American data privacy, post Roe

 As we plunge ahead into the post-Roe era, American laws about abortion are going to be very divided. Some states will seek to criminalize not only surgical abortions, but the use of pharmaceuticals as well (and, if Justice Thomas gets his wish, perhaps contraceptives of all sorts, as well as day-after pills).*

Some states may seek to prosecute their residents who seek treatment out of state, or who order mail order pharmaceuticals. Doing so will leave a data trail, in searches on the web, emails, and geo-location data.  How private will those data be?

This is going to be an issue for tech companies, prosecutors, and legislators at both state and federal levels.  E.g. can prosecutors access and use your geo-location data to determine if you visited a clinic?  Your web searches to see if you looked for one? Your emails or pharmacy data to see if you ordered drugs?  Your medical data of other sorts?

*Here is the Supreme Court Opinion, written by Justice Alito followed by the other opinions. Justice Thomas' concurring opinion begins on p. 117 of the pdf, after Appendix A to the majority opinion which ends on numbered page 108 (but the numbering restarts at 1 for Justice Thomas' opinion).  DOBBS, STATE HEALTH OFFICER OF THE MISSISSIPPI DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH, ET AL. v. JACKSON WOMEN’S HEALTH ORGANIZATION ET AL. 

Here are some thoughts on various aspects of the emerging situation.

From STAT:

HIPAA won’t protect you if prosecutors want your reproductive health records  by By Eric Boodman , Tara Bannow , Bob Herman  and Casey Ross

"With Roe v. Wade now overturned, patients are wondering whether federal laws will shield their reproductive health data from state law enforcement, or legal action more broadly. The answer, currently, is no.

"If there’s a warrant, court order, or subpoena for the release of those medical records, then a clinic is required to hand them over. 

...

"As far as health records go, the most salient law is HIPAA — the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act. It’s possible that federal officials could try to tweak it, so records of reproductive care or abortion receive extra protection, but legal experts say that’s unlikely to stand up in the courts in a time when many judges tend to be unfriendly to executive action.

...

"In states that ban abortion, simply the suspicion that a patient had an abortion would be enough to allow law enforcement to poke around in their medical records under the guise of identifying or locating a suspect, said Isabelle Bibet-Kalinyak, a member of Brach Eichler’s health care law practice. “They would still need to have probable cause,” she said."

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Health tech companies are scrambling to close data privacy gaps after abortion ruling By Katie Palmer  and Casey Ross July 2

"STAT reached out to two dozen companies that interact with user data about menstrual cycles, fertility, pregnancy, and abortion, asking about their current data practices and plans to adapt. The picture that emerged is one of companies scrambling to transform — building out legal teams, racing to design new privacy-protecting products, and aiming to communicate more clearly about how they handle data and provide care in the face of swirling distrust of digital health tools.

"Period-tracking apps have been the target of some of the loudest calls for privacy protections, and the most visible corporate response. At least two period-tracking apps are now developing anonymous versions: Natural Cycles, whose product is cleared by the Food and Drug Administration as a form of birth control, said it’s had calls to trade insights with Flo, which is also building an anonymous version of its app."

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From the Guardian:

Tech firms under pressure to safeguard user data as abortion prosecutions loom. Private information collected and retained by companies could be weaponized to prosecute abortion seekers and providers by Kari Paul

"Such data has already been used to prosecute people for miscarriages and pregnancy termination in states with strict abortion laws, including one case in which a woman’s online search for abortion pills was brought against her in court. 

...

"Smaller companies are also being targeted with questions over their data practices, as frantic calls to delete period tracking apps went viral following the supreme court decision. Some of those companies, unlike the tech giants, have taken public stands.

“At this fraught moment, we hear the anger and the anxiety coming from our US community,” period tracking app Clue said in a statement. “We remain committed to protecting your reproductive health data.”

"Digital rights advocacy group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has advised companies in the tech world to pre-emptively prepare for a future in which they are served with subpoenas and warrants seeking user data to prosecute abortion seekers and providers.

"It recommends companies allow pseudonymous or anonymous access, stop behavioral tracking, and retain as little data as possible. It also advocated for end-to-end encryption by default and refrain from collecting any location information."

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From the NYT:

When Brazil Banned Abortion Pills, Women Turned to Drug Traffickers. With Roe v. Wade overturned, states banning abortion are looking to prevent the distribution of abortion medication. Brazil shows the possible consequences.  By Stephanie Nolen

"The trajectory of access to abortion pills in Brazil may offer insight into how medication abortion can become out of reach and what can happen when it does.

"While surgical abortion was the original target of Brazil’s abortion ban, the proscription expanded after medication abortion became more common, leading to the situation today where drug traffickers control most access to the pills. Women who procure them have no guarantee of the safety or authenticity of what they are taking, and if they have complications, they fear seeking help.

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From the Guardian

Google will delete location history data for abortion clinic visits. The company said that sensitive places including fertility centers, clinics and addiction treatment facilities will be erased

"Alphabet will delete location data showing when users visit an abortion clinic, the online search company said on Friday, after concern that a digital trail could inform law enforcement if an individual terminates a pregnancy illegally.

...

"Effective in the coming weeks, for those who do use location history, entries showing sensitive places including fertility centers, abortion clinics and addiction treatment facilities will be deleted soon after a visit."

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And while we await further developments here, the Times has an article about growing surveillance in China:

‘An Invisible Cage’: How China Is Policing the Future By Paul Mozur, Muyi Xiao and John Liu, June 25, 2022

It begins "The more than 1.4 billion people living in China are constantly watched. They are recorded by police cameras that are everywhere, on street corners and subway ceilings, in hotel lobbies and apartment buildings. Their phones are tracked, their purchases are monitored, and their online chats are censored..."

