Compensating kidney donors with charitable contributions--Choi, Gulati and Posner

Organ shortages remain despite the increase in live donation that has accompanied kidney exchange. But it is illegal to pay donors, so there's an ongoing discussion of other ways to induce a greater supply.  Here's a proposal by Choi, Gulati and Posner...

Altruism Exchanges and the Kidney Shortage

Stephen J. Choi 

New York University School of Law

G. Mitu Gulati 

Duke University - School of Law

Eric A. Posner 

University of Chicago - Law School
January 16, 2013

University of Chicago Institute for Law & Economics Olin Research Paper No. 630
NYU Law and Economics Research Paper No. 13-03 
Abstract:      
Not enough kidneys are donated each year to satisfy the demand from patients who need them. Strong moral and legal norms interfere with market-based solutions. To improve the supply of kidneys without violating these norms, we propose legal reforms that would strengthen the incentive to donate based on altruistic motives. We propose that donors be permitted to donate kidneys in exchange for commitments by recipients or their benefactors to engage in charitable activity or to donate funds to charities chosen by donors. And we propose that charities be permitted to create Altruism Exchanges, which would permit large numbers of altruists to make charitable exchanges with each other, including but not limited to kidney donations. Altruism Exchanges would solve two significant problems with the current system of voluntary kidney donations: the risk of default and the lack of liquidity.



 HT: Alexander Berger

My graduation speech to Stanford economics grads, June 16, 2013

On Sunday I got to dress as Harry Potter and give the Stanford economics graduation speech (on matching and graduation) at Stanford's commencement exercises.

Non-directed kidney donation is up in the UK

Altruistic organ donations rise in UK almost three-fold

"The number of living people giving one of their organs to a stranger almost tripled last year in the UK, according to new figures.

The Human Tissue Authority (HTA) approved 104 so-called altruistic organ donations in 2012-13 compared with 38 the previous year."
*******************

Here are the UK statistics, and here is the page for the UK's kidney exchange program: Paired donation matching scheme

Deceased organ donation and solicitation in Israel: video of my talk at the conference in memory of Jean Francois Mertens in Jerusalem

Here's a video of the talk I gave at the Center for Rationality conference in memory of Jean Francois Mertens on June 7 2013.

An unusual blogging distinction, if it were true

Science writer Colin Schultz writing about Why Scientists Shouldn’t Be Afraid of Blogging and Social Media, presents a slide show that makes the following claim:

So this is Market Design. It’s written by Alvin Roth. Alvin stands as being, as far as I know, the only person with a Nobel prize who runs a blog. Alvin, along with Lloyd Shapley, won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences last year, and this was Alvin’s blog post that day.
******************

I would count the Becker-Posner blog in this category too, but I can't tell whether Mr. Schultz overlooked it, or doesn't count it as what he thinks of as a blog...

Are there any others that you know of?

EC 13: ACM conference on Electronic Commerce, in Philadelphia, June 16-20 2013

EC 13, the 14th ACM conference on Electronic Commerce, will be held in Philadelphia, at Penn.

There will be workshops the 16th and 17th, and the conference proper will be the 18-20th. Some of the sessions that may be of particular interest to readers of this blog are Monday June 17 tutorials on market design by Utku Unver from 9-12:30 and by Tayfun Sonmez from 2-5:30, a session on kidney exchange on Wednesday June 19 (chaired by Aaron Roth) from 10:20-11:20, my talk on kidney exchange on Thursday June 20 from 9-10:00, and a session on Matching (chaired by Itai Ashlagi) from 11:40-12:40. There are also a bunch of sessions on mechanism design, with and without money.


 Here's the program (and here are the abstracts):

