Showing posts with label podcast. Show all posts
Showing posts with label podcast. Show all posts

Thursday, February 8, 2024

Morally contested markets on NPR's Planet Money (including kidneys, revenge and insider trading)

 The NPR show Planet Money discusses kidney sales, revenge, and insider trading. The hosts are enthusiastic about at least thinking about all of these.* 

They start with a discussion of organ transplants, and in the first 9 minutes of the show you can hear some parts of an interview with me, discussing tradeoffs (and possible titles for a book I'm working on).  Then they talk to Siri Isaksson about retaliation, and after that to Chester Spatt about insider trading.

 

They write:

"There are tons of markets that don't exist because people just don't want to allow a market — for whatever reason, people feel icky about putting a price on something. For example: Surrogacy is a legal industry in parts of the United States, but not in much of the rest of the world. Assisted end-of-life is a legal medical transaction in some states, but is illegal in others.

"When we have those knee-jerk reactions and our gut repels us from considering something apparently icky, economics asks us to look a little more closely.

"Today on the show, we have three recommendations of things that may feel kinda wrong but economics suggests may actually be the better way. First: Could the matching process of organ donation be more efficient if people could buy and sell organs? Then: should women seek revenge more often in the workplace? And finally, what if insider trading is actually useful?"

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*In their enthusiasm, they mis-state how few kidney exchanges were done before my colleagues and I got involved. (There weren't many, but more than two...)

As it happens, earlier this week I blogged about another interview, in the NYT, by Peter Coy (in print, not audio) that focused on kidney exchange:

Tuesday, February 6, 2024

Update (5pm): now I see that on the Planet Money site there's a transcript.  Here's the part that I participated in:

SYLVIE DOUGLIS, BYLINE: This is PLANET MONEY from NPR.

(SOUNDBITE OF COIN SPINNING)

MARY CHILDS, HOST:

A couple decades ago, Al Roth was working on solving this problem - people who needed kidneys weren't getting matched effectively with people who had kidneys to donate.

AL ROTH: Part of the kind of work I do is called matching theory.

GREG ROSALSKY, HOST:

Al helped create this, like, beautiful, elegant algorithm that would match kidney donors with recipients.

CHILDS: You obviously won a pretty big prize for this work.

ROTH: I did. I recommend it.

CHILDS: OK. Yeah (laughter). You like the prize. It's a good prize.

ROTH: Yeah.

CHILDS: That's good to know.

ROTH: A week long of parties.

CHILDS: The prize he won? - it was the Nobel Prize in economics.

ROSALSKY: As you might know, Al's matching work vastly improved the way people get kidneys and saved literally thousands of lives. Like, in the year 2000, before Al's work, there were only two paired kidney transplants - two. Thanks to Al's algorithm, there are now about a thousand per year.

CHILDS: But, Al says, his Nobel Prize-winning algorithm - it isn't even the best way to get people kidneys. Technically, he says, the best way is to grow kidneys in a lab, so it's not even the second-best way.

I'm just envisioning you doing all this matching work knowing that this is, like, a little goofy. Like...

ROTH: Oh.

CHILDS: ...There's a easier way.

ROTH: I hope it's a lot goofy...

CHILDS: (Laughter).

ROTH: ...The work I'm doing, anyway.

CHILDS: (Laughter).

ROTH: No, no. That's right. So could we figure out a way to have more donors to have fewer deaths? I bet we could.

ROSALSKY: OK, so there is a much easier, more efficient way to get people kidneys. It's the way people get most things - with money. Like, what if we could just buy and sell organs?

ROTH: Oh, we'd have a lot more organs. That's how we get most of our stuff. There's a famous passage quoted from Adam Smith, which I'm going to paraphrase, but it says something like, it's not through the generosity of the butcher and the baker that you get your food. You buy it from them. It's how they - that's how they sustain their families - is by selling you food. And that's how you get food, and that's why there's enough food.

CHILDS: Right. The kidney market already has supply and demand. It just doesn't have prices to balance them because buying and selling kidneys is illegal in basically the entire world. So here we are. We don't have enough kidneys. We desperately need more, and yet, we refuse to pay more than $0 for them.

