Thursday, January 15, 2009

Market for matchmakers: sorting by price

›
Dating and matchmaking services vary widely on a number of dimensions, one of which is price. Below I'll talk about services whose price...
4 comments:

Heathrow airport

›
Heathrow airport is in the process of expanding by adding an additional runway, a process that has run into lots of opposition, the Times re...
2 comments:
Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Marriage market in Saudi Arabia: age of marriage

›
Many markets unravel , that is, transactions tend to become earlier and earlier. One example is marriage markets, in which betrothals can so...
Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Rental market for textbooks

›
From Peter Klein at Organizations and Markets: Students: Consider Renting, not Buying, Your Books " Chegg is the Netflix of college te...
3 comments:

Class notes on Market Design

›
Fuhito Kojima is teaching a Matching and Market Design class at Yale, and he'll post his lectures as they develop. On my game theory a...

Black market for kidneys--in the US?

›
Some years ago, when I gave a talk on kidney exchange at the Barcelona Clinic, a nephrologist there told me there were hospitals in the US a...
Monday, January 12, 2009

House swaps

›
Tight real estate markets make it especially difficult to complete transactions in which each party needs to sell his own house before he ca...
3 comments:
Sunday, January 11, 2009

Market for Allies

›
A new NBER paper looks at the question. Can Hearts and Minds Be Bought? The Economics of Counterinsurgency in Iraq by Eli Berman, Jacob N. S...
1 comment:
Saturday, January 10, 2009

School choice: cost of strategy-proofness

›
A new NBER paper takes another look at the (old) Boston mechanism. Ex Ante Efficiency in School Choice Mechanisms: An Experimental Investiga...
Friday, January 9, 2009

School choice at sea

›
"Peer effects" are a potentially big issue in schools, although hard to model. How children affect each others' education can ...
Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Market for Humanities Ph.D.'s (and economists)

›
An email from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences announces some preliminary data from a new project: Humanities Resource Center Onlin...
Tuesday, January 6, 2009

College football and the BCS National Championship Game

›
Number 1 ranked Oklahoma will play number 2 ranked Florida Thursday evening in the Bowl Championship Series' National Championship Game,...

Exam schools

›
One way to control admission to (some) public schools is by having an entrance exam. That solves a number of problems, including of course t...
2 comments:
Monday, January 5, 2009

Markets for Macro Risks: Early Shiller

›
Whenever I think about designing markets on which individuals can hedge big risks, I think about the remarkable market-design work of Robert...
Sunday, January 4, 2009

A word for unraveling in Singapore: "Choping"

›
" Choping " is Singapore English slang for reserving something well in advance, i.e. a place in school for your child, etc. That i...
3 comments:

International market for transplantable organs: "transplant tourism"

›
Frank Delmonico writes in response to my previous post as follows: "Re: the Times of London story "It is well-known that patients ...
Saturday, January 3, 2009

Market for transplantable organs

›
The Times of London reports on Outrage over organs ‘sold to foreigners’ Much of the discussion of sales of transplantable organs focuses on ...
2 comments:

The credit crisis and market design

›
The WSJ, in its Real Time Economics Blog and in a related story in their January 2 issue, raises some questions about how discussion of fin...
2 comments:
Thursday, January 1, 2009

Designer dresses: avoiding coordination failure

›
The Telegraph reports that " The anguish and embarrassment of arriving at an exclusive party only to find another woman wearing the sam...
2 comments:

Marriage market for non-resident Indians

›
Being an overseas businessman is no longer the draw it once was in India's market for arranged marriages: West no longer best for Indian...
1 comment:

The Economist as Auctioneer

›
Paul Milgrom has a new company, Auctionomics . Arguably already the world's leading auction theorist, and a demigod among bidding consul...
5 comments:
Wednesday, December 31, 2008

College admissions: deadlines and congestion

›
One modern convenience for high school seniors applying to college in 2008 is the Common Application, which lets them cut down on the numbe...
1 comment:

Marriage Market among a slice of the wealthy

›
The NY Times reports on the International Debutante Ball at the Waldorf-Astoria: Glamour Still Rules, but With Fewer Debutantes . "......
Tuesday, December 30, 2008

Market for honey: "honey laundering"

›
'Honey laundering' beats US tariffs on Chinese food products (I couldn't resist a new criminal activity with such a great name....

Marriage market in Iran

›
The marriage market in Iran is not proceeding as planned, the Guardian reports: Premarital sex on rise as Iranians delay marriage, survey fi...

Pawn shops attracting wealthier customers

›
The WSJ has a story whose title and subtitle sum it up: People Pulling Up to Pawnshops Today Are Driving Cadillacs and BMWs : Well-to-Do Tur...
Sunday, December 28, 2008

Eminent domain

›
A story in the NY Times has a striking photo of a private home in Seattle located in a niche in a large commercial building. The large build...

Market for used books

›
The easy availability of internet shopping for used books hasn't just affected used book stores , it is having an effect on the sale of ...
3 comments:
Thursday, December 25, 2008

New York City Middle School Choice

›
New York City has a centralized school choice process for high schools , but middle schools are another story. The New York Times reports: ...