Tuesday, June 18, 2013
8:45 - 9:00 AM	Keynote Talk I Chair: Eva Tardos
9:00 - 10:00 AM	Cascading Behavior in Social and Economic Networks Jon Kleinberg
10:20 - 11:20 AM	Session 2a: Mechanism Design I Chair: Costis Daskalakis  Prior-Independent Auctions for Risk-Averse Agents Hu Fu, Jason Hartline and Darrell Hoy Prior-free Auctions for Budgeted Agents Nikhil R Devanur, Bach Ha and Jason Hartline On the Ratio of Revenue to Welfare in Single-Parameter Mechanism Design Robert Kleinberg and Yang Yuan
	Session 2b: Prediction Markets Chair: David Pennock  Cost Function Market Makers for Measurable Spaces,  Yiling Chen, Michael Ruberry and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan What You Jointly Know Determines How You Act --- Strategic Interactions in Prediction Markets Xi Alice Gao, Jie Zhang and Yiling Chen An Axiomatic Characterization of Adaptive-Liquidity Market Makers,  Xiaolong Li and Jennifer Wortman Vaughan
11:20 - 11:40 AM	Break
11:40 - 12:40 AM	Session 3a: Multidimensional Mechanism Design Chair: Michal Feldman Multi-parameter Mechanisms with Implicit Payment Computation,  Moshe Babaioff, Robert Kleinberg and Aleksandrs Slivkins Optimal Auctions via the Multiplicative Weight Method Anand Bhalgat, Sreenivas Gollapudi and Kamesh Munagala The Menu-Size Complexity of Auctions Sergiu Hart and Noam Nisan Session 3b: Ad Auctions I Chair: Sébastien Lahaie Real-time Optimization of Personalized Assortments Negin Golrezaei, Hamid Nazerzadeh and Paat Rusmevichientong A Dynamic Axiomatic Approach to First-Price Auctions,  Darrell Hoy, Kamal Jain and Chris Wilkens Competition Among Asymmetric Sellers With Fixed Supply Uriel Feige, Ron Lavi and Moshe Tennenholtz
12:40 - 2:00 PM	Lunch
2:10 - 3:30 PM	Session 4: Online Auctions Chair: Ron Lavi  Ranking and Tradeoffs in Sponsored Search Auctions Ben Roberts, Dinan Gunawardena, Ian Kash and Peter Key Whole-page Optimization and Submodular Welfare Maximization with Online Bidders Nikhil R Devanur, Nitish Korula, Zhiyi Huang, Vahab Mirrokni and Qiqi Yan Peaches, Lemons, and Cookies: Designing Auction Markets with Dispersed Information Ittai Abraham, Susan Athey, Moshe Babaioff and Michael Grubb Auctions for Online Display Advertising Exchanges: Approximations and Design Santiago R. Balseiro, Omar Besbes and Gabriel Y. Weintraub
3:30 - 3:50 PM	Break
3:50 - 4:50 PM	Session 5a: Mechanism Design II Chair: Jason Hartline  Cost-Recovering Bayesian Algorithmic Mechanism Design  Hu Fu, Brendan Lucier, Balasubramanian Sivan and Vasilis Syrgkanis Near-Optimal Multi-Unit Auctions with Ordered Bidders Sayan Bhattacharya, Elias Koutsoupias, Janardhan ,Kulkarni Stefano Leonardi, Tim Roughgarden and Xiaoming Xu Truthfulness and Stochastic Dominance with Monetary Transfers Martin Hoefer, Thomas Kesselhei and Berthold Voecking
	Session 5b: Price of Anarchy and Incentives Chair: Nikhil R. Devanur  Risk Sensitivity of Price of Anarchy under Uncertainty Georgios Piliouras, Evdokia Nikolova and Jeff S. Shamma Improved Bounds on the Price of Stability in Network Cost Sharing Games Euiwoong Lee and Katrina Ligett Sincere and Sophisticated Players in the Envy-free Allocation Problem Rodrigo Velez
4:55 - 6:15 PM	Session 6: Estimation and Forecasting Chair: Michael Wellman  Primary-Market Auctions for Event Tickets: Eliminating the Rents of "Bob the Broker" Eric Budish and Aditya Bhave Measuring the Performance of Large-Scale Combinatorial Auctions: A Structural Estimation Approach Sang Won Kim, Marcelo Olivares and Gabriel Weintraub When Do Noisy Votes Reveal the Truth?  Ioannis Caragiannis Ariel Procaccia and Nisarg Shah A Combinatorial Prediction Market for the U.S. Elections Miroslav Dudik, Sébastien Lahaie, David Pennock and David Rothschild
6:15 - 7:00 PM	Business Meeting
7:00 - 8:30 PM	Poster Session
Wednesday, June 19, 2013
9:00 - 10:00 AM	Session 7: Mechanism Design III Chair: Moshe Babaioff Mechanism Design via Optimal Transport Costis Daskalakis, Alan Deckelbaum and Christos Tzamos Optimal and Near-Optimal Mechanism Design with Interdependent Values Tim Roughgarden and Inbal Talgam-Cohen Truthful Mechanisms for Agents that Value Privacy Yiling Chen, Stephen Chong, Ian Kash, Tal Moran and Salil Vadhan
10:00 - 10:20 AM	Break
10:20 - 11:20 AM	Session 8a: Mechanism Design IV Chair: Robert Kleinberg  Differential Pricing with Inequity Aversion in Social Networks Noga Alon, Yishay Mansour and Moshe Tennenholtz Approximation in Mechanism Design with Interdependent Values Yunan Li Accounting for Price Dependencies in Simultaneous Sealed-Bid Auctions Brandon Mayer, Eric Sodomka, Amy Greenwald and Michael Wellman Session 8b: Kidney Exchange Chair: Aaron Roth Failure-Aware Kidney Exchange John Dickerson, Ariel Procaccia and Tuomas Sandholm Harnessing the Power of Two Crossmatches Avrim Blum, Anupam Gupta, Ariel Procaccia and Ankit Sharma Kidney Exchange in Dynamic Sparse Heterogenous PoolsItai Ashlagi, Patrick Jaillet and Vahideh Manshadi
