2nd Covenant University – International Conference on African Development Issues – 2015

I'll speak tomorrow in Nigeria, about kidney exchange and the possibilities it might offer for mutual aid between Africa and the U.S. in battling kidney disease, at the 2nd Covenant University – International Conference on African Development Issues – 2015

"Covenant University, in her continued quest for significant local and global impact, established the International Conference of African Development Issues (ICADI) series. ICADI is aimed at creating a unique platform for making innovative contributions towards value enhancement and capacity development of the black man and indeed, the African continent from the Covenant University context.

"As a sequel to the success of the first International Conference on African Development Issues (ICADI) that was held in 2014, we are again motivated to organize the second edition of ICADI between 11 – 13 May 2015 at the African Leadership Development Centre, Covenant University, Ota. The University has secured the commitment of a Nobel Laureate, Prof. Alvin Roth as the Keynote Speaker. Al Roth is a Professor of Operations Research from Stanford University, USA, who has done a lot of groundbreaking research in the areas of game theory and market design with specific applications to healthcare. The conference has also enlisted other notable experts as guest speakers. The conference will feature keynote addresses, panel/roundtable discussions, research and industry track papers as well as presentations, workshops and exhibitions.

   Dates: May 11 – 13, 2015

     Theme: Biotechnology, ICT, Materials and Renewable Energy: Potential Catalyst for African Development

    Sub themes:
Biotechnology and sustainable development in Africa
ICT and developing the knowledge economy in Africa
Climate change and renewable energy solutions for African Development
Material science and engineering for African development
Policy frameworks for technology-oriented development paradigms in Africa
 
 Target Audience: Professionals and executives of agro-allied, pharmaceutical, health, chemical industries, ICT providers, engineering firms, research institutes, governmental agencies, policy makers, investors, researchers, academic institutions etc."

Harvard Magazine celebrates Sendhil Mullainathan

The Science of Scarcity

 “To put it bluntly,” says Mullainathan, “if I made you poor tomorrow, you’d probably start behaving in many of the same ways we associate with poor people.” And just like many poor people, he adds, you’d likely get stuck in the scarcity trap.

Kidneys in British Columbia: a recommendation for presumed consent, and against compensation for donors

Kidney Transplant Summit recommends presumed consent legislation to increase organ donation in BC.

"BURNABY, BC, May 6, 2015 /CNW/ - The Jury at the first-ever BC Kidney Transplant Consensus Summit hosted by The Kidney Foundation has recommended that British Columbia adopt presumed consent legislation, with the appropriate safeguards in place, to increase the number of kidney transplants in this province.

The Jury, chaired by the Hon. Wally Oppal QC, also considered but rejected the idea of offering financial incentives to organ donors. Living organ donors are currently reimbursed for expenses incurred in donating an organ, but not for the kidney itself. "As a society, we do not condone the sale of organs," said Oppal."


HT: Sangram Kadam

Everything for Sale? The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts, at Johns Hopkins, May 7

I'm in Baltimore for the next few days...

The Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics
and the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School present
The 2015 Robert H. Levi Leadership Symposium
and Carey Symposium in Markets and Ethics

	Everything for Sale?The Ethics and Economics of Compensation for Body Parts
	Thursday, May 7, 2015 4:30 p.m. - 6:00 p.m.
	Reception to follow
	Johns Hopkins School of Nursing Alumni Auditorium 525 N. Wolfe Street Baltimore, MD 21205
	Welcome: Ruth Faden Andreas C. Dracopoulos, Director and Philip Franklin Wagley, Professor Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics Bernard T. Ferrari Professor and Dean Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Introduction: Mario Macis Assistant Professor of Economics and Management Johns Hopkins Carey Business School Panelists include: Professor James Childress Professor Michele Goodwin Professor Alvin Roth Professor Debra Satz Moderator: Jeffrey Kahn Robert Henry Levi and Ryda Hecht Levi Professor of Bioethics and Public Policy Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics

Data, big and small

Alex Peysakhovich and Seth Stephens-Davidowitz write in the NYT about  How Not to Drown in Numbers, about how you can't always interpret data in a dataset just by looking at the dataset in isolation...

"So what can big data do to help us make big decisions? One of us, Alex, is a data scientist at Facebook. The other, Seth, is a former data scientist at Google. There is a special sauce necessary to making big data work: surveys and the judgment of humans — two seemingly old-fashioned approaches that we will call small data."

Google buys Timeful from Yoav Shoham and Dan Ariely

Here's Timeful.  Here's Dan. Here's Yoav: This Stanford professor just sold his second startup to Google in less than 5 years.

Here's the Google announcement: Time is on your side—welcoming Timeful to Google
"Today we’re excited to announce that Timeful, Inc. is joining the Google family to help make getting things done in your life even easier. 

