Saturday, October 31, 2015

Update on the OPTN/UNOS kidney paired donation pilot program through October 2015

Here's a brief update on the UNOS KPD pilot program:
Kidney paired donation pilot program: Five years of lifesaving service, OCT 26, 2015 |

The program "has arranged 155 kidney transplants since its beginning on October 27, 2010. Several more transplants are scheduled to take place over the next several weeks."

That reflects a growing rate of transplants through the UNOS program, which has not yet achieved the volume of other programs, and now accounts for just over 4% of the 3,648 "Paired donation" transplants recorded by the OPTN database. (I'm not sure if those data capture all the kidney exchange chains.)  The majority of kidney exchange transplants in the U.S.  are accomplished through the other multi-hospital kidney exchange networks (NKR and APD), and, increasingly, through exchanges conducted internally by active transplant centers.   

Friday, October 30, 2015

Repugnant Markets and Forbidden Transactions at the WZB (video)


Here's a video of my recent talk at the WZB in Berlin. Dorothea Kubler introduces me.
My talk goes to 55:15  minutes, and then there is a discussion by Stephan Gosepath, followed by my brief reply and then a general discussion with the audience.

At around minute 44 I talk for almost ten minutes about the exciting experimental work of Sandro Ambuehl (here it's a little too bad that the video doesn't include my slides, but you can get the idea). He's on the market this year (you could hire him), and his job market paper reports experiments designed to investigate the intuition, widely held by non-economists, that high payments may constitute "undue inducements" that can potentially harm the recipient.

Thursday, October 29, 2015

Paying for (imported) blood products in Britain

Yesterday's post about paying for blood plasma in Canada reminded me of this story that The Guardian ran earlier in the year:
Blood money: is it wrong to pay donors?
"In some countries, people get paid for giving blood. And in the UK, we have to buy in plasma. But is safety compromised when money changes hands?"

"A recent black-and-white documentary, Blood, about a mobile blood collection unit in rural Russia, shows scenes familiar to many: dusty halls, anxious donors queuing to register, the occasional struggle to find a vein. Cups of tea, too, albeit just for the team.
Then there are the differences. Donors sit upright on uncomfortable, hard chairs. Some have just come off night shift; others have no money for food. Staff are concerned about how many units will test positive for blood-borne viruses. Potential donors worry about being accepted. A woman without an up-to-date residency certificate is turned away. A man insists he should be allowed to donate; he is broke and desperate for the 850 roubles (£8.85) payment. It is clear that most donors come for the money: for some, it is a lifeline.
Russia isn’t alone in paying donors – the US, China and Germany do, too. In Britain, however, we donate 2m units a year, with no payment – following the World Health Organisation recommendation that blood donation be voluntary. This is not only for altruistic reasons, but also for safety. “The safest blood donors are voluntary, non-remunerated donors from low-risk populations,” says the WHO.
...
"Nevertheless, thousands of NHS patients receive blood plasma from paid donors. This contains clotting factors and antibodies. Thousands of individual donations go into each dose of clotting factors – used to treat haemophiliacs who are bleeding – or immunoglobulins (antibodies) used to treat people with autoimmune diseases, severely damaged immune systems, or some serious infections.
After the outbreak of bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE), known as mad cow disease, some recipients of UK plasma products developed the fatal brain disease variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob-disease (vCJD). As there is as yet no adequate screening test for this, British plasma has not been used since 2002, when we began to import it from the US."
**********

HT Alex Nichifor

Wednesday, October 28, 2015

Bleeding for Canada: plasma exports from the US to Canada

In the HuffPo:, Peter Jaworski begins his rant about the blood supply with a good line about food:  Commodifying Blood Donation Could Solve Canada's Shortfall

"Many people think blood is special in a way that means it shouldn't be "commodified," or bought and sold on a market. It is a basic human need. It's not like the latest gadget or a pair of shoes; it is to be revered, not remunerated.

"I'm glad we don't think food is special in this way. If we did, imagine how many people would die of starvation, or would suffer from hunger.
This past December, the Ontario legislature preserved the sanctity of the exchange of blood through Bill 21, entitled the "Safeguarding Health Care Integrity Act." Schedule 1 included provisions from Bill 178, the Voluntary Blood Donations Act", which prohibits paying and receiving payment for blood, either directly or indirectly. With this bill, the legislature has made the giving and receiving of blood a sacrament.
*************

Of course Canadians don't have to pay other Canadians for blood plasma. If you look at the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) administered by the U.S. International Trade Commission (USITC), you find that HTS number 3002100210 stands for Human Blood Plasma, and in 2013 Canada had imports $29,274,584 worth from the U.S., where of course we compensate plasma donors.

