Deceased donor kidney allocation--webinar today

The UNOS Kidney Transplantation Committee proposal to change the existing kidney-allocation policy for deceased donors
Webinar: Thursday, April 28, 2011
Eastern time: 3:30 - 5:00 p.m. Central time: 2:30 - 4:00 p.m.
Mountain time: 1:30 - 3:00 p.m. Pacific time: 12:30 - 2:00 p.m.
 
Speakers/Faculty:
Kenneth Andreoni, MD, Chair, United Network for Organ Sharing Kidney Transplantation Committee; Associate Professor of Surgery, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH

• UNOS Kidney Committee Allocation Concepts:Not As Different As Some Want You to Believe… (Microsoft Powerpoint Required)

Benjamin Hippen, MD, Metrolina Nephrology Associates, P.A. and the Carolinas Medical Center, Charlotte, NC

• Are We Clear On The Concept? Empirical And Normative Concerns (Microsoft Powerpoint Required)

Dorry Segev, MD, Associate Professor of Surgery and Epidemiology, Director of Clinical Research, Division of Transplantation, Johns Hopkins Medical Institution, Baltimore, MD

Tom Mone, CEO/Executive Vice President, OneLegacy Organ Procurement Organization, Los Angeles, CA

Supplemental Materials:

• Clarification of Media Reports on OPTN Kidney Allocation Concept Document (Internet Connection Required)
  
  
• Concepts for Kidney Allocation – Concepts for Kidney Allocation prepared by the UNOS Kidney Transplantation Committee (40 pages) (Acrobat Reader Required))

Jim Warren, Editor &; Publisher, Transplant News - Moderator 

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See my earlier posts on this proposed policy change in the allocation of deceased donor kidneys:

New proposals for allocating deceased-donor kidneys

NPR On Point discusses kidney allocation proposals

How not to assign kidneys

Debate on kidney allocation in NEJM

The underlying structure of matching models: Scott Kominers

Scott recently finished his unusually well attended dissertation defense. He's engaged in a wide ranging effort to prove all the familiar theorems about matching models without any of the familiar assumptions, or at least with a demonstrably minimal set of assumptions, and hence to discover why things work in models of who gets what.

John Hatfield, on the right in the picture below, is one of Scott's chief co-conspirators.

And here they are, getting down to serious drinking afterwards:

(QED:)


Welcome to the club, Scott.

A match for the law firm market?

Paul Kominers points me to this item: New ‘JD Match’ to Help Law Firms Find Law Students to Interview; K&L Gates Giving Service a Tryout

"Tired of the traditional on-campus law school interviewing process? A consultant may have the answer for some who would like to deal more directly with law firms and other legal employers seeking law students who want to apply for work.

 And here's a longer article from the Am Law Daily, which suggests that unraveling is the motivator, and a deferred acceptance algorithm is part of the proposed solution: JD Match Aims to Fix the Law Firm Recruiting Process

"On Monday, Ashby Jones at The Wall Street Journal's Law Blog lifted the curtain on JD Match, a new product that will try to connect job-seeking law students with firms. For a $99 fee, students upload their resume and basic information to JD Match, then rank the law firms where they’d like to work. The law firms, in turn, rank students. An algorithm matches firms and students based on their rankings.


"It seems like such a nifty, logical concept that we at The Am Law Daily are kicking ourselves for not thinking of it first. We reached out to the driver behind JD Match, law firm consultant and Adam Smith, Esq. blogger Bruce MacEwen, to find out more. Following is an edited transcript of our phone conversation on Tuesday.

What was the genesis of JD Match?

"People have been kicking around the idea about doing something about the dysfunctional law firm recruiting model for a long time. [Harvard Law School professor] Ashish Nanda wrote a piece in The American Lawyer last January addressing this very thing.... And from my perspective, the great train wreck of the 2008/2009 recession really revealed the flaws in the system.

There's this arms race to interview earlier and earlier. It's not a smoothly functioning market at all. The economist in me just found that infuriating. So my partner Janet Stanton and I started talking about doing something like this, probably shortly after Ashish's article came out.

We did an extensive amount of research with managing partners at firms, hiring partners, career services people at law schools, and even students and junior associates, and quickly realized that the medical matching model which Ashish had written about was not going to work in our world. To begin with you can't make anything mandatory with law firms. Nevertheless, we were inspired by the idea of having an algorithm at the heart of the process.


How will the algorithm work?

"The algorithm will run three times in the OCI recruiting season: August, September, and October. What it does is assume the Econ 101 truth that each firm and each student is in the best position to determine what's in their self-interest. So the only input to the algorithm is preferences for firms for students and preferences for students for firms. That's it. No qualitative or quantitative information whatsoever.

"The assumption is that the preferences represent all the distilled information--research, anecdotes, gossip, whatever--that firms have about students and students have about firms. When the algorithm runs, a couple of things happen. First, no student and firm wlll ever be paired unless it's mutual. So if I didn't put Skadden on my list, it doesn't matter if Skadden loves me. I'm not going to be matched with Skadden.


So give me a hypothetical scenario of how this would work.

"Let's pretend I did put Skadden as my first choice and they did have 25 spots. I will tentatively, as the algorithm is running, be matched with Skadden unless and until I get bumped because Skadden gets matched with 25 students it likes more than it likes me. And then I go to my next available firm that has a seat for me. And then it goes on like that.

"Students get [matched with] one and only one firm on the theory that they can only take one job. Firms will get as many students as they said they have slots or maybe fewer if not that many students like them. But they won't get more. So this helps firms manage yield. And two professors of law [Kevin Quinn at the University of California at Berkeley and Andrew Martin at Washington University in St. Louis] are writing the algorithm for us.

Why will you run the algorithm three times?

"Let's pretend that I'm a law student back at Stanford but I have delusions about what a hot commodity I am. Let's say the first 15 firms I rank are highly aspirational: Skadden, Davis Polk, Cleary. You know. The usual suspects. So the August match runs, and I find out that I was matched with firm number 17. Well, this is a reality check for me. It's unfiltered, real-time market information and that should tell me for the September match and OCI, I need to be a little more realistic.

Is there a baseline number of students and firms that JD Match will need to sign up in order for the process to work efficiently?

"Yes. We have four Am Law 30 firms signed up including K&L Gates. We can't name the other three yet, but they will come out shortly. We've been previewing JD Match primarily to the law firms, but we've also reached out to the law schools. The schools are intrigued. They're a little nervous about upsetting the OCI process that they drive, but they do understand JD Match provides an overlay to the process as it currently works. We don't change anything about OCI.

What else do you have in the works?

"We are creating something called the JD Match Institute which we will fund out of our revenues. And its designed to begin to look at the data we will be gathering and suss out what actually makes for successful lawyers.

"Our strong suspicion--confirmed by [University of Indiana professor] Bill Henderson--is it ain't GPA. In version 2.0 of JD Match we will introduce some psychographic and behavioral testing for students. Voluntary, obviously, but there are very few law firms that are doing this. McKenna Long is doing it. Some firms like K&L are doing it in the U.K....

