Update on compensation for bone marrow donors

Frank McCormick emails about a new movie concerning the 9th Circuit court case which ruled that it might be legal to compensate certain kind of bone marrow/blood stem-cell donors, and the subsequent administrative battle to prevent that: Film inspired by Lewiston mom premieres

"A mission to help her three young daughters — Jordan, Julia and Jorja Flynn — stay healthy despite their Fanconi anemia, a rare genetic blood disorder that destroyed their bone marrow and made them extremely susceptible to cancer.

She's fighting to increase America's pool of bone-marrow donors by getting the federal government to allow some donors to be paid — a significant change she believed would help both donors and those in need, like her daughters.

Four years later, the Lewiston mom is still fighting, both for her daughters' health and against the federal government. But she's getting attention for it in a new way.

Today, a short film inspired by her battles will premiere at the Maine International Film Festival in Waterville.

...
"Hoping to help donors ease the financial burden of donation and give them an incentive to see the process through, Gummoe became lead plaintiff in a lawsuit spearheaded by the Institute for Justice.

For years, federal law has prohibited bone-marrow donors — and organ donors — from being compensated. The suit argued that advances in medicine made bone-marrow donation more like plasma donation, which can be compensated under the law, than to kidney donation, which cannot.

In traditional bone-marrow harvesting, doctors stick a needle through a hip bone and remove bone marrow. The alternative method, peripheral blood stem cell donation, is now used most of the time. In stem cell donation, donors receive injections to increase the production of blood-forming stem cells that are then siphoned out of their blood in a process similar to dialysis.

The lawsuit was successful: The 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that the new form of bone-marrow donation did not fall under the category of organ donation as the law was written and could be compensated. At least one nonprofit was planning a pilot program to see how compensation — a $3,000 housing allowance, scholarship or charity donation — might boost bone-marrow donation.

But in 2013, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services proposed a new rule that would explicitly include peripheral blood stem cell donation in the definition of organ donation. With that looming for nearly three years, no group has felt comfortable moving forward with a pilot program to compensate donors.

"If they were to raise money and start pursuing this research and then the department issued its rule and blocked it, it would be a waste of their time and resources, which are precious," Kramer said. "In good faith, they couldn't move forward."

The department has until the end of this year to either move forward to prohibit bone-marrow donors from being compensated or drop the issue. A Health and Human Services spokesman said Wednesday that the department was "working toward being responsive to this deadline."

The department has said a ban on compensation would help ensure that, among other things, donors aren't coerced or exploited.

Gummoe and the Institute for Justice believe a ban only ensures that there aren't enough people willing to donate.  "

"Black market" surrogacy in England, and subsequent legal complications

Organizing markets without a strong legal framework can be tricky; here's a British surrogacy story from the law blog Above the Law: I Want To Put A Baby In You: Underground Surrogacy And The Burger King Baby

"Last month, an English court held that a surrogate to an “underground” arrangement could nevertheless keep custody of the baby she carried. This was despite the fact that the surrogate was not genetically related to the child. Instead, she was hired via a “secret” matching service and matched with a gay couple. They hoped to be parents through surrogacy for a second time.

The intended parents and surrogate met only once for 30 minutes. Unfortunately, the meeting was at a Burger King. And now, this poor child is forever linked to the fast-food franchise.

After the meeting, the surrogate was flown to Cyprus. (As I mentioned previously, Cyprus is a hot destination for surrogacy arrangements.) There, she underwent the transfer of two embryos to her uterus. The eggs were from a donor, and one was fertilized by one of the intended parents and the second egg was fertilized with sperm from the other intended parent. The transfer was successful, and the surrogate became pregnant with twins. But sadly, she later miscarried one of the babies.

Issues continued to mount. The intended parents missed payment deadlines. The surrogate learned that the couple’s first surrogate had a negative review of the intended parents. Ultimately, the surrogate decided to keep the remaining child. She lied, and told the intended parents that she had miscarried both babies. But she was caught when the intended parents saw her very pregnant toward the end of the pregnancy.

The intended parents brought legal action against the surrogate to try to obtain their child. But they also had unclean hands. They had offered to “pay” the surrogate 9,000 pounds in exchange for carrying the baby. While British law allows “reimbursement” of expenses to a compassionate surrogate, no “paying” of a surrogate is permitted. Additionally, the court held that the surrogate herself had a learning difficulty that made her consent to the agreement invalid.

Ultimately, the court awarded full custody to the surrogate—I hope that learning difficulty isn’t too severe—while the intended parents get very limited visitation rights:  one weekend every eight weeks.