HT: Josh Penrod

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Chapter 4 of Who Gets What and Why, in the Milken Institute Review (with art work...)

The Milken Institute Review, Fourth Quarter 2015, has published an excerpt--Chapter 4--of Who Gets What and Why.  It comes with illustrations, which aren't in the original. The chapter is mostly about unraveling, and includes discussion of college football bowls, the market for law school graduates, and medical fellowships...and why Oklahomans are called "Sooners," and fraternity and sorority recruitment is called "rush."

Book Excerpt--Who Gets What and Why

Here's the introduction to the excerpt, by Peter Passell

"Alvin Roth, the author of this excerpt from Who Gets What – and Why,* won a Nobel in economics in 2012 for his work on the “the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.” I know, I know: that’s hardly an intro likely to induce you to dive right in. Most Nobels in economics, after all, are awarded for accomplishments that are too arcane for mere mortals to comprehend. And even the prize winners who do have something pressing to say to the public can rarely write their way out of that proverbial paper bag.

" But Roth and this book are spectacular exceptions. While he was really trained as a mathematician (his PhD is in a discipline called operations research), Roth’s vision has never strayed far from the practical. And he’s a natural-born writer to boot.

"Roth designs “matching markets,” where price alone can’t balance supply and demand – think of markets for everything from marriage to college admissions. Indeed, he’s even saved lives by helping to design an ingenious way to match more donated kidneys to needy patients.

"The chapter excerpted here will give you a taste of his fine mind and formidable ability to make complicated ideas comprehensible. — Peter Passell"
***********
See this earlier post with a video of the conversation about the book that Peter and I had in June: Peter Passell interviews me at the Milken Institute on Who Gets What — and Why: The New Economics of Matchmaking and Market Design


The rest of the book can be found at Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Who-Gets-What-Why-Matchmaking/dp/0544291131 

Monday, October 26, 2015

An interview about market design, in Polish

Google translate seems to work less well in Polish than in some other languages I've been interviewed in, but if you already read Polish, maybe this will be clear:
Alvin Roth. Ekonomista, który leczy nerki

Why most kidney exchange chains have patients receive a kidney before their donor donates one

A "how could things go wrong" story from Canada, when a donor donates before her recipient receives a kidney (due to a last minute glitch):
Organ exchange program slow to deliver on promise to man in need of a kidney, family says
Canadian Blood Services says overall, the kidney exchange program has been successful

"A national program that matches living kidney donors with recipients hasn't delivered on a promise after a woman donated a kidney to a stranger so her ailing son-in-law could get a much-needed transplant, the family says.

"Estella Jamieson agreed to donate one of her kidneys, only after being assured her son-in-law would soon get a transplant. She says she decided to contact Go Public because he is still waiting.
"I know I helped somebody and I'm glad that family is going good, but I just feel if I would have waited I could have helped my own family more," a teary Jamieson says. 
"Jamieson and her son-in-law, Jeff Pike, signed up for the Living Kidney Donor Paired Exchange Program a couple of years ago. It's run by Canadian Blood Services along with provincial transplant programs. 
...
"Jamieson gave her kidney to a stranger, so Pike could get one from another donor. 
"We did our half. My mother-in-law has helped improve someone's life but the return of her doing that, is someone would in turn help me at the same time — not some time down the road when the stars align. I can't help but feel like there are options out there that could speed things up," Pike says. 

"The surgeries were scheduled for February, but the day before Pike's procedure, he developed shingles and couldn't go through with the transplant. Jamieson donated a kidney anyway, on the promise her son-in-law would get a kidney when his health improved. Pike was medically cleared less than a month later but is still waiting. 

"I was assured Jeff would be top priority if I went through with the surgery. It's seven months later and he still doesn't have a kidney. Even if he had date ... but there's no date, there's nothing," Jamieson says.
"While Pike waits, he can't work full-time and is physically weak. He also requires dialysis twice a day. 
...
"Despite all that's happened, Estella Jamieson says she would still recommend the program to others, with one caveat. 
"Don't get me wrong. I think it is a very good program and anyone with a loved one that wants to go into it, I'd say yes to go ahead. But make sure your loved one is getting a kidney when you give yours." 

