, when we have those knee-jerk reactions and our gut repels us from considering the icky thing, economics would like to humbly submit that maybe we should.

(SOUNDBITE OF JORDACHE V. GRANT AND SKINNY WILLIAMS' "OLDER HEADS")

CHILDS: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Mary Childs.

ROSALSKY: And I'm Greg Rosalsky. Today on the show, we apply an elegant economic framework to Al's market, the trading of human organs, to whether or not we should exact revenge on our enemies, and to whether or not we should trade on inside information.

(SOUNDBITE OF JORDACHE V. GRANT AND SKINNY WILLIAMS' "OLDER HEADS")

CHILDS: When we face difficult situations that don't have an absolutely clear right answer, economist Al Roth says borrowing tools from economics can be useful.

ROTH: Economists deal in trade-offs, and one of the things about trade-offs is you have to say to yourself, supposing there's something we really don't like, what will happen if we ban it? And if the answer is it won't go away, but it'll go underground or become criminalized or become very irregular, then you might prefer to regulate it rather than ban it.

ROSALSKY: And there are real problems with banning things. For example, remember that time we tried to ban alcohol, like, in the 1920s and 1930s?

ROTH: We discovered that it gave rise to a big criminal economy and didn't completely wipe out alcohol at all. So we legalized it. And the legal market for alcohol, with all its problems, is a lot nicer in many ways, a lot more socially useful than the criminal market - you know, Al Capone and the Saint Valentine's Day massacre and, you know, Eliot Ness.

CHILDS: Alcohol, as you may know, is legal today. Selling kidneys - no, not legal - with kidneys, we are in our Prohibition era.

ROTH: There is a black market for kidneys. And often it's pretty terrible because the almost-universal laws against compensating kidney donors have driven that market underground. And what underground often means is out of the hospitals and into hotel suites and apartments...

CHILDS: Eugh (ph).

ROTH: ...And - yes, so medically very bad, as well as, you know, not just illegal but dealing with criminals - medically very bad, bad for the donors, bad for the recipients.

CHILDS: And that's what we have today. That's the market we have chosen. We have the black market with money and the legal market with no money.

ROSALSKY: So Al has been thinking about solutions to this. Like, what can we do realistically to incentivize more kidney donations? How else could we go about creating a market for kidneys to be, as Al likes to put it, more generous to kidney donors?

CHILDS: And when Al thinks about how to design a market, he prioritizes investigating what exactly it is that we're objecting to so he can build a market that fixes or avoids those problems. And in the case of kidneys...

ROTH: There are metaphysical objections. You know, it's just wrong. But the objections that seem to touch on the world seem to say that you can't do this without exploiting poor people because poor people are so vulnerable that just offering them money takes away their agency.

CHILDS: The first reaction is just a gut reaction, which doesn't help inform Al on design. The second reaction is that money can be coercive, that if people have no money and you offer them money to participate in a study, they might have to do the study, especially if you offer a huge amount, like a life-changing amount of money. It's just too compelling. They wouldn't have a choice.

ROSALSKY: This argument does strike Al as unreasonable.

ROTH: There's lots of jobs that we pay people to do because otherwise no one would do them. And you can earn a decent living being a meatpacker. But that's one of the things that bothers people. They say, why should we allow a market that will be mostly - most of the participants will be in the lower parts of the income range? And of course, that isn't very sympathetic to people who are lower income, right? In other words...

CHILDS: Right.

ROTH: ...We need jobs that people with lower income can get. That's why they have some income - is that there are jobs.

CHILDS: Luckily, there is a really obvious, easy solution to this objection - just solve poverty.

ROTH: There'd be a lot less repugnance to monetary transactions if there was no income inequality.

CHILDS: (Laughter).

ROTH: If you wanted to sell me your kidney, but we all had the same income and the same prospects, it just might not be a big thing.

CHILDS: OK, failing that, Al mentioned another way to create a kidney market, a way to get kidneys only from people who aren't that poor - a tax break.

ROTH: People who are wealthy enough to benefit from tax credits on income tax aren't the poorest of the poor. So it might be that the way to start paying kidney donors is to say, we will give you a tax break on everything after the first $10 million of income in the year that you - you know, and then only hedge fund managers would donate kidneys, and that would be repugnant.