"What we think we can develop in fairly short order is empirical evidence of what makes for a successful lawyer and that would be tremendously exciting for us because law firms could begin to hire a little more rationally. Frankly I think it could only be good for the students. There are 40,000 law students in the U.S. and how many of them are on the Harvard Law Review? But a lot of them could be great with clients, could be responsive, could be team players, could be emotionally intelligent....It could only open up more doors."

Pre-kindergarten and school choice in Boston

Boston has a pre-kindergarten program that doesn't have enough spaces to meet demand, particularly because it is an entryway into the full public school choice process: a child who gets a good school for pre-K is guaranteed to be able to stay there for elementary school.

Stephanie Ebbert picks up the story in the Globe: Split decisions on school lottery.
Parents shut out of Boston pre-K classes despair, while others rejoice in top picks

"Chief Jasaad Rogers of Roxbury, like his brother before him, had lousy luck in the Boston public schools lottery. Not only was the 4-year-old shut out of the schools his parents wanted; he did not win a prekindergarten seat in any school at all. His parents, who both work full time, were left with few options besides paying for him to go somewhere else.

RELATED

• GRAPHIC Getting into
  the Lyndon School
• Special section: Inside the
  school assignment maze

In West Roxbury, Debra Brendemuehl hit the jackpot, though she did not necessarily need full-day schooling for her 4-year-old, Brendan. (“They’re not kids forever,’’ she reasoned.)

She entered the lottery because she knew the only way to get him into the neighborhood’s highly sought-after schools was to apply when he was 4. The strategy worked: He won a spot at one of the city’s most competitive schools, the Lyndon in West Roxbury, which he can attend through eighth grade."

Ad for custom egg donor

An ad in the Harvard Crimson (the student newspaper) reflects some of the fast-changing world of same-sex marriage and the market for reproductive services, with a mixed-race married gay couple looking for a Caucasian-Chinese mixed race egg donor. I infer that the market for surrogate wombs may also be involved.

**************

(This also reminds me of the work Kim Krawiec has been doing on the American Society for Reproductive Medicine’s guidelines for compensating oocyte donors. ("Total payments to donors in excess of $5,000 require justification and sums above $10,000 are not appropriate.")

Kim's recent blog posts on the subject are here, here, here and here, and her paper is here: Krawiec, Kimberly D., Sunny Samaritans and Egomaniacs: Price-Fixing in the Gamete Market (May 23, 2009). Law and Contemporary Problems, Vol. 72, No. 3, 2009; UNC Legal Studies Research Paper No. 1356012. Available at SSRN: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1356012

Misc. repugnant transactions

Kung Pao Kitten (a recipe meant as a joke, that elicited lots of complaints...)

Student suspended from fraternity for having sex with girl on university roof

"A student who had sex with a girlfriend on top of a university building in front of hundreds of onlookers has been suspended from his fraternity."

"The university said it was investigating whether the actions of the male student "constituted a violation of university policies that prohibit unauthorised access to building roofs."

The university is USC.

Susan Athey and the National Medal of Science

No, not yet.

But this.

The White House

Office of the Press Secretary

For Immediate Release April 21, 2011 President Obama Announces More Key Administration Posts

Susan Athey, Appointee for Member, President’s Committee on the National Medal of Science
Susan Athey is a Professor of Economics at Harvard University and co-director of the Market Design Working Group at the National Bureau of Economic Research. Her current research studies the design of auction-based marketplaces, the statistical analysis of auction data, and internet economics. Dr. Athey was the first female recipient of the highly prestigious John Bates Clark medal, awarded by the American Economic Association, and she is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She recently served as an elected member of the executive committee of the American Economics Association as well as the Council of the Econometric Society. Dr. Athey received her B.A. from Duke University in economics, mathematics, and computer science and her Ph.D. from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Laws against polygamy to be tested in Canada

Canadian laws against polygamy will be tested in a suit brought against some of the inhabitants of the rural enclave of Bountiful, British Columbia, who are polygamous adherents of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). The Canadian magazine The Walrus covers the story: To the Exclusion of All Others: In a liberal society, is polygamy still intolerable?

At least part of the issue is how traditional divorce law, set up for dividing property between two people, would be adopted.
"American legal scholar Adrienne Davis, who believes that conventional family law rooted in monogamous marriage may not be up to attempts at cobbling polygamous marriage onto it, points out an alternative: commercial partnership law. Typically used when two or more parties go into business, according to Davis it would certainly address “polygamy’s central conundrum: ensuring fairness and establishing baseline behaviour in contexts characterized by multiple partners, on-going entrances and exits, and life-defining economic and personal stakes.” Of course, there would be a huge administrative cost to both adapting the model to marriage, and to ensuring that over the course of a union all partners consented to any new additions to it and renegotiated their respective rights as the landscape changed. More to the point, however, this is not what polygamists want, and it’s not what we want. Remember, liberal marriage was built on the concept of love; it’s hard to imagine a way of squaring this with the filing of an annual marriage report."

Exploding offers and the market culture of law reviews

Here's an April 19 open letter To the legal community from a number of student-edited law journals.

"In recent years, many law journals have adopted the practice of issuing “exploding offers”—giving scholars only a couple of days, hours, or even minutes to accept an offer of publication. The reasoning behind these offers was simple: we each hoped to secure the best articles for our own journal before others could identify them and make competing offers. But experience has made clear that the costs of this practice—to the quality of our deliberations, to the faculty with whom we work, and, ultimately, to the scholarship we publish—dramatically outweigh the benefits. We therefore commit, effective immediately, to give every author at least seven days to decide whether to accept any offer of publication.

"This decision stems from the recognition that what once seemed an effective strategy for any one of us has in fact had a highly corrosive effect on all of us. Journals have responded to the prospect of exploding offers elsewhere by speeding up their own processes: rapidly winnowing down submissions, quickly holding articles committee votes, and, in the case of many journals, only occasionally consulting scholars in the field regarding an article’s novelty or contribution. This expedited review has inevitably favored established authors, popular topics, and broad claims at the expense of originality and merit. It has led many law journals to establish a twotrack process for article review: a fast track for widely recognized authors, whose submissions are more likely to elicit exploding offers; a slower track for younger authors and authors who teach at lower-ranked institutions. Many deserving pieces in the latter category never get to the front of the line.

"Moreover, expedited review has unduly compelled authors to undertake complicated workarounds and endure strong-arming and stress. Nor have exploding offers accomplished their purpose of improving our standing: for as often as we’ve taken good articles from others, we’ve had good articles taken from us. The dominant experience has merely been an ever-expanding push toward quick review and quick decision.

"Opening a seven-day offer window will substantially eliminate these defects. Student editors, lacking the incentive to expedite selection decisions, will be able to engage more deeply with the articles we review. We will have the time to consult scholars regularly regarding an article’s significance and novelty. As a result, all of us will be able to publish more of the stellar pieces that, under the current system, slip through the cracks.

"No doubt giving up a practice to which we’ve grown accustomed entails some risk. But we are confident that the risks of continuing the present race to the bottom are substantially greater. We invite all other student-edited law journals to join this letter, and we welcome an ongoing discussion with both journals and authors about how best to work together effectively."

