Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Midway Market Design Workshop, July 9–11, 2014 University of Chicago Booth School of Business

This has been a good summer for market design conferences, and here's another:

Midway Market Design Workshop


July 9–11, 2014

University of Chicago Booth School of Business
ORGANIZERS
ALI HORTAÇSU, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
ERIC BUDISH, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO BOOTH SCHOOL OF BUSINESS
SCOTT DUKE KOMINERS, HARVARD SOCIETY OF FELLOWS
NICOLE IMMORLICA, MICROSOFT RESEARCH
JASON HARTLINE, NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY
This conference will bring together researchers from economics and computer science to study the design of online and offline markets in a variety of settings. Rigorous modelling of incentives, strategic behavior, and asymmetric information will be the common thread among these researchers. Diverse applications ranging from securities trading to school choice mechanisms will be considered.

Wednesday, July 9

11:00am  12:00pm
Market Design: Topics and Techniques
Microsoft Research
12:00pm  1:00pm
Breakout Session
1:00pm  2:00pm
Lunch
2:00pm  3:00pm
Breakout Session
3:00pm  4:00pm
Empirics of Multi-Unit Auctions
University of Chicago
4:00pm  5:00pm
Breakout Session

Thursday, July 10

9:00am  9:50am
Inverse Optimization for the Recovery of Market Structure from Market Outcomes: An Application to the MISO Electricity Market
Wilfrid Laurier University
9:50am  10:40am
Semi-Robust Estimation and Redesign of Manipulable School Choice Mechanisms: the Case of Seoul
University of Chicago
10:40am  11:10am
Break
11:10am  12:00pm
Pragmatic Algorithmic Game Theory
University of British Columbia
12:00pm  1:00pm
Lunch
1:00pm  1:50pm
Managing Congestion in Dynamic Matching Markets
Stanford University
1:50pm  2:10pm
Break
2:10pm  3:00pm
Strategy-Proofness, Investment Efficiency, and Marginal Returns: An Equivalence
University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business
3:00pm  3:50pm
Double Auction with Interdependent Values: Incentives and Efficiency
Stanford University

Friday, July 11

9:00am  9:50am
Need for Speed? Exchange Latency and Market Quality
VU University Amsterdam
9:50am  10:40pm
Price Constraints, Speed Competition, and Market Quality
College of Business at Illinois
10:40am  11:10am
Break
11:10am  12:00pm
The High-Frequency Trading Arms Race: Frequent Batch Auctions as a Market Design Response
University of Chicago Booth School of Business
12:00pm  1:00pm
Lunch
- See more at: http://bfi.uchicago.edu/events/midway-market-design-workshop#sthash.hkWGY3Te.dpuf

Monday, July 7, 2014

The (U.S.) market for surrogate wombs

The NY Times has a great story on surrogacy, by Tamar Lewin:
Coming to U.S. for Baby, and Womb to Carry It--Foreign Couples Heading to America for Surrogate Pregnancies