Pregnancy in Poland, a database and anti-abortion laws

 The Lancet recently reported on new pregnancy data being collected in Poland, and controversy on whether and how it might be used in enforcing Poland's very stringent anti-abortion laws.

Poland to introduce controversial pregnancy register, by Ed Holt, Lancet,  VOLUME 399, ISSUE 10343, P2256, JUNE 18, 2022  DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(22)01097-2

"A new legal provision in Poland requiring doctors to collect records on all pregnancies has been condemned by critics who fear it could create a pregnancy register to monitor whether women give birth, or track those who go abroad for abortions.

Poland has some of Europe's strictest abortion laws, with terminations allowed in only two instances—if the woman's health or life is at risk and if the pregnancy is the result of either rape or incest. Until last year, abortions had also been allowed when the fetus had congenital defects. Most legal terminations in Poland were carried out under this exemption. But this provision was removed by a constitutional court ruling following a challenge by members of the ruling right-wing Law and Justice party, which some rights activists accuse of systematic suppression of women's rights.

Rights groups and opposition Members of Parliament (MPs) say that, in light of the tightened abortion legislation, they worry that the collected pregnancy data could be used by police and prosecutors in an unprecedented state surveillance campaign against women. “A pregnancy register in a country with an almost complete ban on abortion is terrifying”, Agnieszka Dziemianowicz-BĄk, an MP for the New Left party, said. 

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Here's a recent NY Times story on the implementation of Polish anti-abortion law:

Poland Shows the Risks for Women When Abortion Is Banned. Poland’s abortion ban has had many unintended consequences. One is that doctors are sometimes afraid to remove fetuses or administer cancer treatment to save women’s lives.  By Katrin Bennhold and Monika Pronczuk, Updated June 16, 2022

"Today, Poland and Malta, both staunchly Catholic, are the only European Union countries where abortions are effectively outlawed.

"The consequences in Poland have been far-reaching: Abortion-rights activists have been threatened with prison for handing out abortion pills. The number of Polish women traveling abroad to get abortions, already in the thousands, has swelled further. A black market of abortion pills — some fake and many overpriced — is thriving.

"Technically, the law still allows abortions if there is a serious risk to a woman’s health and life. But critics say it fails to provide necessary clarity, paralyzing doctors."

SCOTUS on dialysis and DaVita

 The Supreme Court delivered a number of decisions recently, and the news coverage has rightly focused on the decisions that will increase guns and decrease abortions.  

But another decision has implications for how dialysis is financed for patients with kidney failure. It's going to take some time for all the adjustments that will now start to be made to determine what this means for the financing of kidney care.

Briefly, all kidney failure patients are eligible for Medicare coverage for dialysis, but private insurers covered the first 30 months (and pay much more than Medicare rates).  The case concerns a health insurance program that sought not to pay those rates, and in the case of MARIETTA MEMORIAL HOSPITAL EMPLOYEE HEALTH BENEFIT PLAN ET AL. v. DAVITA INC. ET AL.  the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the health plan.

Here's the story from Reuters:

U.S. Supreme Court rules against DaVita over dialysis coverage  By Nate Raymon

"June 21 (Reuters) - The U.S. Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected dialysis provider DaVita Inc's (DVA.N) claims that an Ohio hospital's employee health plan discriminates against patients with end-stage kidney disease by reimbursing them at low rates in hopes they would switch to Medicare.

"In a 7-2 decision authored by conservative Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the court ruled that Marietta Memorial Hospital's employee health plan did not violate federal law by limiting benefits for outpatient dialysis because it did so without regard to whether patients had end-stage renal disease. A lower court had ruled in favor of Denver-based DaVita.Following the ruling, shares of DaVita, one of the nation's two largest dialysis providers, closed 15% lower. Shares of German rival Fresenius Medical Care (FMEG.DE) dropped 9%."

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Here's a blog from the law firm that won the case, Vorys, Sater, Seymour and Pease LLP :

6/21/22 Vorys Wins 7-2 at U.S. Supreme Court in Marietta Memorial Hospital Employee Health Benefit Plan v. DaVita Inc 

"On June 21, 2022, the U.S. Supreme Court released its decision in Marietta Memorial Hospital Employee Health Benefit Plan v. DaVita Inc. siding with petitioners (our side) and our client Marietta Memorial Hospital, its employee group health plan and health plan third-party administrator, for which Vorys argued the case.  The Court found that the group health plan does not impermissibly “‘differentiate in the benefits it provides’ to individuals with end-stage renal disease or ‘take into account’ whether an individual is entitled to or eligible for Medicare.”  The Supreme Court decision overturned a split decision by the U. S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit.

...

"The case began on December 19, 2018, when DaVita, a commercial dialysis provider, sued Marietta Memorial Hospital, a small community hospital located in Marietta, Ohio; the Hospital’s medical plan, the Marietta Memorial Hospital Employee Health Benefit Plan; and the Hospital’s third-party administrator, Medical Benefits Mutual Life Insurance Company, in the United States District Court for the Southern District of Ohio.  DaVita, a large, for-profit dialysis provider, alleged violations of the Medicare Secondary Payer Act (MSPA) and Employee Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA).  The Defendants, represented by Vorys, filed a motion to dismiss, which the District Court granted. 

"DaVita appealed to the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, which disagreed with the District Court decision.  Marietta appealed the district court decision to the U.S. Supreme Court. 