HT: Clayton Featherstone, who writes "I wonder who the first defector will be?"

I notice that none of the journals signing the letter have made the more difficult promise not to respond to exploding offers from less prestigious journals. So there will still be incentives for authors to try to move up the prestige ranking of law journals by first soliciting offers from lower ranked journals, and then trying to turn these into hasty acceptances from higher ranked journals.

for more on exploding offers and market culture,
Niederle, Muriel, and Alvin E. Roth, "Market Culture: How Rules Governing Exploding Offers Affect Market Performance," American Economic Journal: Microeconomics, 1, 2, August 2009, 199-219.

And here are some (law review) articles on exploding offers in the market for law clerks:

Avery, Christopher, Christine Jolls, Richard A. Posner, and Alvin E. Roth, "The Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" University of Chicago Law Review, 68, 3, Summer, 2001, 793-902.(online at SSRN)

Avery, Christopher, Jolls, Christine, Posner, Richard A. and Roth, Alvin E., "The New Market for Federal Judicial Law Clerks" . University of Chicago Law Review, 74, Spring 2007, 447-486.

A danceable economic experiment on public good provision

Lights! Dancers! Economics!

"If Milton Friedman and Martha Graham had a love child, it might look something like the "Tragedy of the Commons."

"Antony Davies, an associate professor of economics at Duquesne University, and his sister, Jenefer Davies, an assistant professor of dance at Washington and Lee University, staged the experimental production this month at Washington and Lee to demonstrate a key principle of economics. The tragedy of the commons, enunciated in an essay of the same name in 1968 by the ecologist Garrett Hardin, states that when a resource is held jointly, its owners will deplete it more quickly than when individuals own equal and private portions of the same resource.
...
"In the performance, five volunteers from the audience individually controlled spotlights that illuminated each of five dancers onstage. Volunteers were told that they should try to keep their dancers illuminated as long as possible but that the light was a limited resource: The first performance began with 30 seconds of light in the communal "light bank," and audience members drained that bank when they illuminated their dancers. Turning the light off, however, would slowly replenish the time in the bank.


"Immediately after the first performance with the communal bank, the dancers began a second performance. But this time the five volunteers drew light from—and restored it to—private banks, up to six seconds per volunteer.
...
"The economic theory played out as anticipated. The volunteers generated more light during the second leg of each of the three performances, with their individual "light banks," than they did while sharing time from the communal bank. Mr. Davies was relieved."

You can see the dance here: econ dance performance

Mixed martial arts: a formerly repugnant transaction?

New York State is one of the few holdouts, and a recent Op-Ed in the NY Times anticipates that will end: It Only Looks Dangerous

"MIXED martial arts is one of the fastest-growing sports in America. Yet for years the New York State Legislature has refused to sanction M.M.A. — making New York one of the last states holding out against the sport’s expansion. (Connecticut is a holdout, too.) After helping to block a clause in last year’s budget that would have legalized M.M.A., Bob Reilly, a state assemblyman, called it “a violent sport not worthy of our society.”

...
"There have been only three fatalities in the 17-year history of American M.M.A. But we average almost that many in a single year in boxing: 129 fighters have died in American rings since 1960.


"Some might argue that such statistics only make the case that boxing, too, should be banned. But what about hockey or football? Men’s Health has proudly and without controversy featured Drew Brees, Tom Brady and other N.F.L. stars on our cover — despite the fact that football and hockey combined sent 55,000 Americans to the emergency room for head injuries in 2009 alone.
...
 "The New York State Assembly and Senate both have bills in committee that would allow M.M.A. into the state, and it only makes sense to push them through."

Jon Levin, Clark Medalist

Among a long list of accomplishments, the AEA includes these:

"The Organization and Design of Markets
A second main strand of Levin's research focuses on the success or failure of specific markets in efficiently allocating scarce resources.  Much of it attempts to determine whether changes in market design and institutions would lead to  more efficient outcomes. This research is distinguished by the way it integrates economic  theory, novel empirical methods, and data to obtain interesting new insights.  For example, in a series of papers with Susan Athey (a previous John Bates Clark medalist), Levin studied competitive bidding for federally-owned timber, with the goal of understanding how different auction  rules used by the government have affected competition. These papers are examples of excellent applied work, and they helped establish the frontier for empirical work on auctions, an active and exciting area in the last decade."

Congratulations, Jon.

Edelman on Bloomberg on Google

Antitrust regulation is of course a form of market design. Ben Edelman talks about his concerns here.

Jeff Ely on market design

Jeff Ely is a very serious microeconomist indeed, so it isn't cheap talk when he gives market design a big compliment and writes of: "the most important development in Microeconomics right now:  market design"

High school choice in New York City

The outcome of the main match for positions in NYC high schools has come out, and about 8,000 children (out of somewhat more than 80,000) did not find a match among their listed choices and will have to go through the supplemental round to find a match: Over 8,000 New York eighth-graders rejected from high school choices, forced to apply again

"Pamela Wheaton of Insideschools.org at The New School said every year there are some kids who don't get matched because there aren't enough good schools to go around.

"There simply aren't the spaces," she said, noting the process is also "very complicated" for parents who don't necessarily realize the steep competition at some choice schools.

"The city's record at matching students with at least one of their choices has improved since 2004, when 16% of students got no matches."

A similar problem--shortage of spaces in popular schools--has influenced the kindergarten choice process as well: Kindergarten crunch: Popular schools run out of seats and parents are furious
 
Not enough good schools: that's a problem no school choice system can fix by itself.
(Recall the similar story I blogged about in Boston: Boston Globe on school choice.)

My papers on school choice in NY and Boston are here.

France Enforces Ban on Full-Face Veils in Public

Here's the story in the NY Times.

"A French ban outlawing full-face veils in public, the first to be enacted in Europe, came into force on Monday and faced immediate, if low-key, challenges."

Delayed college admissions

The NY Times reports on a new trend in enrollment management: Admission to College, With Catch: Year’s Wait

"Now, as colleges are increasingly swamped with applications, a small but growing number are offering a third option: guaranteed admission if the student attends another institution for a year or two and earns a prescribed grade-point average.

"This little-noticed practice — an unusual mix of early admission and delayed gratification — has allowed colleges to tap their growing pools of eager candidates to help counter the enrollment slump that most institutions suffer later on, as the accepted students drop out, transfer, study abroad or take internships off campus.

“Life happens — we all understand that the size of the freshman class diminishes as they progress,” said Barmak Nassirian, an associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers in Washington. “This is an attempt at what is called enrollment management.”

"But while the practice, known as deferred admission or a guaranteed transfer option, offers applicants another shot at their dream school, it can also place them in limbo, as they start college life on a campus they plan to abandon. And it can create problems for that institution, which is not usually told about the deal the student has struck with a competitor.

"Monica Inzer, the dean of admission at Hamilton College in upstate New York, called the practice “borderline unethical,” saying it had the effect of recruiting students from other colleges. “We would allow a student to defer for a year, but never to matriculate full time at another college,” Ms. Inzer said."