Sunday, October 25, 2015

Support from the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation (BSF), and from the National Science Foundation (NSF)

The current newsletter of the US-Israel Binational Science Foundation has taken note of the early support that Ido Erev and I received from them, and I'm very happy to acknowledge it. I wonder how widespread are binational science foundations?

Alvin Roth's New Book and NPR Interview

"Roth is a pioneer in the field of game theory and experimental economics and in their application to the design of new economic institutions. Early in his career, he and Prof. Ido Erev from the Technion received BSF funding on three different occasions for their work on how reinforcement learning can make useful predictions in experimental games."

They also quote me in an NPR interview, about kidney exchange, saying
“I kind of think of economists as being helpers here,” he said. “We have some ideas, but we don't do any of the surgeries.”
*************

The NSF also takes note of the support it has given to Nobel laureates, and I am certainly grateful for the support I received:
NSF-funded Nobel Prize winners in science through 2015

ECONOMICS
1970 – Paul A. Samuelson*
1972 – Kenneth J. Arrow*
1973 – Wassily Leontief
1975 – Tjalling C. Koopmans
1978 – Herbert A. Simon
1980 – Lawrence R. Klein
1981 – James Tobin
1982 – George J. Stigler
1983 – Gerard Debreu
1985 – Franco Modigliani
1986 – James M. Buchanan Jr.
1987 – Robert M. Solow
1992 – Gary S. Becker
1993 – Robert W. Fogel, Douglass C. North
1994 – John C. Harsanyi, John F. Nash*
1995 – Robert E. Lucas
1997 – Robert C. Merton
1998 – Amartya Sen
1999 – Robert A. Mundell
2000 – James J. Heckman, Daniel L. McFadden
2001 – George Akerlof, Michael Spence, Joseph Stiglitz
2002 – Daniel Kahneman, Vernon Smith
2003 – Robert C. Engle, Clive W. Granger
2004 - Finn E. Kydland, Edward C. Prescott
2005 – Robert J. Aumann, Thomas C. Schelling
2006 – Edmund S. Phelps
2007 – Leonid Hurwicz, Eric Maskin and Roger Myerson
2008 – Paul Krugman
2009 – Elinor Ostrom, Oliver E. Williamson
2010 – Peter A. Diamond, Dale Mortensen
2011 – Thomas J. Sargent, Christopher A. Sims
2012 – Alvin E. Roth and Lloyd S. Shapley
2013 – Eugene F. Fama, Lars Peter Hansen, Robert J. Shiller
2014 – Jean Tirole
2015 – Angus Deaton
* Received NSF support after receiving Nobel Prize.

Saturday, October 24, 2015

Market design conference at Microsoft Research New England, Oct 24-25

Immediately following the NBER market design conference is another, at Microsoft Research New England: Designing the Digital Economy, October 24-25, 2015

Saturday, October 24 

12:30pm - 2:00 Registration and Lunch 
2:00 - 2:15Welcome by Glen Weyl 
2:15 - 3:15 Title TBD by Eric Budish, discussed by Joshua Mollner 
3:15 - 3:30 Coffee Break 
3:30 - 4:30 
Cheap Talk, Round Numbers, and the Economics of Negotiation” presented by Matt Backus (joint work with Thomas Blake and Steven Tadelis), discussed by Susan Athey 
Can sellers credibly signal their private information to reduce frictions in negotiations? Guided by a simple cheap-talk model, we posit that impatient sellers use round numbers to signal their willingness to cut prices in order to sell faster, and test its implications using millions of online bargaining interactions. Items listed at multiples of $100 receive offers that are 5%–8% lower but that arrive 6–11 days sooner than listings at neighboring “precise” values, and are 3%–5% more likely to sell. Similar patterns in real estate transactions suggest that round-number signaling plays a broader role in negotiations.
4:30 - 5:00 Coffee Break 
5:00 - 6:00 
Adverse Selection and Auction Design for Internet Display Advertising” presented by Paul Milgrom (joint work with Nick Arnosti and Marissa Beck), discussed by Bobby Kleinberg 

We model an online display advertising environment with brand advertisers and better-informed performance advertisers, and seek an auction mechanism that is strategy-proof, anonymous and insulates brand advertisers from adverse selection. We find that the only such mechanism that is also false-name proof assigns the item to the highest bidding performance advertiser only when the ratio of the highest bid to the second highest bid is sufficiently large. For fat-tailed match-value distributions, this new mechanism captures most of the gains from good matching and improves match values substantially compared to the common practice of setting aside impressions in advance.