"Other than the United States, only a few countries — among them India, Thailand, Ukraine and Mexico — allow paid surrogacy. As a result, there is an increasing flow in the opposite direction, with the United States drawing affluent couples from Europe, Asia and Australia. Indeed, many large surrogacy agencies in the United States say international clients — gay, straight, married or single — provide the bulk of their business.
The traffic highlights a divide between the United States and much of the world over fundamental questions about what constitutes a family, who is considered a legal parent, who is eligible for citizenship and whether paid childbirth is a service or exploitation.
In many nations, a situation that splits motherhood between the biological mother and a surrogate carrier is widely believed to be against the child’s best interests. And even more so when three women are involved: the genetic mother, whose egg is used; the mother who carries the baby; and the one who commissioned and will raise the child.
Many countries forbid advertising foreign or domestic surrogacy services and allow only what is known as altruistic surrogacy, in which the woman carrying the baby receives payment only for her expenses. Those countries abhor what they call the commercialization of baby making and view commercial surrogacy as inherently exploitive of poor women, noting that affluent women generally do not rent out their wombs.
But while many states, including New York, ban surrogacy, others, like California, welcome it as a legitimate business. Together, domestic and international couples will have more than 2,000 babies through gestational surrogacy in the United States this year, almost three times as many as a decade ago. Ads galore seek egg donors, would-be parents, would-be surrogates. Many surrogates and intended parents find each other on the Internet and make their arrangements independently, sometimes without a lawyer or a formal contract.
The agencies that match intended parents and surrogates are unregulated, creating a marketplace where vulnerable clients yearning for a baby can be preyed upon by the unscrupulous or incompetent. Some agencies pop up briefly, then disappear. Others have taken money that was supposed to be in escrow for the surrogate, or failed to pay the fees the money was to cover.
Surrogacy began in the United States more than 30 years ago, soon after the first baby was born through in vitro fertilization in England. At the time, most surrogates were also the genetic mothers, becoming pregnant through artificial insemination with the sperm of the intended father. But that changed after the Baby M case in 1986, in which the surrogate, Mary Beth Whitehead, refused to give the baby to the biological father and his wife. In the wake of the spectacle of two families fighting over a baby who belonged to both of them, traditional surrogacy gave way to gestational surrogacy, in which an embryo is created in the laboratory — sometimes using eggs and sperm from the parents, sometimes from donors — and transferred to a surrogate who has no genetic link to the baby.
But thorny questions remain: How much extra will the surrogate be paid for a cesarean section, multiple births — or loss of her uterus? What if the intended parents die during the pregnancy? How long will the surrogate abstain from sex? If she needs bed rest, how much will the intended parents pay to replace her paycheck, and cover child care and housekeeping?
“The gestational carrier has to agree to follow medical advice, but there has to be some level of trust,” said Andrew W. Vorzimer, a Los Angeles surrogacy lawyer who advises on many arrangements that have gone awry. “Once everyone goes home and the doors are closed, there’s no way to really monitor what’s going on.”
Since the Baby M case, the common wisdom has been that the main risk for parents is the surrogate’s changing her mind. But Mr. Vorzimer, who has tracked problem cases in the United States over the years, said it was the reverse: Trouble most often starts with the intended parents. One intended mother decided, well into the pregnancy, that she could not raise a child that was not genetically hers. Another couple, after a divorce, offered the surrogate mother money to have an abortion.
...
Critics sometimes draw an analogy to prostitution, another subject that raises debate over whether making money off a woman’s body represents empowerment or exploitation.
In Canada, as in Britain, payment for surrogacy is limited to expenses.
“Just like we don’t pay for blood or semen, we don’t pay for eggs or sperm or babies,” said Abby Lippman, an emeritus professor at McGill University in Montreal who studies reproductive technology. “There’s a very general consensus that paying surrogates would commodify women and their bodies. I think in the United States, it’s so consumer-oriented, so commercially oriented, so caught up in this ‘It’s my right to have a baby’ approach, that people gloss over some big issues.”
Germany flatly prohibits surrogacy, with an Embryo Protection Act that forbids implanting embryos in anyone but the woman who provided the egg. Ingrid Schneider of the University of Hamburg’s Research Center for Biotechnology, Society and the Environment said it is in children’s best interest to know that they have just one mother.
“We regard surrogacy as exploitation of women and their reproductive capacities,” Dr. Schneider said. “In our view, the bonding process between a mother and her child starts earlier than at the moment of giving birth. It is an ongoing process during pregnancy itself, in which an intense relationship is being built between a woman and her child-to-be. These bonds are essential for creating the grounds for a successful parenthood, and in our view, they protect both the mother and the child.”
With all that is known about adopted children’s seeking out their biological parents, other European experts say, it is wrongheaded to create children whose relationship with the woman who provided the egg or carried them will be severed.
...
The restrictions in many countries have been a boost for American surrogacy. For overseas couples, the big draw is the knowledge that many states have sophisticated fertility clinics, experienced lawyers, a large pool of egg donors and surrogates, and, especially, established legal precedent.
“We chose the United States because of the certainty of the legal process,” said Paulo, an engineer and scrub nurse. “Surrogacy is very secretive in Portugal. People don’t talk about surrogacy, and it’s hard to get any information. In the United States it is all clear.”
But it is not cheap. International would-be parents often pay $150,000 or more, an amount that rises rapidly for those who do not get a viable pregnancy on their first try. Prices vary by region, but surrogates usually receive $20,000 to $30,000, egg donors $5,000 to $10,000 (more for the Ivy League student-athlete, or model), the fertility clinic and doctor $30,000, the surrogacy agency $20,000 and the lawyers $10,000. In addition, the intended parents pay for insurance, fertility medication, and incidentals like the surrogate’s travel and maternity clothes.
Because surrogacy is so expensive in the United States, many couples travel to India, Thailand or Mexico, where the total process costs half or less. But complications have arisen — as in the case of a couple stuck in India for six years, trying to take home a baby boy, whom genetic testing had found not to be related to them, apparently because of a mix-up with the sperm donation.
Four years ago, according to Stuart Bell, the chief executive of Growing Generations, a Los Angeles surrogacy agency, only about 20 percent of its clients came from overseas, but now international clients are more than half. Other agencies report the same trend.
“Anyone who can afford it chooses the United States,” said Lesa A. Slaughter, a fertility lawyer in Los Angeles."

