Monday, February 1, 2010

Finance as portrayed in Victorian novels

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I think of my work on repugnance , and on protected transactions , as part of a broader project of understanding how the workings of the eco...
1 comment:
Sunday, January 31, 2010

A LEAP forward at Harvard

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Here is an email announcement I received today from my colleague Raj Chetty: I am writing to introduce the Lab for Economic Applications and...

Where repugnant transactions motivate 'honor crimes'

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No More Honor Killings writes Melik Kaylan in Forbes (1/29/10), in a column suggesting the practice may date to pre-Islamic Arab culture. Jo...

Corporate funding of research

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Joshua Gans writes (following a John Tierny column) about a new category of transaction in danger of being regarded as repugnant, corporate ...
Saturday, January 30, 2010

College football and the BCS as a political football

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The WSJ reports today: U.S. May Examine College Footbal Bowl System "Sen. Orrin Hatch (R.-Utah) said he received a letter from the Just...

iPhone app for finding broken parking meters

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Application identifies broken meters so that drivers can park at them without paying . The app, called NYC Broken Meters, "allows users...

misc kidney exchange news stories, videos

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VIDEO: Woman Part Of Kidney Exchange Benefiting 10 People - Video ... Twenty people in four states will have surgeries, giving 10 people a c...
Friday, January 29, 2010

Moving towards kidney exchange on a national scale in the U.S.

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There are lots of good reasons to move towards kidney exchange on a national scale (the main ones being the benefits of a thick market). On...
2 comments:
Thursday, January 28, 2010

Dogs and cats becoming repugnant as food in China?

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The Guardian reports Chinese legal experts call for ban on eating cats and dogs . "Chinese legal experts are proposing a ban on eating ...

Surrogacy

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The NY Times has a forum on The Baby Market : "The Times recently published an article on the ethical and legal issues surrounding the...
1 comment:
Wednesday, January 27, 2010

The Australian paired Kidney eXchange (AKX) goes live

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"The Australian paired Kidney eXchange Program (AKX) is a nationwide live kidney donor exchange program which will become operational i...
Tuesday, January 26, 2010

School choice in SF moves forward

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Yesterday Muriel Niederle and Clayton Featherstone were among the presenters to the San Francisco Board of Education, speaking about possibl...
1 comment:

Closing NY City High Schools

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The NY Times has a story by Sharon Otterman on closing "persistently lowest performing" high schools . These are often the large, ...

Spring 2010 courses in Market Design in Boston/Cambridge

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Susan Athey at Harvard and Tayfun Sonmez at Boston College will both be teaching market design courses this semester, and Peter Coles and B...
1 comment:
Monday, January 25, 2010

Pay to play at Russian universities

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The Chronicle of Higher Education reports on an anti-corruption campaign at Kazan State University: A Russian University Gets Creative Again...
Sunday, January 24, 2010

Sex for the disabled and healthcare

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The London Times asks: Is sex for the disabled the last taboo? "The sexual feelings of disabled people have long been ignored. Now the ...
1 comment:

Commodification of the body, in Economic Sociology

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The November 2009 issue of Economic Sociology , The European Electronic Newsletter , is largely devoted to discussion of "commodificati...
Saturday, January 23, 2010

Jon Baron has a new blog

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Jonathan Baron's new blog, Judgment misguided , starts with a great post on Troubles understanding health-insurance reform . Read it, a...

Prostitution and the internet

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Scott Cunningham and Todd Kendall have two papers on prostitution, which discuss among other things how sex is sold on the internet: “ Prost...
2 comments:
Friday, January 22, 2010

Texas regulation watch: horse floaters and eyebrow threaders

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The WSJ brings us the story: Texas Horse Dentists Feel the Bite Of State Regulatory Oversight "For a quarter-century, Mr. Mitz has prac...

Progress towards a sensibly organized national kidney exchange

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An important story has played out one more quite positive step in the dry prose of medical bureaucracy, in the form of a report of the Polic...
1 comment:
Thursday, January 21, 2010

Two new matching papers from Cal Tech

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Federico Echenique, emailing from the left coast, sends along links for two new papers: 1) "Aggregate Matchings," joint with SangM...

Mathoverflow.net

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Mathoverflow.net is an internet site on which people can ask and answer math questions. It elicits a good deal of effort for free, in an Op...
1 comment:
Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Peer review and markets for ideas, in law and science

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Most scientific journals involve "peer review," where the peers in question are supposed to be experts on the subject of a particu...
Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Random allocation, preferences, and welfare: a fish story

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Flying from Madrid to Boston on an Airbus with two aisles not long ago, two stewardesses proceeded in parallel down the aisles offering food...
Monday, January 18, 2010

Onur Kesten on discrete allocation

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Onur Kesten of CMU has two recent papers that offer new views of old problems. Kesten, Onur , Why do popular mechanisms lack efficiency in r...
Sunday, January 17, 2010

Allocation of deceased donor livers

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Ex-chief of transplant program indicted in cover-up of patient switch "On Wednesday, a federal grand jury indicted the former director ...
Saturday, January 16, 2010

blue guitar

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Market design lyrics: "They said, 'You have a blue guitar, You do not play things as they are.' The man replied, 'Things as...