7:00 - late Dinner at Area Four 

Sunday, October 25

8:30am - 9:00 Breakfast 
9:00 - 10:00 
“Mixed Pricing in Online Marketplaces” presented by Michael Sinkinson (joint work with Katja Seim), discussed by Bruno Strulovici. 

A rich theory literature predicts mixed pricing in various settings due to standard price discrimination, search frictions, and various other rationales. While typically interpreted as implying occasional sales or price dispersion, online marketplaces enable a firm to truly use randomization as a tool in pricing. We investigate a case of mixed pricing across a large subset of products on a major e-commerce website. We first test for randomizing behavior, before constructing a model of price discrimination that would generate such behavior as optimizing behavior. We estimate the model and use it to assess pricing effects of a proposed merger in the industry.

10:00 - 10:15 Coffee Break 
10:15 - 11:15 “Real Time Pricing and Labor Supply in the Sharing Economy" by Chris Nosko, discussed by Ricardo Perez-Truglia 
11:15 - 11:30 Coffee Break 
11:30 - 12:30 

The degree and scope of criminal justice surveillance increased dramatically in the United States over the past four decades. Recent qualitative research suggests the rise in surveillance may be met with a concomitant increase in efforts to evade it. To date, however, there has been no quantitative empirical test of this theory. In this article, I introduce the concept of “system avoidance,” whereby individuals who have had contact with the criminal justice system avoid surveilling institutions that keep formal records. Using data from Add Health (n = 15,170) and the NLSY97 (n = 8,894), I find that individuals who have been stopped by police, arrested, convicted, or incarcerated are less likely to interact with surveilling institutions, including medical, financial, labor market, and educational institutions, than their counterparts who have not had criminal justice contact. By contrast, individuals with criminal justice contact are no less likely to participate in civic or religious institutions. Because criminal justice contact is disproportionately distributed, this study suggests system avoidance is a potential mechanism through which the criminal justice system contributes to social stratification: it severs an already marginalized subpopulation from institutions that are pivotal to desistance from crime and their own integration into broader society.

12:30 - 1:30 Lunch 
1:30 - 2:30 Overview of Empirical Economics program, led by Susan Athey, but also featuring Greg Lewis, Markus Mobius, Denis Nekipelov and Justin Rao 
2:30 - 3:30 
"Consensus Expectations and Conventions" presented by Ben Golub (joint work with Stephen Morris), discussed by Muhamet Yildiz.  

Players have uncertainty over both an external random variable -- such as a security price -- and over each other's beliefs. We study agents' subjective expectations of the weighted average of others' subjective expectations...of the weighted average of others' subjective expectations of the external random variable. The weights involved can be viewed as a network. By relating these iterated average expectations to a Markov chain, we characterize their limit properties, generalizing prior results on games with common priors and complete-information network games. We then apply the conclusions to study coordination games, over-the-counter financial markets, the possibility of rationalizable trade, and the robustness of equilibrium.

3:30 - 3:45 Coffee Break 
3:45 - 4:45 
"Sales Mechanisms in Online Markets: What Happened to Internet Auctions?" presented by Liran Einav, discussed by Justin Rao.

Consumer auctions were very popular in the early days of internet commerce, but today online sellers mostly use posted prices. Data from eBay shows that compositional shifts in the items being sold, or the sellers offering these items, cannot account for this evolution. Instead, the returns to sellers using auctions have diminished. We develop a model to distinguish two hypotheses: a shift in buyer demand away from auctions, and general narrowing of seller margins that favors posted prices. Our estimates suggest that the former is more important. We also provide evidence on where auctions still are used, and on why some sellers may continue to use both auctions and posted prices.