"On November 5, 2021, the U.S. Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari, agreeing to hear the case.   In recognition of the importance of the case, the office of the Solicitor General of the United States filed an amicus brief, joined in the oral argument and urged the U.S. Supreme Court to rule in favor of the Marietta Memorial Hospital, its group health plan and the third-party administrator.  Oral arguments took place on March 1, 2022."

Scott Cunningham's Mixtape Podcast Interview with Alvin Roth

 Here's Scott Cunningham's Mixtape Podcast Interview with Alvin Roth... "We discuss Gale and Shapley, Roth and Sotomayor, game theory and more"

You can listen to our conversation at the link above.  He drew me out about some things I hadn't thought of in a while, such as my varied relationships with Gale, Shapley and Bob Wilson, and how my ideas about matching markets developed over the course of my career (which started in Operations Research and then morphed into Economics...)

He also reveals the manner in which he was the perfect reader of my 1990 book Two-Sided Matching with Marilda Sotomayor. 

His site is multi-media, if you scroll down you'll find a video (the one below in on YouTube), and if you keep scrolling down you'll find an essay he wrote called "Paying it Forward..." which recounts more about what our book meant to him and some of our subsequent interactions over the years. And below that is his Transcript of [our] podcast interview, for those who prefer to read rather than listen or watch.

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I've had occasion to blog about Scott:

Friday, February 16, 2018

Sex work, Craigslist, and the law; podcast with Scott Cunningham

Here's a link to an interview with Scott Cunningham, whose work on sex work I've blogged about before. There's a surprising amount of discussion about causal inference and differences in differences. (I always suspected that econometrics was sexy, but this is the first time I’ve heard a podcast about that.)

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The accidental experiment with legal prostitution in Rhode Island

A scholarly paper and an easy to read-or-listen-to NPR report recount the period in which indoor prostitution was legal in Rhode Island.

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

The Craigslist market for erotic/adult services

Same sex marriage in Colorado: then and now

In 1975, as the county clerk of Boulder County, Cela Rorex issued several marriage licenses to same sex couples, before the State Attorney General ruled against them.  When she died earlier this month, she was remembered by the current Colorado governor, and his husband.

Clela Rorex, Clerk Who Broke a Gay-Marriage Barrier, Dies at 78. In 1975 she issued a gay couple a license to marry in Colorado, becoming a hero to some and an object of hate for others.  By Neil Genzlinger

"Colorado’s governor, Jared Polis, who is gay, was among those paying tribute to Ms. Rorex.

“So many families, including First Gentleman Marlon Reis and I, are grateful for the visionary leadership of Clela Rorex,” he wrote on Facebook, calling her a woman “ahead of her time.”

Medical aid in dying in Italy--a first

 The NYT has the story:

Man Paralyzed 12 Years Ago Becomes Italy’s First Assisted Suicide  By Elisabetta Povoledo

"Paralyzed 12 years ago in a traffic accident, “Mario” faced a series of legal, bureaucratic and financial hurdles in his pursuit of death

"On Thursday, “Mario,” identified for the first time by his real name, Federico Carboni, ended his life, becoming Italy’s first legal assisted suicide, in his home in the central Italian port town of Senigallia.

"Mr. Carboni, an unmarried truck driver, was surrounded by his family, friends, and people who had helped him to achieve his goal, including officials with the Luca Coscioni Association, a right-to-die advocacy group that assisted Mr. Carboni during the past 18 months and announced his death.

...

"An Italian court ruling has declared assisted suicide permissible in Italy under certain limited circumstances, but there is no legislation enshrining the practice, which for Mr. Carboni, led to delays.

...

"In a landmark ruling in 2019, Italy’s Constitutional Court said that assisted suicide could not be considered a crime as long as certain conditions were met.

...

"The Constitutional Court ruled that in some cases assisting someone could not be considered a crime as long as the person requesting aid met certain conditions: they had to have full mental capacity and suffer from an incurable disease that caused severe and intolerable physical or psychological distress. They also had to be kept alive by life-sustaining treatments.

...

"The Roman Catholic Church is firmly opposed to assisted suicide and euthanasia, which it has called “intrinsically evil” acts “in every situation or circumstance.” 

In defense of online anonymity, by Mike Luca in the WSJ

Mike Luca writes about anonymity as a feature of market design, in the WSJ:

In Defense of Online Anonymity. Lack of transparency on the internet may help fuel toxic dialogue, but it also encourages honest feedback and protects people against discrimination  By Michael Luca

"Anonymity on the internet has gotten a bad rap lately, and for good reason. The shield of anonymity has contributed to a toxic online ecosystem that is too often marred by cyberbullying, misinformation and other social ills. Removing anonymity has the potential to foster accountability and trust. 

...

"But this overlooks an important fact: The internet needs some anonymity.  ...The relatively anonymous nature of online transactions removed markers of race, gender and other factors that sometimes were used to discriminate against customers in conventional transactions.

...

"As an economist studying the design of markets and platforms, I concentrate on whether companies are creating ecosystems that are both efficient and inclusive. My collaborators Ben Edelman, Dan Svirsky and I set out to understand the implications of Airbnb’s design choices. In 2015 we conducted an audit study, building on an approach used to analyze labor markets and offline rental markets. We sent identical booking requests to thousands of hosts, varying only the user’s name—using some names that birth records show to be more common among Black Americans and other names that are more common among white Americans. We found that the Black “guests” were roughly 16% less likely to be accepted, and the discrimination was similar whether hosts had only a single listing or multiple ones.

