Sunday, December 27, 2020

Global chocolate production and consumption

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This map  of cocoa production and consumption from the  Cocoa Barometer 2020  would make it easy to guess which way is North (were it not fo...
Saturday, December 26, 2020

Global markets in antiquity: olive oil and wine

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Markets are ancient human artifacts, and a recent paper in the EJ suggests that markets of global scale, based on comparative advantage and ...
Friday, December 25, 2020

A chain of 900 strangers...

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 When I talk about chains on this blog, I'm almost always talking about kidney exchange .  But there are other kinds of gift giving chai...
Thursday, December 24, 2020

Fast Covid vaccine development --science and funding

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  Here's a news article from Nature: The lightning-fast quest for COVID vaccines — and what it means for other diseases. The speedy appr...
Wednesday, December 23, 2020

Celebrating Ramanujan's birthday (with some math quotes)

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 Yesterday,  22 December, is celebrated every year as  National Mathematics Day in India, in honor of the 1887 birthday of the great Indian ...
Tuesday, December 22, 2020

The market for music rights--all Bob Dylan's songs

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  The NY Times has the story: Bob Dylan Sells His Songwriting Catalog in Blockbuster Deal--Universal Music purchased his entire songwriting ...
Monday, December 21, 2020

Edward (Eddie) Lazear (1948-2020)

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  My Stanford colleague Eddie Lazear passed away last month, from pancreatic cancer. ( When he moved from the University of Chicago to Stanf...
Sunday, December 20, 2020

Jefferson University celebrates Dr. Ignazio Marino

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Ignazio Marino , transplant surgeon (and former Mayor of Rome) has received the Achievement Award in Medicine from Thomas Jefferson Univers...
Saturday, December 19, 2020

Should college admissions be organized like the medical residency match?

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 The Chronicle of Higher Ed asks why not organize college admissions the way we organize the match for residency positions in medicine. (It ...
Friday, December 18, 2020

Allocating vaccines while they're still scarce--I'm interviewed by Stacy Vanek Smith on the Indicator from Planet Money

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  Here's a podcast in which I'm interviewed by Stacey Vanek Smith about how vaccines might be allocated while still scarce: Who Gets...
Thursday, December 17, 2020

Eduardo Laguna Müggenburg explores the repugnance of price gouging, and defends his dissertation

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  Eduardo Laguna successfully defended his Ph.D. dissertation last month. One of the papers he presented  (with Justin Holz and  Rafael Ji...
Wednesday, December 16, 2020

Some more Nobel links for Wilson and Milgrom

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 This was a Nobel year unlike any in recent memory, since the Covid pandemic prevented the festivities from being held in Stockholm as they ...
Tuesday, December 15, 2020

Another mail order catalog throws in the towel (Sic transit gloria mundi .)

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  The mail order catalogs of Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward were as innovative in the late 1800's as Amazon is today, bringing reta...
Monday, December 14, 2020

Designing centralized marketplaces that work gracefully with pre-existing decentralized ones, in Management Science, by Benjamin Roth and Ran Shorrer

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 In Management Science (online ahead of print): Making Marketplaces Safe: Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design ...
Sunday, December 13, 2020

Milgrom's "Discovering Prices" reviewed in the JEL by Kominers and Teytelboym

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 In the December Journal of Economic Literature: The Parable of the Auctioneer: Complexity in Paul R. Milgrom's Discovering Prices by Sc...
Saturday, December 12, 2020

The Einstein Foundation Award for Promoting Quality in Research (apply or nominate now...)

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 Here's the announcement of a new award, for promoting research integrity, reproducibility, and or other elements of research quality. T...
Friday, December 11, 2020

Concerns about remote interviewing for the surgery match

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 I don't doubt that every year people are nervous about the residency Match, and worries this year are related to the special situation ...
Thursday, December 10, 2020

Susan Athey wins the CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications

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 The seminar is tomorrow, it appears that registration is required. CME Group-MSRI Prize in Innovative Quantitative Applications:  Virtual S...

Advance Market Commitments for Vaccines

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 David Warsh, in his weekly  Economic Principals (not a mis-spelling, it's often about economists, and newspapers) writes about Advance...
Wednesday, December 9, 2020

Top trading cycles (and recollections of New Orleans), in AER:Insights, by Abdulkadiroğlu, Che, Pathak, Roth and Tercieux

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A decade ago I was part of the team that designed the new school choice system for the New Orleans Recovery School District.  On the Distric...