4:45 - 5:00 Closing remarks by Greg Lewis 

Organizing committee

Greg Lewis (Microsoft)
Glen Weyl (Microsoft and Chicago)

Friday, October 23, 2015

Honoring Hugo Sonnenschein, University of Chicago October 23–24, 2015

I'm in Berlin today, heading to Chicago to help celebrate Hugo Sonnenschein:

Conference Honoring Hugo Sonnenschein, University of Chicago
October 23–24, 2015

ORGANIZERS: PHILIP J. RENY, UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
VIJAY KRISHNA, PENN STATE UNIVERSITY
Friday, October 23

"The University of Chicago Department of Economics and the Becker Friedman Institute are pleased to host the Conference Honoring Hugo Sonnenschein. This conference will bring together friends and colleagues to honor Hugo Sonnenschein’s scholarship, to celebrate his new status as “Charles L. Hutchinson Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus,” and to recognize the exciting work in economic theory that is being carried out today.

Hugo Sonnenschein is an economic theorist whose most important scholarly work concerns the mathematical structure of market demand functions. His fundamental contributions on this topic, which he pioneered, have had a lasting effect on the field of general equilibrium, including the computation of equilibrium prices, and have greatly influenced and continue to influence the development of the theory of the household and of other group decision-making units. He has also made fundamental contributions to demand theory, social choice, imperfect competition, information economics, and game theory. Hugo's thesis supervision history is legendary in the profession. He has supervised the theses of many of the most prominent economic theorists of our generation, thereby ensuring the continued application of mathematical rigor to problems of importance in economics for years to come.

In 2009, he shared the BBVA Foundation Frontiers of Knowledge Laureate in Economics, Finance and Management with Andreu Mas-Colell “for extending the reach and applicability of general equilibrium analysis and for establishing the modern theory of aggregate demand.” Hugo’s recognitions also include Member, National Academy of Sciences, 1990; President, Econometric Society, 1989; Editor, Econometrica, 1977-1984; Distinguished Fellow, American Economic Association, 2005."

Thursday, October 22, 2015

Repugnant transactions and forbidden markets at the WZB in Berlin

Yesterday I gave the Harnack Lecture to the Max Planck Society, and today I speak at the WZB...
Repugnant Markets and Forbidden Transactions
WZB Distinguished Lecture in Social Sciences by Alvin E. Roth

The lecture will be followed by a discussion by Stefan Gosepath who is Professor of Practical Philosophy at Freie Universität Berlin.


: Dorothea Kübler
Donnerstag, 22. Oktober 2015
Beginn: 17:00 Uhr
: WZB, Reichpietschufer 50, 10785 Berlin, Raum A 300

Market Design conference at the NBER, Oct 23-24

I'll be elsewhere, but this looks like fun:

Market Design Working Group Meeting
Michael Ostrovsky and Parag Pathak, Organizers
October 23-24, 2015
NBER
2nd Floor Conference Room
1050 Massachusetts Avenue
 Cambridge, MA

PROGRAM


PROGRAM




Friday, October 23


8:00 AM
Shuttle leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 AM
Shuttle leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 AM
Continental Breakfast
9:00 AM
Tayfun Sonmez, Boston College
Utku Unver, Boston College
Ozgur Yilmaz, Koç University
How (not) to Integrate Blood Subtyping Technology to Kidney Exchange
Mehmet Ekmekci, Boston College
M. Bumin Yenmez, Carnegie Mellon University
Integrating Schools for Centralized Admissions
10:30 AM
Break
11:00 AM
Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Duke University
Joshua Angrist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Yusuke Narita, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Parag Pathak, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and NBER
Research Design meets Market Design: Using Centralized Assignment for Impact Evaluation

Shuchi Chawla, University of Wisconsin
Jason Hartline, Northwestern University
Denis Nekipelov, University of Virginia
Mechanism Design for Data Science
12:30 PM
Lunch
2:00 PM
John Hatfield, University of Texas at Austin
Scott Duke Kominers, Harvard University
Alexandru Nichifor, University of St Andrews
Michael Ostrovsky, Stanford University and NBER
Alexander Westkamp, University of Bonn
Full Substitutability
Thanh Nguyen, Purdue University
Rakesh Vohra, University of Pennsylvania
Near Feasible Stable Matchings with Complementarities
3:30 PM
Break
4:00 PM
Ali Hortaçsu, University of Chicago and NBER
Jakub Kastl, Princeton University and NBER
Allen Zhang, Department of the Treasury
Bid Shading and Bidder Surplus in the U.S. Treasury Auction System
Jonathan Levin, Stanford University and NBER
Andrzej Skrzypacz, Stanford University
Are Dynamic Vickrey Auctions Practical? Properties of the Combinatorial Clock Auction
5:30 PM
Adjourn
5:30 PM
Shuttle leaves NBER for Royal Sonesta Hotel
6:30 PM
Dinner – Dante Restaurant at the Royal Sonesta Hotel

