An Alliance for Paired Donation reception: "Business Attire"

I got the following invitation by email: I assume that the photograph is to illustrate what is meant by "Business Attire" (so surgeouns won't come in scrubs...)

Join us in honoring our esteemed colleague,   Alvin Roth, PhD,   winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economics During the ATC Meeting Saturday Evening, May 18th in the Willow Room At the Sheraton Seattle Hotel 1400 Sixth Avenue, Seattle, WA 98101 Time: 6:00 - 8:00 p.m. Business Attire Please RSVP By May 7th 2013 to reserve your seat l-r, Alvin Roth, PhD, with King Carl Gustaf XVI of Sweden at the Nobel Prize Ceremony

.Among Dr. Roth's achievements, the Nobel Prize Committee cited his work with the Alliance for Paired Donation (APD) in developing the algorithms that are used in the APD and other kidney paired exchange programs. After drinks and  hors d'hoeuvres, there will be a short presentation by Dr. Roth and  by Dr. Alan Leichtman, co-investigator of the Alliance for Paired Donation's Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ) sponsored study to propose a standard acquisition cost (SAC) for kidney donors who donate through the mechanism of kidney paired donation.

Art and Economics in Fresno

I received the following, unusual email:

I am writing to let you know about my exhibition "ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS?" at the Fresno Art Museum. 

It is roughly based on your research in matching theory.

Thank you for the inspiration,

Sonya Rapoport

ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS? is an interactive artwork that updates the Pattern and Design (P&D) art pieces that I created  from 1966 to 1968. I had painted iconic abstractions directly onto kitchy patterned linen from closeout sales. The results became my Funky P&D artwork.

Upon learning about the 2012 Nobel Prize in Economic Science for Marketing Design and Matching Theory, I was inspired to update the P&D work according to the research of its winners, Alvin Roth and Lloyd Shapley. 

ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS? pays tribute to Marketing as Andy Warhol's work pays tribute to Celebrity. The updated P&D work consists of ten stable images composed of a black and white, 8 x 10" glossy photograph of a 60's P&D painting placed on a New York Times Advertisement. I titled each of these ten stable art works with an unstable media headline, such as "Find Your Magic." The titles are "unstable" because I invite viewers to reassign the titles to a "stable" image of their choice. I track the results in a Matching Theory algorithm.

The work of Nobel laureates Roth and Shapley seeks to optimize how people, such as medical students and job applicants, and institutions, like residency programs and companies, find and select each other in order to create stable matches.

ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS? demonstrates both restricted and unrestricted mechanisms for matching. I organized data-gathering events in which groups of ten participants picked one "unstable" title and matched it with one "stable" composite image. I then removed this newly named work, leaving only nine titles for re-matching with the nine remaining composite images. This restricted mechanism of matching continued until all titles were assigned to a composite image. During the exhibition at the Fresno Art Museum, participants will engage in the unrestricted mechanism of matching any title to any composite image, previously selected or not.

In ImPOSSIBLE CONVERSATIONS? I try to merge art with economic science. By encouraging people to interact with my composite artworks, I created a simplistic model of the Marketing Design and Matching Theory to demonstrate the difference between the restricted and unrestricted selections.

Donate Life California solicits living kidney donors

Donate Life California Launches Living Donation California

"SACRAMENTO, Calif., May 14, 2013 – Living Donation California launched today as a first-of-its-kind, state-authorized information and referral service to inspire and inform people to be altruistic living kidney donors. Through its website, www.LivingDonationCalifornia.org, the free service provides information about living kidney donation and refers potentially eligible individuals for evaluation at a transplant center.

“There is a national shortage of kidneys available for transplant, and the need is especially acute in the State of California. By encouraging people to be altruistic kidney donors, Living Donation California gives hope to the thousands of transplant-eligible Californians who spend years on dialysis – years they could be spending more time with family, working and living healthy, active lives,” said Lisa Stocks, Board President of Donate Life California, administrators of the state’s organ and tissue donor registry who together with fifteen kidney transplant programs developed the Living Donation California initiative.

In California, kidney transplant candidates wait up to ten years, and for many patients twice as long as the national average, for a kidney transplant from a deceased donor. Circumstances allowing for organ recovery at the time of death are a rare (less than one percent) occurrence, so the state’s transplant community is focused on increasing living donation to help the large and growing number of Californians in need of kidney transplants.