Medical residency scramble

Dr.  Naveed Saleh, writing in New Physician, describes some of the different prognoses suggested for the new resident scramble (SOAP) which will operate next year: Unscrambling the Match.

"Roth predicts that the rules of the SOAP will be subverted by both programs and applicants eager to match. "If it's really, really tempting for people on both sides to break the rules," says Roth, "often the rules get broken."
Roth suggests that instead of the SOAP, the NRMP and ERAS should institute a properly organized second match during Match Week.
Mona M. Signer, executive director of the NRMP, disagrees with Roth's prediction that decision-making during the SOAP will be strategic. Instead, she predicts that programs and applicants will continue to pursue their best opportunities. Additionally, as with the Match, should a program or applicant violate prescribed rules, sanctions would be imposed.

My previous posts on the residency scramble, and the proposed new rules are here.

Live donor teeth (and George Washington)

Owen Ozier writes: "I have been reading Ron Chernow's 2010 biography of George Washington, and came across a passage about the trade in a different body part - teeth. I hadn't ever heard of this before, but it reminded me of your talk, so I thought I would send it along:

"From chapter 36 of Washington: A Life

"Always a tough, leery customer, Washington was skeptical about claims made for transplanted teeth. The following year, when Le Mayeur performed a successful transplant upon Richard Varick, it made a convert of Washington. According to Mary Thompson, Washington bought nine teeth in 1784 from certain nameless "Negroes" for thirteen shillings apiece.[7] Whether he wanted the teeth implanted directly in his mouth, or incorporated into dentures, we cannot say. However ghoulish this trade sounds to modern readers, it was then standard practice for rich people to purchase teeth from the poor. In his advertisements, Dr. Le Mayeur offered to buy teeth from willing vendors and bid "three guineas for good front teeth from anyone but slaves." [8] This suggests a stigma among white people about having slaves' teeth. We can deduce that Washington's dental transplant miscarried, since by the time of his presidential inauguration in 1789, he had only a single working tooth remaining."

Relevant references appear to be:
[5] Brown, Lawrence Parmly. "The Antiquities of Dental Prosthesis:
Part III, Section 2, Eighteenth Century." Dental Cosmos 76, No. 11, November 1934
[7] Henriques, Peter R. Realistic Visionary: A Portrait of George Washington. Charlottesville: UVA Press, 2006, p.154
[8] Unger, Harlow Giles. The Unexpected George Washington: His Private Life. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley and Sons, 2006, p.163

(Kant also wrote about sale of teeth: see my earlier blog post Kant on compensation for organ donors )

Swoopo: gone but not forgotten

Swoopo is reported to be bankrupt: Goodnight, Swoopo: The Pay-Per-Bid Auction Site Is Dead

I blogged in 2009 about A proliferation of penny auctions, and when I looked back at it just now, I saw that it attracted a bunch of spammish comments from penny auction sites...

HT: Peter Coles

2011 Summer School: Market Failure and Market Design

2011 Summer School. Market Failure and Market Design, Louvain-la-Neuve, May 23-26, 2011

To submit a paper: Those interested should submit a title for their presentation AND a paper as well as your curriculum vitae by April 10 to Sylvie Mauroy. The selection of speakers and preliminary program will be announced by April 26.

To register (without presenting a paper): Just send an e-mail to Nancy De Munck or Sylvie Mauroy with your complete affiliation. There is no registration fee, but registration is NECESSARY before May 10.

Keynote Speakers:


Douglas BERNHEIM, Stanford University
Lecture 1: Poverty and Self-Control
Lecture 2: Applied Behavioral Welfare Economics: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly
Lecture 3: Revealed Preference without Choice

Vincent CRAWFORD, University of Oxford
Lecture 1: Strategic Thinking
Lecture 2: Level-k Auctions (paper 1 - paper 2 )
Lecture 3: Efficient Mechanisms for Level-k Bilateral Trading

Parag PATHAK, Massuchusetts Institute of Technology


Organizing committee:
Jean Hindriks, CORE, Université catholique de Louvain

Georg Kirchsteiger, ECARES, Université Libre de Bruxelles
François Maniquet, CORE, Université catholique de Louvain

 
HT: Bettina Klaus

Should there be a donor kidney market? Latest version of a familiar debate

The Los Angeles Times published a short debate between two familiar interlocuters, Ben Hippen and Frank Delmonico: Pro/con The consequences of a donor kidney market

"With a waiting list for a kidney at almost 83,000 Americans, the push to offer cash and other incentives grows. Two experts offer their opposing views on a donor kidney market."

"People who need kidneys are dying unnecessarily, and an organ market would save lives."
Dr. Benjamin Hippen is a transplant nephrologist at the Carolinas Medical Center in Charlotte, N.C.
"The most compelling reason for setting up a market for organs is that there really isn't any other plausible solution to the growing disparity between the demand for and supply of organs. Even if we were to maximize organ procurement from deceased donors, we still couldn't meet the demand.

"As that demand grows, it's not just potential kidney recipients who get desperate — it's also potential donors, who often have a close-up view of what their loved ones are going through. We then see people with health problems, like high blood pressure or obesity, say that they're willing to take on a certain amount of risk so that their loved one can live a better life.

"A regulated market would be, in some sense, safer — the pressure would be taken off folks who want to be donors but perhaps shouldn't be for medical reasons. Transplant professionals could then select the healthiest donors, who are at the lowest risk for long-term complications. With a regulated market, we could say to high risk-donor candidates, "No, you shouldn't be a donor, and your loved one isn't going to suffer as a consequence of that decision."

"There's also a significant difference between what it costs to maintain a transplant versus what it costs to maintain someone on dialysis. In 2007, $28 billion was spent nationally on people on dialysis; about $2.2 billion was allocated to kidney transplantation. So transplants are vastly more cost-effective, and in general they confer a longer survival benefit. Also, a larger proportion of people are able to go back to work compared with people on dialysis.

"The unregulated, underground black market in organs in developing countries has been catastrophic for both donors and recipients. But the reason that someone who is desperately poor may be able to sell their kidney on the black market is that people in countries of comparative wealth have failed to solve their own supply problem. That is a policy failure. If the demand for organs could be met through legal, ethical strategies, some of the driving forces that support black markets would disappear.

"If, indeed, the current system isn't meeting demand, then there's a sense in which it's unethical not to establish regulated incentives for living donors or to think more carefully about not doing so. The cost is being paid by the people who are dying on the waiting list, getting sicker on dialysis or selling their kidneys under terrible circumstances."

"An organ market would exploit the world's poor and set the precedent for medical transplant tourism that puts everyone at risk."
Dr. Francis Delmonico is the director of renal transplantation at Massachusetts General Hospital and a professor of surgery at Harvard Medical School. He is also the medical director of the New England Organ Bank in Newton, Mass.

"Despite the good intentions of those who would suggest that an organ market could be regulated, it's impossible to do so. A market for organ sales enables brokers and extra payments, and in a global society, the market could not be restricted to the United States.

"Right now, our country sets the tone on this issue. Once we say it's OK to have a market here, it condones markets everywhere else in the world, and with medical tourism being what it is, those in search of kidneys will go to the place where it's the cheapest price — Americans won't be limited to undergoing transplants locally.