CHILDS: But there's a twisted logic to it because at least they could - like, should something go awry in the surgery or in the...

ROTH: Yeah, they'd be fine. They'd be fine. Yeah.

ROSALSKY: Perfect. Like, now we have a few ideas of how to make this happen without paying people for kidneys. We could resolve income inequality, or we could just, you know, do a tax credit and receive only hedge fund manager kidneys. And - right? - there's something a little goofy about all this because these solutions are trying to account for objections that are just hard to design around 'cause those objections are at least partly stemming from some messy human feeling or intuition that just won't let us exchange things in the normal way.

CHILDS: So do you think there'll ever be a U.S. market for kidneys?

ROTH: Well, I think we're not doing a good job yet and that we ought to find a way to be more generous to donors so that we have more of them.

CHILDS: And what that looks like - you're open to suggestion?

ROTH: I'm open to suggestions.

Regretting the dating market, in the Atlantic

In the Atlantic, the authors regret that marriages are no longer made in heaven, but are becoming a market...

The ‘Dating Market’ Is Getting Worse
The old but newly popular notion that one’s love life can be analyzed like an economy is flawed—and it’s ruining romance. by ASHLEY FETTERS and KAITLYN TIFFANY

Many people are quoted, most briefly and to the effect that the marriage market is a new and bad phenomenon.

"The application of the supply-and-demand concept, Weigel said, may have come into the picture in the late 19th century, when American cities were exploding in population. “There were probably, like, five people your age in [your hometown],” she told me. “Then you move to the city because you need to make more money and help support your family, and you’d see hundreds of people every day.” When there are bigger numbers of potential partners in play, she said, it’s much more likely that people will begin to think about dating in terms of probabilities and odds."

I seem to have been the only one who didn't have a negative quote about markets (in an interview that if I recall correctly took place on Valentine's day):

"The Stanford economist Alvin Roth has argued that Tinder is, like the New York Stock Exchange, a “thick” market where lots of people are trying to complete transactions, and that the main problem with dating apps is simply congestion. To him, the idea of a dating market is not new at all. “Have you ever read any of the novels of Jane Austen?” he asked. “Pride and Prejudice is a very market-oriented novel. Balls were the internet of the day. You went and showed yourself off.”

Once-a-year dating match services for college students

Valentine's Day is a good day to take note of dating services that operate only once a year, particularly since one of them, Datamatch, operates on a Valentine's Day schedule.  It started at Harvard, and has now spread to other universities.  Here's a story from the Harvard Crimson:

Datamatch Sends Love to Thirteen Schools   By Michelle G. Kurilla
"Datamatch, a free matchmaking service run by the Harvard Computer Society, is now available to students at 13 schools.

Program organizers expanded Datamatch's reach from last year, when the service was available at four colleges and universities. HCS, which launched the program in 1994 exclusively for Harvard College students, also offered Datamatch to students at Brown University, Columbia University, and Wellesley College in 2018.
...
"This Valentine’s Day, Datamatch will share the love on thirteen other campuses, in addition to Harvard: Boston College, Brown University, Carleton College, the University of Chicago, the Claremont Colleges, Columbia University, Cornell University, MIT, Wellesley College, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Washington University in St. Louis, and Yale University.
...
"Matches will be released on February 14 across the country."
***********

And from The Oxford Student:
The Oxford Marriage Pact Is Back!  by Oz Myerson
"The Oxford Marriage Pact is back, fuelling discussion, debate, and hope among a large proportion of Oxford students this week. In the run up to Valentine’s day, it has been easy to spot many events geared towards hopeful lovers – The Oxford Marriage Pact sits comfortably amongst RAG Blind Dates, the Freud’s Jazz society Valentine’s evening, and the recent Magdalen x St. Hilda’s take-me- out event."
*********

Stanford's Marriage Pact doesn't run on Valentine's day, but is becoming a campus event. Here's a recent story from the Stanford Daily:
Stanford Marriage Pact releases second annual Campus Report  
by Danielle Echeverria

"The number of participants in the Marriage Pact — which asks students about a range of topics from religion and politics to sex and spontaneity — has grown each year since its advent three years ago. In total, 91.4% of the class of 2020 has sought a match at least once. The Marriage Pact has had 8,621 unique Stanford undergraduate participants across its three years of existence.