Indian names for college sports teams

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Some people find repugnant the once common use of Native American names for college sports teams, and the practice is in steep decline: Nati...
Friday, January 15, 2010

Ken Rogoff on grandmasters and growth

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My colleague Ken Rogoff writes about two subjects he knows as well as anyone: Grandmasters and Global Growth . Drawing analogies from the gr...
2 comments:
Thursday, January 14, 2010

Ethics of test preparations--for kindergarten

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Sharon Otterman in the NY Times reports: Tips for the Admissions Test ... to Kindergarten "Test preparation has long been a big busines...
Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Languages as marketplaces

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Linguistics and Economics have something big in common, they both study things that human beings have built collectively. Like markets, lang...
2 comments:
Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Medical marijuana laws

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Laws about marijuana give a different window on repugnant transactions. Jan 12: N.J. approves medical marijuana bill "The Legislature...
1 comment:

Same sex marriage; recent developments

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Same sex marriage continues to provide a window on repugnant transactions , i.e. transactions some people think other people shouldn't ...
Monday, January 11, 2010

Mortgages, "strategic default," and repugnance

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Steve Leider writes: I’ve noticed lately that a lot of people (both public intellectuals like Megan McCardle and Rod Dreher as well as [othe...
1 comment:

Money laundering

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Illegal markets, like those for narcotics, can't so easily make use of all the financial services provided by banks and other intermedia...
Sunday, January 10, 2010

European job market for economists: the RES meetings are coming up

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The ASSA meetings in Atlanta were held the first weekend of January, and while that was the main venue for preliminary interviews by North A...
1 comment:

A kidney exchange in Minnesota

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Josephine Marcotty at the Minneapolis St. Paul Star Tribune continues to do a great job of reporting on kidney exchange . Here's her lat...
1 comment:
Saturday, January 9, 2010

Incentives for organ donors at MR and the WSJ

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Alex Tabarrok writes at MR about Innovative Solutions to the Shortage of Transplant Organs , and at the WSJ: The Meat Market . He discusses ...

Critiques of higher education

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Kevin Carey writes that colleges don't expose themselves to sufficient public scrutiny: That Old College Lie Noam Scheiber worries (toge...
Friday, January 8, 2010

Unraveling of primary elections

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Further unraveling , that is. NH Seeks to Stay No. 1 in Presidential Primaries "New Hampshire lawmakers hope to erase any doubt that th...

Market for childbirth, when it comes with a passport

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Quite a few places give citizenship to babies of (even) non-resident parents if they happen to be born there. The U.S. is one, and Hong Kong...
Thursday, January 7, 2010

Martha Nussbaum on same sex marriage

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Martha Nussbaum expresses the view that opposition to same sex marriage is related to physical disgust, when interviewed in the Sunday NY Ti...
2 comments:
Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Polygamy in Malaysia

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Malaysian Polygamy Club Draws Criticism "“Men are by nature polygamous,” said Dr. Rohaya, Mr. Ikram’s third wife, flanked by the other ...
Tuesday, January 5, 2010

Academic job market in a recession year

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Inside Higher Ed has an article on the downturn in number of positions advertised through the Modern Language Association, the American Hist...
Monday, January 4, 2010

Spam newspaper

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One of the odder features of the internet ad economy is that it is apparently profitable to create internet sites that draw some search traf...

Recruitment of male high school athletes by ... girls

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Inside Higher Ed reports : "A string of scandals involving alcohol, sex and male high school sports stars -- and the National Collegiat...
1 comment:
Saturday, January 2, 2010

Matching and Market Design at the ASSA meetings in Atlanta

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I'm not at the meetings in Atlanta, but if I were, I'd try to catch this session this morning: Matching and Market Design Presiding:...

Market for class notes, posted by students

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There are lots of sites that sell study aids to college students, and there are lots of college courses whose notes are posted online (e.g. ...
Friday, January 1, 2010

It turns out I'm a Business professor

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The same lecture can be described in subtly different ways to different audiences. I see this a lot, because I have a joint appointment betw...
Thursday, December 31, 2009

The year in market design

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Kidney exchange : In fits and starts, kidney exchange is picking up. The biggest development this year has followed from Mike Rees' pion...
Wednesday, December 30, 2009

Airport security and privacy

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Recent discussions of airport security in the post underpants-bomber era make it clear that privacy is a complex issue. For example, if an a...

Dan McFadden salutes Hurwicz and Laffont

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Daniel McFadden, The human side of mechanism design: a tribute to Leo Hurwicz and Jean-Jacque Laffont , Rev. Econ. Design (2009) 13:77–100 (...