Saturday, October 24


8:00 AM
Shuttle leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 AM
Shuttle leaves Royal Sonesta Hotel for NBER
8:30 AM
Continental Breakfast
9:00 AM
Nick Arnosti, Stanford University
Marissa Beck, Stanford University
Paul Milgrom, Stanford University
Adverse Selection and Auction Design for Internet Display Advertising
Daniela Saban, Stanford University
Gabriel Weintraub, Columbia University
Procurement Mechanisms for Differentiated Products
10:30 AM
Break
11:00 AM
Steven Lalley, University of Chicago
Glen Weyl, Microsoft Corporation
Quadratic Voting
Canice Prendergast, University of Chicago
The Allocation of Food to Food Banks
12:30 PM
Adjourn

Wednesday, October 21, 2015

Is it unethical to pay more than $10,000 for human egg donation? (An antitrust suit...)

The NY Times has the story: Egg Donors Challenge Pay Rates, Saying They Shortchange Women

"In a federal lawsuit, a group of women are challenging industry guidelines that say it is “inappropriate” to pay a woman more than $10,000 for her eggs. The women say the $10,000 limit amounts to illegal price-fixing, and point out that there is no price restriction on the sale of human sperm. A federal judge has certified the claim as a class action, which will most likely go to trial next year.
...
"While many other countries limit egg donation and the compensation that is allowed, egg donation is essentially unregulated in the United States. But in 2000, the American Society for Reproductive Medicine established the guidelines for how much women should be paid. They say that compensation over $5,000 requires “justification,” and that more than $10,000 is “beyond what is appropriate.” The amounts have never been adjusted.
The society argues that capping the price ensures that low-income young women are not drawn to donate by a huge payout without considering how it may affect their lives.
“If the compensation became too high, there is a concern that it might be incentive for donors to lie about their medical history,” said Tripp Monts, a lawyer representing the society. “And it could induce young women to donate without thinking too far down the road.”

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

“Coping with difficult decisions: An Experimental Economics perspective” in Dusseldorf

I'm arriving in Dusseldorf today, for a workshop marking the end of a years-long project originally organized by Reinhard Selten:

Closing workshop of the Academy Research Center
“Rationality in the Light of Experimental Economics”

Coping with difficult decisions: An Experimental Economics perspective
Part I: Mini-School on complex experiments

10:00 – 11:00    Introductory lecture on complex experiments
Sabine Pittnauer (Univ. Bonn): Procedural rationality in complex decision problems

11:00 – 12:00   Presentations by young researchers (Part I)
Sven Nolte (Finance Center Muenster): An Experimental Analysis of Annuity Aversion
David Schindler (Univ. Munich LMU): Risk, Time Pressure, & Selection Effects
Ori Plonsky (Technion): Reliance on small samples, the wavy recency effect and similarity-based learning
Annika Herr (Univ. Düsseldorf): Organ donation in the lab: Preferences and votes on the priority rule

12:00 – 12:30 Coffee Break

12:30 – 13:30     Presentations by young researchers (Part II)
Josue Ortega (Univ. Glasgow): Rational Inattention in Online Dating
Katharina Momsen (Univ. Mannheim): Buying Goods of Unknown Value - An Experiment
Efrat Aharonov (Technion): On the imitation of mistakes
Volker Benndorf (Univ. Düsseldorf): Voluntary Disclosure of Information and Unraveling

13:30 – 15:00     Lunch research seminars
Group Prof. Ido Erev
Mira Fischer (Univ Köln): Investment in Learning and Beliefs about Knowledge and Talent: Experimental Evidence on the Effects of Two Dimensions of Confidence
Stephan Germer (Univ. Hannover): tba
Claudia Möllers (Univ. Düsseldorf): tba
Anja Rey (Univ. Düsseldorf): Representing and Solving Hedonic Games with Ordinal Preferences and Thresholds
Rebecca Schmitt (TU Kaiserslautern): Bridging the Attitude-Preference-Gap: A Cognitive Approach To Preference Formation
Nadja Wolf (Univ. Hannover): Mental Accounting in Tax Evasion Decisions – An Experiment on Underreporting and Overdeducting
Group Prof. Uri Gneezy
Anna Brandt (Univ Bern):  Personality correlates of willingness to compete
Marianne Carson (Royal Veterinary College): Behavioural adaptations of poultry production stakeholders to disease outbreaks and different control policies in Bangladesh
Henning Cordes (Finance Center Muenster): Perceiving the Real Value: How Inflation Communication Affects the Attractiveness of Delayed Consumption
Judith Schneider (Finance Center Muenster): tba
Lisa Spantig (Univ. Munich LMU): High-Stakes Non-Monetary Decision under Risk
Valentin Wagner (Univ. Düsseldorf): Shying Away from Demanding Tasks? Experimental Evidence
on Gender Differences in Multiple-Choice Tests