"Beyond the matching algorithm, the Marriage Pact has generated aggregated data on how Stanford students think and what they value. For the second year in a row, the Marriage Pact team has released a Campus Report that highlights trends in the data.
...
"According to the Report, approximately two-thirds of students do not think it is important for their children to be raised with religion. Nearly half of students expect their children to attend Ivy League-tier schools and do not think it is important to make more money than their peers."

The market for chocolate

The NY Times has the story, just in time for Valentine's Day:

Everything You Don’t Know About Chocolate
The beloved bar has come a long way in quality and complexity. Here’s a primer on how it’s made, and how to choose the best and most ethically produced.
By Melissa Clark

"One of the biggest ethical concerns about chocolate-making is the cacao supply chain. In the current system, the vast majority of cacao beans are sold as a commodity crop without regard to quality. Because farmers aren’t paid more for better beans, there’s no incentive for them to plant finer-flavored cultivars. Nor would they have the money to do so. In West Africa, which grows 60 to 70 percent of the world’s beans, many cacao farmers live below the poverty line, making less than $1.90 a day.
...
"While some chocolate makers buy directly from farmers, most of the micro, bean-to-bar makers in the United States get beans from one of two direct-trade cacao importers, Uncommon Cacao and Meridian Cacao. Both have strong social goals that include living wages for the farmers."

Matching story for Valentine's day--BBC

Valentine's Day sparks a demand not just for love, but also for stories about marriage as a matching market.  This year I was among those interviewed by the BBC.  Below are two links:  you can listen to the interviews, or read a summary.

First, the interviews: They go for 18 minutes, and are easy listening.  I'm interviewed third, beginning just before minute 10 and going to about minute 14.   (I didn't see a way to embed it) :

Rational Partner Choice: "Should your head trump your heart when seeking lifelong love? We ask an economist, a romantic novelist and a hyper-rationalist businessman this Valentine's Day challenge."

(There actually are 4 interviews, the fourth is with the wife of the businessman, Ed Conard: they've been happily married for 20 years.)
************

The written summary has me as the middle of three views on the subject (the headline below reflects the first of the views they considered, with marriage modeled as an optimal stopping problem).

Forget love: This is how to find your perfect partner  By Justin Rowlatt

Here's what they say about their conversation with me:

"Mr Conard's approach to choosing a wife is a well-established method for buying things like a new place to live but, says Nobel Prize winning economist Alvin Roth, spouses aren't like houses: marriage is a market without prices.
...
"He agrees that it is important to meet quite a few possible partners before you take the plunge - "don't marry the first person you meet", he warns.

"You've also got to have realistic expectations: "the first thing a matrimonial agency has to do is persuade clients they aren't a 10."

"But, he says, you can do too much calibrating and evaluating. Choosing a partner is a two-way thing: it is only when you are serious about marriage that potential partners will take you seriously.

"Part of being well matched is the history you share and this starts when you first meet", Prof Roth says, "so investing in that history improves the quality of that match."
***************
And here are my Valentine's Day blog posts to date.

Algorithms for Valentines Day, in the WSJ (update: and elsewhere)

The "Numbers" column in the Wall Street Journal salutes Valentines Day by discussing the deferred acceptance algorithm, and mentioning some of its applications.
You May Now Kiss the Algorithm
A mathematical solution ensures no one is paired with an unacceptable mate
by Jo Craven McGinty

It opens with this encouraging line about stable matching:
"Sorry, love birds. Sometimes, you have to take what you can get."

If you can't read the rest at the above link, try the link at Ms. McGinty's twitter account (or maybe it will even work from here:  #TheNumbers https://www.wsj.com/articles/you-may-now-kiss-the-algorithm-1518184800 … via @WSJ).

