Saturday, December 12, 2009

Computer assisted markets: infrastructure

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Some time ago the NY Times ran a story on "smart infrastructure:" Bringing Efficiency to the Infrastructure The story was mostly h...
Friday, December 11, 2009

Shill bidding in domain name auctions

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SnapNames Employee Caught Bidding on Auctions That's from Elliot's Blog: Domain Name Investing News and Tips . (And you wondered why...

School assignment in New York City

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The December issue of the American Economic Review has our paper on the redesign of the NYC high school assignment system: Abdulkadiroglu, A...
Thursday, December 10, 2009

Auction design by Paul Klemperer

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Paul Klemperer alerts me to two new market design papers. He writes "here is the paper about the Product-Mix Auction, the new auction d...
Wednesday, December 9, 2009

Course allocation at HBS

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Some of the gems of the market design literature involve the careful analysis of existing institutions for allocating scarce goods, to unde...
Tuesday, December 8, 2009

Law and market design

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Law obviously plays an enormous role in market design. Haifa University's Forum for Law and Markets is hosting a conference today on Beh...

Compensation for donors of human eggs for medical research

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Fox News carries the following press release: Pro-Life Feminist Group Sues NYS over Compensation for Women's Eggs . "Feminists C...
2 comments:
Monday, December 7, 2009

The market for blood plasma

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Is Money Tainting the Plasma Supply? "Hundreds, probably thousands, of Mexicans like Ms. Delgado come to the United States to trade the...
1 comment:

Compensating blood donors

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Robert Slonim, Mario Macis, and Nicola Lacetera report on the effect of (non-cash) incentives on whole blood donation: Will There Be Blood? ...
Sunday, December 6, 2009

DARPA Red balloons at MIT

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The DARPA network challenge has been won by the MIT team: MIT wins $40,000 prize in nationwide balloon-hunt contest "On MIT's Web...

New York State Senate Votes Down Gay Marriage Bill

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Same sex marriage continues to teeter on the cusp of whether Americans regard it as a repugnant transaction , whether it should be legal or ...
Saturday, December 5, 2009

Market for kidnapping

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The Hostage Business "Few sectors have endured the economic downturn of recent years better than kidnapping. Confidence in big banks an...

Deferred acceptance in Ghanian school choice

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Kehinde Ajayi , a Ph.D. Candidate in the Department of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, is studying school choice in Gha...
Friday, December 4, 2009

School choice in San Francisco, Chicago, and Cambridge MA

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Changes in school assignment procedures are being discussed in San Francisco, Chicago, and even Cambridge, MA. In San Francisco, the rede...
Thursday, December 3, 2009

New York City High School choices are due Dec 4

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These days I follow the NYC high schools from a distance, but it's gratifying to see some of the long lasting changes that Atila Abdulka...
Tuesday, December 1, 2009

Kidney exchange in People Magazine

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In the Nov 30 issue, with Johnny Depp on the cover. "The chain's home base is the University of Toledo Medical Center, where transp...
2 comments:

The signaling deadline for the economics job market is midnight tonight

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A quarter of new Ph.D.s who failed to signal last year reported that it was because they missed the deadline. The deadline is midnight tonig...
Monday, November 30, 2009

The signaling deadline for the econ job market is tomorrow, Tuesday, at midnight

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If you are an economist on the jobmarket, planning to be interviewed at the ASSA meetings in January, and if you haven't submitted your ...
2 comments:
Saturday, November 28, 2009

The job market for new economists: preliminary report

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I chair the AEA ad hoc committee on the job market, and a preliminary version of a report we're writing may be of interest to those on t...