Sunday, July 6, 2014

Game theory at Stony Brook this summer: 25th anniversary conference starts July 7


Celebrating 25 Years of Game Theory at Stony Brook University

Game Theory chessboardThis July, the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory will celebrate the 25th anniversary of its International Conferences on Game Theory. Since 1990, the Center has organized yearly Summer Festivals on Game Theory, which bring together prominent game theorists and many leading economists from around the world. It continues this year with the iconic Conference on Game Theory from July 7 to 11, followed by two workshops, starting on July 13 and July 16, respectively.
Approximately 200 participants come each year to Stony Brook University from Asia, Europe, and North and South America, among them 10 Nobel Laureates in economics: Kenneth Arrow, Robert Aumann, Gerard Debreu, Eric Maskin, Roger Myerson, John Nash, Alvin Roth, Thomas Schelling, Reinhard Selten and Lloyd Shapley, five of whom are affiliated members of the Center for Game Theory (Aumann, Maskin, Nash, Roth and Shapley).
The focus of the summer activities has been not only on game theory, but also on its applications, particularly in economics. Topics to be covered in this year’s sessions include auctions, bargaining, Bayesian games, contract theory, cooperation and markets, cost sharing, decision theory, fairness, finance, industrial organization, game primitives, knowledge and expectations, networks, repeated and dynamic games, evolution and learning, mechanism design, social and political models, solution concepts and voting.
New this year, as part of the Workshop on Strategic Aspects of Terrorism, Security, and Espionage, will be a “War Game” session designed by Boaz Ganor, the founder and Executive Director of the International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT), and the head of the Homeland Security Studies Programs at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), in Herzliya, Israel. During the “War Game” session participants will play different roles in given circumstances. The simulation of this game will be played simultaneously in Stony Brook and Tel-Aviv.
For more details on the conference and workshops, please visit the Center’s new website at www.gtcenter.org. Presentations will be held in the Charles B. Wang Center.
2014 Festival Events
July 7 to July 11: International Conference on Game TheoryThis conference will feature more than 170 presentations. The organizing committee includes Robert Aumann, Sandro Brusco (Chair, Department of Economics), Pradeep Dubey, Abraham Neyman and Yair Tauman (Director of the Stony Brook Center for Game Theory). The scientific organizers are Johannes Hörner (Yale University) and William H. Sandholm (University of Wisconsin). This year’s plenary speakers include: Mehmet Ekmekci (University of Pittsburgh);Jeffrey Ely (Northwestern University)Amanda Friedenberg (Arizona State University)Daniel Friedman (UCSC);Michihiro Kandori (University of Tokyo)Fuhito Kojima (Stanford University)Ehud Lehrer (Tel-Aviv University);Thomas Mariotti (Université Toulouse 1 Capitole)Marcin Pęski (University of Toronto)Tadashi Sekiguchi (Kyoto University)Roland Strausz (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)Timothy Van Zandt (INSEAD)Jörgen Weibull (Stockholm School of Economics)Jonathan Weinstein (Washington University in St. Louis) and Peyton Young (University of Oxford).
July 13 to July 15: Workshop on Innovations, Patents and LicensingThe organizers are Rabah Amir (University of Iowa), Debapriya Sen (Ryerson University) and Yair Tauman (Stony Brook University and IDC Herzliya).
July 16 to July 18: Workshop on Strategic Aspects of Terrorism, Security, and EspionageThe organizers are Boaz Ganor (IDC Herzliya), Timothy Mathews (Kennesaw State University) and Yair Tauman(Stony Brook University and IDC Herzliya).
About the CenterThe Stony Brook Center for Game Theory, known until recently as the Center for Game Theory in Economics, grew out of the former Institute for Decision Sciences (IDS), established at Stony Brook University in 1989. The Center has organized 83 international conferences and workshops, and has hosted more than 2500 scientists since its establishment. According to Nobel Laureate Kenneth Arrow, who reviewed the IDS some years ago, the resident and affiliated members of the Center constitute “a Game Theory group that is unequaled in the United States, if not in the world.” The impact of Game Theory on economics and other disciplines in the social and natural sciences is pervasive. Its concepts and techniques have become commonplace in the study of industrial organization, international trade, bargaining and the economics of information, to name just a few economic applications. Uses of Game Theory in non-economic areas include studies of legislative institutions, of voting behavior, of communication and persuasion, of fashion, of revolutions and popular uprisings, of international conflicts, and of evolutionary biology. Its impact was reflected in the 1994, 2005, 2007 and 2012 Nobel Prizes in Economics, which were awarded to nine game theorists.