While it sounds shocking to award a surrogate the parental rights over a child to which they have no genetic connection, this unfortunately happens throughout the world. Even in the United States. And “underground” surrogacy arrangements are not unusual.
...
"the Chinese Ministry of Heath all but outlawed surrogacy in 2001. So the estimated 10,000 surrogacy births in China a year are all via its underground surrogacy industry. And due to the illegality of the arrangement, intended parents in China can lack legitimate parental rights to their children born via surrogacy."
...
"It Happens To U.S. Too. Surrogates change their minds in the United States as well. In the Robinson case, a gay couple in New Jersey asked the sister of one of the men to carry their children for them. Like the China case, this one also involves twin girls. The children were not related to the sister, but the result of an anonymous egg donor and the sperm from the spouse of her brother. After the girls were born, the relationship between the surrogate and the intended parents deteriorated..."

Acquiring the first thousand customers in a two-sided market

HBS Working Knowledge has a nice piece about a case study by Professor Thales Teixeira,

How Uber, Airbnb, and Etsy Attracted Their First 1,000 Customers

On Airbnb:
"founders Brian Chesky and Joe Gebbia thought like customers themselves, trying to figure out where they would go if Airbnb didn’t exist. It didn’t take them long to figure out the answer: Craigslist. The entrepreneurs figured they could do a better job of making apartments appealing than the online classified site, but first they had to siphon away its customers. To do that, Chesky and Gebbia created software to hack Craigslist to extract the contact info of property owners, then sent them a pitch to list on Airbnb as well.

The strategy worked. With nothing to lose, property owners doubled their chances of finding a potential renter, and Airbnb had a ready supply of homes with which it could attract customers."

Repugnant transactions in Saudi

The NY Times has an interesting story on Saudi Arabia: A Saudi Morals Enforcer Called for a More Liberal Islam. Then the Death Threats Began.

Some of the story focuses on repugnant transactions:

"Their embrace of technology runs counter to the history of Wahhabi clerics rejecting nearly everything new as a threat to the religion. Formerly banned items include the telegraph, the radio, the camera, soccer, girls’ education and televisions, whose introduction in the 1960s caused outrage."
...
"The government has sought to control the flow of religious opinions with official fatwa institutions. But state-sanctioned fatwas have provoked laughter, too, like the fatwa calling spending money on Pokemon products “cooperation in sin and transgression.

While the government seeks to get more women into the work force, the state fatwa organization preaches on the “danger of women joining men in the workplace,” which it calls “the reason behind the destruction of societies.”

And there are fatwas that arm extremists with religious justification. There is one fatwa, still available in English on a government website and signed by the previous grand mufti, that states, “Whoever refuses to follow the straight path deserves to be killed or enslaved in order to establish justice, maintain security and peace and safeguard lives, honor and property.”

It goes on: “Slavery in Islam is like a purifying machine or sauna in which those who are captured enter to wash off their dirt and then they come out clean, pure and safe, from another door.”

Scott Kominers celebrated at Chicago--market design and inequality

3 Questions with Scott Kominers, from the Human Capital and Economic Opportunity Global Working Group

Medical tourism: cataract surgery in Britain

Britain is both an origin and a destination for medical tourism--travel to get better or cheaper medical care--and not everyone is happy to be on the receiving end.

The Telegraph has the story: Health tourists jump queue for cataract operations on NHS as British patients wait up to eight months

"Health tourists are being given cataract surgery on the NHS ahead of British patients because their conditions are considered more of a priority, it has emerged.

Hundreds of people from countries including Zimbabwe and Nigeria have been offered the eye operations before UK taxpayers, official figures show.

They have been fast-tracked by medics as their conditions are said to be "very complex and urgent", while some hospitals have waiting times of almost eight months.

Cataract surgery is the most common treatment provided on the NHS and 300,000 operations are carried out each year."
************
For some medical tourism that takes British citizens abroad, see e.g. these earlier posts...

What do British fertility tourists choose in America? It's a girl!

Indian surrogates bearing British babies

Assisted suicide in England and Switzerland, continued

Donating a kidney today, and getting a promise of a living donor kidney in the future for someone you specify

Here's a news release from UCLA: ‘Gift certificate’ enables kidney donation when convenient and transplant when needed

"The program allows for living donors to donate a kidney in advance of when a friend or family member might require a kidney transplant.
...
"It is such a simple concept," Veale said. "It's the brainchild of a grandfather who wanted to donate a kidney to his grandson nearing dialysis dependency, but the grandfather felt he would be too old to donate in a few years when his grandson would likely need a transplant."