"In response to our research, Airbnb commissioned a task force and then gradually reintroduced anonymity at various steps in the process. Since 2018, hosts have been required to make a decision about whether to accept or reject a guest before seeing their picture. In Oregon, the site has been spurred to go further by a lawsuit from Airbnb customers there who alleged discrimination on the basis of their names. Since January, the names of Oregon-based guests are no longer disclosed before owners accept their bookings.

...

"Of course, anonymity needs to be implemented thoughtfully and comes with its own risks; the same anonymity that can help to protect honest feedback might protect illegitimate feedback as well. My research with Giorgos Zervas, published in the journal Management Science in 2016, found evidence of businesses extensively engaging in fake reviews, enabled in part by the shield of anonymity. Work by economists Dina Mayzlin, Yaniv Dover and Judy Chevalier, published in the American Economic Review in 2014, found that fake reviews are more common when there is less verification of reviews. Anonymity can also make us feel more disconnected even while exchanging views."

A Forum on Kidneys for Sale in Iran, in Transplant International

 Just published in Transplant International (which is the journal of the European Society for Organ Transplantation), is a paper describing the Iranian market for kidneys in the city of Mashad, and three commentaries on it.  

 Here's the original paper:

Kidneys for Sale: Empirical Evidence From Iran  by Tannaz Moeindarbari and Mehdi Feizi

And here are three short commentaries.

Kidneys for Sale? A Commentary on Moeindarbari’s and Feizi’s Study on the Iranian Model  by Frederike Ambagtsheer1, Sean Columb, Meteb M. AlBugami, and Ninoslav Ivanovski

Kidneys for Sale: Are We There Yet? (Commentary on Kidneys for Sale: Empirical Evidence From Iran) by Kyle R. Jackson, Christine E. Haugen, and Dorry L. Segev

Criminal, Legal, and Ethical Kidney Donation and Transplantation: A Conceptual Framework to Enable Innovation  by Alvin E. Roth, Ignazio R. Marino, Kimberly D. Krawiec and Michael A. Rees

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The commentary by Roth, Marino, Krawiec and Rees contrasts the legal Iranian market with the dangerous black markets that operate elsewhere, outside of regular medical institutions.

Here's a recent long article that pulls together much of the discussion on compensation for donors and on sale of kidneys and transplant black markets:

Organ Trafficking, Can the illicit trade be stopped? By Sarah Glazer,  CQ Researcher, June 24, 2022 – Volume 32, Issue 22

HT: Frank McCormick

Dynamic Matching and Queueing Workshop July 5-6, 2022 Paris School of Economics

Dynamic Matching and Queueing Workshop July 5-6, 2022 Paris School of Economics

In Person & Zoom Event    Registration

July 5th:

12:00 PM (UTC+2): Lunch (Room R2-20)

2:00 PM (UTC+2): “Matching in Dynamic Environments” - Amin Saberi (Stanford)

3:00 PM (UTC+2): “Near-Optimal Policies for Dynamic Matching” - Itai Ashlagi (Stanford), Itai Gurvich (Northwestern) and Suleyman Kerimov (Stanford)

4:00 PM (UTC+2): Coffee Break

4:30 PM (UTC+2): “A Dynamic Estimation Approach for Centralized Matching Markets: Understanding Segregation in Day Care” - Olivier De Groot (TSE) and Minyoung Rho (UAB)

5:30 PM (UTC+2): “Choices and Outcomes in Assignment Mechanisms: The Allocation of Deceased Donor Kidneys” - Nikhil Agarwal (MIT), Charles Hogdson (Yale) and Paulo Somaini (Stanford)

July 6th:

2:00 PM (UTC+2): “You Can Lead a Horse to Water: Spatial Learning and Path Dependence in Consumer Search” - Charles Hodgson (Yale) and Greg Lewis (Amazon)

3:00 PM (UTC+2): “Online Matching in Sparse Random Graphs: Non-Asymptotic Performances of Greedy Algorithm” - Nathan Noiry (Télécom Paris), Flore Sentenac (CREST) and Vianney Perchet (CREST)

4:00 PM (UTC+2): Coffee Break

4:30 PM (UTC+2): “Constrained Majorization: Applications in Mechanism Design” - Afshin Nikzad (University of Southern California) / Online

5:30 PM (UTC+2): “Price Discovery in Waiting Lists: A Connection to Stochastic Gradient Descent ” - Itai Ashlagi (Stanford), Jacob Leshno (Chicago Booth), Pengyu Qian (Purdue University), and Amin Saberi (Stanford) / Online

6:30 PM (UTC+2): Social gathering

Organizers: Yeon-Koo Che (Columbia), Julien Combe (CREST, Polytechnique), Victor Hiller (Panthéon-Assas, LEMMA) and Olivier Tercieux (PSE)   

Paris School of Economics, 48 boulevard Jourdan, 75014 PARIS

San Francisco's Lowell High School admissions will return to merit-based system

 The SF Chronicle has the latest twist in this involved story over San Francisco's elite Lowell High School.

Lowell High School admissions will return to merit-based system after S.F. school board vote  by Jill Tucker

"After nearly two years of intense and bitter debate, test scores and grades will once again determine which San Francisco students are admitted to Lowell High School after the city’s school board decided to return to the merit-based admission system Wednesday.

"In a 4-3 vote, the school board decided to restore the previous merit process after two years of using a lottery-based system. The vote will now apply to freshman entering in the fall of 2023 as well as future classes, unless the board takes further action in the future to change the admission process.

...

"The board’s decision was the latest inflection point in the nearly two-year saga featuring feuding public officials, a lawsuit and accusations of racism over which students are eligible to attend Lowell, long considered one of the highest-performing public high schools in the country.

"The board first approved a switch to a lottery system in October 2020, citing a lack of academic data given the switch to distance learning earlier that year.

