Monday, October 5, 2009

Incentives and food safety

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In a disturbing story on food safety, the NY Times focuses on ground beef and reports E. Coli Path Shows Flaws in Ground Beef Inspection . ...
Sunday, October 4, 2009

Kidney sales

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Here's a very interesting 9 minute YouTube video on kidney sales, including in the U.S.: CNN Reports On The Buying & Selling Of Huma...

Course allocation by Budish, updated

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Eric Budish's updated (and still remarkable) paper is here: The Combinatorial Assignment Problem: Approximate Competetive Equilibrium Fr...
Saturday, October 3, 2009

Hotbeds of innovation: food in Portland

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Why are Silicon Valley and Cambridge MA hotbeds of innovation? A nice NY Times story about the culinary scene in Portland Maine, by Julia Mo...
Friday, October 2, 2009

Klemperer's auction design for toxic assets

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Over at voxeu.org, Paul Klemperer writes about Central bank liquidity and “toxic asset” auctions , which describes briefly his paper Klemper...
Thursday, October 1, 2009

Michael Kearns heads up a new market design program at Penn

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The University of Pennsylvania today issued a press release announcing a new undergrad program: Penn Launches Undergraduate Program in Marke...

Further unraveling of basketball recruiting

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Zhenyu Lai, a graduate student in Economics at Harvard, who is taking Market Design this semester, sent me the following email, which he gav...

Further consequences of unraveling of law firm hiring

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The Crimson reports on the difficulties facing Harvard Law students graduating in this recession year: Tough Times For Harvard Lawyers ...
Wednesday, September 30, 2009

A proliferation of penny auctions

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Last year I thought about blogging about Swoopo , the "entertainment shopping" site that is run as an "all pay" auction ...
23 comments:
Tuesday, September 29, 2009

When a protected transaction meets a repugnant one: The MA suit over the Defense of Marriage Act

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Same sex marriage raises issues involving both repugnant transactions and protected transactions . On the one hand, marriage is one of our ...
Monday, September 28, 2009

Reserving spaces in crowded places

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It may be possible for vacationing Germans to reserve rental lounge chairs at a crowded beach or pool, but in Saudi Arabia it's a crime...
1 comment:
Sunday, September 27, 2009

Are names destiny?

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Does your name influence your choice of career? The following paragraph caught my eye, from a NY Times story on testing the safety of motorc...
3 comments:

Thaler on mandated choice

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In the NY Times, Dick Thaler considers how the way people are asked whether they would like to be deceased organ donors might influence the ...
1 comment:

London Times reports on ads to sell kidneys

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Despite the headlines, it isn't clear that they found any actual cash-for-kidney transactions, or the infrastructure to support them, b...
9 comments:
Saturday, September 26, 2009

Where burial societies go to die

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The NY Times has a story on burial societies, cooperatives set up by immigrants in the 1800s and early 1900s to buy and maintain cemeteries....
Friday, September 25, 2009

Common deadlines

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One way to try to control unraveling of transaction dates is to specify, and try to enforce, particular times at which certain aspects of a...
1 comment:
Thursday, September 24, 2009

Entrepreneurial Market Design

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In the coming weeks, I'll be making a series of posts on a subject I term Entrepreneurial Market Design , the study of creating for-prof...
2 comments:

Nagel's guessing/beauty contest game: a famous experiment in game theory

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Much of game theory concerns how ideally rational players should behave when they interact with other ideally rational players, when everyon...
2 comments:
Wednesday, September 23, 2009

College admissions in Illinois

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The long running story about politically connected candidates getting preferential admissions at the University of Illinois reached some sor...
1 comment:

The market for college athletes

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Putting the Amateur Myth to Rest by Allen L. Sack "I agree with Brand that the term amateur is not a good fit for modern college sports...
1 comment:
Tuesday, September 22, 2009

Books on demand (Espresso in the Square)

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The Harvard Crimson reports on a new dimension to the book market in the age of the internet, books printed on demand (and delivered by bicy...

