Sunday, May 2, 2010

Prizes as a spur to innovation: a White House memo

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A March 2010 White House memo " Guidance on the Use of Challenges and Prizes to Promote Open Government ," promotes the use of pri...
Saturday, May 1, 2010

Herodotus on repugnance

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Apparently it all depends on what you're used to. From The History of Herodotus , III.38 (Written 440 B.C.E, Translated by George Rawlin...
Friday, April 30, 2010

It's 20 years since 1990 (and there's a conference to prove it)

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A conference with the daunting title Roth and Sotomayor: Twenty Years After has been organized at Duke next week by Atila Abdulkadiroglu , ...
Thursday, April 29, 2010

Polygamous marriage in Gaza

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A report from Gaza in The Economist focuses on a polygamous wedding agency. "In his crisp fourth floor office, Mr Atiri and I leafed t...
1 comment:
Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Dan Ariely in Forbes

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Dan Ariely known for his creative experiments (and now famous for his book Predictably Irrational , and with another book on the way) is pro...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 27, 2010

Artificial intelligence and market design

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Abe Othman , a grad student in CS at CMU (who took my market design course when he was an undergrad at Harvard), has a new, not always pc bl...

Subscription dating sites: matching versus recruiting

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The proprieters of the (apparently no-fee) online dating site OKCupid have a blog in which they analyze their copious data in interesting ...
2 comments:
Monday, April 26, 2010

Misc. repugnant transactions

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Repugnant transactions are those that some people don't want others to engage in. Here are a few that caught my eye recently. Double fee...
Sunday, April 25, 2010

Faculty-student liasons repugnant at Yale

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From the Yale alumni magazine: University bans faculty-student sex "After more than a quarter century of debate, Yale faculty membe...
Saturday, April 24, 2010

College rankings: how they influence applicants, and colleges

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A recent paper discusses the impact of the US News and World Report rankings of colleges: " Why is First Best? Responses to Information...

Assortative dating

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Specialty dating sites are nothing new; and here's a story about one that specializes in beauty: Beautiful dating events: ‘It’s not shal...
Friday, April 23, 2010

More on kidney donation and social networking

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It continues to look like social networking may become big for kidney donation . Here's a recent story from New England: Conn. mayor don...
Thursday, April 22, 2010

The WSJ on the football draft and market design

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Writing in the Sports section of the Wall Street Journal, Reed Albergotti considers the NFL player draft, and some possible alternatives. Wh...
3 comments:
Wednesday, April 21, 2010

BBC on Suppliers of Human Bodies

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The BBC has aired a 20 minute piece on Suppliers of Human Bodies . You can listen to it here . The first interviewee is my HBS colleague Mic...
Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Games, a new online game theory journal

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This announcement came in today's email. Dear All, The first issue of Games, dated March 2010, has been published and is available under...
1 comment:

The Market and Marketization

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I'm following at a distance a series of workshops in Helsinki on the philosophy and sociology of economics: The Market and Marketization...
Monday, April 19, 2010

A living lung donor is running today in the Boston marathon

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A stranger, a gift, and a marathon miracle: Ellyn Cohen needed a lung to live, then a woman she’d never met offered hers "It was an unu...
Sunday, April 18, 2010

Civet coffee

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Here's a story from the NY Times that, if published on April 1, would have won a prize. From Dung to Coffee Brew With No Aftertaste ...
1 comment:

Live kidney donation via twitter and other social networking sites

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For many years the transplant community was very uneasy about solicitation of live kidney donors, but that seems to be changing. Web sites l...
Saturday, April 17, 2010

Boston Globe on school choice

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The problem with school choice is not enough seats at good schools. And in every city I've dealt with, there are two political parties w...
Friday, April 16, 2010

Matching with preferences for colleagues

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Marek Pycia at UCLA has a revised paper on matching when you care who your colleagues are: Stability and Preference Alignment in Matching an...
Thursday, April 15, 2010

Waiting lists

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A pessimistic story in the NY Times about college admissions waiting lists, which are long this year: For Students, a Waiting List Is Scant ...
Wednesday, April 14, 2010

Egg donor compensation

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Study hard. The Globe reports: Yes, top students reap rich rewards, even as egg donors Would-be parents want high scorers "The Harva...
1 comment:
Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Biological markets: exchange of goods and services among non-human species