The release goes on to mention two such advanced donations that have already been made.
***********

Here's a related announcement: Voucher Allows You To Donate A Kidney Now, Secure One For Later

"Already, 9 other hospitals across the U.S. have joined UCLA and agreed to honor the voucher program. Recently, the Ethics Committee of the American Society of Transplant Surgeons also voted in favor of the voucher program and sent the matter to their executive committee for formal approval.  "


HT: Frank McCormick, Philip Held

Causal Inference and Big Data in PNAS

From PNAS (hard to pronounce, but has some good papers:)

Sackler Colloquium on Drawing Causal Inference from Big Data (Free Online)

Introduction

Drawing causal inference from Big Data 

Richard M. Shiffrin

Colloquium Papers

Causal inference in economics and marketing

Hal R. Varian

Estimating peer effects in networks with peer encouragement designs

Dean Eckles, René F. Kizilcec, and Eytan Bakshy

Quantity discounts on a virtual good: The results of a massive pricing experiment at King Digital Entertainment

Steven D. Levitt, John A. List, Susanne Neckermann, and David Nelson

Characterizing treatment pathways at scale using the OHDSI network

George Hripcsak, Patrick B. Ryan, Jon D. Duke, Nigam H. Shah, Rae Woong Park, Vojtech Huser, Marc A. Suchard, Martijn J. Schuemie, Frank J. DeFalco, Adler Perotte, Juan M. Banda, Christian G. Reich, Lisa M. Schilling, Michael E. Matheny, Daniella Meeker, Nicole Pratt, and David Madigan

Inferring cortical function in the mouse visual system through large-scale systems neuroscience

Michael Hawrylycz, Costas Anastassiou, Anton Arkhipov, Jim Berg, Michael Buice, Nicholas Cain, Nathan W. Gouwens, Sergey Gratiy, Ramakrishnan Iyer, Jung Hoon Lee, Stefan Mihalas, Catalin Mitelut, Shawn Olsen, R. Clay Reid, Corinne Teeter, Saskia de Vries, Jack Waters, Hongkui Zeng, Christof Koch, and MindScope

Causal inference and the data-fusion problem

Elias Bareinboim and Judea Pearl

Recursive partitioning for heterogeneous causal effects

Susan Athey and Guido Imbens

Methods for causal inference from gene perturbation experiments and validation

Nicolai Meinshausen, Alain Hauser, Joris M. Mooij, Jonas Peters, Philip Versteeg, and Peter Bühlmann

Improving massive experiments with threshold blocking

Michael J. Higgins, Fredrik Sävje, and Jasjeet S. Sekhon

Linear mixed model for heritability estimation that explicitly addresses environmental variation

David Heckerman, Deepti Gurdasani, Carl Kadie, Cristina Pomilla, Tommy Carstensen, Hilary Martin, Kenneth Ekoru, Rebecca N. Nsubuga, Gerald Ssenyomo, Anatoli Kamali, Pontiano Kaleebu, Christian Widmer, and Manjinder S. Sandhu

Lasso adjustments of treatment effect estimates in randomized experiments

Adam Bloniarz, Hanzhong Liu, Cun-Hui Zhang, Jasjeet S. Sekhon, and Bin Yu

Modeling confounding by half-sibling regression

Bernhard Schölkopf, David W. Hogg, Dun Wang, Daniel Foreman-Mackey, Dominik Janzing, Carl-Johann Simon-Gabriel, and Jonas Peters

Investing in countries of first refuge, in return for integrating refugees into their economy

The NY Times has a story about Jordan: If a Carrot for Jordan Works, Syrian Refugees Will Stay Put

"Jordan, which has 650,000 Syrian refugees registered with the United Nations inside its borders, has long made it nearly impossible for them to work legally, citing concerns about high unemployment among its citizens. But under the new experiment, the government has given out 13,000 work permits to Syrians, and is promising to issue up to 50,000 by year’s end — and tens of thousands more in the future.

"In exchange, the World Bank is giving Jordan a $300 million interest-free loan, the likes of which are traditionally reserved for extremely poor countries in Africa. Western nations, including the United States, have offered roughly $60 million to build schools to accommodate Syrian children. And Jordan is close to clinching what it wants most: tax-free exports to the European Union, especially garments stitched in its industrial export zones.

"In short, Western leaders are using their financial and political leverage to convince Jordan that it is worthwhile to help refugees improve their lot in this country so they do not cross the Mediterranean Sea in flimsy rafts in search of a better life in Europe. It is a stark shift for both donor countries and Jordan, which, after absorbing generations of refugees from wars across the Middle East, had tried to keep Syrians from establishing a permanent foothold.

“Some may say this is the one shot that the government has to extract a lot of money,” Stefan Dercon, a professor at Oxford University and the chief economist at the British government’s development aid agency, which supports the effort in Jordan. “I would say it is also the only shot that it will have to really reform its economy and create jobs, with substantial international funding.”

"Jordan is not the only country trying to leverage Europe’s anxiety about refugees and migrants. Turkey has negotiated a deal that involves taking back most of those who traveled across the Aegean Sea into Greece in exchange for $6.6 billion in European aid and a proposed waiver of visas for Turks entering Europe.

