Repugnant transactions in Australia

Australian pub offers free alcohol for knickerless women.

Mayor Janet Cribbes slammed the promotion in the local press.
"It fuels the fire for irresponsible drinking, irresponsible behaviour and puts young women at risk and makes them more vulnerable to sexual assault," she said.
"I'd thought they would have learnt their lesson from the dwarf episode. We'll be paying them a visit soon, I'd say."

Bibliography of matching--update

I maintain a web-based Bibliography of matching and market design, and it is getting harder to keep it up to date as the field grows. (This is a good problem to have. If you have some papers that should be there, please send me a list in a form I can cut and paste:) I just added/updated the following papers by Fuhito Kojima:

Incentives and Stability in Large Two-Sided Matching Markets (2007), with Parag A. Pathak, American Economic Review, forthcoming.

Random Assignment of Multiple Indivisible Objects (2007), forthcoming, Mathematical Social Sciences.

Matching with Contracts: Comment (2007), with John William Hatfield, American Economic Review, forthcoming..

Games of School Choice under the Boston Mechanism with General Priority Structures (2007), Social Choice and Welfare, forthcoming.

The Law of Aggregate Demand and Welfare in the Two-Sided Matching Market (2007),
Economics Letters, forthcoming.

When can Manipulations be Avoided in Two-Sided Matching Markets? Maximal Domain Results (2007),
The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics (contribution), Article 32.

Matching and Price Competition: Comment (2007),
American Economic Review 97, pp 1027-1031.

Random Paths to Pairwise Stability in Many-to-Many Matching Problems: A Study on Market Equilibration (2006), with M. Utku Ünver,
International Journal of Game Theory (the Special Issue in Honor of David Gale), 2008.

Mixed Strategies in Games of Capacity Manipulation in Hospital-Intern Markets (2006),
Social Choice and Welfare 27, pp 25-28.

Strategy-Proofness of the Probabilistic Serial Mechanism in Large Random Assignment Problems (2007), with Mihai Manea

Competitive Claims and Resource Allocation by Deferred Acceptance (2007), with Mihai Manea,

Finding All Stable Matchings with Couples (2007), revise

Asymptotic Equivalence of Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mechanisms (2008), with Yeon-Koo Che

Group Incentive Compatibility for Matching with Contracts (2007), with John William Hatfield

Substitutes and Stability for Matching with Contracts (2007), with John William Hatfield

ReRegulation of the financial markets

A lot of market design is done, thoughtfully or on the fly, by regulators. A good overview of recent events in the financial market meltdown is at
Freakonomics: Diamond and Kashyap on the Recent Financial Upheavals

Incentives in (British) medicine

The Telegraph reports on the Annual Congress of the British Orthopaedic Association: Severely injured patients are being delayed specialist care because Government targets mean hospitals are encouraged to operate on routine cases first, experts have warned.

"Routine cases such as hip and knee replacements have to be carried out within Government waiting time targets meaning urgent trauma cases are delayed which can jeopardise their recovery."

The Google-Yahoo deal

Hal Varian's thoughts on the Google-Yahoo deal are here: The SearchIgnite study on ad prices and the Yahoo-Google deal.

Ben Edelman's are here.

Science (and Economics?) and Religion

The Church of England (in the person of the Rev Dr Malcolm Brown, their director of Mission and Public Affairs) has published a belated apology to Charles Darwin, called Good religion needs good science. For those of us worried about the sometimes contentious relation between economics and religion, in connection with repugnant transactions, for example, it is worth reading.

Dr Brown notes "It is hard to avoid the thought that the reaction against Darwin was largely based on what we would now call the 'yuk factor' (an emotional not an intellectual response) when he proposed a lineage from apes to humans."

His concluding paragraph:
"Charles Darwin: 200 years from your birth, the Church of England owes you an apology for misunderstanding you and, by getting our first reaction wrong, encouraging others to misunderstand you still. We try to practice the old virtues of 'faith seeking understanding' and hope that makes some amends. But the struggle for your reputation is not over yet, and the problem is not just your religious opponents but those who falsely claim you in support of their own interests. Good religion needs to work constructively with good science – and I dare to suggest that the opposite may be true as well."

University tuition in Israel

Israel has several remarkably good universities, all heavily regulated by the state. Recently some private colleges have opened. The following story from Yedhiot suggests the government might allow universities some freedom in setting tuition. (We'll see...)
Appropriation committee defies education minister, permits each university to set own tuition fee level. Student Union vows it will put up fight

Kidneys in Canada

The Kidney Foundation of Canada applauds recent government announcement to improve organ donation:

Canada is taking steps to promote kidney exchange by establishing a database of patient-donor pairs.

