Showing posts with label bibliography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bibliography. Show all posts

Monday, May 7, 2012

American economic association finances; legacy of Mark Perlman



An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education about the finances of academic professional societies brings back fond memories of my late Pittsburgh colleague Mark Perlman: Scholarly Groups' Choices Yield Diverging Fortunes.

""When new executive-committee members come on, I say, 'Let me explain the finances of the association,'" says John J. Siegfried, secretary-treasurer of the American Economic Association. "We have two products that subsidize everything else."
Most of that subsidy comes from the association's online database, EconLit; the other source is the association's jobs listings, which employers pay to post and which appear chiefly online. "It radically changes our business model," Mr. Siegfried says of EconLit, "though that's flattering it."
His breezy description of the association's economic model acknowledges how the quirks of history and personality can produce long-term consequences. Indeed, the economists' group owes much of its present fiscal strength to choices made decades ago. When asked how his scholarly association went about developing EconLit, Mr. Siegfried answered simply, "You have Mark Perlman."
Mr. Perlman, who died in 2006, was hailed for his encyclopedic knowledge of the discipline's philosophy, history, and institutions. He was an economist at the University of Pittsburgh in 1969, when the Journal of Economic Literature, which he founded, started publishing articles, book reviews, and a bibliography of scholarship in economics.
For several years, Mr. Perlman and association staff collected journals and manuscripts, piling them in eight-foot-high stacks in the narrow corridors of a dark, cramped space next to a beauty parlor on Forbes Avenue, near Pitt and Carnegie Mellon University.
"An earthquake in Pittsburgh would likely have led to our employees being crushed under economics journals," Mr. Siegfried wrote earlier this year in toasting the retirement of Dru Ekwurzel, who served as the association's director of publications.
In the early 1980s, Ms. Ekwurzel was instrumental in transferring tapes of journal citations, abstracts, and bibliographic material to an online information-retrieval service. Scholars would gain access to this database through a terminal and dial-up service at a subscribing library. In 1984 that database, named EconLit, made its debut at the association's annual meeting.
By the time the World Wide Web was born, the association was well positioned. In 2010, EconLit generated nearly $3.9-million in revenue from subscribing libraries and universities, or more than 40 percent of the association's budget.
The group's seven journals, available in print and online, are agenda setters for the field, but they also cost far more to produce than the income they generate. The group's annual meeting breaks even.
With a surplus of more than $1.2-million and income from EconLit and the job listings, the association chose recently to slash by more than half, to as little as $20, its fees for membership, in hopes of stemming a 13-percent decline in members since 2003.
"We have a strange situation of not hanging on by our fingernails," Mr. Siegfried says, "and I know others are."
**********
Mark passed away in May 2006.
Obituary: Mark Perlman / Prominent economist of post-World War II era

Professor Mark Perlman: Historian of economic thought

Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Market for books in translation

The Frankfurt book fair sounds like it's a lot of fun for publishing professionals, but it also sounds like the market for books to translate hasn't been changed much by technology: Wheeling and Dealing and Finding Books to Translate Into Dutch. Much of the information seems to be passed between people who know each other.

Thursday, September 18, 2008

Bibliography of matching--update

I maintain a web-based Bibliography of matching and market design, and it is getting harder to keep it up to date as the field grows. (This is a good problem to have. If you have some papers that should be there, please send me a list in a form I can cut and paste:) I just added/updated the following papers by Fuhito Kojima:

Incentives and Stability in Large Two-Sided Matching Markets (2007), with Parag A. Pathak, American Economic Review, forthcoming.

Random Assignment of Multiple Indivisible Objects (2007), forthcoming, Mathematical Social Sciences.

Matching with Contracts: Comment (2007), with John William Hatfield, American Economic Review, forthcoming..

Games of School Choice under the Boston Mechanism with General Priority Structures (2007), Social Choice and Welfare, forthcoming.

The Law of Aggregate Demand and Welfare in the Two-Sided Matching Market (2007),
Economics Letters, forthcoming.

When can Manipulations be Avoided in Two-Sided Matching Markets? Maximal Domain Results (2007),
The B.E. Journal of Theoretical Economics (contribution), Article 32.

Matching and Price Competition: Comment (2007),
American Economic Review 97, pp 1027-1031.

Random Paths to Pairwise Stability in Many-to-Many Matching Problems: A Study on Market Equilibration (2006), with M. Utku Ünver,
International Journal of Game Theory (the Special Issue in Honor of David Gale), 2008.

Mixed Strategies in Games of Capacity Manipulation in Hospital-Intern Markets (2006),
Social Choice and Welfare 27, pp 25-28.

Strategy-Proofness of the Probabilistic Serial Mechanism in Large Random Assignment Problems (2007), with Mihai Manea

Competitive Claims and Resource Allocation by Deferred Acceptance (2007), with Mihai Manea,

Finding All Stable Matchings with Couples (2007), revise

Asymptotic Equivalence of Probabilistic Serial and Random Priority Mechanisms (2008), with Yeon-Koo Che

Group Incentive Compatibility for Matching with Contracts (2007), with John William Hatfield

Substitutes and Stability for Matching with Contracts (2007), with John William Hatfield