"Europe is also promising over $4 billion in aid to several African countries in exchange for their help in stemming the exodus out of the continent. Even Sudan, long under European and American sanctions for its human rights record, is reaping money as part of the package. Libya is getting assistance from Europe to keep migrant boats from crossing the Mediterranean, an approach that Human Rights Watch describes as outsourcing “the dirty work to Libyan forces.”
...
"The Jordan deal, announced in February as part of the Jordan Compact, is described optimistically by its framers as “turning the Syrian refugee crisis into a development opportunity.” Its goal is to draw new foreign investment and create jobs for both Jordanians and Syrians. The risk, its proponents privately point out, is that no new investments will pour in, Jordan’s economy will continue to languish and local resentment will grow.

"Until recently, barely 5,000 Syrian refugees had work permits. The International Labor Organization, a United Nations agency that supports and devises work policies, estimated that 50,000 people in Jordan worked off the books — roughly the number that the government is promising to legalize this year alone.

For Jordan’s leaders, grappling with debt and an economy growing at an anemic 2.4 percent, access to the European market is a critical incentive."

The U.S. House of Representatives expresses concerns about organ transplants in China

The House of Representatives has passed a resolution of concern:

H.Res.343 - Expressing concern regarding persistent and credible reports of systematic, state-sanctioned organ harvesting from non-consenting prisoners of conscience in the People's Republic of China, including from large numbers of Falun Gong practitioners and members of other religious and ethnic minority groups.114th Congress (2015-2016) | Get alerts

RESOLUTION

Hide Overview icon-hide

Sponsor:	Rep. Ros-Lehtinen, Ileana [R-FL-27] (Introduced 06/25/2015)
Committees:	House - Foreign Affairs; Judiciary
Latest Action:	06/13/2016 On motion to suspend the rules and agree to the resolution, as amended Agreed to by voice vote. (text: CR H3728)  (All Actions)

Tracker:

This bill has the status Passed House

Here are the steps for Status of Legislation:

1. Introduced
2. Passed House

More on This Bill

• CBO Cost Estimates [0]

Subject — Policy Area:

• International Affairs
• View subjects

• Summary (2)

 

• Text (2)

 

• Actions (14)

 

• Titles (1)

 

• Amendments (0)

 

• Cosponsors (185)

 

• Committees (2)

 

• Related Bills (0)

Summary: H.Res.343 — 114th Congress (2015-2016)All Bill Information (Except Text)

Market design and cultural context: from an interview in Japan

When I was in Japan in April I spoke at Tokyo Institute of Technology. Here's a brief account that just appeared in English, highlighting some remarks I made that markets have cultural contexts: Professor Alvin E. Roth interviewed in Contemporary Society class

"A student asked why Roth engages in fieldwork such as operating room visits to conduct his research. The professor pointed out that markets have too many unwritten rules and are too complex to understand only through books. There are also many culture-related rules that need to be learned through direct experience. If someone designs the Japanese market, that person should be Japanese, someone who truly understands Japanese culture. This comment visibly moved the audience and will undoubtedly motivate students as they pursue their future study and research activities."

Howard Raiffa (1924-2016)

Multiple emails this morning tell that Howard Raiffa passed away peacefully last night. He was an early game theorist, a hero of decision theory, and an institution builder (as well as an institution) at Harvard and elsewhere. (He was also the advisor of my advisor, Bob Wilson.) A gentle man and an intellectual giant.

Here is a picture of Howard and Estelle I took at dinner in Cambridge in 2012. They were high school sweethearts, throughout their long life together.

Estelle and Howard Raiffa in 2012

**************
Updates:

July 11: here's the email announcement from HBS
"To:  HBS Community
From:  Nitin Nohria
Re:  Sad news -- Howard Raiffa

I am very sorry to let you know that Howard Raiffa died peacefully at his home in Arizona on Friday July 8 following a long battle with Parkinson's.  He was 92 years old.  He is survived by his wife, Estelle, and his two children, Mark and Judy.

Howard, the Frank Plumpton Ramsey Professor of Managerial Economics, came to Harvard Business School in 1957 through the generosity of the Ford Foundation as one of a small cadre of discipline-based scholars.  He was interested in the resolution of conflict through mediation and arbitration, and several times during his career he either invented an entirely new field or changed an existing field so fundamentally that he earned recognition as its reinventor -- from decision analysis to game theory to negotiation analysis.  He authored and co-authored seminal works such as Applied Statistical Decision Theory and Decisions With Multiple Objectives.  An epitome of One Harvard before the phrase was coined, he interests spanned boundaries, and he is credited as a founder of the modern Kennedy School (where he held a joint appointment beginning in 1969) and had close ties as well with the Law School and School of Public Health.  He also served as the founding director of the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.

Here at HBS, he was gentle and demanding mentor to many, and a friend and colleague to many more.  While he officially retired from the faculty in 1994 he remained on as an advisor for some time after.

While we do not yet know of plans for a memorial service, we will be sure to communicate any information as it is learned, as well as a full obituary once it is finalized.