One thing not emphasized in the column is that the man-optimal stable matching and the woman-optimal stable matching are very often the same or nearly so.
**************

Update: even the Nobel foundation can't resist the Valentine's Day connection. Here's their facebook post

Nobel Prize

18 hrs · 

#ValentinesDay. Would you let an economist set you up on a date?  which links to

How a matchmaking algorithm saved lives

Long before dating sites, a pair of economists delved into the question of matchmaking, and hit upon a formula with applications far beyond romance.

Valentine's day

What do Valentine's day and National organ donor day have in common?  Well...hearts.  And love. And the same day...

February 14: National Donor Day

Focused on five points of life: organs, tissues, marrow, platelets, and blood. Many nonprofit health organizations sponsor blood and marrow drives and organ/tissue sign-ups across the nation. National Donor Day was started in 1998 by the Saturn Corporation and its United Auto Workers partner with the support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and many nonprofit health organizations.

February 14 is National Donor Day

Each year, February 14th is significant for more than just Valentine's Day.  Today is designated as National Donor Day focusing on the "five points of life"  organ, tissue, marrow, platelets, and blood donation.  Donation drives are held throughout February nationwide.  Be a hero!  Be a donor!  And THANK YOU!

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Valentine's day celebration is also repugnant in some places:
Pakistan bans Valentine's Day for being unIslamic
Ban on the traditional Christian celebration of love follows a similar move by Saudi Arabia
"Pakistan has become the latest country to ban Valentine's Day.

It has prohibited all public celebrations and any media coverage because the celebration is not part of Muslim traditions."

And (I'm sorry to say) this: Mob Kills Eloped Lovers After Storming Afghan Police Station

How can you tell you're an economist? Valentine's day economics

How can you tell you're an economist?  Maybe if Valentine's Day makes you think of dating sites as congested matching markets.  Here are two views from The Economist about thickness and congestion in dating markets:
Optimising romance: To find true love, it helps to understand the economic principles underpinning the search

Valentine’s day economics--Would a dating app just for economists work?

A Valentine's day salute to Gale and Shapley and the deferred acceptance algorithm

The University of California celebrates David Gale and Lloyd Shapley with an article appropriate to Valentine's Day:

How a matchmaking algorithm saved lives
Long before dating sites, a pair of economists delved into the question of matchmaking, and hit upon a formula with applications far beyond romance.

The article has Jane Austen characters in the explanation of the deferred acceptance algorithm, and pictures, including these:

They also link to this animated, interactive Berkeley mathsite exhibit on the stable marriage problem. (It is part of a larger MathSite interactive mathematics exhibit supported by the David Gale Fund for Interactive Mathematics.)
*********************

Valentine's day reminds me of a post from a few years ago:

What has G-d been doing since the Creation? (Matchmaking, of course...))

Happy Valentine's day to all, from Philadelphia:)

The market for affairs

Here's the latest on the growing 'infidelity economy', facilitated by the website Ashley Madison, about which I've blogged before.

Adultery is good for your marriage – if you don’t get caught, says infidelity website boss As global membership to the world’s biggest infidelity site soars to over 24 million, its founder explains the international appeal of adultery

"Famed for its catchy motto – “Life is short. Have an affair” – the dating service is free for women but paying for men.
...
"The website is currently in the throes of a rapid global expansion: since launching in Canada on Valentine’s Day in 2002, it has attracted more than 24 million members in 37 countries, with South Korea launched last week."

Matching and market design for Valentine's day

Valentine's day always inspires lots of stories about matching, and lately some of these are also about market design.  Here are some that caught my eye.

Ray Fisman, one of the pioneers in the experimental study of dating, writes in Slate about a market design experiment by my colleagues Soo Lee and Muriel Niederle: Will You Accept This Digital Rose? How little flower icons could solve Internet dating’s biggest problem. (see my blog post on that experiment here).

A more pessimistic view is expressed over at the Guardian: Is online dating destroying love? That article includes some discussion of Dan Ariely's efforts at designing a more interactive dating site.

The NY Times weighs in with a return to optimism (at least for educated women) in a story titled The M.R.S. and the Ph.D., which says that education is no longer the barrier to marriage that it once may have been for women.

And speaking of education, a NY Times profile of Harvard Ph.D. economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers points out that even if you let the tax consequences stop you from officially marrying, you can still arrange your joint lives in a way that looks very married indeed: It’s the Economy, Honey.

