Showing posts sorted by date for query egg trading. Sort by relevance Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by date for query egg trading. Sort by relevance Show all posts

Saturday, January 18, 2020

Egg trading by hermaphrodite fish--evolutionary game theory by Peña, Nöldeke, and Puebla

Game theory is about how payoffs among multiple parties change the way they interact with each other. One of the most interesting areas of application is in the study of evolution of populations.  Here's a paper about reciprocity in reproductive strategies that depend on the thickness of various aspects of the market...

The Evolution of Egg Trading in Simultaneous Hermaphrodites
Jorge Peña, Georg Nöldeke, and Oscar Puebla

Abstract: Egg trading—whereby simultaneous hermaphrodites exchange each other’s eggs for fertilization—constitutes one of the few rigorously documented and most widely cited examples of direct reciprocity among unrelated individuals. Yet how egg trading may initially invade a population of nontrading simultaneous hermaphrodites is still unresolved. Here, we address this question with an analytical model that considers mate encounter rates and costs of egg production in a population that may include traders (who provide eggs for fertilization only if their partners also have eggs to reciprocate), providers (who provide eggs regardless of whether their partners have eggs to reciprocate), and withholders (cheaters who mate only in the male role and just use their eggs to elicit egg release from traders). Our results indicate that a combination of intermediate mate encounter rates, sufficiently high costs of egg production, and a sufficiently high probability that traders detect withholders (in which case eggs are not provided) is conducive to the evolution of egg trading. Under these conditions, traders can invade—and resist invasion from—providers and withholders alike. The prediction that egg trading evolves only under these specific conditions is consistent with the rare occurrence of this mating system among simultaneous hermaphrodites.

Here's the full text.

Monday, January 5, 2015

Ramesh Johari's course on Platform and Marketplace Design, starts tomorrow

Take the class, or you can also scroll down and see the syllabus with links to the papers.

MS&E 336: Platform and Marketplace Design

Course time

Tuesdays and Thursdays, 10:00-11:50 AM

Instructors

Ramesh Johari
Associate Professor
Management Science and Engineering
Electrical Engineering (by courtesy)
Huang Engineering Center, Room 311
E-mail: ramesh.johari@stanford.edu
Office hours: TBA, Huang 311
Additional office hours by appointment


Nick Arnosti (TA)
Management Science and Engineering
E-mail}: narnosti@stanford.edu
Office hours: TBA

Course website

The course website will be accessible through CourseWork.

Catalog course description

The last decade has witnessed a meteoric rise in the number of online markets and platforms competing with traditional mechanisms of trade. Examples of such markets include online marketplaces for goods, such as eBay; online dating markets; markets for shared resources, such as Lyft, Uber, and Airbnb; and online labor markets. We will review recent research that aims to both understand and design such markets. Emphasis on mathematical modeling and methodology, with a view towards preparing Ph.D. students for research in this area.

Detailed course description

Markets are an ancient institution for matching the supply for a good or service with its demand. Physical markets were typically slow to evolve, with simple institutions governing trade, and trading partners generally facing a daunting challenge in finding the “right” partner. The information technology revolution, however, has generated a sea of change in how markets function: now, markets are typically complex platforms, with a range of mechanisms involved in facilitating matches among participants.  Recent trends point to an unprecedented level of control over the design, implementation, and operation of markets: more than ever before, we are able to engineer the platforms governing transactions among market participants.  As a consequence, market operators or platforms can control a host of variables such as pricing, liquidity, visibility, information revelation, terms of trade, and transaction fees. The decisions made by the platform and the market participants interact, sometimes in intricate and subtle ways, to determine market outcomes.


This course is intended to prepare students for research on online and platform markets.  The course was inspired by the following observation: in the last decade, a wide range of graduates with quantitative backgrounds have been put into positions where they are effectively designing markets every day.  Often this is a side effect of being thrust into a software engineering, product development, or regulatory role: for example, a new hire might be asked to change how users browse through search results on eBay or Airbnb.  As is immediately apparent to a market designer, small changes to that basic infrastructure---the search engine---can radically alter the behavior of the market itself.  The goal in the class is to prepare students to be able to think conceptually about these market design challenges.