"A board majority then made that decision permanent four months later, citing a lack of diversity and racism at the elite academic schools. But the hurried vote sparked a lawsuit and then a judge’s ruling that the district violated laws related to the Brown Act, which regulate public meetings.

"The board then had to backpedal, reversing the decision before extending the lottery process for another year."

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Earlier:

Sunday, April 17, 2022

Lowell High School principal resigns in San Francisco, in latest setback for elite high school

New York City school choice: increased use of lotteries in the news

The recent emphasis on lotteries in NYC school choice is discussed in the NY Times:

N.Y.C. Tried to Fix High School Admissions. Some Parents Are Furious. In an attempt to democratize schools, the city is focusing less on grades, attendance and test scores. Instead, it relies heavily on a lottery.  By Ginia Bellafante

"Some back story: Apart from what are known as the specialized high schools — hypercompetitive institutions like Stuyvesant and Bronx Science that, controversially, admit students on the basis of a single standardized test — the city gives eighth graders the option of applying to 160 screened high schools and programs that have their own criteria.

"Whether a student qualifies for one of these selective schools has typically depended on an opaque combination of grades, test scores (different from the ones used for the specialized high schools), essays, art portfolios and other work. The next step has students rank their preferences in descending order on a scale of one to 12, after which they are thrown into a lottery. A prizewinning algorithm developed to match medical students to residency programs then determines where a student is placed.

"Among high-achieving families in Manhattan, brownstone Brooklyn and many parts of Queens, the goal is not a spot in just any of the 160 schools but admission to eight or nine that are especially competitive, prestigious and largely dominated by white and Asian families. What has caused such ire in the current admissions cycle is that many parents discovered that their children — students with grade-point averages in the high 90s, for instance — were admitted to none of their ranked choices. Instead they would be funneled to schools they knew little about.

...

"The state exams, usually a determining factor in high school placements, had been abandoned during the pandemic. So, too, were attendance records. Students with grades in the mid-80s were now bundled with those who had much higher averages, meaning that an eighth-grader with an academically stellar record but a poor lottery number could easily lose out to a merely very good student with a great lottery assignation."

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Previous related posts:

Monday, April 18, 2022

NYC plugs a school choice leak (of random numbers)

Friday, April 29, 2022

More on NYC school choice lotteries

School Choice in Chile

 Here's a recent report on the implementation of centralized school choice in Chile.

School Choice in Chile by José Correa, Natalie Epstein,  Rafael Epstein, Juan Escobar, Ignacio Rios, Nicol ́as Aramayo, Basti ́an Bahamondes, Carlos Bonet, Martin Castillo, Andres Cristi, Boris Epstein, and Felipe Subiabre, OPERATIONS RESEARCH Vol. 70, No. 2, March–April 2022, pp. 1066–1087

Abstract. "Centralized school admission mechanisms are an attractive way of improving social welfare and fairness in large educational systems. In this paper, we report the design and implementation of the newly established school choice system in Chile, where over 274,000 students applied to more than 6,400 schools. The Chilean system presents unprecedented design challenges that make it unique. First, it is a simultaneous nationwide system, making it one of the largest school choice problems worldwide. Second, the system is used for all school grade levels, from prekindergarten to 12th grade. One of our primary goals is to favor the assignment of siblings to the same school. By adapting the standard notions of stability, we show that a stable assignment may not exist. Hence, we propose a heuristic approach that elicits preferences and breaks ties between students in the same priority group at the family level. In terms of implementation, we adapt the deferred acceptance algorithm as in other systems around the world."

"From a practical standpoint, a key lesson is that maintaining continuous communication and collaboration with policymakers is essential, as many practical issues arise and must be incorporated into the design. In addition, decomposing the implementation into a given number of steps allowed us to gain experience, solve unexpected problems, and continuously improve the system. "

Russian Journalist’s Nobel Medal Sells for $103.5 Million, with proceeds to UNICEF for Ukrainian refugees.

 The NYT has the story: it exemplifies quite a number of things (including jump bidding in a reserve price charity auction...)

Russian Journalist’s Nobel Medal Sells for $103.5 Million. Dmitri A. Muratov, the editor of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, will donate proceeds to UNICEF to help Ukrainian child refugees.  By Kalia Richardson

"The Nobel Peace Prize put up for auction by the Russian journalist Dmitri A. Muratov to help Ukrainian refugees sold Monday night for $103.5 million to an anonymous buyer, obliterating the record for a Nobel medal.

"The proceeds from the auction will go to UNICEF to aid Ukrainian children and their families displaced by Russia’s invasion of their country.

"Mr. Muratov is the editor in chief of the independent newspaper Novaya Gazeta, which suspended publication in March in response to the Kremlin’s increasingly draconian press laws. In an interview with The New York Times last month, he said he was inspired to auction the award he won last year by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr, who sold his medal to help civilian relief in Finland following the Soviet invasion of that country in 1939.

...

"The previous record for auctioning off a Nobel medal came in 2014, when the prize belonging to James Watson, who shared in the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA, sold for $4.1 million ($4.76 million, including the commission that goes to the auction house).

"Heritage Auctions, which handled the sale of Mr. Muratov’s medal, has sold five former Nobel Prizes, including the one awarded to Watson’s co-discoverer, Francis Crick. That medal sold for $2.27 million in 2013.

