Sunday, December 24, 2023
Kidney exchange as an innovation in organization
Monday, October 30, 2023
Simple Proofs of Important Results in Market Design-- (video of my talk at Berkeley's Simons Institute)
Wednesday, October 11, 2023
Wednesday, September 20, 2023
Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design: SLMath introductory workshop (videos)
Last week I gave the opening talk of the week long Introductory Workshop at SLMath, on Mathematics and Computer Science of Market and Mechanism Design. Some of the video lectures are now online here (consisting mostly of slides and voice).
My talk introduces the general themes of market design by recounting the history and challenges facing the market for new doctors from 1900 through this year.
Berkeley's Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath), formerly known as the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) has a commanding view of the SF Bay.
Tuesday, April 11, 2023
Experiments and market design, video (I'm interviewed by Chiara Spina from INSEAD)
Sunday, October 9, 2022
Public Lecture at Iowa State (video): "Who Gets What and Why? Economists as Engineers."
Iowa State University in Ames Iowa has made available a video of a public lecture I gave there on September 22, called "Who Gets What and Why? Economists as Engineers."
Wednesday, September 21, 2022
Economists as Engineers: Public lecture at Iowa State University tomorrow
I'll be travelling today to Ames Iowa, to give a public lecture tomorrow evening at Iowa State University (and to attend a market design conference there on Friday and Saturday)
Friday, July 15, 2022
The Future of Living Donor Kidney Transplantation (videos)
On May 7, 2022 the University of Chicago hosted a Symposium on "The Future of Living Donor Kidney Transplantation: Evolving National Perspectives in Kidney Transplant "
Philip Held, one of the organizers, has provided the following guide, concluding with a link to an elegant Data Handbook that gives direct access to each talk.
"A Symposium: The Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation
Earlier this year, we presented a virtual
symposium on the Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation. A
primary focus was on the ethics of rewarding organ donors with an opening
presentation by:
· Janet Radcliffe Richards, a philosopher and ethicist from Oxford University.
Other speakers and topics included:
· Nobel Laureate Alvin Roth Ph.D. of Stanford University who laid out the case for paired kidney donation (aka kidney exchange), the only major technical improvement in transplantation in years.
· Frank McCormick, Ph.D. presented recently published (Value in Health) research showing how the government can completely end the kidney shortage and save more than 40,000 kidney failure patients each year from premature death by rewarding living kidney donors.
The Symposium took place on May 7, 2022. It was hosted by John Fung M.D. Ph.D. at the University of Chicago’s Transplantation and Transplant Institute and was funded by the National Kidney Donation Organization (NKDO) and WaitListZero.
This Symposium presented a broad education on the subject of living kidney donation, and indeed was presented for Continuing Medical Education (CME) credits by the University of Chicago.
The audio-visual recording of the entire University of Chicago’s CME symposium is available, for free. Access is extremely easy and one can access any and all presentations with 3 simple clicks starting with 2 clicks here: Data Handbook."
If you prefer you can binge on the sessions in order:
Session 1: The Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation
Session 2: The Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation
Session 3: The Future of Living Kidney Donor Transplantation
My talk, called "Kidney Exchange (and Kidney Controversy)" is the first half hour of the video below of the second of three symposium sessions.
Friday, July 1, 2022
Scott Cunningham's Mixtape Podcast Interview with Alvin Roth
Here's Scott Cunningham's Mixtape Podcast Interview with Alvin Roth... "We discuss Gale and Shapley, Roth and Sotomayor, game theory and more"
You can listen to our conversation at the link above. He drew me out about some things I hadn't thought of in a while, such as my varied relationships with Gale, Shapley and Bob Wilson, and how my ideas about matching markets developed over the course of my career (which started in Operations Research and then morphed into Economics...)
He also reveals the manner in which he was the perfect reader of my 1990 book Two-Sided Matching with Marilda Sotomayor.
His site is multi-media, if you scroll down you'll find a video (the one below in on YouTube), and if you keep scrolling down you'll find an essay he wrote called "Paying it Forward..." which recounts more about what our book meant to him and some of our subsequent interactions over the years. And below that is his Transcript of [our] podcast interview, for those who prefer to read rather than listen or watch.
