Thursday, September 4, 2025

Rationing access to mud in the Thames

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 There's a lot of mud in the Thames, but access to it is limited to when the tide is low (yes, the Thames has tides in the parts that ar...
Wednesday, September 3, 2025

Immigrants and the tech economy

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   This picture, from a tech firm, speaks for itself.  
Tuesday, September 2, 2025

The business of Sotheby's---the design of an auction house

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 The New Yorker has a story about Sotheby's, focusing on its new owner, but with some interesting descriptions of the auction business. ...
Monday, September 1, 2025

Demand for surrogacy outstrips supply in England (where commercial surrogacy is illegal)

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  Economics in action. The Guardian has the story: ‘It’s overwhelming’: woman who was UK’s first surrogate closes agency as demand soars Kim...
Sunday, August 31, 2025

Abhijit Banerjee's column on food and economics, in The Times of India

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  Abhijit Banerjee writes a monthly column on food (cooking it and eating it) and economics , in The Times of India You can see them all a...
Saturday, August 30, 2025

Michel Callon (1945-2025)

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  Hans Kjellberg  informs me that the eminent sociologist of markets, Michel Callon has died. Kjellberg writes about his long collaboration...
Friday, August 29, 2025

The science and politics (and lawfare) of abortion pills with other uses in reproductive healthcare

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Two recent articles shed some light on how the market for reproductive healthcare is evolving.  Dr. Jessica Chen writes "I dispensed mi...
Thursday, August 28, 2025

The Walras-Bowley Lecture: Fragmentation of Matching Markets and How Economics Can Help Integrate Them, by Kamada, Kojima, and Matsushita

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 Fuhito Kojima's 2023 Walras Bowley Lecture has just been uploaded to arxiv, and it looks to be an exciting contribution to the market d...
Wednesday, August 27, 2025

Stanford kidney conference, recap

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 Stanford Impact Labs (SIL) reports on our recent kidney exchange conference Global Solutions-focused Summit on Expanding Access to Kidney ...
Tuesday, August 26, 2025

"Better to exchange kidneys than bombs."

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 Some coffee cups  should naturally come in pairs, so that you have one for a friend in need. (These recently arrived in the mail, from Laur...
Monday, August 25, 2025

In China, you can hire a woman to disrupt a husband's extra-marital affair

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 The Guardian reviews a movie about a kind of covert marriage therapy becoming available in China, in which a 'mistress dispeller" ...
Sunday, August 24, 2025

Meat and dairy allergy ( to alpha-gal), ticks and gene-modified pigs

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 A previously rare allergy to a sugar molecule called alpha-gal, found in almost all mammals but humans, is now being spread by tick bites. ...
Saturday, August 23, 2025

Chocolate fermentation and its microbiome (coming to desserts near you)

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 The Guardian brings us the latest breakthrough in chocolate science: Scientists claim to have unlocked ‘secret sauce’ needed for fine choco...
Friday, August 22, 2025

Regulating markets for antiquities, to more effectively compete with black markets (Kremer and Wilkening in JEP)

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 Bans on illegally recovering, selling, and exporting archeological antiquities often result in black markets.  Michael Kremer and Tom Wilke...
Thursday, August 21, 2025

The UN General Assembly issues a call for surrogacy to be outlawed

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 A growing number of families are formed by gestational surrogacy, in which a woman bears a child for another couple.  Surrogacy is legal th...
Wednesday, August 20, 2025

Market design podcast on NPR's Planet Money (with Alex Teytelboym)

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  Alex Teytelboym comments throughout a program about market design on NPR's Planet Money:   The episode focuses on the design o...