The vast majority of living kidney donors are family or close friends of their recipients. A small but growing percentage are altruistic donors who offer the gift of a kidney without expectation of receiving anything in return. Federal law prohibits buying and selling organs for transplant, although in some cases living organ donors may be reimbursed for travel and other expenses incurred during the donation process. However, altruistic donors commonly feel greatly empowered by their choice to donate a kidney."

14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce June 16-20, The University of Pennsylvania

Here, from David Parkes is the call for participation in the EC conference at Penn in June. Note the deadlines of May 24 for hotels and May 28 for registration.  It looks like market design will be well represented, including two tutorials called just that by Utku Unver and Tayfun Sonmez.  I'll speak about developments in kidney exchange:

Kidney Exchange: where we’ve been and where we can go from here

Abstract: I’ll give an overview of the growth of kidney exchange and of the computational, economic, and behavioral issues that arise.  Kidney exchange has grown into an enterprise involving many hospitals and overlapping exchange networks, and in the process the set of strategic players has changed, and so has the patient pool. I’ll discuss how the market design has evolved to keep pace with these changes, and further challenges that remain, for the medical community, for economists, and for computer scientists.

MONDAY, MAY 6, 2013

from David Parkes: Final Call for Participation:: 14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce June 16-20, The University of Pennsylvania

FINAL CALL FOR PARTICIPATION

14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13>
June 16-20, 2013 Philadelphia, PA

Early registration deadline: May 28
Hotel cut-off: May 24 

Since 1999 the ACM Special Interest Group on Electronic Commerce (SIGecom)
has sponsored the leading scientific conference on advances in theory,
systems, and applications at the interface of economics and computation,
including applications to electronic commerce.

The Fourteenth ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce (EC'13) will feature
invited speakers Jon Kleinberg and Alvin Roth, paper presentations,
workshops, and tutorials.

The conference will be held from Sunday, June 16, 2013 through Thursday,
June 20, 2013 at the University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA.

Accepted technical papers and invited talks will be presented from June 18
through June 20; tutorials and workshops will be held on June 16 and June
17. Accepted papers will be available in the form in which they are
published in the ACM Digital Library one week before the conference.

Registration <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/registration.html> is now open
with early registration period ending May 28, and the reduced rate for the
conference hotel <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/conferencehotel.html> is
available until May 24, 2013.

Program outline:

14th ACM Conference on Electronic Commerce: June 18-20, 2013

Detailed program will be announced shortly. List of Accepted Papers is
announced.

Program will include a poster session on the evening of June 18th. See
http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/callforposters.html for the call for posters
due on May 10th.

Keynote speakers are

Alvin Roth (Stanford): Kidney Exchange: Where We've Been and Where We Can
Go From Here

Jon Kleinberg (Cornell): Cascading Behavior in Social and Economic
Networks

Workshops <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/schedule_workshops.html> and
Tutorials <http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/schedule_tutorials.html> are held
Sunday June 16th and Monday June 17th.

Workshops
http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/schedule_workshops.html:

The 3rd Workshop on Social Computing and User Generated Content
Organizers: Yiling Chen (Harvard) and Arpita Ghosh (Cornell)

Workshop on "he Economics of Privacy"
Organizers : Aaron Roth (UPenn) and Katrina Ligett (Cal Tech)

The 9th Ad Auction Workshop
Organizers: Ashish Goel (Stanford), Michal Feldman (Hebrew University),
Ian Kash (Microsoft) and Neel Sundaresan (eBay)

Crowdsourcing and Online Behavioral Experiments
Organizers: Sid Suri (Microsoft Research), Winter Mason (Stevens Institute
of Technology) and Daniel Goldstein (Microsoft Research)

Tutorials
http://www.sigecom.org/ec13/schedule_tutorials.html:

Social Computing and User Generated Content
Presenters: Yiling Chen (Harvard) and Arpita Ghosh (Cornell)

Prior-Robust Optimization
Presenters : Nikhil Devanur (MSR) and Balasubramanian Sivan (U.
Wisconsin-Madison)

Econometrics
Presenter: Bo Cowgill (UC Berkeley)

Market Design I
Presenter: Utku Unver (Boston College)