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Friday, February 16, 2018
Sex work, Craigslist, and the law; podcast with Scott Cunningham
Wednesday, August 30, 2017
The accidental experiment with legal prostitution in Rhode Island
Tuesday, September 14, 2010
Thursday, April 14, 2022
#122 Game Theory and Market Design. "Unsiloed" podcast about Who Gets What and Why
Monday, January 17, 2022
Honoring Milgrom and Wilson at the ASSA meetings in January (video)
The video is at the link, there are four ten minute discussions, followed by brief responses by Paul and Bob.
My discussion of Bob Wilson begins at around 27:20, and my final words to him were "Bob: you saw and demonstrated the future of game theory in economics, earlier and more clearly than anyone else. We’re all lucky to know you."
AEA Nobel Laureate Address Honoring the 2020 Nobel Laureates Paul R. Milgrom (Stanford University) and Robert B. Wilson (Stanford University)
January 8, 2022 at 2:30 PM ET
View Recording
Presiding: Christina D. Romer, University of California-Berkeley
Friday, January 14, 2022
Experimental Economics in the Tradition of John Kagel (video)
In October there was an in-person celebration of John Kagel, which I was delighted to participate in, in Tucson, Arizona. (It was my first in-person conference since the beginning of the Covid pandemic, during a brief window of optimism.) Now it's been posted on YouTube by the hosts, at the Economic Science Lab of the University of Arizona:
My talk was called Experimental Economics in the Tradition of John Kagel, and I began by explaining this photograph, which has John in the middle.
Kagel, John H. and A.E. Roth, "The dynamics of reorganization in matching markets: A laboratory experiment motivated by a natural experiment," Quarterly Journal of Economics, February, 2000, 201-235.
Wednesday, November 24, 2021
Mail order catalogs, downtown department stores, suburban malls, and modern home delivery
Here's a 10 minute video in which I discuss how retail markets have changed over the last century and more, with the invention of mail order catalogs, and the growth of downtown department stores (in part as a result of urban public transportation), and then suburban shopping malls, before our current age of digital commerce and home delivery.
This was my discussion of talks by Rob Townsend and David Autor at the October zoom conference
Tuesday, September 14, 2021
Market design (I talk to the entering Ph.D. class at Escola Nacional de Administração Pública)
Yesterday I gave what I think was the first lecture to the entering class of Ph.D. students at the Escola Nacional de Administração Pública (ENAP) in Brasilia. I spoke about market design, using as my main examples school choice and kidney exchange. Afterwards there was Q&A on a variety of subjects, including black markets and repugnance.
Here's a video (I start to speak around minute 8):
Thursday, September 9, 2021
Kidney exchange, in Microeconomic Insights
The team at Microeconomic Insights has published an easy to read summary of my just published paper with Itai Ashlagi in the September issue of Management Science:
Kidney Exchange: An Operations Perspective
"No country is presently able to supply all the kidney transplants required by its population, and most people with kidney failure will die without receiving a transplant. Kidney exchange is a way to increase the number of transplants by allowing incompatible patient-donor pairs to exchange kidneys. For logistical reasons, early exchanges involved just two patient-donor pairs, but the rise in donors without a particular recipient in mind has enabled long chains of non-simultaneous transplants. However, barriers between kidney exchange programs, both within and across countries, continue to make it difficult to find matches for some patient-donor pairs. Breaking down these barriers will be challenging, but the potential rewards are large—both in terms of lives saved and reduced healthcare costs."
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Here's a link to the original paper:
1. Itai Ashlagi and Alvin E. Roth, “Kidney Exchange: an Operations Perspective,” Management Science, September 2021, Volume 67, Issue 9, September 2021, Pages 5301-5967, iii-iv, https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/mnsc.2020.3954
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Here's a video of a lecture I gave about the paper in June to an INFORMS audience, starting at minute 2:55.
Monday, April 19, 2021
Controversial Markets: Public lecture at the Zurich Center for Market Design (video)
A video of my April 13 lecture on Controversial Markets is now available at the Zurich Center for Market Design. (The talk proper is about an hour, and then includes some Q&A about compensation for donors, among other things, starting at around minute 56.)
Here's a direct link:
Monday, March 15, 2021
Rajk College interviews me and Matt Jackson (pre-pandemic)
Here's an interview that reminds me of the before (Covid) days, when we could go into the office.