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From the web pages of the French scientist Ronald Noe : Biological Markets . "The label 'biological markets' was proposed by...
Monday, April 12, 2010

Unpaid workers: athletes and interns

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Several blogs and news stories follow unpaid parts of the labor force, college athletes and student interns. For Love of The Game (And The M...
Sunday, April 11, 2010

Couples on the labor market

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One of the longstanding puzzles in market design is why we have been as lucky as we have been in the design and operation of labor market cl...
Saturday, April 10, 2010

Networks in markets that unravel, and those that don't: Itay Fainmesser

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Itay Fainmesser defended his dissertation yesterday. One of the papers in his dissertation concerns job markets that have “unraveled” so t...
Friday, April 9, 2010

Liver exchange

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Living Donor Exchange Poses New Option for Liver Transplantation "Two major transplant centers in Hong Kong and South Korea released...
1 comment:
Thursday, April 8, 2010

Organ trafficking: a black market for kidneys

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Israeli police arrest suspected black market brokers, after complaints were made by unpaid donor/sellers. Reserve general suspected of organ...
Wednesday, April 7, 2010

Update on economics job market scramble

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Registration on the 2010 Economics Job Market Scramble for new Ph.D.s is now closed, and those who have registered will be able to view the...
Tuesday, April 6, 2010

The first kidney exchange in the U.S., and other accounts of early progress

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The Student BMJ (a student run affiliate of the British Medical Journal) has an article interviewing the pioneering surgeons who conducted t...
Monday, April 5, 2010

Sniping in auctions with substitutes

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On an auction site like eBay, many copies of the same good may be on offer for different auctions. A new sniping site, goSnipe , allows bidd...
Sunday, April 4, 2010

Repugnant transactions in New Zealand: Easter Sunday sales

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The NZ Herald reports on Illegal Trading. "The number of shops found to be trading illegally over the Easter weekend appears to be sim...

Work hours of surgical residents

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The culture is changing to comply with the law, but it's hard. For doctors, a matter of time: MGH residents cut back to 80-hour weeks, b...
Saturday, April 3, 2010

Presumed consent and deceased donor organ donation

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Kim Krawiec writes : "Duke sociologist (and Crooked Timber blogger) Kieran Healy visited my Taboo Trades and Forbidden Markets semin...
Friday, April 2, 2010

Fortune-telling is repugnant in Saudi Arabia (and a capital crime)

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This headline caught my eye this morning: Lebanese Not to Be Beheaded Friday for Witchcraft "A Lebanese man condemned to death for witc...

Renal data: kidney exchange

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A 2009 report of the United States Renal Data System includes this on the early growth of kidney exchange , through 2007. "Living Dono...
Thursday, April 1, 2010

Transactions that are repugnant in Dubai

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Britons sentenced to a month in prison for kissing in Dubai restaurant "At the appeal hearing on Sunday, their defence lawyer Khalaf al...
Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Blog on school choice by Atila Abdulkadiroglu

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Atila Abdulkadiroglu at Duke has a new blog called School Choice : News and developments from schools and economics that matter to parents a...

Harvard's mysterious Z-list

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One of the more unusual routes to admission at Harvard is the Z-list, which the Crimson writes about this week. Z-Listed Students Experience...
Tuesday, March 30, 2010

Kidney exchange at NEPKE

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The Sunday Globe has a good story about a recent three way kidney exchange at the New England Program for Kidney Exchange. One of the donors...
Monday, March 29, 2010

The market for matzot

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The Passover holiday is a time to think about matzah, whose plural is matzot. A little market history: Thoroughly Modern Matzah "In 188...
Sunday, March 28, 2010

School choice in North Carolina

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"A bitter fight over school choice in North Carolina grabbed national headlines in recent months," says a news release from Duke U...

Usury and anti-semitism

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From Ira Stoll's review of Capitalism and the Jews , by Jerry Z. Muller, Princeton University Press: "The book by Mr. Muller, a pro...
1 comment:
Saturday, March 27, 2010

China's theme park of dwarves

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A Miniature World Magnifies Dwarf Life Quotes reflecting opposing views of repugnance: “I think it is horrible,” said Gary Arnold, the spoke...
Friday, March 26, 2010

School choice is serious business: litigation and politics in NYC and Chicago

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In NYC, high school admissions have been delayed by a lawsuit motivated by the city's effort to close some schools: High school letters ...