"From there, transplant tourism in global markets brings unanticipated consequences. It increases the risk for diseases like hepatitis, tuberculosis or malignancy, and it also opens the door to a variety of unethical practices involving the donor and their medical care.

"The central problem of organ sales is that it's a victimization and exploitation of poor people, notwithstanding good intention. The source of these organs is always the lowest socioeconomic class of a particular country — we know that has been the case in the Philippines, in Pakistan, in Egypt and in Iran. And the payment isn't that substantial of an amount, so rather than making them better off or helping them, the money is quickly used, and the donor is left with one less kidney. It's a reality that there's no escaping.

"It's true that there has been a plateau of living donors in this country, and something has to be done. For that reason, I do believe in eliminating disincentives for donors. The living donor who doesn't have health insurance should have it — and even life insurance — provided for them, as it pertains to the donation event."

HT: Ted Roth

Medicare payments for dialysis

The New York Times describes the growing federal expenses for dialysis, and some surrounding controversy: When Ailments Pile Up, Asking Patients to Rethink Free Dialysis

"Of all the terrible chronic diseases, only one —end-stage kidney disease — gets special treatment by the federal government. A law passed by Congress 39 years ago provides nearly free care to almost all patients whose kidneys have failed, regardless of their age or ability to pay.


"But the law has had unintended consequences, kidney experts say. It was meant to keep young and middle-aged people alive and productive. Instead, many of the patients who take advantage of the law are old and have other medical problems, often suffering through dialysis as a replacement for their failed kidneys but not living long because the other chronic diseases kill them.


"Kidney specialists are pushing doctors to be more forthright with elderly people who have other serious medical conditions, to tell the patients that even though they are entitled to dialysis, they may want to decline such treatment and enter a hospice instead. In the end, it is always the patient’s choice.
...
"When Congress established the entitlement to pay for kidney patients in October 1972, dialysis and transplants were new procedures that were not covered by health insurance. There were horrifying stories — rich people got dialysis and lived while poor people died. In Seattle, a committee meted out dialysis by voting on who could get it. A man who was supporting a family, for example, took precedence over a single woman.


"It also was expected at that time that fewer than 40 patients per million would need dialysis, and that most of those patients would be healthy — except for their failed kidneys — and under age 54.

"Now more than 400 people per million start dialysis each year. More than a third of the patients are 65 or older, and they account for about 42 percent of the costs. People over 75 make up the fastest-growing group of dialysis patients. And most elderly dialysis patients have other serious diseases like diabetes, heart failure, stroke and even advanced dementia. One-third of them have four or more chronic conditions.

"The federal program, said Dr. Peter S. Aronson, a professor of nephrology at Yale University’s School of Medicine “is so emblematic of good intentions misapplied.”

“The question,” Dr. Aronson said, “is how to dial it back.”

"Recent studies have found that dialysis does not prolong life for many elderly people with other serious chronic illnesses. One study found that the procedure’s main effect is to increase the chances that such patients will die in the hospital rather than at home.

"Meanwhile, costs are soaring — end-stage kidney disease will cost the nation an estimated $40 billion to $50 billion this year."

Donation after cardiac death

When are you dead? An article in Stanford Medicine explores the question, which becomes pointed when the subject is deceased organ donation. The standard criterion in the U.S. is brain death, but of course irreversible cessation of heartbeat is an older standard. The trouble is that organs have to be preserved fast after cardiac death, unlike the case of a brain dead patient on a ventilator.

So there are obstacles to donation after cardiac death (DCD). Most of the discussion of restricting organ donation to brain dead patients focuses on the desperately needed organs that are made unavailable to the patients who need them. So I was struck by this view from another angle, by Nikole Neidlinger, MD, the medical director of the California Donor Transplant Network.

“A lot of people think that it’s all about the organ recipient, but really, I think, the donors’ families get the biggest benefit,” Neidlinger says. “They have spent perhaps weeks dealing with the hardship of seeing loved ones on life support and coming to terms with their death. And the fact that the donor gets a chance to help another person live — it’s a legacy that counts so much for families.”

Redesigning the market for bribes (by making some bribes legal to give)

The Wall Street Journal reports that Kaushik Basu, currently on leave from Cornell as Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India, has been thinking about how to reduce the incidence of bribe taking in India by officials who require bribes to deliver (legal) services that they are supposed to provide as part of their government duties. His idea is to make it legal to give a bribe in such a case, while keeping it illegal to demand or receive one, so that after the fact the bribe givers could report/testify against corrupt officials without being treated as their partners in crime.

Here's the WSJ story: Kaushik Basu Says Make Bribe Giving Legal, and here's the working paper from the Indian Ministry of Finance: Why, for a Class of Bribes, the Act of Giving a Bribe should be Treated as Legal

HT: Tabarrok at MR

Review of kidney exchange

Here's a new article reviewing developments in kidney exchange, aka kidney paired donation (not "published" yet, but just appeared online):

Kidney paired donation
C. Bradley Wallis; Kannan P. Samy; Alvin E. Roth; Michael A. Rees
Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 2011; doi: 10.1093/ndt/gfr155

Full Text: https://academic.oup.com/ndt/article/26/7/2091/1896342

Abstract

Kidney paired donation (KPD) was first suggested in 1986, but it was not until 2000 when the first paired donation transplant was performed in the USA. In the past decade, KPD has become the fastest growing source of transplantable kidneys, overcoming the barrier faced by living donors deemed incompatible with their intended recipients. This review provides a basic overview of the concepts and challenges faced by KPD as we prepare for a national pilot program with the United Network for Organ Sharing. Several different algorithms have been creatively implemented in the USA and elsewhere to transplant paired donors, each method uniquely contributing to the success of KPD. As the paired donor pool grows, the problem of determining allocation strategies that maximize equity and utility will become increasingly important as the transplant community seeks to balance quality and quantity in choosing the best matches. Financing for paired donation is a major issue, as philanthropy alone cannot support the emerging national system. We also discuss the advent of altruistic or non-directed donors in KPD, and the important role of chains in addition to exchanges. This review is designed to provide insight into the challenges that face the emerging national KPD system in the USA, now 5 years into its development.

The gastro fellowship match after five years

A recent article takes stock of the Gastroenterology fellowship match, five years after it was reinstated with some new design rules (about exploding offers):
The Match: Five Years Later, by Deborah D. Proctor et al., Gastroenterology 2011;140:15–18

Proctor et al. report considerable progress, although they continue to monitor violations of market policy. There seems to be a particular issue with respect to research positions.

"...the NRMP/SMS was uniquely set up for our many diverse program offerings. Four tracks were created—Clinical, Clinical Investigator Research, Basic Science Research, and Research—and a reversion process was implemented for the 4 tracks, such that unfilled slots from 1 track could revert to open slots in another track. The GI Match successfully reopened in January 2006 with a match day in June 2006 for fellowship positions starting in July 2007."
...
"However, we must recognize that not all programs are eager or willing to participate in the Match process."
...