11:20 - 11:40 AM	Break
11:40 - 12:40 PM	Session 9a: Mechansim Design without Money I Chair: Ariel Procaccia Strategyproof Facility Location for Concave Cost Functions Dimitris Fotakis and Christos Tzamos Strategyproof Facility Location and the Least Squares Objective Yoav Wilf and Michal Feldman Loss Calibrated Methods for Bipartite Rationing Herve Moulin and Jay Sethuraman Session 9b: Public Goods and Networks Chair: Arpita Ghosh A Network Approach to Public Goods Matt Elliott and Ben Golub Empirical Agent Based Models of Cooperation in Public Goods GamesMichael Wunder, Siddharth Suri and Duncan Watts Pricing Public Goods for Private Sale  Michal Feldman, David Kempe, Brendan Lucier and Renato Paes Leme
12:40 - 2:00 PM	Lunch
2:00 - 3:20 PM	Session 10a: Social Networks Chair: Jeff MacKie Mason  Complex Contagion and the Weakness of Long Ties in Social Networks: Revisited Roozbeh Ebrahimi, Golnaz Ghasemiesfeh and Jie Gao Selection and Influence in Cultural Dynamics David Kempe, Jon Kleinberg, Sigal Oren and Aleksandrs Slivkins Incentives, Gamification, and Game Theory: An Economic Approach to Badge Design David Easley and Arpita Ghosh A Markov Chain Approximation to Choice ModelingJose Blanchet, Guillermo Gallego and Vineet Goyal Session 10b: Complexity and Learning Chair: Yishay Mansour  Best-Response Dynamics Out of Sync Roee Engelberg, Alex Fabrikant, Michael Schapira and David Wajc The Empirical Implications of Rank in Bimatrix Games Siddharth Barman, Umang Bhaskar, Federico Echenique and Adam Wierman Learning Equilibria of Games via Payoff QueriesRahul Savani, John Fearnley, Martin Gairing and Paul Goldberg Super-Efficient Rational ProofsPablo Azar and Silvio Micali
3:20 - 3:50 PM	Break
3:50 - 4:50 PM	Session 11: Networks Chair: Jon Kleinberg  Selection Effects in Online Sharing: Consequences for Peer Adoption Sean J Taylor, Eytan Bakshy and Sinan Aral Bertrand Networks Moshe Babaioff, Brendan Lucier and Noam Nisan Potential Games are Necessary to Ensure Pure Nash Equilibria in Cost Sharing Games Ragavendran Gopalakrishnan, Jason Marden and Adam Wierman
6:00 - 10:00 PM	Conference Dinner
Thursday, June 20, 2013
	Keynote Talk II Chair: Preston McAfee
9:00 -10:00 AM	Kidney Exchange: Where We’ve Been and Where We Can Go From Here Alvin E. Roth
10:00 -10:20 AM	Break
10:20 - 11:20 AM	Session 13: Mechanism Design without Money II Chair: Mallesh Pai Unbalanced Random Matching Markets Itai Ashlagi, Yashodhan Kanoria and Jacob Leshno Existence of Stable Matchings in Large Markets with Complementarities Eduardo Azevedo and John Hatfield Mechanism Design for Fair Division Richard Cole, Vasilis Gkatzelis and Gagan Goel
11:20 - 11:40 AM	Break
11:40 - 12:40 AM	Session 14a: Ad Auctions II Chair: Noam Nisan Budget Smoothing for Internet Ad Auctions: A Game Theoretic Approach Denis Charles, Deeparnab Chakrabarty, Max Chickering, Nikhil R Devanur and Lei Wang Revenue Optimization in the Generalized Second-Price Auction David Thompson and Kevin Leyton-Brown Auctions with Unique Equilibria Shuchi Chawla and Jason Hartline Session 14b: Matching Chair: Itai Ashlagi Designing for Diversity in Matching Scott D Kominers and Tayfun Sonmez Two-Sided Matching with Partial Information Baharak Rastegari, Anne Condon, Nicole Immorlica and Kevin Leyton-Brown House Allocation with Indifferences: A Generalization and a Unified View Daniela Saban and Jay Sethuraman
12:40 - 2:00 PM	Lunch
2:10 - 3:30 PM	Session 15a: Crowd Sourcing in networks Chair: Jenn Wortman Vaughan Sybil-proof Mechanisms in Query Incentive Networks Wei Chen, Wang Yajun, Dongxiao Yu and Li Zhang On Discrete Preferences and CoordinationFlavio Chierichetti, Jon Kleinberg and Sigal Oren Incentivizing Participation in Online Forums for Education Arpita Ghosh and Jon Kleinberg Privacy and Coordination: Computing on Databases with Endogenous Participation Arpita Ghosh and Katrina Ligett Session 15b: Online experience Chair: Siddharth Suri Pick Your Poison: Pricing and Inventories at Unlicensed Online Pharmacies Nektarios Leontiadis, Tyler Moore and Nicolas Christin Down-to-the-Minute Effects of Super Bowl Advertising on Online Search Behavior Randall A Lewis and David Reiley Optimizing Password Composition Policies Jeremiah M Blocki, Saranga Komanduri, Ariel Procaccia and Or Sheffet Latency Arbitrage, Market Fragmentation, and Efficiency: A Two-Market Model Elaine Wah and Michael Wellman
3:30 - 3:50 PM	Break
3:50 - 4:50 PM	Session 16: Information and Networks Chair: Nicole Immorlica Robust Incentives for Information Acquisition,  Gabriel Carroll Social Learning and Aggregate Network Uncertainty Ilan Lobel and Evan Sadler Implementing the "Wisdom of the Crowd" Ilan Kremer, Yishay Mansour and Motty Perry
4:50 PM	End