With that motivation in mind, we have three main goals for the quarter:
  1. Problems.  The first goal is to use the quarter to identify open research directions that have risen to the forefront with the rise of online platforms.  We live in an exciting time for market design, with great interest in the fundamentals, as well as a rich set of applications that motivate research directions, and provide data and testbeds for validation.  A key emphasis in this part of the class is to focus on “levers” that affect the information that market participants obtain about each other in a variety of ways.
  2. Tools. The second goal is to ensure students have access to a basic set of tools with which to reason about such markets.  The course assumes students have already had prior exposure to game theory and economic modeling.  In this course, we will focus on a set of tools that have specifically proven helpful in studying platform markets, and the effects of design interventions on these markets.  A key emphasis is on large market models.
  3. Applications.  Along the way, we hope to learn about how the research questions we identify and the tools we learn are relevant to specific marketplaces.  This will be through a mix of mathematical modeling, empirical research, as well as anecdotal evidence.


The course will be taught using a mix of lecture format and seminar-style guided discussion. Much of what we will discuss is active research, so the reading material will be drawn from relevant papers in the literature; this material will be available from the course website. The focus will be on encouraging discussion of both open theoretical questions and modeling issues. This is particularly important since the course content draws from a range of disciplines (operations research, computer science, economics, etc.). The course should provide a unique forum for a lively exchange of ideas across these boundaries.

Evaluation

Your grade in the course will be based on two components.
  1. Participation in lecture [ 40% of course grade ]. You will be expected to read papers and actively participate in lectures.  To help make sure this happens, for at least four of the weeks of the quarter, you will have to choose one paper that you need to read and prepare a “mini-review”.  The mini-review consists of answers to the following three questions, in 100 words or less each:
    1. What is the paper about?
    2. What are the strengths of the paper?
    3. What are the weaknesses of the paper?
Each mini-review will be graded credit/no-credit, i.e., you will receive full credit for this
component if you satisfactorily complete each mini-review.
  1. Course project [ 60% of course grade ]. A course project is the main evaluation component of the class.  The course project is meant to get you thinking actively about research problems in the market design problems represented by the course material.  The project will culminate in a presentation to your fellow students, and a written report (due by March 20, 2015).
    I will distribute more details on the project in the first week of lecture.

Course outline



Note: The content described on the course outline below will take up the first 14 lectures of the quarter.  (This is why each lecture is 110 minutes, instead of the usual 75 minutes.)  The remainder of the quarter will be used for guest speakers and discussion and presentation of course projects.


Part 1 (2 lectures): Introduction to platforms

We introduce platforms, and cover some of the relevant economics literature that defines and analyzes two-sided platforms.


Topics of interest:
  1. What is a (two-sided) platform?
  2. What is the objective of the platform operator,
    what information does she possess, and
    what tools does she have to acheive these objectives?
  3. What are the objectives of platform participants,
    what information do they possess,
    and what actions are available to them?


Papers:


Part 2 (2 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- pricing

We consider what the introductory papers might have missed, focusing on pricing strategies.  The emphasis is on operational details of platform behavior.


Topics of interest:
  1. Pricing usage
    1. Membership fees and subscriptions
    2. Usage-based fee with flat fee per transaction/match
    3. Usage-based fee with volume-based fee per transaction/match
  2. Pricing visibility: paying for preferential access to the other side of the market
  3. Pricing transaction risk: paying for reduced uncertainty of trade


Papers:


Part 3 (3 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- reputation and feedback

We study the role of reputation systems used by online platforms to help participants judge trading partners they have never met.


Topics of interest:
  1. Examples of reputation and feedback systems
  2. What incentives do particular systems provide to market participants?
  3. How do we design systems that incentivize honest feedback?
  4. How should the platform use the feedback system as a “lever” to improve market performance?