Our thoughts and sympathies are with his family and other loved ones."


Here's the Kennedy School obituary: Harvard Kennedy School Remembers Howard Raiffa, July 11, 2016, By Doug Gavel

Here's the IIASA obituary (Howard was IIASA's founding director):  Howard Raiffa 1924-2016

July 12: Here's the INFORMS obituary
Howard Raiffa January 24, 1924 – July 8, 2016

July 13: here's the NYT obit
Howard Raiffa, Mathematician Who Studied Decision Making, Dies at 92
"Howard Raiffa was born in the Bronx on Jan. 24, 1924, the son of Jacob Raiffa, who sold wool products, and the former Hilda Kaplan. He graduated from Evander Childs High School, where he was captain of the basketball team. Math was his best subject, but he dreamed of being a basketball player or coach.

He was attending City College when he enlisted in the Army Air Corps, where he was a radar specialist. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1946, a master’s in statistics and a doctorate in mathematics, all from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.

In 1945, he married Estelle Schwartz. She and his daughter survive him, as do a son, Mark, and four grandchildren."

Kidney exchange and school choice in German (two interviews)

In Stern, in German, Bernhard Albrecht talks to  me about Tauschbörse für Organe, "Exchange of Organs."

Offering kidney, seeking kidney
Filesharing are in vogue. Some exchange Sammelbildchen, other clothing. The Nobel laureate economist Alvin Roth has developed a system to swap bodies. Who could benefit?


And today in Berliner Zeitung,  Nobel Prize winner Alvin Roth about the chaos at school choice and organ donation  (Nobelpreisträger Alvin Roth über das Chaos bei Schulwahl und Organspende)

(The latter interview comes without a byline, but I believe the interviewer was by the political correspondent Tobias Peter.)

School choice in Indianapolis

The Indy Star has the story on the changes to come: School choice made easier for Indy parents

"The good news is that change is coming. A new non-profit organization, Enroll Indy, launched by a Mind Trust Education Entrepreneur Fellowship, is working with Indianapolis Public Schools, the Mayor’s Office and the State Charter School Board to streamline the school application process for public school families. Its plan includes a new school information source for parents to learn about their options; a robust effort to work directly with families on navigating the process; a streamlined application that includes both IPS and charter schools; a shared deadline across all schools and a much-needed window of transparency into school enrollment.

For nearly a year, stakeholders in both IPS and the charter sector have worked together on recommendations focused on making enrollment more efficient, equitable and transparent. As such, Enroll Indy is poised to launch a system this fall that will dramatically improve access for all families.

This new system not only will make the enrollment process easier for all families, but it will provide robust data and information to our city as a whole. It will provide new information on the type of schools families want and where they want them, meaning districts and authorizers will be able to collaborate strategically to meet the needs of families, rather than starting schools with no information on the neighborhood’s needs or wants. This data also will enable us to ensure schools are behaving fairly and serving all students, not just those who are easiest to educate."

The global system of refugee protection

I'm at the Center for Migration Studies (CMS*) in New York, attending a conference on the global system of refugee protection, and how it interacts with a myriad of related concerns, among which security has become prominent.

Refugee protection/resettlement is a wicked problem, in all the senses of the word. After the first day of discussion I have to admit its complexity is head-breaking.

Everything having to do with refugee resettlement is complicated by the highly charged political environment in which it is now discussed, and the big consequences this can have. For example, Fiona Adamson of the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies showed some refugee/migrant-inspired posters from the recent Brexit campaign to take Britain out of Europe, like this one.

*************
*As it happens I began the week at the other CMS, in Baltimore, talking about kidney exchange.

Campaign against research misconduct in the Netherlands

Inside Higher Ed has the story: The Dutch Fight for Research Integrity (and the url is more informative than the headline--https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2016/06/23/netherlands-starts-major-campaign-against-research-misconduct )

"There are two parts of the Dutch investigation into research integrity: a program called Fostering Responsible Research Practices, which will include a national survey of researchers and research grants into the area, and a fund for replication studies of important “cornerstone” research that has been relied on to make policy or has attracted lots of media attention.
The programs are set to be signed off soon and calls for proposals are expected before the end of the summer.
The mass survey of researchers in the Netherlands will encompass all disciplines, including humanities scholars, who, like scientists, can be “selective” in their use of sources, he said. The anonymized results will be reported back to universities so they can judge the extent of the problem."

Charter schools and school choice

Souls, a journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, has a special issue on New Orleans schools.

Volume 17, Issue 3-4, 2015 

• Taylor & Francis
•  

Souls

A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society

ISSN
1099-9949 (Print), 1548-3843 (Online)

Special Issue: Education in New Orleans: A Decade after Hurricane Katrina

The papers are by and large critical of recent reforms, including school choice.  New Orleans Recovery School District has mostly charter schools.
**********

And here's a paper just published in the AER that looks at the effects of charter schools, using the fact that some non-charters have been taken over, which changes the selection criteria (students already in a takeover school are grandfathered in...)