Is the set of stable matchings generically small? Ashlagi, Kanoria and Leshno on large random marriage markets

Suppose you have a matching market with two kinds of players, say each player of one kind owns a single left shoe and the other kind each owns a single right shoe, and they can earn $1 by assembling a pair of shoes.  Then if there are more left shoe owners than right shoe owners, the core of the game will give $1 to every right shoe owner and $0 to every left shoe owner. (Here's an old  experiment on such a game.)

The situation is very much less clear if the game isn't played for money, and if the players are not all identical. But in a surprising result, Itai Ashlagi, Yash Kanoria and Jacob Leshno have shown that in a two sided marriage model (in which each man has preferences over all the women and each women over all the men, so agents aren't at all identical), then even a slight imbalance in the sizes of the two sides of the market makes the set of stable matchings very small: Unbalanced random matching markets, by Itai Ashlagi, Yashodhan Kanoria, and Jacob D. Leshno.

"Abstract: We analyze large random matching markets with unequal numbers of men and women. We fi nd that being on the short side of the market confers a large advantage. For each agent, assign

a rank of 1 to the agent's most preferred partner, a rank of 2 to the next most preferred partner

and so forth. If there are n men and n + 1 women then, we show that with high probability, in

any stable matching, the men's average rank of their wives is no more than 3 logn, whereas the

women's average rank of their husbands is at least n/(3 logn). If there are n men and (1 +lamda )n

women for lamda> 0 then, with high probability, in any stable matching the men's average rank of

wives is O(1), whereas the women's average rank of husbands is Omega(n). Simulations show that

our results hold even for small markets."

We already knew that large matching markets have small sets of stable matchings when preference lists are short. This result suggests that small sets of stable matchings may arise for quite different reasons.