Papers:
  1. Horton and Golden, Reputation Inflation in an Online Market


Part 4 (3 lectures): Operational details of platforms -- search

We discuss how the platform can mediate matches by directing the search effort of each side of the market.


Topics of interest:
  1. How do market participants cope with the search frictions of finding trading partners?
  2. What information should the platform share with market participants about potential matches?
  3. What mechanisms can the platform provide to participants to improve the signals they send each other?


Papers:
  1. Horton and Johari, At What Quality and What Price? Inducing Separating Equilibria as a Market Design Problem


Part 5 (4 lectures): Modeling tools

In this part of the course we will cover some tools that have proven helpful in modeling and analyzing operational aspects of two-sided platforms.  We emphasize the use of large market models.


Topics of interest:
  1. Large market models of static markets
    1. Directed search and decentralized matching
    2. Double auctions
  2. Large market models of dynamic markets
    1. Repeated (dynamic) auctions
    2. Dynamic matching models


Papers of interest:

  1. Arnosti, Johari, and Kanoria, Managing Congestion in Dynamic Matching Markets

Monday, August 30, 2010

The market for human eggs

Here's a multifaceted article on the global market for human eggs and fertility treatment, with medical tourists flowing from countries with more restrictive laws to those with few or none: Unpacking The Global Human Egg Trade

"According to a 2010 study by the European Society of Human Reproduction and Embryology, nearly 25,000 egg donations are performed in Europe for fertility tourists every year. More than 50% of those surveyed traveled abroad in order to circumvent legal regulations at home. The Cypriot government estimates that, each year, 1 in 50 women on the island between the ages of 18 and 30 sells her eggs. One NGO analyst says that among the island's Eastern European immigrants, the rate may reach 1 in 4, and some women give up their eggs several times in a year. By comparison, only 1 of every 14,000 eligible American women donates.


"Donation is described as an altruistic act, which means no payments," says Savvas Koundouros, a Cypriot embryologist, as he draws heavily on a cigarette. "It sounds strange to all of us that a person would receive so many injections over weeks and then undergo general anesthesia just because they are kind people." Koundouros has impregnated more women than Genghis Khan -- and thanks to a system that does not in any way rely on altruism, he plans to seed many, many more. He recently invested more than 1 million euros in a state-of-the-art IVF clinic in the resort city of Limassol.
...
"Peter Singer, the Ira V. Decamp professor of bioethics at Princeton, doesn't necessarily have a problem with the sale of eggs. "I don't think that trading replaceable human body parts is in principle worse than trading human labor, which we do all the time, of course. There are similar problems of exploitation when companies go offshore, but the trade-off is that this helps the poor to earn a living," he says. "That's not to say that there are no problems at all -- obviously, there can be -- and that is why doing it openly, in a regulated and supervised manner, would be better than a black market." Note that he says "would be."


"While the clinics of Cyprus sometimes feel like frontier outposts, the ones in Spain can seem like established fortresses. Spain has been the top destination for European fertility tourists since the mid-1980s. At Barcelona's Institut Marquès, a 14th-century carriage house in one of the poshest parts of town, you can understand why....

"In 2007, the U.K. banned payments to egg donors. In 2009, the Institut Marquès opened a satellite office in London, offering full-service, pregnancy-guaranteed packages for as little as $37,000 for three IVF cycles. The stream of foreign customers has become so steady that the clinic no longer waits for patients to sign on before tracking down appropriate donors. Instead, it keeps a bull pen of women on hormones, ready to give up their eggs. "Sometimes we will lose the eggs if we can't find a customer, but it's a trade-off," says embryologist Josep Oliveras. "This way, we can guarantee a steady supply."
...
"Perhaps more than any other company, Elite IVF has transformed baby-making into a globalized, industrialized process. For Sher, outsourcing is simply the inevitable outcome of the science that allowed procreation to move out of the bedroom and into the lab. Like the Petra Clinic and the Institut Marquès, Elite IVF offers clients cheaper access to eggs and a full suite of fertility treatments; unlike those more-localized operations, Elite operates worldwide, with offices and partner clinics in Britain, Canada, Cyprus, Israel, Mexico, Romania, and the U.S. Sher plans to expand soon to Turkey, taking advantage of new bans on egg donation there.