Saturday, July 5, 2014

School Choice in Israel

On Thursday, Atila Abdulkadiroglu and I attended and spoke at a conference on Controlled Parental School Choice in Tel Aviv, organized by the Israel Ministry of Education. A growing number of municipalities are using school choice, and we spoke of the importance of making it safe for families to reveal their preferences.


Thursday, July 3, 2014

San Francisco may re-emphasize neighborhood schools in their school choice plan

From the SF Chronicle: Plan's goal: Get S.F. families into neighborhood school

"Unlike families who live in the suburbs, San Francisco residents don't automatically get assigned to the school near their homes.

"The system is built on decades of desegregation efforts and the idea of equal access to all schools.

"It requires families to submit a list of schools that they want their children to attend. If a school has enough spots for the families who want in, there are no issues. But if a school has fewer seats than families who listed it, a complicated tie-breaker system kicks in.

"Siblings of students get the first available seats. Then, families living in census tracts where students post the lowest test scores - which the district calls CTIP, for Census Tract Integration Preference - get second priority. Those in the school's attendance area are third, followed by everyone else.

"Schools like Clarendon, with high test scores, low student poverty and experienced teachers, fill up with siblings and CTIP families, leaving few or no seats for students who live in the neighborhood.

"Norton and Fewer want to flip things so attendance area comes before CTIP, giving higher priority to families who live nearby than to those living in presumably disadvantaged neighborhoods.

"The CTIP tie-breaker, introduced three years ago, was supposed to help diversify schools without specifically using race.

"It didn't work.

"All the board members appreciate diversity and want to eliminate racial isolation in our schools," Fewer said. "We just don't know if the CTIP preference is doing this. It's time to revisit it."


"Data from the past three years show 28 schools - a quarter of all campuses - are still racially isolated, meaning that 60 percent of enrollment is a single ethnic group.

"Instead of creating a big melting pot in schools, a CTIP address has become a golden ticket for families who wanted to attend the city's most popular schools, Norton said. It has also created demand for housing in CTIP areas, with real estate agents promoting those neighborhoods and people lying about their address to get an advantage.

"And even if a family living in a CTIP area were wealthy, it would not matter - they would still get the same high-priority status as someone living in poverty.

"There was no means test, said McCarthy, whose children were assigned to Sanchez Elementary, more than 2 miles from home.

"Someone that makes half a million a year that just bought a $2 million home in the Mission" has a better chance at Clarendon, she said. "That's unfair that they can kind of trump us."

"The CTIP wasn't intended to give an unfair advantage or attract people to buy or rent in certain neighborhoods, Norton said.