Happy Valentine's day to all, and happy hunting to all of you in matching mode.

Misc. kidney exchange

A larger than usual exchange in SF: SF hospital performs 10-person kidney exchange
"Five people have received healthy kidneys from five donors in what may be among the largest kidney exchanges at a single hospital in California.

"The swap at California Pacific Medical Center took place on Friday during a series of operations, the San Francisco Chronicle reports.

"This has been bread-and-butter for us for a few years; we've just never done one of this size," said Dr. Steve Katznelson, medical director of California Pacific's kidney transplant program. "There are all sorts of logistics involved, and it's hard to do."
******

Kidney exchange in India is still rare (but not rare like a unicorn): Two women in kidney swap to save life of other’s spouse
"Dr H Sudarshan Ballal, medical director and chairman, medical advisory board of Manipal Health Enterprises, said swap transplants are common in the US but not so in India. "One of my earlier patient was a middle-aged woman whose husband was a potential donor but incompatible with her. They migrated to the US and later told me they had done a swap with a Jewish couple there. We've been trying for a long time to make swap transplants happen but managed it this time," he said. "

****
Here's an account of a non-simultaneous nondirected donor chain at St. Barnabas hospital in New Jersey, conducted around Valentine's day, with reporting of an April 2011 meeting of patients and donors: Donors, recipients in chain of eight kidney transplants gather for reunion.
The non-directed donor chose to remain anonymous "I’ve got some new scars, but that’s it," the donor said. "I’d rather it not be a big deal."

Today is (also) National Donor Day

Happy Valentine's Day! Isn't it good to love and be loved?

Food for thought: Today is also National Donor Day.

"February 14 is the 10th National Donor Day -- a day to give the gift of life.
Fill out an organ and tissue donation card, register with your State Donor Registry and make sure your family knows you want to be a donor.
Join the National Registry of potential volunteer marrow and blood stem cell donors.
Learn how you can donate your baby's umbilical cord blood stem cells at birth.
Donate blood.
Why be a Donor?
The need is great and growing.
Almost 95,000 people are in need of an organ for transplant.
Approximately 35,000 children and adults in our country have life-threatening blood diseases that could be treated by a marrow/blood stem cell or cord blood transplant.
Every two seconds someone in America needs blood, more than 39,000 units each day, according to the American Red Cross.
Why do it Today?
Valentine's Day is the day of love and donation is the gift of life. Can you think of a more loving gesture than making February 14 the day you join thousands of Americans in making the donation decision?

National Donor Day was started in 1998 by the Saturn Corporation and its United Auto Workers partners with the support of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and many nonprofit health organizations. "

Repugnant transactions in Saudi Arabia

I call a transaction 'repugnant' if some people want to engage in it, but others don't want them to. In Saudi Arabia these often involve religious views.
The NY Times report that the Turkish soap opera Noor is very popular among Saudi women, but not among clerics: Arab TV Tests Societies’ Limits With Depictions of Sex and Equality .
"That divided response was apparent this month when Sheik Luhaidan, the Saudi cleric, made his comment about killing the owners of satellite TV stations that broadcast indecent material.
His comments were quickly rebroadcast, and an uproar ensued. Critics across the ideological spectrum, including some hard-line Saudis, berated him as having crossed the line. Some of the television networks Sheik Luhaidan appeared to be referring to are owned, after all, by members of the Saudi royal family.
Sheik Luhaidan, who is chief justice of Saudi Arabia’s highest legal authority, the Supreme Judicial Council, is said to have been surprised by all the controversy.
A few days later, apparently under pressure from senior figures in the Saudi government, he appeared on state television to explain. He said he had not meant to encourage or condone the murder of station owners. Assuming other penalties do not deter them, he said, the owners should first be brought to trial and sentenced to death — and then they could be executed."

For some other, related examples, see
Saudi Arabia bans sale of dogs, cats in capital, and
Saudi Arabia bans all things red ahead of Valentine's Day.

However, as elsewhere, what transactions are repugnant can change over time, in both directions, and things formerly repugnant can become less so:
Saudi Women Can Now Stay in Hotels Alone