Market Design II
Presenter: Tayfun Sonmez (Boston College)

Marginal Revolution: Manhattan meets Disney World

Tyler Cowen at MR writes today about this repugnant market, described in the NY Post: Rich Manhattan moms hire handicapped tour guides so kids can cut lines at Disney World

And Minnesota makes 12 (states that have legalized same sex marriage)

As more states legalize same sex marriage, its status as a repugnant transaction isn't yet history. Minnesota's move was hardly bipartisan: Minnesota Senate Clears Way for Same-Sex Marriage

"Gay couples will be permitted to wed in Minnesota starting in August, making it the 12th state to permit same-sex marriage and the first in the Midwest to take such a step outside of a court ruling.

"The State Senate, controlled by Democrats, voted 37 to 30 on Monday to allow same-sex marriages, after approval by the State House last week. Gov. Mark Dayton, also a Democrat, had urged lawmakers to pass the measure and said he would sign the bill on Tuesday afternoon.
...
"Nationally, advocates of same-sex marriage lauded Minnesota’s move, saying it would add momentum to similar efforts elsewhere, including in at least one other Midwestern state, Illinois, which is considering a provision legalizing same-sex marriage. Critics of the Minnesota measure, meanwhile, predicted that the vote on Monday would carry a lasting political price for the state’s Democrats in coming elections. They also said that barring a sweeping ruling by the United States Supreme Court establishing same-sex marriage as a right, other states were not likely to follow Minnesota’s lead in a sudden wave of legislative changes.

"In a way, Monday’s vote was a startling shift in the conversation in this state. For much of 2012, Minnesotans had been debating an amendment to the state Constitution that would have done the opposite — define marriage as between a man and a woman. While 30 states have adopted such provisions, Minnesotans in November rejected the amendment and sent majorities of Democrats to both chambers of the State Legislature, setting off an intense new push to legalize same-sex marriage.
...
"The issue had pitted this state’s most urban area, around the Twin Cities, against rural sections of the state where lawmakers said support was more uncertain. In both chambers, voting fell along largely partisan lines.

In the end, four Republicans in the State House and one in the State Senate voted to allow same-sex marriage, while two House Democrats and three Senate Democrats voted no."

Choices of low achieving students in NYC high school choice

The Institute for Education and Social Policy has a report out on NYC high school choices, and how these differ for high and low achieving students. (I blogged about news reports of this and related studies here.)

The study itself, by Lori Nathanson, Sean Corcoran and Christine Baker-Smith, all of NYU is here:
High School Choice in New York City: A Report on the School Choices and Placements of Low-Achieving Students

Here's the summary of the executive summary:


Key Findings
• Low-achieving students were matched to schools that were lower performing, on average, than
those of all other students.
• These differences in placements were:
- Driven by differences in students’ initial choices—low-achieving students’ first-choice
schools were less selective, lower-performing, and more disadvantaged;
- Not a consequence of low-achieving students being less likely to receive their first
choice—overall, lower-achieving and higher-achieving students were matched to their top
choices at the same rate.
• Both low- and higher-achieving students appear to prefer schools that are close to home. Thus,
differences in students’ choices likely reflect, at least in part, the fact that lower-achieving
students are highly concentrated in poor neighborhoods, where options may be more limited.

Looking back at the first year of New Orleans' One App school choice system

New Orleans families should get their choice list in by the deadline of May 24 (don't wait til the last minute).  In the meantime, the Times-Picayune recaps last year's experience: Ben Franklin Elementary, McMain top OneApp choices for 2013-14

"In their first year in the unified New Orleansschool enrollment system, the five Orleans Parish School Board direct-run schools punched above their weight. Going into the 2013-14 school year, Ben Franklin Elementary was the most popular choice for younger students and McMain was the most popular high school, according to new OneApp data provided to NOLA.com | The Times-Picayune. 

"OneApp, now in its second year, aims tostreamline the school enrollment process in New Orleans' decentralized, two-district system. Families fill out one application and a computer algorithm matches students to open seats, by random lottery plus a few priority factors such as having a sibling in a school or, for the elementary years, geographic catchment area.

"All the schools in the city participate except for OPSB's popular charters and a handful of state-authorized charters that can take students from outside Orleans Parish. TheRecovery School District started the program and continues to lead it."