"Josh Benesh, the chief strategy officer for Heritage Auctions, which will not take a commission on the sale, said he was flabbergasted by the final price. The bidding had been mainly cruising along in increments of $100,000 or $200,000 when it suddenly spiked from $16.6 million to $103.5 million. Gasps filled the room when a Heritage Auctions employee manning the phone relayed the figure"

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Here's the Heritage Auction site:

 The Dmitry Muratov Nobel Peace Prize Charity Auction to Benefit UNICEF's Child Refugee Fund #790 / Lot #1

Here are some posts about earlier sales of Nobel prize medals, some by economists:

Saturday, October 26, 2019

Auction results: Nobel medals of John Nash and Reinhard Selten

Saturday, September 3, 2016

Sotheby's to Offer John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences

Tuesday, October 11, 2016 John F. Nash, Jr.'s 1994 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences medal and memorabilia: Auction at Sotheby's

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Hayek at auction at Sothebys

Thursday, October 27, 2016 Re-auction of Kenneth Wilson's, 1982 Nobel medal for Physics

Thursday, February 26, 2015 Kuznets' Nobel Prize medal auction

Tuesday, March 5, 2013 Nobel medal and diploma of Francis Crick: available at auction

Tuesday, April 23, 2013 Crick's Nobel medal, and letter to his son describing DNA

Japanese court upholds ban on same sex marriage

 The Japan Times has the story:

In LGBTQ rights setback, Japan court says barring same-sex marriage not unconstitutional   June 20, 2022

"An Osaka court on Monday ruled that Japan's ban on same-sex marriage was not unconstitutional, dealing a blow to LGBTQ rights activists in the only Group of Seven nation that doesn't allow people of the same gender to marry.

"Three same-sex couples — two male, one female — had filed the case with the Osaka District Court, only the second case to be heard on the issue in Japan. In addition to rejecting their claim that being unable to marry was unconstitutional, the court dismissed their claim for ¥1 million per person in damages.

"The plaintiffs said they will appeal Monday's ruling to a higher court.

"The latest case revolved around the interpretation of marriage in Article 24 of the Constitution, which stipulates, "Marriage shall be based only on the mutual consent of both sexes and it shall be maintained through mutual cooperation with the equal rights of husband and wife as a basis."

Report of a SARS-CoV-2 human challenge trial. In Britain.

 The May issue of Nature Medicine reports what I am pretty sure was the first covid challenge trial. It was a small one, designed to track how the viral load develops after infection, to see how quickly tests detect infection, and to check procedures to pave the way for subsequent challenge trials.  Recall that a challenge trial, also called a human infection trial, is one in which the participants are deliberately exposed to the disease, and then reside in the hospital under close medical observation and care.

Killingley, B., Mann, A.J., Kalinova, M., Boyers, A., Goonawardane, N., Zhou, J., Lindsell, K., Hare, S.S., Brown, J., Frise, R. and Smith, E., 2022. Safety, tolerability and viral kinetics during SARS-CoV-2 human challenge in young adults. Nature Medicine, 28(5), May, 1031-1041.

"36 volunteers aged 18–29 years without evidence of previous infection or vaccination were inoculated with 10 TCID50 of a wild-type virus (SARS-CoV-2/human/GBR/484861/2020) intranasally in an open-label, non-randomized study (ClinicalTrials.gov identifier NCT04865237; funder, UK Vaccine Taskforce). After inoculation, participants were housed in a high-containment quarantine unit, with 24-hour close medical monitoring and full access to higher-level clinical care."

...

"Written informed consent was obtained from all volunteers before screening and study enrollment. Participants were given a donation of up to £4,565 to compensate for the time and inconvenience of taking part in the study (including at least a 17-day quarantine). This was calculated using the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) formula and the UK national living wage."

Two of the volunteers were found to have previous antibodies, and of the remaining 34, 53% (18 people) were infected with the disease after 5 days.  

Here's a schematic of how the trial proceeded, starting with almost 27,000 people who volunteered online to participate in the trial, from which the final 36 participants were chosen.

In contrast, the Phase 3 clinical trial of the Pfizer vaccine had almost 22,000 people in the vaccine group and in the placebo group, and reported after four months that only 8  participants in the vaccinated group had contracted the disease, compared to 162 in the placebo group.  So the vaccine was 95% effective (only 5% of the 170 infections were in the vaccinated group).

Big (Phase 3) vaccine trials aren't comparable to small preliminary trials, so my point here is just that in the challenge trial the rate of infection of unvaccinated volunteers in 5 days is more than fifty times that rate over four months in the traditional clinical trial, in which participants go about their lives and get infected by chance.  That's one of the reasons that challenge trials offer the possibility of fast and efficient testing.

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When the study was completed, in 2021, the NY Times published a column with the headline

Britain Infected Volunteers With the Coronavirus. Why Won’t the U.S.?,  By Kate Murphy Oct. 14, 2021

It ended with the following paragraph:

"As one participant in Britain’s Covid human challenge trial put it: “You know the phrase ‘one interesting fact about yourself’ that strikes terror into everyone? That’s now solved forever. I did something that made a difference.”

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Of course challenge trials are controversial in lots of ways. See some discussion here of the ethics of paying challenge participants. 

Monday, February 22, 2021

Ethical Payment in Human Infection Challenge Studies in the American Journal of Bioethics

Monday, March 1, 2021

Compensating challenge vaccine trial participants: further discussion in the American Journal of Bioethics

Thursday, October 29, 2020

Paying participants in challenge trials of Covid-19 vaccines, by Ambuehl, Ockenfels, and Roth

"we note that increasing hourly pay by a risk-compensation percentage as proposed in the target article provides compensation proportional to risk only if the risk increases proportionally with the number of hours worked. (Some risky tasks take little time; imagine challenge trials to test bulletproof vests.) "

Sunday, November 1, 2020

What do we know about the effects of payments to participants in challenge trials for vaccines, and other public spirited activities?