American Economic Review 2016, 106(7): 1878–1920

Charters without Lotteries: Testing Takeovers in New Orleans and Boston

Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Joshua D. Angrist, Peter D. Hull and Parag A. Pathak

Charter takeovers are traditional public schools restarted as charter schools. We develop a grandfathering instrument for takeover attendance that compares students at schools designated for takeover with a matched sample of students attending similar schools not yet taken over. Grandfathering estimates from New Orleans show substantial gains from takeover enrollment. In Boston, grandfathered students see achievement gains at least as large as the gains for students assigned charter seats in lotteries. A non-charter Boston turnaround intervention that had much in common with the takeover strategy generated gains as large as those seen for takeovers, while other more modest turnaround interventions yielded smaller effects.

Full-Text Access | Supplementary Materials

Civil servants study market design in Melbourne

The Centre for Market Design in Melbourne is offering a course leading to a Specialist Certificate in Economic Design:

"Sixty international and national government decision makers completed the Specialist Certificate in Economic Design in Canberra last Friday (24 June 2016) with the aim of deepening their economic knowledge.
"The new graduate course, accredited by the University of Melbourne, and developed and taught by the Centre for Market Design (CMD) brings policymakers up-to date with the latest developments in microeconomics.
"It provides public servants with a conceptual framework for analysing policies and evaluating their effect, with emphasis on the resource and information constraints policymakers and market designers face.
...
"Economic design includes the design of procurement mechanisms and sales auctions, double-auctions in two-sided markets, algorithms for matching (e.g. students to schools, or children to kindergarten), and the writing of performance contracts.

The market for first year lawyers: some top salaries are moving to 180K

After years at which top salaries for brand new lawyers at big firms were concentrated at $160,000, the magic number seems to be jumping to $180K.

See Above the Law: http://abovethelaw.com/2016/06/salary-wars-scorecard-which-firms-have-announced-raises/

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

See this earlier post: Wednesday, August 15, 2012 Salaries of new law grads

Can a family that has decided to end life support decide a loved one should be a living donor?

Transplantation is a field full of the kind of wrenching discussions that you might expect to find as hypotheticals in a philosophy class. The WSJ follows one such discussion:
The Difficult Ethics of Organ Donations From Living Donors

"The family proposed that doctors put Mr. Osterrieder under anesthesia and perform surgery to remove a kidney for transplant. Like any living donor, he would be expected to survive the procedure. Then, a few days later, the ventilator would be removed and he would be allowed to die.

“Just the feeling something good would come out of this helped us,” says Kim Shuster, 31, one of Mr. Osterrieder’s daughters.

"A labyrinth of federal and state rules and regulations, as well as those of individual transplant centers, guide organ procurement. The family met with the hospital’s ethics committee, spoke with doctors and talked among themselves. Everyone wanted to make sure the choice reflected Mr. Osterrieder’s wishes, but there was also discussion about how the family might feel if their decision made news and strangers, not to mention relatives, criticized them.

"Kathy Osterrieder says she, her children and son-in-law all agreed, “if any of us are not on board, we won’t do this.” Whatever happens, she told them, “we have to survive as a unit.”

"The ethics committee gave its approval, and the hospital reached out to the federally designated organ-procurement service that helps coordinate donations in the region. The organization’s leaders were moved. But when they put out a call to 14 different transplant centers to find a surgeon to perform the operation, “we could not find a surgeon who was willing,” says Kurt Shutterly, chief operating officer of the Center for Organ Recovery and Education, based in Pittsburgh.

"The surgeons didn’t feel it was ethical to remove Mr. Osterrieder’s kidney without his direct authorization, Mr. Shutterly recounts. They also worried, he says, that if a living donor died soon after the procedure, it might jeopardize an institution’s entire transplant program.
...
"Earlier this year, an Organ Procurement and Transplantation Network and UNOS working committee wrote a report about the ethical considerations of a type of “imminent-death donation,” in which a living donor through a surrogate donates an organ before the planned withdrawal of ventilator support. The committee found that, under certain circumstances, the practice may be ethical, but some people who read the report expressed significant enough concerns that the committee determined, for now at least, that it didn’t want to move forward with trying to change UNOS policy. The report is expected to be posted soon for public comment.

“It is powerful to think that someone at the end of life, who has suffered a lot of illness, would want to do something to help someone else by being a living donor,” says Peter Reese of the University of Pennsylvania, chairman of the OPTN/UNOS ethics committee.

"And yet, despite the fact that offering an organ is an exquisitely personal decision, transplantation is a highly communal process, from the involvement of many medical disciplines in the extraction of the organ to the decision about who receives it. “If all those people don’t agree and we try to push this forward, we run the risk of undermining the whole enterprise,” Dr. Reese says. “Organ transplantation requires public trust to a massive degree.”