"Sher sees the regulatory and price differentials in eggs as an opportunity to reduce the cost of raw materials, pass the savings on to his customers, and offer them virtually any fertility service that they can't get at home. Want sex selection, which is illegal in most countries? A Mexican clinic can help you. Too old for IVF in the U.S.? Cyprus is the answer.

"Today, Elite IVF's network of clinics, egg sellers, and surrogate moms produces between 200 and 400 children per year, helping create families like Aron and Shatzky's. And it's just going to get more complicated. "The future is designer babies," says Sher. He describes an offer he once received from an investor interested in partnering with Elite IVF. "Surrogates in Asia would carry the eggs of superdonors from America -- models with high SAT scores and prestigious degrees who would be paid $100,000 for their eggs. Those babies could sell for $1 million each -- first to his friends, then to the rest of the world."

"Sher declined the offer, but says it is only a matter of time before someone moves in that direction. At that point, maybe governments will get more involved. McGee, the bioethicist, predicts that "we will soon begin to recognize the danger of an ant-trail model of reproduction whereby strangers without any responsibility to each other and clinicians able to vanish in a puff of smoke meet in a transaction that culminates in humanity's ultimate act: creation."

HT to MR

Saturday, February 20, 2010

Books about markets for body parts (for and against)

Below are a mix of books, some scholarly some popular, mostly harvested by clicking on the Amazon links "people who bought this book also bought," from one book to the next. The descriptions are from Amazon:

Body Shopping: Converting Body Parts to Profit by Donna Dickenson
Product Description
According to law, you don't actually own your own body, and you might be shocked by the cunning ways everyone from researchers and entrepreneurs to doctors, insurers, and governments are using that fact to their advantage. Thanks to developments in biotechnology and medicine, cells, tissues, and organs are now viewed as both a valuable source of information and as the raw material for new commercial products.This 'currency of the future' might be fueling the new biotechnology industry, but the former owners of that flesh and bone aren't entitled to one fraction of the proceeds. In "Body Shopping", award-winning writer Donna Dickenson makes a case against the newfound rights of businesses to harvest body parts and gain exclusive profit from the resulting products and processes. To illustrate her case, she presents a series of compelling stories of individuals injured or abused by the increasingly rapacious biotechnology industry. Some cases have become public scandals, such as the illicit selling of the late broadcaster Alastair Cooke's bones by a body parts ring involving surgeons and undertakers.Others are hardly known at all, including the way in which for-profit umbilical cord blood banks target pregnant women with offers of a 'service' that professional obstetrics bodies view as dangerous, the leukemia patient who tried and failed to claim property rights in a $3 billion cell line created from his tissue, and the real risks facing women who provide eggs for the global market in baby-making. "Body Shopping" offers a fresh, international, and completely up-to-date take on the evolving legal position, the historical long view, and the latest biomedical research - an approach that goes beyond a mere recital of horror stories to suggest a range of new strategies to bring the biotechnology industry to heel. The result is a gripping, powerful book that is essential reading for everyone from parents to philosophers, and from scientists to lawmakers - everyone who believes that no human should ever be reduced to the sum of their body parts.