Unraveling of MBA recruitment

 The WSJ has the story:

Some M.B.A.s Are Getting Job Offers Before They Step Onto Campus. Early recruiting—before students and prospective employers see how they take to business school—reflects the fierce competition for fresh talent in consulting.   By Lindsay Ellis

"Just getting accepted into business school is proving a career boost for some students, who are fielding offers from consulting firms before their M.B.A. programs even begin.

"Major consulting firms including Bain & Co. and McKinsey & Co. say they are offering some 2023 internships to students who don’t start business school until this fall. Some offers come with the promise of a full-time job after graduation in 2024.

...

"McKinsey began early recruiting last year after finding some of its recruiting prospects had already committed elsewhere, said Kristin Altenburg, an associate director of U.S. campus recruiting. "

Conference on Mechanism and Institution Design July 11th to 15th, 2022 National U. of Singapore, online.

 Here's the announcement:

2022 Conference on Mechanism and Institution Design July 11th to 15th, 2022 

Department of Economics, National University of Singapore

Keynote Speakers: Fuhito Kojima, Dan Kovenock, Alessandro Pavan,  Rakesh Vohra

"The theme of the conference is on mechanism and institution design, interpreted in a general sense. The conference welcomes papers in all areas of economics, finance, information system, and politics, etc., which are related to mechanisms and institutions. The topics include but are not limited to game theory and foundations, asymmetric information, mechanism design, market design, information design, market and equilibrium, assignments, auctions, contests, bargaining, matching, college admission, election schemes, political institutions, sustainability, public good provision, nonlinear pricing, law and litigation, voting, sports, economic reform, comparative economics, regulation, taxation schemes, school choice, governance, corporate finance, cryptocurrency, financial institutions, capital structure, incentives in labor market, social choice, information and learning, decision theory, platform, network, etc. Papers can be theoretical, empirical, experimental, or historical. Young economists including senior PhD students are encouraged to submit their papers.

"Based on the feedback from the session organizers and individual submitters, we decide to hold the conference fully online this time."

ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’22), June 28th through July 15th

 Nicole Immorlica sends this announcement:

The Twenty-Third ACM Conference on Economics and Computation (EC’22) is taking place virtually and physically from June 28th through July 15th and includes many events of interest, including some targeted to students and early-career researchers. Virtual registration is priced to make the conference broadly accessible (just $10 or free with ACM SIGecom membership for students). Register and join us for:

 

·  Virtual Conference Tutorials and Contributed Poster Session: June 28-July 1, 2022: tutorials on market design, search, crypto, and learning, as well as a selection of contributed research posters.

·  Virtual Preview Day, July 6, 2022: posters and lightning talks of accepted conference papers.

·  Virtual Mentoring Workshop: July 7, 2022: how-to talks, job market panels, and several small group and social activities.

·  In-Person Opening Reception: 6:00-8:30 PM MT, July 11, 2022

·  Hybrid In-Person & Virtual Conference Technical Program: July 12-July 14, 2022

·  Hybrid In-Person & Virtual Conference Workshops: July 15, 2022: workshops on contract design, market design, and revenue management.

 

We look forward to seeing you at EC’22! 

 Please reach out to sigecom-ge...@googlegroups.com with questions.

Behavioral economics and market design are quite different -- Nick Chater and George Loewenstein reflect

 Experimental economics is one of the empirical foundations of what we now call behavioral economics.  Market design sometimes depends on experiments, and is sometimes behavioral.  And when behavioral economists talk about "choice architecture" there is a clear connection with market design, although market design focuses more directly on the 'rules of the game' than on the psychology of human behavior.  Despite the connections, the two fields always felt quite different.

Here's a new working paper by two eminent behavioral scientists, one trained as a psychologist and one as an economist, saying that behavioral economics is oriented to individual level behavior, which is quite different from system level design and behavior, and that it can be costly to mistake one for the other.

The i-Frame and the s-Frame: How Focusing on Individual-Level Solutions Has Led Behavioral Public Policy Astray  by Nick Chater and George Loewenstein

Abstract: An influential line of thinking in behavioral science, to which the two authors have long subscribed, is that many of society’s most pressing problems can be addressed cheaply and effectively at the level of the individual, without modifying the system in which individuals operate. Along with, we suspect, many colleagues in both academic and policy communities, we now believe this was a mistake. Results from such interventions have been disappointingly modest. But more importantly, they have guided many (though by no means all) behavioral scientists to frame policy problems in individual, not systemic, terms: to adopt what we call the “i-frame,” rather than the “s-frame.” The difference may be more consequential than those who have operated within the i-frame have understood, in deflecting attention and support away from s-frame policies. Indeed, highlighting the i-frame is a long-established objective of corporate opponents of concerted systemic action such as regulation and taxation. We illustrate our argument, in depth, with the examples of climate change, obesity, savings for retirement, and pollution from plastic waste, and more briefly for six other policy problems. We argue that behavioral and social scientists who focus on i-level change should consider the secondary effects that their research can have on s-level changes. In addition, more social and behavioral scientists should use their skills and insights to develop and implement value-creating system-level change.

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updated reference: Chater N, Loewenstein G. The i-frame and the s-frame: How focusing on individual-level solutions has led behavioral public policy astray. Behav Brain Sci. 2022 Sep 5:1-60. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X22002023. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 36059098.

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This is not the first time that G.L. has warned of this. Here's his 2010 NYT op-ed:

Economics Behaving Badly By GEORGE LOEWENSTEIN and PETER UBEL, July 14, 2010

"As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address. Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics."