"The number of fellowship applicants genuinely committed to an academic research career has been
slowly declining. Simultaneously, competition has stiffened for the grant dollars that pay for these research training positions, and the criteria to renew grant support has become more demanding.
Needless to say, the competition for these increasingly scarce, well-qualified, research-track applicants has become fierce, and the authors are aware of several examples during the last application cycle of candidates interested in research being offered fellowship positions outside the Match.

...
"Although the statistics continue to demonstrate that Match participation is robust, healthy, and gradually increasing, there is also a growing desire to close the loopholes in Match rules that allow a small minority of programs to take unfair advantage of applicants and colleagues."

***************
To summarize the overall encouraging statistics, in the (2006) Match for 2007 positions, 283 positions were offered and 585 applicants applied, of whom 276 were matched. In the Match for 2011 positions, 383 positions were offered to 642 applicants, of whom 362 were matched.

Here are some papers reporting various elements of the Gastroenterology market design.
The match offers programs the ability to have unfilled positions of one kind (e.g. research positions) revert to other kinds of positions via the Roth-Peranson algorithm (see
Roth, A. E. and Elliott Peranson, "The Redesign of the Matching Market for American Physicians: Some Engineering Aspects of Economic Design American Economic Review, 89, 4, September, 1999, 748-780.)

Profile in the Boston Globe: "The Matchmaker"

Leon Neyfakh writes about me and market design in the Sunday Boston Globe:

The Matchmaker: The Harvard economist who stopped just studying the world and began trying to fix it

LCD Soundsystem and ticket scalping

Jacob Leshno (who is a fan of both market design and LCD soundsystem) writes to alert me to some stories about their "final" concert today, how scalpers using software bots acquired most of the tickets as soon as they went on sale, and how the band responded by scheduling more concerts.

Hipsters v. Scalpers: How LCD Soundsystem is trying to foil professional ticket resellers.
"But LCD fans were not left out in the cold. The debacle attracted the wrath of the band's charismatic front man, James Murphy. On LCD Soundsystem's blog, he wrote: "this here is just to say that we were more than taken aback and surprised about the speed of ticket sales for the april 2nd MSG gig, as well as the effectiveness of scalper pieces of fucking shit at getting their hands on said tickets before fans could, and it's knocked us on our asses."

"The market had failed in his mind. He told fans not to pay thousands of dollars to get into the Madison Square Garden show: "I will try to figure a way out to fuck these fuckers. NO MATTER WHAT WE DO, IT IS NOT WORTH THAT KIND OF MONEY TO SEE US!" Soon enough, he realized he had an ace up his sleeve. He flooded the market, adding shows, upping ticket supply, and hopefully pushing prices down. (Those shows will go on sale this Friday.)"

See also
Tickets To Hide: Bands that scalp their own tickets and other true tales from the world of live music.
and
fuck you, scalpers. terminal 5 shows added.

Matching and Price Theory

That's the name of a conference being held at the Milton Friedman Institute: Matching and Price Theory, May 6-7, 2011

Friday, May 6:
9:00 - 9:50 am The College Admissions Problem with a Continuum of Students
Eduardo Azevedo (Harvard University) and Jacob Leshno (Harvard University)

9:50 - 10:40 am Stability and Competitive Equilibrium in Trading Networks
John Hatfield (Stanford University), Scott Kominers (Harvard University), Michael Ostrovsky (Stanford University), Alexandru Nichifor (University of Maastricht) and Alexander Westkamp
(University of Bonn)

10:55 - 11:45 am Sorting and Factor Intensity: Production and Unemployment across
Skills, Jan Eeckhout (University of Pennsylvania) and Philipp Kircher (London School of Economics)

11:45 - 12:20 pm Discussion led by Eric Budish (University of Chicago)

12:20 - 1:50 pm Lunch

1:50 – 2:40 pm Hedonic Price Equilibria, Stable Matching, and Optimal Transport: Equivalence, Topology, and Uniqueness, Pierre-André Chiappori (New York University), Robert McCann (University of Toronto), and Lars Nesheim (University College London)

2:40 – 3:30 pm Distinguishing the Payoffs of Upstream and Downstream Firms in Matching Games, Jeremy Fox (University of Chicago)

3:30 – 4:05 pm Discussion led by Ariel Pakes (Harvard University)

4:20 – 5:10 pm Strategyproofness and Manipulability in Large Economies, Eduardo Azevedo (Harvard University) and Eric Budish (University of Chicago)

5:10 – 5:45 pm Discussion led by John Hatfield (Stanford University)

Saturday, May 7:
9:00 - 9:50 am Decentralized Matching with Aligned Preferences, Muriel Nederle (Stanford University) and Leeat Yariv (California University of Technology)

9:50 - 10:40 am TBA, Ilya Segal (Stanford University)

10:40 – 11:15 am Discussion led by Alvin Roth (Harvard University)

11:30 - 12:30 pm Panel and Audience Discussion on Open Questions, Gary Becker (University of Chicago), James Heckman (University of Chicago), Paul Milgrom (Stanford University) and Alvin Roth (Harvard University)

Register online here

Boston Globe on school choice

The Boston Globe has a series of articles and videos on the Boston School choice system, and the experience of getting in, or not, to your first choice schools: GETTING IN: INSIDE BOSTON’S SCHOOL ASSIGNMENT MAZE.

Part of the message is that there aren't enough pre-K seats to fill the demand. And, as one parent points out, "the lottery is not the problem, the problem is that there are bad schools."

 Here are the articles so far, in reverse order of appearance (I make a 45 second appearance in the video in the "Relief..." story, starting just about minute 1:15...and then again for a moment right at the end, at 5:20):

Relief, dismay, even guilt greet student placements

Boston public schools’ lottery, a system designed to distribute students without bias, can inevitably cause divisions among winners and losers.

Taking a chance, making a choice

The lottery assigning kindergartners to classrooms is designed to be fair, but with too few good schools to choose from, too many opt to leave.

Selection process starts with choices, ends with luck

In the Boston public schools, kindergarten registration can be a saga that plays out from the time a child is 3.

Kim Krawiec reflects on organ donation

I recently gave a talk at Duke U. Law School, on my paper with Judd Kessler (who will be a professor at Wharton next year). In the law school manner, I didn't present the paper, but responded briefly to two discussants, Kim Krawiec and Kieran Healy, and then answered questions. It was a novel experience for me, and great fun. Both Kim and Kieran are well informed about organ donation and related matters, and gracious hosts.

Now Kim has posted some of her comments on The Faculty Lounge: Al Roth: The Pied Piper of Repugnance?

Report from the front on the war for talent

From a recent NY Times article on recruiting in Silicon Valley:

"Two executives at a small start-up who spoke on the condition of anonymity said it recently lost an intern when one of the biggest start-ups offered the candidate a 40 percent bump in stock options, potentially worth hundreds of thousands of dollars — but only if the candidate accepted the job before hanging up the phone.

“The atmosphere is brutally competitive,” said Keith Rabois, a Silicon Valley veteran and chief operating officer at Square, where Mr. Firestone works. “Recruiting in Silicon Valley is more competitive and intense and furious than college football recruiting of high school athletes.”
...
"Tech recruiters have also expanded their searches. They still scout college campuses, particularly Stanford’s computer science department, where this year it was common for seniors to receive half a dozen offers by the end of first semester. But since college degrees are not mandatory, recruiters are also going to computer coding competitions and parties, in search of talent that is reminiscent of the dot-com mania."