Who finds sales of genetically modified food repugnant? (Hint: they are disgusted)

Here's a paper on a source of firm opposition to genetically modified food:

Sydney E. Scott, Yoel Inbar, and Paul Rozin
Evidence for Absolute Moral Opposition to Genetically Modified Food in the United States
Perspectives on Psychological Science May 2016 11: 315-324

Abstract

Public opposition to genetic modification (GM) technology in the food domain is widespread (Frewer et al., 2013). In a survey of U.S. residents representative of the population on gender, age, and income, 64% opposed GM, and 71% of GM opponents (45% of the entire sample) were “absolutely” opposed—that is, they agreed that GM should be prohibited no matter the risks and benefits. “Absolutist” opponents were more disgust sensitive in general and more disgusted by the consumption of genetically modified food than were non-absolutist opponents or supporters. Furthermore, disgust predicted support for legal restrictions on genetically modified foods, even after controlling for explicit risk–benefit assessments. This research suggests that many opponents are evidence insensitive and will not be influenced by arguments about risks and benefits.

A matching market for polygamy: SecondWife.com

Here is a (combinatorial?) site for plural marriage for Muslims: SecondWife.com

“then marry women of your choice, two or three, or four but if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly, then only one”
- Quran 4:3

Repugnance and the social acceptance of kidney exchange (in French)

Here's an article, en français, that considers repugnance as central to the design (and public acceptance) of kidney exchange:

Brisset Nicolas, « Un marché sans marchandise ? Répugnance et matching market », Revue d'économie politique 2/2016 (Vol. 126) , p. 317-345 
URL : www.cairn.info/revue-d-economie-politique-2016-2-page-317.htm.

Here is its table of contents. (Google Translate is helpful but far from perfect in reading the article for those of us who are linguistically impaired...)

Plan de l'article

1. Introduction
2. Roth et la répugnance : le cas des organes
2.1. La solution marchande au manque d’organes
2.2. Le rejet de la solution marchande et la solution de Roth
3. Les critiques de la solution marchande
3.1. Motivation et effet d’éviction
3.2. Commerce de détresse et liberté du donneur
4. Donner corps à la répugnance
4.1. Conventions, marquage et incitation : du marchand et du non marchand
4.2. Don-contre-don et limite de la solution marchande
5. Conclusion

Here's more info on the author: Nicolas Brisset.

Matching markets--a short instructional video from the Core Project

Here's a short (4 minute) teaching video put together by the CORE Project ("Teaching Economics as if the last three decades had happened") from a much longer videotaped discussion on market design, matching markets, kidney exchange and repugnant transactions.




Here's a link to a CORE class that uses this video:

Introducing Unit 20: Innovation, information and the networked economy

Volatility in the political marketplace-Brexit

Will the United Kingdom of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland break up, following the 52% to 48% vote for the UK to leave the European Union? (Scotland and Northern Ireland voted to remain in the EU...).

Ken Rogoff has a characteristically well-written article (Britain’s Democratic Failure) arguing that such momentous decisions should be taken by super-majorities, not by a simple majority.

"The real lunacy of the United Kingdom’s vote to leave the European Union was not that British leaders dared to ask their populace to weigh the benefits of membership against the immigration pressures it presents. Rather, it was the absurdly low bar for exit, requiring only a simple majority. Given voter turnout of 70%, this meant that the leave campaign won with only 36% of eligible voters backing it.
This isn’t democracy; it is Russian roulette for republics. A decision of enormous consequence – far greater even than amending a country’s constitution (of course, the United Kingdom lacks a written one) – has been made without any appropriate checks and balances."

Scotland, of course, has voted in the past to remain part of the UK--might it vote differently in the future? By a similarly narrow margin?  

Airbnb and racial discrimination by hosts

The NY Times follows the story: Airbnb Vows to Fight Racism, but Its Users Can’t Sue to Prompt Fairness

"SAN FRANCISCO — Brian Chesky, chief executive of Airbnb, made a vow this month to root out bigotry from his business.

His online room-sharing company has recently been grappling with claims of discrimination, with several Airbnb users sharing stories on social media about how they were supposedly denied a booking because of their race. The issue came into the open in December, when a working paper by Harvard University researchers found it was harder for guests with African-American-sounding names to rent rooms through the site.

“This is a huge issue for us,” Mr. Chesky said at a company event in San Francisco in early June. “We will be revisiting the design of our site from end to end to see how we can create a more inclusive platform.”

But even as Mr. Chesky promised to stamp out racism from Airbnb, the company’s class-action litigation policy makes it tough — if not impossible — for customers to push the start-up to make any substantive changes on the issue. Airbnb requires that people agree to waive their right to sue, or to join in any class-action lawsuit or class-action arbitration, to use the service.