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

Here's a recent Social Science Bites podcast  in which GL is interviewed by David Edmonds. It touches on some of Loewenstein's vast accomplishments (he pioneered many of the most important topics in behavioral economics before they were widely recognized as important...). It focuses on the "empathy gap" that we exhibit when we fail to appreciate how we'll behave when we're in a different affective state. He also answers questions about where his ideas come from, and eclectic research methods.

George Loewenstein on Hot and Cold Affect

An unusual Argentine presidential candidate supports a monetary market for kidneys

 The right-wing Argentine politician,  Javier Milei, who describes himself as an anarcho-capitalist (but who the Washington Post thinks has a chance of becoming Argentina's next president, supports the sale of kidneys for transplantation. (The Buenos Aires Times describes him in general as an "outspoken provocateur.") While the election is only in 2023, this is the first time I have heard of this issue entering any sort of political campaign.

Here's the story in La Nacion, with some excerpts in rough translation by Google:

Javier Milei se manifestó a favor de la venta de órganos tras apoyar la compra libre de armas y denunciar a periodistas: “Es un mercado más”  2 de junio de 2022

"Javier Milei spoke out in favor of the sale of organs after supporting the free purchase of weapons and denouncing journalists: “It is one more market”

"In a week full of controversy for having denounced journalists and supported the free purchase of arms , the national deputy Javier Milei expressed another controversial opinion this morning: he declared himself in favor of the sale of organs . “It is one more market,” said the libertarian, who has already declared himself a presidential candidate for 2023.

"Asked about his position regarding this practice prohibited by law in Argentina, Milei said: “It is one more market and you could think of it as a market. The problem is why everything has to be regulated by the State.

...

"Later, he said that "there is probably something" that leads someone to decide to market their organs and under the assumption that this reason could be, for example, poverty, Milei indicated: "Then we are going to put it in other terms: if not you end up buying that organ, you end up starving and you don't even have a life."

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HT: Julio Elias

MR on repugnance for compensating blood donors, carried to an absurd conclusion

 Alex Tabarrock had a great post at MR the other day, via Peter Jaworski, called A Bloody Waste.

Here's how it began:

A Bloody Waste

by  Alex Tabarrok June 7, 2022 at 7:25 am in 

• Economics
 
• Law
 
• Medicine

"Hemochromatosis is a disorder in which extra iron builds up in the body. A potential treatment is phlebotomy so patients with hemochromatosis want to donate blood and donate regularly. The American Red Cross, however, does not permit people with hemochromatosis to donate blood. Why not? The blood is safe and effective. The blood of these patients doesn’t have much, if any, extra iron (the iron builds up in the body not so much in the blood per se). The “problem” is that people with hemochromatosis benefit themselves by giving blood and for this reason their blood is considered tainted by the American Red Cross."

Price gouging laws are unpopular with economists

 Chicago Booth's Initiative on Global Markets recently polled their panel of academic economists in the U.S. on whether a new law banning price gouging would be useful. Almost no one thought that would be a good idea:

Who Benefits from Meritocracy? by Diana Moreira & Santiago Pérez

 Exams for U.S. civil service positions apparently started for some positions in 1883, and here's an NBER working paper that looks at the difference that made in the composition of people hired, by socioeconomic status.

Who Benefits from Meritocracy?  by Diana Moreira & Santiago Pérez

NBER WORKING PAPER 30113 DOI 10.3386/w30113 June 2022

Does screening applicants using exams help or hurt the chances of lower-SES candidates? Because individuals from lower socioeconomic backgrounds fare, on average, worse than those from richer backgrounds in standardized tests, a common concern with this "meritocratic" approach is that it might have a negative impact on the opportunities of lower-SES individuals. However, an alternative view is that, even if such applicants underperformed on exams, other (potentially more discretionary and less impersonal) selection criteria might put them at an even worse disadvantage. We investigate this question using evidence from the 1883 Pendleton Act, a landmark reform in American history which introduced competitive exams to select certain federal employees. Using newly assembled data on the socioeconomic backgrounds of government employees and a difference-in-differences strategy, we find that, although the reform increased the representation of "educated outsiders" (individuals with high education but limited connections), it reduced the share of lower-SES individuals. This decline was driven by a higher representation of the middle class, with little change in the representation of upper-class applicants. The drop in the representation of lower-SES workers was stronger among applicants from states with more unequal access to schooling as well as in offices that relied more heavily on connections prior to the reform. These findings suggest that, although using exams could help select more qualified candidates, these improvements can come with the cost of increased elitism.

From the conclusions:

"Our findings have implications for the broader debate on exams and meritocracy. Allocating opportunities based on exams is sometimes described as an equity-efficiency panacea, helping select the most qualified candidates while simultaneously increasing the representation of lower SES individuals. Our results challenge this view: although using exams could, in principle, help select more qualified candidates, we show that these improvements can also come with the cost of increased elitism. More generally, our findings show that adopting less discretionary selection criteria might not necessarily help the chances of lower-SES individuals.

...

"Importantly, while we investigate how exams shaped the social origins of government officials, an important question that remains unanswered is whether the poor themselves were on net made worse off by the reform. The answer to this question is not an obvious one for a variety of reasons. For instance, individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds might benefit the most from having a well-functioning state, even if achieving this efficiency implies that they might lose direct access to government jobs. "

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This paper makes me think of an earlier paper, about the historical introduction and then abandonment of a national exam-based school choice system in Japan, where the result of national exams was that urban students filled more of the places...

Friday, February 21, 2020

School choice, centralized and decentralized, in Japan, a century ago, by Tanaka, Narita and Moriguchi