It was conducted January 30, 2020 by students from Rajk College in Budapest, who also interviewed Matt Jackson. Along with some more familiar things (what are matching markets?) I got to talk about the relationship of market design to mechanism design, and what I like about being an academic.
Here's the interview with me (11 minutes):
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
School choice under discussion in Vienna (video, in English and German)
On Wednesday I spoke about school choice in Vienna. (Here's the prospectus.)The video is below. (I start speaking around minute 9:30, in English, for 30 minutes, and the subsequent talk and discussion are in German.)
Wednesday, October 21, 2020
Ned Brooks interviews me at the National Kidney Donor Organization virtual conference (video)
For easy access, here's the video of my talk at the National Kidney Donor Organization virtual conference, about which I blogged this morning. We talked about kidney exchange, global kidney exchange, and repugnant transactions...
National Kidney Donor Advocate Conference, on YouTube
Here's an announcement I received from Ned Brooks, the founder of NKDO, National Kidney Donation Organization (formerly Donor to Donor). If I understand correctly, the different talks and interviews will be available at the link after first streaming in conference style, starting at 9am Pacific time. It includes a video of Ned interviewing me.
I'll update this post as necessary.
"This Wednesday, October 21st, NKDO, National Kidney Donation Organization (formerly Donor to Donor) will release the virtual National Kidney Donor Advocate Conference. This event is designed to give volunteer living donor advocates the information they need to be more effective advocates for living donation. Transplant industry experts across the country will be presenting to you and delivering invaluable advice about their area of expertise.
The conference will stream on our YouTube channel beginning at 12:00 noon Eastern this Wednesday. The conference will be in segments and accessed through the “playlist”, either streaming as one event or accessed at different points in the conference. The link is https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsoS-yavRQCVl7bwcjT2iCA , which will go live at noon Eastern on Wednesday.
- Have you ever wondered about the transplant surgeons who do the surgery? What
they are thinking and what they would like you to know? Dr. Joshua Mezrich,
transplant surgeon at UWMadison and author of “When Death Becomes Life: Notes
from a Transplant Surgeon” talks about his experience with organ donors and
recipients.
- Are you a living donor or a transplant recipient, or expecting to be one? Do
you remember the experience of being evaluated at the transplant center and
listening to all the information, and maybe feeling a little overwhelmed?
Living Donor Coordinator Marian Charlton and Patient Coordinator Janet Hiller
are two of the most respected voices in transplant, and they will tell you what
they want you to know to better understand the process. Anyone who goes through
this experience or has a loved one in transplant will want to see these
segments.
- Living kidney donors deserve all protections available, from reimbursement
for out-of-pocket costs and lost wages to medical coverage for medical issues
that may arise months or years after donation. Garet Hil, founder and CEO of
the National Kidney Registry, talks about the suite of protections available to
living donors through Donor Shield.
- Are you a kidney patient in need of a donor? Harvey Mysel, a two-time
kidney recipient and founder and CEO of the Living Kidney Donor Network, talks
about how to have your kidney donor find you.
- Professor Alvin Roth won the Nobel Prize in Economics for his work creating
the algorithms that contributed to the creation of the “kidney chain”, a
development that transformed kidney transplant procedures. Prof. Roth discusseshis work and the business known by the intriguing moniker of “repugnanttransactions.”
- All kidney patients will benefit by watching nephrologist Dr. David Serur
talk about kidney disease and what every kidney patient and advocate needs to
know to be properly informed about how to deal with renal disease.
- Non-directed, or altruistic, donors are a rare breed, though we are trying to
change that. No one knows the brain of the non-directed donor better than
Professor Abigail Marsh, who has been studying non-directed donors for years.
If you want to better understand why someone will happily donate a kidney to a
stranger, this presentation will help answer that question. Prof. Marsh
is the author of “The Fear Factor: How One Emotion Connects Altruists,
Psychopaths, and Everyone In-Between.”
- If you listen to podcasts, you are probably familiar with “Freakonomics”
and its creator, Stephen Dubner. It was the Freakonomics interview with Prof.
Roth that set Donor to Donor and NKDO into motion, and our interview with Mr.
Dubner will interest anyone who understands “the power of the pod”.
- Jim Gleason is a heart transplant recipient and the president of TRIO,
Transplant Recipients International Organization. Mr. Gleason is a motivational
speaker who asks the question, “Are you a cookie monster?”