Black Markets: The Supply and Demand of Body Parts by Michele Goodwin, 2006
From Publishers Weekly
Law professor and bioethicist Goodwin sheds much needed light in this disturbing examination of yet another failure of the American health care system: an organ donation process that leads to the sale of human organs. Despite some highly technical sections, the author artfully uses case law and tragic stories of people caught in the machinery of an organ marketplace that favors the well connected. Even readers well versed in current events are likely to be shocked by the prevalence of "presumed consent" legislation in 28 states that shifts the choice to donate away from potential donors —corneas, for instance, are routinely harvested by local coroners unless a specific prior refusal has been communicated (and sometimes even despite such a directive). The author does a good job of linking this country's history of medical scandals that victimized African-Americans to that community's misgivings about serving as either donors or seekers of a spot on the coveted transplant waiting lists. Her controversial recommendations, which include lifting the taboo on selling cadaveric organs to address the organ deficit, should spark much discussion. (Mar.)


Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism (Science and Cultural Theory) ~ Catherine Waldby (Author), Robert Mitchell (Author)
Product Description
As new medical technologies are developed, more and more human tissues—such as skin, bones, heart valves, embryos, and stem cell lines—are stored and distributed for therapeutic and research purposes. The accelerating circulation of human tissue fragments raises profound social and ethical concerns related to who donates or sells bodily tissue, who receives it, and who profits—or does not—from the transaction. Catherine Waldby and Robert Mitchell survey the rapidly expanding economies of exchange in human tissue, explaining the complex questions raised and suggesting likely developments. Comparing contemporary tissue economies in the United Kingdom and United States, they explore and complicate the distinction that has dominated practice and policy for several decades: the distinction between tissue as a gift to be exchanged in a transaction separate from the commercial market and tissue as a commodity to be traded for profit.
Waldby and Mitchell pull together a prodigious amount of research—involving policy reports and scientific papers, operating manuals, legal decisions, interviews, journalism, and Congressional testimony—to offer a series of case studies based on particular forms of tissue exchange. They examine the effect of threats of contamination—from HIV and other pathogens—on blood banks’ understandings of the gift/commodity relationship; the growth of autologous economies, in which individuals bank their tissues for their own use; the creation of the United Kingdom’s Stem Cell bank, which facilitates the donation of embryos for stem cell development; and the legal and financial repercussions of designating some tissues “hospital waste.” They also consider the impact of different models of biotechnology patents on tissue economies and the relationship between experimental therapies to regenerate damaged or degenerated tissues and calls for a legal, for-profit market in organs. Ultimately, Waldby and Mitchell conclude that scientific technologies, the globalization of tissue exchange, and recent anthropological, sociological, and legal thinking have blurred any strict line separating donations from the incursion of market values into tissue economies.


Body Brokers: Inside America's Underground Trade in Human Remains (Paperback)~ Annie Cheney 2006
From Booklist
*Starred Review* Here's one with the potential to keep folks up nights, wondering whether the urn on the mantel contains 100-percent Uncle Fred or a blend. Before journalist Cheney began an assignment for My Generation magazine, she had never suspected there might be diverse career opportunities for cadavers, that whatever one wants to be when one grows up, options continue to exist postmortem. But consider the ever-popular organ donor program. And then there's the option of donating one's body to a medical school for the betterment of mankind through science. Once that latter choice is made, Cheney learned, alternatives multiply, and a corpse can follow one of several roads. On a lower thoroughfare, big bucks are waiting for the cold-blooded entrepreneur ready to carve human bodies up like chickens and parcel them out to the highest bidder for such uses as military bomb test dummies, lifelike operative subjects for medical seminars, and resource troves for the machine-tooling of bones into orthopedic apparatus. Even if one never willingly donates one's body, there are enough unscrupulous morticians and morgue workers who will surreptitiously carve out an ulna or a femur and replace it with a PVC pipe, then sell the goods on the not-so-open open market. This is a chilling expose of the grisly industry of body trading. Donna ChavezCopyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.