That clause, known as a class-action waiver, crops up whenever someone logs into Airbnb’s site. In March, the company updated its terms of service for new users, partly tohighlight that clause. Last month, Airbnb users were unable to log in and use their accounts until they agreed to the updated terms, including the class-action waiver language.

...

"For Airbnb, an effective response to discrimination claims is needed to blunt any fallout on its business. The company, valued at about $25 billion, has hosts in more than 34,000 cities and 191 countries and is positioning itself as an alternative to hotels. Airbnb recently raised $1 billion in debt to help finance its growth, according to a person familiar with the deal who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the transaction is not public. The credit facility wasreported earlier by Bloomberg.

Airbnb’s expansion depends partly on whether people of different nationalities and ethnicities feel welcomed to the platform in the same nondiscriminatory way that they are welcomed at international hotel chains. Two rival room-sharing services, Innclusive and Noirbnb, are now marketing themselves as services that provide inclusive and safe short-term rentals for people of any race or ethnicity.

Ms. Murphy, the Airbnb adviser, said the company recognized that eliminating discrimination was in its best interests. She said Airbnb’s relative youth — the company was founded in 2008 — meant it could deal with the issue in a more agile way than companies with entrenched cultures that may have needed the pressure of litigation to do the right thing.

“Airbnb is part of a new area of commerce, and the conditions for transactions are still developing,” she said. “That’s why it’s important to get it right.”

Repugnance watch: Nude photos as collateral for loans

The Guardian has the story: China's 'naked loans' force female students to bare all in return for more cash

"Shady internet lenders in China are reportedly coercing female college students to provide nude pictures of themselves as collateral – a loan-for-porn scheme that has prompted anger on the country’s internet.

Under the arrangement reported by state media this week, some college students have agreed to send photos of themselves naked, holding their identification cards, to potential lenders. In exchange, they became eligible for higher loan amounts – two to five times the normal sum, the state-run Beijing Youth Daily reported.

Lenders tell the students they will publish the photos online if the loans are not repaid on time, often at usurious interest rates.

According to state media, the loan scheme is taking place on JD Capital’s Jiedaibao website. Jiedaibao is a platform where individuals - often friends and acquaintances – can lend or borrow money, striking their own arrangements."

Repugnance watch: US ceases efforts to end global trade of polar bear parts

The Guardian has the story: US ceases efforts to end global trade of polar bear parts

"The US government has quietly dropped its campaign for an international ban in the trade of polar bear parts, which would have given the practice the same outlaw status as the elephant ivory market.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service has spent several years attempting to ban the overseas trade of polar bear skins, teeth, paws and other parts from Canada, which permits the hunting of the Arctic predators.

However, the federal agency has said it won’t pursue the matter further at an international summit of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites), in September. Instead, the US will focus on the threat posed to polar bears from climate change.

...

"The US’s bid to ban the polar bear trade has garnered support from the UK, Germany and Russia but has been opposed by Canada, which insists that hunting is sustainable and an important cultural practice of the native Inuit people. Hunting can also generate income for communities, with tourists paying up to $50,000 for the chance to shoot a polar bear."

A skeptical view of the Iranian market for kidneys, from Shiraz

Here's an article (gated) from a recent issue of Transplantation, describing how the transplant program in Shiraz is discouraging patients from the (legal) market there for buying kidneys from living unrelated donors (they impose a six month waiting time for such transplants). Most patients who have transplants at Shiraz are receiving deceased donor kidneys.

Transplantation:

June 2016 - Volume 100 - Issue 6 - p 1165–1169

doi: 10.1097/TP.0000000000001164

In View: Around the World

Paid Living Donation and Growth of Deceased Donor Programs

Ghahramani, Nasrollah MD

Abstract

Abstract: Limited organ availability in all countries has stimulated discussion about incentives to increase donation. Since 1988, Iran has operated the only government-sponsored paid living donor (LD) kidney transplant program. This article reviews aspects of the Living Unrelated Donor program and development of deceased donation in Iran. Available evidence indicates that in the partially regulated Iranian Model, the direct negotiation between donors and recipients fosters direct monetary relationship with no safeguards against mutual exploitation. Brokers, the black market and transplant tourism exist, and the waiting list has not been eliminated. Through comparison between the large deceased donor program in Shiraz and other centers in Iran, this article explores the association between paid donation and the development of a deceased donor program. Shiraz progressively eliminated paid donor transplants such that by 2011, 85% of kidney transplants in Shiraz compared with 27% across the rest of Iran's other centers were from deceased donors. Among 26 centers, Shiraz undertakes the largest number of deceased donor kidney transplants, most liver transplants, and all pancreas transplants. In conclusion, although many patients with end stage renal disease have received transplants through the paid living donation, the Iranian Model now has serious flaws and is potentially inhibiting substantial growth in deceased donor organ transplants in Iran.