Does anyone know some talented high school PHP, Ruby and Python programmers? (Or maybe they are already teaching those things in kindergarten?)

Same sex marriage still a repugnant transaction in Maryland

Same-Sex Marriage Bill Falls Short in Maryland

"The speaker of Maryland’s Democratic-controlled House of Delegates, Michael E. Busch, said that the bill, the Civil Marriage Protection Act, had fallen short of the 71 votes required for passage and that Democrats had decided to withdraw it instead of holding a vote that would fail.


“This is a distance run, not a sprint,” Mr. Busch said. “We’ll come back next year and take a strong look at it.”

"The withdrawal capped a tumultuous few weeks, which began with the bill’s sponsors saying that its passage was all but assured and that Maryland would soon become the sixth state to legalize same-sex marriage.
...
"Two national groups that oppose same-sex marriage, the National Organization for Marriage and the Family Research Council, both highlighted African-American and religious opponents of the bill as central to its defeat.


“Particular thanks must go to the African-American pastors, church members and delegates who spoke out against the attempted hijacking of the concept of ‘civil rights,’ ” the Family Research Council said in a statement.

"Democrats hold 98 of the House’s 141 seats, more than enough to overcome near-total Republican opposition, but ultimately about a third of all Democrats opposed it.
...
"The bill’s supporters would settle for no less than full marriage rights, as are legal in Connecticut, Iowa, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont and the District of Columbia. A Democrat’s proposal to make the bill about civil unions instead of marriage failed.


“The law walks. It doesn’t run,” said Michael A. McDermott, a Republican who supported the civil union alternatiPost Optionsve. “You need to take it a step at a time.”

Misc. kidney transplantation

In Texas, where everything is the biggest, the Texas Transplant Physician Group says they are the biggest "in Texas AND the United States."
"Our Living Paired Donor Kidney Transplant team made history in November, 2010, with the world's largest paired donor kidney transplant donor chain--with 16 transplants completed over three days. The 17th donor's "bridge" kidney was used to start another chain in December--extending the record-breaking chain to 23--still the largest single center kidney donor chain in the world! The kidney recipients ranged in age from 17 to 69 and all were transplanted with fully matched kidneys without the need for desensitization therapy. Dr. Adam Bingaman, Kidney and Pancreas Transplant Surgeon and Director of the Live Donor Kidney Transplant Program with Texas Transplant Physician Group is planning to extend the chain further in January, 2011.

"Read the local and national coverage this donor chain generated in our Kidney News section."

*********************

A story in the LA Times about a procedural error gives some insight into transplant procedures: Wrong patient got kidney at USC
"USC University Hospital halted kidney transplants last month after a kidney was accidentally transplanted into the wrong patient, according to a spokesman for the program that coordinates organ transplants in Los Angeles.

"The patient who received the wrong kidney escaped harm, apparently because the kidney happened to be an acceptable match, said Bryan Stewart, spokesman for the program, OneLegacy, which was notified of the error by the hospital.

"The hospital, which performs about two transplants a week, confirmed in a statement that it had voluntarily halted transplants Jan. 29 after a "process error" was discovered. The hospital did not detail the nature of the error and declined to answer questions. It said no patients were harmed.
...
"In general, immediately after a kidney is removed from a donor, it is placed in a plastic container with a screw-on lid. That container, labeled with an identification number, is then placed inside three sterile plastic bags, which are placed on ice in another container.


"The nurses in the operating room and the surgeon must check for the ID number on the kidney and compare that with the patient ID number," Klintmalm said.

"It is the operating room surgeon's responsibility to make sure the numbers match," he said. "You sign forms before you start the surgery."

****************
Flip Klijn writes: "Recently, several towns in the Netherlands started discussing the possibility to ask citizens directly whether they are willing to sign a donor form (i.e., to give permission for organ transplants at the time of decease) when they visit the city hall to pick up a driver's license or a passport. In Amsterdam, both left-wing and right-wing political parties seem to agree that this is a good idea: http://www.metronieuws.nl/regionaal/gemeente-amsterdam-ja-tegen-nieuw-plan-donoren/SrZkcu!QfBmXR4HMGY/

(There are already similar proposals in Rotterdam and The Hague. And probably for the US this is not something new.) In another city (Breda) they stopped asking "because citizens apparently did not like to be asked" (according to the city hall): http://www.bredavandaag.nl/nieuws/politiek/40539/2010-12-14/gemeente-breda-negeert-motie-d66

Marijuana in Montana and shark-fin soup in California

Two NY Times stories about repugnant markets caught my eye:

Soup Without Fins? Some Californians Simmer

and

In Montana, an Economic Boon Faces Repeal Effort

On Montana marijuana:

"Questions about who really benefits from medical marijuana are now gripping Montana. In the Legislature, a resurgent Republican majority elected last fall is leading a drive to repeal the six-year-old voter-approved statute permitting the use of marijuana for medical purposes, which opponents argue is promoting recreational use and crime.

"If repeal forces succeed — the House last month voted strongly for repeal, and the Senate is now considering it — Montana would be the first to recant among the 15 states and the District of Columbia that have such laws.
...
"Bozeman’s mayor, Jeff Krauss, a Republican, said he thought there was an element of economic fairness to be considered in the debate about medical marijuana’s future. “I don’t think anybody passed it thinking we were creating an industry,” he said, referring to the 2004 voter referendum. But like it or not, he said, it has become one, and legal investments in the millions of dollars have been made."
...
"One owner of a gardening supply company in the Bozeman area estimated that a person could essentially buy a job for $15,000, beginning a small growing operation with 100 plants. Especially for construction trade workers who were used to being self-employed before the recession, the owner said, the rhythms of the new industry feel familiar.

“Forty to 50 percent of customers come from construction,” said the owner, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because her national suppliers threatened to stop doing business with her if their products were openly associated with marijuana. “Plumbers, electricians, the whole genre of working-class, blue-collar Montana.”


On shark-fin soup, there are environmental and animal-rights issues, as well as cultural ones:
"...in a move that has infuriated Mrs. Li and others in this community, a bill recently introduced in the California Legislature would ban the sale and possession of shark fins, including the serving of shark’s fin soup. Down the rickety alleyways and produce-laden byways of San Francisco’s Chinatown, some see the proposed law as a cultural assault — a sort of Chinese Exclusion Act in a bowl.

"Similar to a measure passed in Hawaii, the bill seeks to curtail shark finning, a brutal, bloody practice of the global trade in which the fins are typically hacked off a live shark, leaving it to die slowly as it sinks to the bottom of the sea.

"In Hawaii, restaurants have until June 30 to cook or dispose of their fin inventories, and penalties for possession will be severe, with fines of $5,000 to $15,000 for a first offense. Similar bills were introduced in Oregon and Washington State.