Kidney for Sale by Owner: Human Organs, Transplantation, and the Market )~ Mark J Cherry, 2005
Product Description
Over the past decade in the United States, nearly 6,000 people a year have died waiting for organ transplants. In 2003 alone, only 20,000 out of the 83,000 waiting for transplants received them - in anyone's eyes, a tragedy. Many of these deaths could have been prevented, and many more lives saved, were it not for the almost universal moral hand wringing over the concept of selling human organs. Bioethicist Mark Cherry explores the why of these well-intentioned misperceptions and legislation and boldly deconstructs the roadblocks that are standing in the way of restoring health to thousands of people. If most Americans accept the notion that the market is the most efficient means to distribute resources, why should body parts be excluded? Kidney for Sale by Owner contends that the market is indeed a legitimate - and humane - way to procure and distribute human organs. Cherry stakes the claim that it may be even more just, and more compatible with many Western religious and philosophical traditions, than the current charity-based system now in place. He carefully examines arguments against a market for body parts, including assertions based on the moral views of John Locke, Immanuel Kant, and Thomas Aquinas, and shows these claims to be steeped in myth, oversimplification, and contorted logic. Rather than focusing on purported human exploitation and the irrational "moral repugnance" of selling organs, Cherry argues that we should focus on saving lives. Following on the thinking of the philosopher Robert Nozick, he demonstrates that, with regard to body parts, the important core humanitarian values of equality, liberty, altruism, social solidarity, human dignity, and, ultimately, improved health care are more successfully supported by a regulated market rather than by well meant but misguided, prohibitions.


The Ethics of Organ Transplants: The Current Debate (Contemporary Issues (Buffalo, N.Y.).) (Paperback 1999)~ Arthur L. Caplan (Author, Editor), Daniel H. Coelho (Editor)
From Library Journal
Renowned bioethicist Caplan (Ctr. for Bioethics, Univ. of Pennsylvania) and medical writer Coelho have selected 35 articles that are representative of the ethical issues surrounding organ transplantation. Scarcity of organs and the high costs involved in these procedures force difficult legal, philosophical, scientific, and economic choices. What are the sources of organs used in transplantation? How can we make the procurement system more efficient? Should we pay for organs? Should someone who has already received one transplant be allowed a second? Should alcoholics be given liver transplants? Are transplants really worth the tremendous costs? These are just a few of the questions discussed here. In many cases, the editors have selected companion articles that illustrate contrasting viewpoints on a particular issue. Although some articles are slightly dated, the issues are still relevant. This well-balanced, reasonably priced compilation is recommended for all libraries.ATina Neville, Univ. of South Florida at St. Petersburg Lib.Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The U.S. Organ Procurement System: A Prescription for Reform (AEI Evaluative Studies.) (Hardcover) by David L. Kaserman and A. H. Barnett
Product Description
Experts make a compelling and persuasive case for markets in human organs.

Kieran Healy, Last Best Gift. Altruism and the Market for Human Blood and Organs. Chicago University Press, 2006


The Baby Business: How Money, Science, and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception (Hardcover)~ Debora L. Spar
From Publishers Weekly
Among the troubling aspects of new reproductive technologies is the takeover of reproduction by the marketplace. This probing study accepts the free market process while casting a discerning and skeptical eye at its pitfalls. Harvard business prof Spar (The Cooperative Edge: The Internal Politics of International Cartels) explores many aspects of the high-tech commodification of procreation: the fabulous revenues commercial fertility clinics earn from couples' desperate desire for children and the ensuing conflicts between medical ethics and the profit motive; the premiums paid for sperm and eggs from genetically desirable donors; the possible exploitation of poor, nonwhite and Third World surrogate mothers paid to gestate the spawn of wealthy Westerners; the fine line between modern adoption practices and outright baby selling; and the new entrepreneurial paradigm of maternity, in which the official "mother" simply finances the assemblage of sperm, purchased egg and hired womb and lays contractual claim to the finished infant. Spar considers most of these developments inevitable and not undesirable (they provide kids to parents who want them), but calls for government regulation to curb excesses and protect the interests of all involved. Her sanguinity will not satisfy all critics, but she offers a lucid, nuanced guide to this brave new world. (Feb. 14) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.