And various Canadian provinces (BC in 2006 and Ontario and Manitoba in 2008) have initiated programs to reimburse out of pocket expenses of live organ donors,and some very limited lost income reimbursement. While the laws that prohibit organ sales often explicitly allow reimbursement of expenses, jurisdictions have been slow to authorize reimbursement, for fear of starting down the slippery slope towards payment for organs.

Market for textbooks

Don’t Buy That Textbook, Download It Free in the NY Times:

"In protest of what he says are textbooks’ intolerably high prices — and the dumbing down of their content to appeal to the widest possible market — Professor McAfee has put his introductory economics textbook online free. ...“This market is not working very well — except for the shareholders in the textbook publishers,” he said. “We have lots of knowledge, but we are not getting it out.”

Black market for kidneys in Singapore

A Singapore businessman sentenced for attempting to buy a kidney from a villager in Indonesia has highlighted the shortage of kidneys available for transplants and has fueled a national debate on the legalization of organ trade.

Market for professors

A brief comparison of some features of the academic marketplaces in Argentina, France, and Germany is given in The Worst Academic Profession Career Structures by Philip G. Altbach and Christine Musselin.

Euthanasia

Repugnant transactions in Europe:
"In his homily, the pope said the ill should pray to find ''the grace to accept, without fear or bitterness, to leave this world at the hour chosen by God.'' The Vatican vehemently maintains that life must continue to its natural end.
The message has special resonance in Europe. Belgium and the Netherlands have legalized euthanasia, and Switzerland allows counselors or physicians to prepare a lethal dose, though patients must take it on their own."

From NY Times: Pope to sick: Accept death at hour chosen by God

Matching for zoo keepers

Calling a matchmaking site a studbook might be too blunt for most dating sites. But zookeepers need a thick market to find the right matches: see the NY Times on Seeking Mates for Furred and Clawed . (NB to matchmaking entrepreneurs, it's too late to reserve the URL studbook.com, that's already an active site.)

Wind farms

It may seem strange for an entrepreneur to call for more government regulation, but when it comes to energy, that is what Mandelstam is doing. “As a student of history, you go back to a guy named Thomas Edison, and his first power plant, and the thing one has to point out is that the government and regulators have been integrally enmeshed in the energy business ever since it began on Pearl Street in 1882.” He points to Europe as an exemplar: “We were the world leader in wind. Europe overtook us quite a while ago and continues to beat us all the time because they got the public policy right.” Wise regulation, according to Mandelstam, and a thoughtful debate about energy policy is the best way to correct that. “Let’s line up all the subsidies of coal and nuclear power and oil and natural gas and wind — and let’s have a debate,” Mandelstam urges. “That hasn’t happened in the last eight years, and now, frankly, we’re paying the price for it.”

From the NY Times Sunday Magazine article Wind-Power Politics.

Used book stores

One of the markets most changed by the rise of the internet is the market for used books. Back in the day, people visiting Cambridge MA, for example, might put aside some time to browse the used book stores. The idea was that you probably had a mental list of out of print books you were looking for. No more. If you want an out of print book, you can search online and buy it from a distant seller. The NY Times book review has an essay today, Attack of the Megalisters, nostalgic for the old days.

(Hat tip to Muriel Niederle.)

Market for nurses

The Washington Post runs a story whose sub-headline is Recruitment Plans Focus On Working Conditions Over Financial Rewards . Apparently salary isn't the only way to compete for scarce nurses. Job satisfaction matters too. Who knew?

Airline safety: incentives and reporting

The NY Times has a story on airline safety, Panel Backs Letting Airlines Confess Errors Unpunished . Airlines and doctors have very different practices about reporting errors: there's more public reporting of "near misses" and other events in the domain of air traffic control, but docs have morbidity conferences in which they talk among themselves about bad outcomes.

Pay for performance in medicine

The NY Times has an essay called The Pitfalls of Linking Doctors’ Pay to Performance .

Presumed consent for organ donation

Repugnance: The Telegraph reports on objections to proposals to institute a presumed consent rule in Britain, where, as in the US, there is a big shortage transplantable organs.

Auctions for airline slots

A good idea that isn't going anywhere quickly is an auction for airline slots in the most congested airports. Here's a recent story from the Washington Post.

Introduction

Peter Coles and I are starting this blog in connection with our Fall 2008 Market Design course at Harvard. It is meant as a place to post news stories related to market design (including stories related to repugnant markets), and to think about market design ideas generally if briefly. For students, it is meant not to replace but to supplement the course page (where the class handouts will still be found). It also won't replace my market design page, although there will likely be links back and forth.

We are new bloggers, so please bear with us while we learn what this is good for. Our initial plan is to post only sporadically.