The Timeful team has built an impressive system that helps you organize your life by understanding your schedule, habits and needs. You can tell Timeful you want to exercise three times a week or that you need to call the bank by next Tuesday, and their system will make sure you get it done based on an understanding of both your schedule and your priorities. We’re excited about all the ways Timeful’s technology can be applied across products like Inbox, Calendar and beyond, so we can do more of the work for you and let you focus on being creative, having fun and spending time with the people you care about."

Ray Fisman to Boston University

Boston University celebrates their newest senior hire (but the sub-headline in the BU Today story makes you wonder what they think their other economists do:
Economist Raymond Fisman to Join BU Faculty--Known for connecting theory to the real world

"BU’s newest economics professor has garnered a lot of attention for parking tickets. Not tickets Raymond Fisman received himself, but those in his much-cited 2006 study showing that UN diplomats from countries with a reputation for corruption, as well as anti-American sentiment, get more parking tickets than diplomats from countries that are considered less corrupt, like Sweden."

Raymond Fisman will bring an eclectic approach as the first Slater Family Professor in Behavioral Economics. Photo by Leslye Smith

Kidney exchange in the NY Times Magazine

Kidney exchange and public relations sometimes go hand in hand, which isn't a bad thing at all, since the more people who know about kidney exchange, the more transplants will be possible. A modest 6-transplant non-directed donor chain in California has attracted a nice story in this week's NY Times Magazine: The Great American Kidney Swap by By Malia Wollan.

Here's some of what the NY Times article has to say:

"A law-abiding American in need of a kidney has two options. The first is to wait on the national list for an organ donor to die in (or near) a hospital. The second is to find a person willing to donate a kidney to you. More than half the time, such donor-and-recipient pairs are incompatible, because of differences in blood type or the presence, in the donor’s blood, of proteins that might trigger the recipient’s immune system to reject the new kidney. The genius of the computer algorithms driving the kidney chains is that they find the best medical matches — thus increasing the odds of a successful transplant — by decoupling donors from their intended recipients. In the United States, half a dozen of these software programs allow for a kind of barter market for kidneys. This summer, doctors will most likely complete the last two operations in a record-breaking 70-person chain that involved flying donated kidneys on commercial airlines to several hospitals across the country.
...
"Economists call an arrangement like this a matching market. “It is not fundamental to economic theory to assume people are selfish,” Alvin E. Roth, an economist who teaches at Stanford University, told me. Roth won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2012 for his work using game theory to design matching markets, which pair unmatched things in mutually beneficial ways — students with public schools and doctors with hospitals. In such markets, money does not decide who gets what. Instead, these transactions are more akin to elaborate courtships.

"The classic example of a matching market is the college-admissions process. Every year, tens of thousands of students apply to Harvard University. But just because a student wants a spot in the freshman class and can afford tuition does not mean he gets in. Harvard must also want him to attend. In the case of kidney exchange, this matchmaking happens at a microcellular level. White blood cells contain genetic markers, proteins that help our immune systems distinguish between our bodies and foreign invaders. The more closely a transplant recipient’s genetic markers match a donor’s, the more likely the body is to adopt that foreign kidney as its own rather than attacking it."
*********

The average chain length for nondirected donor chains in the U.S. has lately been around 5, The latest longest chain accomplished 34 transplants (so it involved 68 people, donors and recipients).It's possible that that the number of transplants in the chain in this story was limited by the particular, proprietary commercial software that was used. One of the interesting things about kidney exchange is that most of the software is provided for free by the researchers who develop it, and is described in the open scientific literature. The  software used by the UNOS kidney paired donation pilot program is designed by Tuomas Sandholm and his colleagues at CMU, and Itai Ashlagi (at MIT until next year, when he comes to Stanford) and his colleagues have software that is very widely used by kidney exchange networks and large transplant centers, and the latest version of this software was described in January in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

You can download kidney exchange software from Itai's web page: here I've copied his instructions:

Kidney exchange source code. Instructions for how to compile can be found here. An older version in c# can be found here (for both cycles and chains), which also generates patient-donor pairs as well as compatibility matrices. The software finds an allocation that maximizes the number of transplants using cycles and chains each of a different bounded length. CPLEX is needed to use.

Bay Area Behavioral & Experimental Economics Workshop today in Santa Cruz

Here's the program: 2015 Bay Area Behavioral and Experimental Economics Workshop (BABEEW5) Program  May 2nd 2015, UCSC LEEPS Lab, Baskin Plaza.

Interviews in the TSEconomist,

In their March 2015 issue, The TSEconomist, a magazine published by students at the Toulouse School of Economics, interviews Ken Arrow, me, and Josh Lerner, after asking each of us to pose for a picture with a copy of the magazine:

• Nobel Corner: Interview with Kenneth Arrow
• Interview with Alvin Roth
• Interview with Josh Lerner