"Scientists cite a growing international demand for shark’s fin soup, especially popular with China’s expanding middle class. As the once-ceremonial dish becomes more accessible, up to 73 million sharks are being killed a year.

"The bill is attracting a motley group of supporters, including the state’s sport and commercial fishermen’s associations, aquariums, chefs, scientists and numerous environmental groups.

"But in a city where food and the environment are perhaps equal obsessions, the politics of soup has also highlighted a generational divide between eco-conscious children and their tradition-bound elders. "

AMMA 2011 The Second Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications

 AMMA 2011: The Second Conference on Auctions, Market Mechanisms and Their Applications  New York, NY August 22-23, 2011  Call for papers.

The conference seeks papers devoted to issues that arise in all stages of deploying a market mechanism to solve a problem. This includes, but is not limited to, theoretical and empirical examination of questions such as:

• Is a market the right mechanism for the problem? What are the externalities involved? What are the issues with central planning?

• How should novel markets be organized? What is the "right" micro-structure for a given problem?

• What is the best way to provide incentives? Is (real) money necessary?

• Will the use of markets lead to the creation of artificial economies and what can we say about these economies?

• What new problems arise because of the special nature of these markets (e.g., from everyone wanting to use a cluster around the time of a conference deadline)?

• What protocols need to be in place for agents to participate in such markets (including everything from practical matters like integrating bidding protocols into the system to theoretical questions like incentive compatibility)?

• Is there a need for new mechanisms for specific applications (e.g., auctions used in sponsored search were never used in other settings)? If so, what properties of applications warrant such mechanisms?

In addition to more traditional academic papers, we are especially interested in experiences from the real world (case studies and new applications). Below are some potential areas, but the list is simply illustrative rather than exhaustive -- we welcome papers in all areas of market design.
Sample areas include:

• Content delivery networks
• Resource allocation in networks and distributed computing
• Sponsored search auctions
• Prediction markets
• Allocation of landing slots in congested airports
• Road pricing
• Student-school matching
• Kidney exchanges
• Combinatorial auctions

Submission Deadline
April 15, 2011

Notification of acceptance/rejection
May 27, 2011

Final versions of archival papers due
June 15, 20

Unraveling of NBA (and college) basketball

The NY Times Magazine writes about the Baylor freshman basketball player who is already an NBA draft prospect: Is it Dunk and Done for Perry Jones?

"In eighth grade, Jones was invited to attend a Baylor University basketball game on the campus in Waco, Tex. He was still a raw player, not widely known and in some ways perfect for the Baylor program, which was not attracting the best of the seasoned prospects.
...
"Jones declared on the ride home that he had found his school, and soon after, he committed to Baylor, meaning that the team’s coach, Scott Drew, offered him a scholarship and he accepted. It was only a verbal bond, one that could not be officially sealed until he reached his senior year of high school and signed an N.C.A.A. letter of intent, but he never wavered, even as coaches from more-traditional college-basketball powers, including Kansas and U.C.L.A., sent letters to his home.
...
"But just about everyone assumes that he will be a one-and-done player at Baylor, a pure rental who stays for a single season. That has become the norm for top college players. In fact, in some projections, as many as six of the top 10 picks in this spring’s N.B.A. draft are college freshmen."...
...(Players can no longer enter the N.B.A. straight out of high school, as Kobe Bryant, LeBron James and many others did.)
...
"You might assume that if Jones left school after just one season for the N.B.A., it would be a terrible disappointment to the coaches who recruited him when he was in his early teens — then had to keep in constant contact to make sure no one poached him. (Such vigilance is known as baby-sitting.) But that is not the case. If Jones leaves, it will further validate Baylor’s program and show everyone — the media, potential recruits, influential summer-league coaches who control players and sometimes broker them to colleges — that Baylor is a place that attracts top talent and produces N.B.A. millionaires. It will make it easier for Drew to recruit more players like Jones, who then, of course, also might also leave after one season. "

******
See my earlier posts Unraveling and uncertainty: The NBA draft, and Another step in the unraveling of the baskeball market about how the rule that players have to be 19 years old and a year out of high school before being drafted by the NBA has caused some players to play a year for European teams.



HT: Scott Cunningham

The surrogacy supermarket in India

This graphic, about the thriving pregnancy-for-hire market in India, is from the article Moms market, by Namita Kohli, in the Hindustan Times.

HT: Amol Agrawal

2011 job market scramble for new economics Ph.D.s

The AEA's Economics job market scramble web page opens for registration tomorrow.

2011 Job Market Scramble Important Dates:

March 23: Registration Opens
March 30: Registration Closes
April 1-12: Scramble Website will be open for viewing by registered participants only
April 12: Scramble Viewing will close.

See the Scramble Guide for more detailed information.

And good luck to all still on the market.

Are college places in the U.K. like Japanese medical internships?

That's the question raised in this Times Higher Education story by Simon Baker: Could Japanese hospital doctors offer a remedy to student place dilemma?

"Ministers still scratching their heads over how to release individual English universities from controls on student numbers while keeping a lid on the cost to the taxpayer have been urged to look at work by leading economists in the US.

"Research by academics at the universities of Stanford and Harvard on the placing of doctors in Japanese hospitals could contain the solution to a conundrum that is perplexing policymakers.

"The suggestion comes as David Willetts, the universities and science minister, reiterated in a speech last week that finding a solution to freeing up student places was the "big prize" that the government needed to drive competition in the sector.

"However, apart from putting forward short-term proposals to allow a proportion of overall places to be contested through a "core and margin model", all he said was that he would "welcome a debate" on a more permanent settlement.

"A radical solution could lie in the kind of research led in the US by Alvin Roth, George Gund professor of economics and business administration at Harvard University, an expert in how to design markets under public sector constraints.

"He said the problem faced by the English university system was "somewhat similar" in character to attempts by the Japanese government to allocate enough junior doctors to hospitals in rural areas by using regional "caps" that hold down numbers in cities.

"The issue was investigated by Fuhito Kojima, an assistant professor in economics at Stanford University, and Yuichiro Kamada, a graduate student at Harvard. They designed an algorithm to find the most efficient way to solve the problem.

"Dr Kojima said their analysis could be applied to the English university system - given that institutions were in effect operating under one large "regional cap" on numbers - by designing an algorithm to "transfer" places between institutions according to their popularity among students.

"Often, the problem is that these kinds of adjustments go through bureaucratic processes that firstly can take a lot of time and secondly do not result in the correct or efficient outcome. Once you use an algorithm, this kind of adjustment can be automatic," he said.

HT: Nick Feltovich

and here is the Kamada and Kojima paper: IMPROVING EFFICIENCY IN MATCHING MARKETS WITH REGIONAL CAPS: THE CASE OF THE JAPAN RESIDENCY

Match Day 2011

This past Thursday, medical school seniors found out where they are matched to residencies. Ishani Ganguli, one of the newest in the fine tradition of doctor/writers reflects briefly on her experience: Matched!

"For medical students, Match Day can be exhilarating or deeply disappointing. Some schools create pageantry around the event, asking students to come up to the mike in front of an amphitheater of classmates to receive and read aloud their results. Others, like Harvard, simply pass out the envelopes and serve lunch."