Internet resources for the homeless

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Being homeless does not necessarily mean being cut off from the internet. The Boston Globe reports Online sites offer a fertile venue for so...
Friday, November 27, 2009

Rules of the road for cars and bikes

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In many places where cars and bikes share a road, they customarily (if not legally) follow different rules. In England, a trial program will...
Thursday, November 26, 2009

The market for fresh turkeys

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Frozen turkeys can be produced year round, but fresh turkeys for Thanksgiving all need to be brought to maturity at around the same time. T...
Wednesday, November 25, 2009

Two edited volumes

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Two edited volumes recently arrived in the mail: Better Living through Economics , edited by John Siegfried; and Studies of Labor Market Int...

Early and late matching to career choices

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A recent NBER paper by Ofer Malamud finds that students (in Scotland) who get to choose their academic specialty later in their educational ...
Tuesday, November 24, 2009

Designing a course grading system

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Noam Nisan at Algorithmic Game Theory tells a funny story about grades for a game theory class. (Don't try this for other subjects...)
Monday, November 23, 2009

Worldwide university rankings, compared to GNP

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Rankings have lots of problems, but here is an ambitious attempt to look at universities all around the world. "The Academic Ranking of...
3 comments:

Final remarks in our market design class

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Harvard's new academic calendar and Thanksgiving combined to produce an early end to the lecture part of our Market Design class. I ende...
Sunday, November 22, 2009

Who gets deceased-donor kidneys? Thinking about changes in the rules.

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A lot of thought and politics goes into changing the rules for which patients get which kidneys, how long they wait, and how much that shoul...
3 comments:

Incentives for buying health insurance when healthy

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My colleague Marty Feldstein worries in the Washington Post about potential incentive mis-alignments in new health care legislation: Obamaca...
4 comments:
Saturday, November 21, 2009

Restaurant reservations

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An interesting paper by Alexei Alexandrov and Martin A. Lariviere asks Are Reservations Recommended? From the abstract: "We examine th...

Misc. repugnant transactions

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Environmentalists seek to wipe out plush toilet paper (headline in Boston Globe) They advocate products made of recycled fibers "And, ...
Friday, November 20, 2009

Harvard housing

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Harvard sophomores, juniors and seniors are assigned housing randomly, with some details that require strategic thinking. The objective see...
Thursday, November 19, 2009

Non-simultaneous kidney exchange chains

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Quite a few kidney exchange chains, starting with a non-directed (altruistic) donor, have been done non-simultaneously , since the first non...
Wednesday, November 18, 2009

Gaming the Liver Transplant Market (by Jason Snyder)

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When my colleagues and I began talking to transplant surgeons about the design of kidney exchanges, it was initially sometimes hard to convi...
Tuesday, November 17, 2009

Louis Menand on the market for PhDs in English

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Louis Menand, in Harvard Magazine, has many interesting things to say about the Ph.D. in English literature and the market for Ph.D.s in Eng...
Monday, November 16, 2009

Humanities job market: priming the pump

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The American Council of Learned Societies has decided to give the job market for humanities Ph.D.s a boost, in the face of the tough job mar...
2 comments:
Sunday, November 15, 2009

Market for lesson plans

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College professors sell textbooks, business school professor can profit from case studies, and now there's a market for lesson plans for...

Signaling for interviews in the Economics Job Market: Registration opens tomorrow

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Here is the American Economic Association's announcement of the 2009 mechanism for Signaling for Interviews in the Economics Job Market ...
2 comments:
Saturday, November 14, 2009

Nothing human need be foreign to economics

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Economists like to think of Economics as a broad church that welcomes investigation of a wide range of human activity from many viewpoints. ...
2 comments:

A grave problem of supply and demand

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Grave sites, once sold and occupied, are intended to be occupied for a very long time, and their sale can't easily be negotiated if more...
1 comment:
Friday, November 13, 2009

School choice, and separation of church and state

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As a beneficiary of both a democratic and a religious tradition, I think that separation of church and state is good not just for states (if...
1 comment:
Thursday, November 12, 2009

Incentives in Chicago school choice

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The Chicago Sun Times reports : "Poring over data about eighth-graders who applied to the city's elite college preps, Chicago Publi...