Another step in the unraveling of the baskeball market

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In a further unraveling of the market for basketball players, Jeremy Tyler, 18, "became the first player to drop out of high school t...
1 comment:
Monday, September 21, 2009

Unraveling in junior tennis:

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Not only do the most competitive tennis players have to start training while young, they have to train more intensely than is compatible wit...
Sunday, September 20, 2009

Regulating fast trading on Wall St

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David Silver has a nice article in the NYT comparing the proposed regulation of "flash trading" with some of the century old regul...
Saturday, September 19, 2009

Market for (smuggled) cultural treasures

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Trading in certain kinds of antiquities and "cultural treasures" is regarded as a repugnant transaction in many parts of the world...
Friday, September 18, 2009

Cent mail: signalling that your email isn't spam

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Here's a new twist (from Yahoo! Research) on paying to send email as a barrier to spam: a 1 cent donation to charity for each email buys...
1 comment:
Thursday, September 17, 2009

Congestion in online job search

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Companies that post job openings online get access to many resumes, but may have trouble sorting through them. Phyllis Korrki writes: Where,...
1 comment:

A fast auction for gift cards

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TC50: Gift Card Auction Site Rackup Aims To Shake Up Market A "fast auction" in which the high bidders buy themselves gift cards a...
1 comment:
Wednesday, September 16, 2009

Law firm recruitment, rescinded offers, etc.

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Law firm recruitment begins with the recruitment of summer associates, many of whom are traditionally made offers for permanent employment s...

NRMP to implement "managed scramble"

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After the medical match, some applicants and positions remain unmatched. Right now, that is handled through a fairly decentralized "scr...
Tuesday, September 15, 2009

Playing the admissions game

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A recent NBER paper focuses on how student behavior has changed in reaction to the increasing competition for admission to elite colleges (r...
1 comment:

Penny wise and pound foolish on kidneys and antirejection drugs

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Medicare pays for kidney transplants (which are both better and cheaper than the dialysis it replaces and that Medicare also pays for). But ...
1 comment:
Monday, September 14, 2009

Your penny for my two cents: micropayments on the web

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Even if you are prepared to pay a penny for my thoughts, the transaction costs would likely deter you, unless the payment can be made automa...

Authors' Registry: Clearinghouse for small payments

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How should small fees for copying copyrighted material be collected and distributed? About once a year, I get a communication from The Autho...
3 comments:
Sunday, September 13, 2009

Norman Borlaug, father of "Green Revolution"

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Here is the NY Times obituary for Norman Borlaug, who changed how grains are produced: Norman Borlaug, 95, Dies; Led Green Revolution "...
1 comment:

People are experience goods (online dating version)

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What do you get when you cross an online dating site with speed dating? Virtual Date... Here's an interesting paper on adding some tex...
4 comments:

Marriage and dating in NYC: matching complements

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Some dating services seek to match likes to likes, e.g. South Asians, or Ivy League graduates. But there's also a market for the traditi...
3 comments:
Saturday, September 12, 2009

Debtor's prison in Dubai

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The NY Times reports on criminal justice in Dubai: For a Bounced Check in Dubai, the Penalty Can Be Years Behind Bars Here's what I wrot...
1 comment:

Service versus self service

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In some markets you serve yourself, in others you are served. Which is the luxury? It depends. The recent decisions by some universities to ...
Friday, September 11, 2009

Medical match policies (NRMP)

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The NRMP has some new rules for 2009, which suggests that there have been some new problems (I haven't been involved for a while). ...
Thursday, September 10, 2009

Two-career job searches

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When a couple needs two career-track jobs, they face a hard problem of coordination with each other and with their prospective employers. If...
2 comments:

Deceased organ donation: advice from Steve Jobs

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Here's a 2-minute CNN video , at the beginning of which Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who recently received a deceased donor liver , advises us ...
2 comments:
Wednesday, September 9, 2009

Law clerks for Massachusetts courts, continued

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In MA, the Proposal to let law-firm hires help state courts is dropped . "The state judiciary has abandoned a controversial proposal to...
1 comment:

Market for new lawyers

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Graduating in a recession is no fun, and aspects of the way lawyers are hired and promoted may make that particularly so not only for this y...
Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Matching for school choice

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School choice has received some extended coverage lately, with articles intended to appeal to a broad audience interested in education issue...