15:00 – 16:00     Poster session

Part II: Plenary talks and panel discussion on coping with difficult decisions
16:00 – 16:15     Welcome address
16:15 – 17:00     Professor Uri Gneezy: Lying Costs and Incentives
17:00 – 17:45     Professor Ido Erev: On maximization, complexity, and the effect of economic incentives
17:45 – 18:15     Coffee break
18:15 – 19:00     Professor Alvin E. Roth: Repugnant transactions and forbidden markets
19:00 – 20:00     Panel discussion: “Coping with difficult decisions: What do we know about how difficult decisions are made and how they can be improved?”
                              Moderation by Professor Martin Weber

20:00                    Closing remarks and supper

Monday, October 19, 2015

A blizzard of short videos from UBS Nobel Perspectives--from a set of interviews conducted over two days at Stanford

UBS has commissioned a series of interviews about Nobel laureates. A film crew spent two days at Stanford interviewing me, my wife Emilie, and some of my students and colleagues (Mike Ostrovsky, Muriel Niederle, Sandro Ambuehl, Paul Milgrom), and they then conducted some interviews elsewhere also (of Tim Harford and Paul Donovan). You can see a collection of resulting videos at their site here:

How do we make matches that last? Alvin E. Roth, Nobel Laureate, 2012

The longest video is this one, 8 minutes, in which a number of people appear:




A less organized list of the collection of videos is below:




    Alvin E. Roth meets his hero - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=uUNIwT0i498
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    ... Shapley is one of the giants of game theory - meeting him was an impressive moment for me.' Nobel-Prize ...

    The rules of the market - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives ...

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=V-jviWNBs1M
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    Markets don't operate in a vacuum, they need rules to function properly. Watch Nobel-Prize winner in ...

    Alvin E. Roth finally gets a high school diploma - Nobel ...

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=jviVUC4MkhU
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    Alvin E. Roth might be a Nobel Laureate, but he never graduated from high school. At least now he has an ...

    Alvin E. Roth - his life and work - Nobel Perspectives ...

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=yc7sPyQyZm0
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    'The magic of markets doesn't happen by magic', says Roth. In other words, for people to come together ...

    Matching kidney donors with recipients - Alvin E. Roth ...

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9OYmUnecfU
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    Alivin E. Roth had already come up with a way to match doctors with jobs in hospitals and children with places ...

    Game theory - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=drIMO_Ud6X8
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    Game theory is a kind of mathematics that lets us model the rules of the game. But what happens when people ...

    Market design - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=1AEUAwa_fmg
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    ... we make are situated in a big world. Nobel-Prize winner in Economic Science Alvin E. Roth talks market ...

    Match-making - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=nsIAtndNc5Q
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    God created the world in six days, but what has he been doing since then? He's been making matches. Watch ...

    Experiments - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives - YouTube

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=6LWn91wvjrY
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    ... can economic theory be applied to help us solve problems in the British health service? Watch Nobel-Prize ...

    Human interaction - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives ...

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=YF9Ib0WlBaE
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    'People talk all the time, we transact, we compete. Market design is about understanding and facilitating that ...

    Building bridges - Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives ...

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=yTSUjWq79zQ
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    'We've learned to build bridges better, and that's also the case with markets' Watch Nobel Laureate Alvin ...

    Paul Donovan on Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perspectives ...

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=5cK668w5HOs
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    UBS Global Economist Paul Donovan explains the allure ofAlvin E. Roth's approach to game theory, and ...

    Tim Harford on Alvin E. Roth - Nobel Perpectives - YouTube

    www.youtube.com/watch?v=fVFCGLYmyZE
    9 hours ago - Uploaded by UBS
    The Financial Times columnist and author of The Undercover Economist explains how Alvin E. Roth's ...