"People are making really big life decisions so they can be in a CTIP zone," she added. "That makes me very uneasy."

"In addition, African American and Latino families are less likely to participate in the first round of the school assignment lottery than white or Asian families, which again raises the question of whom the CTIP preference is serving."
*********

Background material: from SFUSD (San Francisco Public Schools).  Student Assignment and Enrollment Reports

Wednesday, July 2, 2014

Recap of the 25th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory- Matching and Market Design

The 25th Jerusalem School in Economic Theory- Matching and Market Design was, in my humble opinion, a great success. If you click on the link above you can see videos of all 20 lectures.  (There's even a "play all" button, which I presume (I haven't tried it) would launch 30 hours of lectures that you could binge-watch.)

Over a hundred students attended the lectures, given by ten speakers over nine days (plus a day off). Many visitors attended at least some of the lectures, led by Ken Arrow who attended them all. Eyal Winter was celebrated as he finished 15 years as director of the summer school, and prepared to hand the reins to Elchanan Ben-Porath.

Topics covered ranged from elegant abstract theory to fully implemented practical designs, from matching markets to auctions and financial markets, and from designs implemented two decades ago to designs successfully implemented this year.

The quality of the students, and of the new generation of market designers who lectured, makes me very optimistic about the future of market design as "the source of practical advice, solidly grounded in well tested theory, on designing the institutions through which we interact with one another."

QED
















Tuesday, July 1, 2014

Private and public healthcare in Israel

In Israel, there is disagreement over the right ways to mix publicly funded health care and private insurance. Here's the story from Haaretz:
In dramatic decision, private medical care banned in Israel's public hospitals
Although committee headed by Health Minister Yael German banned private services, medical tourism is still allowed, though it is unclear to what extent.
By Roni Linder-Ganz | 16:39 25.06.14 |

"Private medical services, popularly known by the Hebrew acronym sharap, would no longer be permitted at government hospitals if the recommendations of a committee headed by Health Minister Yael German are adopted."

Here's an ungated report: Health Minister: No Private Care in Public Hospitals  
Health Minister (Yesh Atid) Yael German announced on Wednesday, 27 Sivan 5774 that after about a year of deliberation and meetings, the committee she headed has decided private “Sharap” (שר”פ – שרות רפואה פרטי) medical care would not be offered in the nation’s public hospitals.
German is a supporter of the Sharap service and during the months of meetings she tried to persuade her colleagues to vote in favor of the option, a move she feel would improve the nation’s healthcare as well as shorten waiting lines for appointments with experts.
However the committee decided against it for it believes it is better for the masses to place more of the health care burden on the government instead of the private citizen.

Globes reports that “supporters of private medicine included German herself; Penina Koren, the former head of her office in the Herzliya Municipality; National Economic Council chairman Prof. Eugene Kandel; health economist Prof. Jacob (Kobi) Glazer; Ministry of Health director general Prof. Arnon Afek; and Israel Medical Association Secretary General Leah Wapner. Opponents included former Ministry of Health deputy director general Prof. Gabi Bin-Nun, Prof. Leah Achdut from the Ruppin Academy, Ministry of Finance deputy budgets director Moshe Bar Siman Tov, and Adv. Adi Niv-Yaguda, a specialist in medical law”.
If the Sharap plan would have been approved, it would have permitted choosing a specialist in a public hospital, which would also result in a shorter waiting period. Sharap is paid for by the patient, who may or may not have additional healthcare insurance to cover it. For example, a private visit today in Hadassah Hospital with a senior specialist under Sharap costs 1,150 NIS. Kupat Cholim Maccabi will reimburse a patient if s/he sees a senior physician whose name appears on the approved list in the amount of 80% or 616 shekels, whichever is lower.
Opponents feel that the top doctors are taking private patients during the hours they should be seeing HMO patients and therefore, those unable to pay for private medical care are left out in the cold with substandard care and long lines for an appointment or procedure.
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A few years ago I blogged about a similar debate concerning Britain's National Health Service:

Monday, May 31, 2010

The London Times reports NHS bars woman after she saw private doctor