Charity at a price

›
Nicholas Kristof's NY Times column on Christmas day, The Sin In Doing Good Deeds , begins with the question about repugnant transactions...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Markets and fraud

›
You can't read the news these days without thinking about fraud, and how market designers should think about it. I don't just mean h...
5 comments:
Tuesday, December 23, 2008

Lifesharers: organ donation as a club good rather than a public good

›
My earlier post today drew a comment from the executive director of an organization, LifeSharers , with an interesting approach to promotin...
3 comments:

Incentives for organ donors, continued

›
Two eminent transplant docs, Drs. Frank Delmonico and William Harmon, have sent me an open letter expressing their concerns about proposed l...
3 comments:
Sunday, December 21, 2008

The market for economics: what should economists study?

›
The Boston Globe has a story in today's Ideas section about whether academic economists will and should redirect their energies to focu...
2 comments:
Saturday, December 20, 2008

Marriage market: dowries

›
The previous post got me thinking about dowries and their role in marriage markets: the paper I like best is " Why Dowries?" Ameri...
2 comments:
Friday, December 19, 2008

Marriage market: Middle East

›
Head of Palestinian clan offers Iraqi shoe-throwing journalist a bride "The head of a large West Bank family wants to reward the Iraqi ...

Repugnant gambles

›
Justin Wolfers has a blog post at Freakonomics in which he observes that the Australian Federal Treasurer regards bets about the recession ...
Wednesday, December 17, 2008

Competition among airports

›
London's Heathrow, Gatwick, and Stansted airports are presently run by BAA Ltd , which also runs the Edinburgh and Glasgow airports in S...

Incentives for Organ Donors

›
Apologies for this unusually long post: to make sense of this you have to look at bits of Federal legislation. The one sentence summary is t...

Academic marketplace: Recession at Yale

›
Yale's president, economist Richard Levin, has written a sensible letter to the Yale community about dealing with the sharp drop in Yal...
Tuesday, December 16, 2008

Bankruptcy

›
Contracts are shaped in part by the legal framework that determines what happens when contracts break down. The long time scholar of bankrup...
Monday, December 15, 2008

Some transactions become repugnant again in Holland

›
Holland scrapping liberal policies on drugs and brothels to clean up image "The Dutch are rethinking their famously liberal polices on ...
2 comments:
Sunday, December 14, 2008

Surrogate motherhood, continued.

›
Last month I blogged about a NY Times Sunday magazine story written by a woman who hired a surrogate mother to bear her child, in connection...
3 comments:
Saturday, December 13, 2008

Illegal cartels and the prisoner's dilemma

›
Paraffin wax is a humble byproduct of oil refining, and the EU's competition commission recently fined a passel of big oil refiners for ...
2 comments:
Friday, December 12, 2008

School choice in Belgium

›
Estelle Cantillon , a leading market designer working in Belgium, writes in LeSoir about the current school choice situation, following the ...
Thursday, December 11, 2008

Market for Senate seats

›
Auction theorist, designer, and entrepreneur Peter Cramton sends me the following email about the recent arrest of the Governor of Illinois...
1 comment:
Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Should assisted suicide be a legal transaction? The debate continues.

›
The debate in England about whether the laws criminalizing assisted suicide should be changed has grown agonizing to follow, with a televise...
2 comments:
Tuesday, December 9, 2008

School choice in NYC

›
Last month I blogged about the New York City high school choice mechanism that Atila Abdulkadiroglu, Parag Pathak and I helped design. The N...

Academic marketplace: Recession at Harvard

›
Harvard's endowment has (like most assets) taken a huge hit in the market meltdown. However, it is likely that, when the storm is over, ...

Auctions of airport takeoff and landing slots--maybe not so soon after all

›
Auctions of slots at NYC airports delayed yet again: Court Order Delays Auction of Landing Slots at Airports "A court order on Monday d...
Sunday, December 7, 2008

Markets for durables when credit is tight

›
Two stories in the NY Times reflect changes in markets for durable goods and for real estate in the context of tight credit: layaway plans a...
1 comment:

Auctions of airport takeoff and landing slots--maybe coming soon

›
U.S. to Auction Slots Soon at New York City Airports reports the Times. "The auction is scheduled for next Friday, with results annou...
2 comments:

Export controls are hard to enforce

›
The Boston Globe reports on the export to Iran of an oil exploration tool developed at Schlumberger's labs near MIT: Oil firm sidesteps ...
Saturday, December 6, 2008

Illegal markets: Dogfighting

›
Dogfighting Subculture, Illegal and Secretive, Is Taking Hold in Texas Not only is dogfighting itself a felony in Texas, many of the partici...
1 comment:
Friday, December 5, 2008

New Zealand traffic rules

›
Traffic rules are designed to avoid coordination failures. In much of the world, driving is on the right. New Zealand is one of the island n...
2 comments:
Thursday, December 4, 2008

Auctions as tourist attractions

›
If you never visited the Tokyo morning fish auctions, it may be too late: Tourists banned from famous Tokyo tuna auctions at world's big...
2 comments:
Wednesday, December 3, 2008

Assisted suicide and monarchy

›
I have blogged before about assisted suicide as a repugnant transaction that (along with some others) is undergoing changes in perception i...

Medical residents

›
The Institute of Medicine has issued a report on the training of new doctors: Expert Panel Seeks Changes in Training of Medical Residents (...
Tuesday, December 2, 2008

Elder care: household production

›
Jane Gross at the NY Times blogs on a recent AARP report, which points out that eldercare is mostly provided by families: Love’s Labor . (Th...