ROSALSKY: And as Al saw while working on kidneys, people had moral objections to the idea of paying for organs. They had concerns that just didn't really make sense to him as an economist.

ROTH: But when I started to look, it turns out there are lots of markets like that.

CHILDS: Lots of markets where people just don't want to allow a market. They feel icky about putting a price on something. Al has a list - for example, surrogacy - a legal and flourishing industry in much of the U.S., not in much of the rest of the world; assisted end of life - perfectly fine medical transaction in Oregon, illegal where I am in Virginia.

ROSALSKY: Al is actually working on a book about all of this.

ROTH: Its working title is "Repugnant Transactions And Controversial Markets." And the idea is that sometimes economists have perfectly good ideas that other people don't think are perfectly good.

ROSALSKY: Al has sort of made his own little subdiscipline in economics about this.

ROTH: "Ickonomics" (ph), "Yuckonomics" (ph) - you know, I trade in book titles. I'm open to suggestions.

CHILDS: You can email Al with your book title suggestions, though honestly, that's kind of hard to beat. In the meantime, when we have those knee-jerk reactions and our gut repels us from considering the icky thing, economics would like to humbly submit that maybe we should.

(SOUNDBITE OF JORDACHE V. GRANT AND SKINNY WILLIAMS' "OLDER HEADS")

CHILDS: Hello, and welcome to PLANET MONEY. I'm Mary Childs.

ROSALSKY: And I'm Greg Rosalsky. Today on the show, we apply an elegant economic framework to Al's market, the trading of human organs, to whether or not we should exact revenge on our enemies, and to whether or not we should trade on inside information.

(SOUNDBITE OF JORDACHE V. GRANT AND SKINNY WILLIAMS' "OLDER HEADS")

CHILDS: When we face difficult situations that don't have an absolutely clear right answer, economist Al Roth says borrowing tools from economics can be useful.

ROTH: Economists deal in trade-offs, and one of the things about trade-offs is you have to say to yourself, supposing there's something we really don't like, what will happen if we ban it? And if the answer is it won't go away, but it'll go underground or become criminalized or become very irregular, then you might prefer to regulate it rather than ban it.

ROSALSKY: And there are real problems with banning things. For example, remember that time we tried to ban alcohol, like, in the 1920s and 1930s?

ROTH: We discovered that it gave rise to a big criminal economy and didn't completely wipe out alcohol at all. So we legalized it. And the legal market for alcohol, with all its problems, is a lot nicer in many ways, a lot more socially useful than the criminal market - you know, Al Capone and the Saint Valentine's Day massacre and, you know, Eliot Ness.

CHILDS: Alcohol, as you may know, is legal today. Selling kidneys - no, not legal - with kidneys, we are in our Prohibition era.

ROTH: There is a black market for kidneys. And often it's pretty terrible because the almost-universal laws against compensating kidney donors have driven that market underground. And what underground often means is out of the hospitals and into hotel suites and apartments...

CHILDS: Eugh (ph).

ROTH: ...And - yes, so medically very bad, as well as, you know, not just illegal but dealing with criminals - medically very bad, bad for the donors, bad for the recipients.

CHILDS: And that's what we have today. That's the market we have chosen. We have the black market with money and the legal market with no money.

ROSALSKY: So Al has been thinking about solutions to this. Like, what can we do realistically to incentivize more kidney donations? How else could we go about creating a market for kidneys to be, as Al likes to put it, more generous to kidney donors?

CHILDS: And when Al thinks about how to design a market, he prioritizes investigating what exactly it is that we're objecting to so he can build a market that fixes or avoids those problems. And in the case of kidneys...

ROTH: There are metaphysical objections. You know, it's just wrong. But the objections that seem to touch on the world seem to say that you can't do this without exploiting poor people because poor people are so vulnerable that just offering them money takes away their agency.

CHILDS: The first reaction is just a gut reaction, which doesn't help inform Al on design. The second reaction is that money can be coercive, that if people have no money and you offer them money to participate in a study, they might have to do the study, especially if you offer a huge amount, like a life-changing amount of money. It's just too compelling. They wouldn't have a choice.

ROSALSKY: This argument does strike Al as unreasonable.

ROTH: There's lots of jobs that we pay people to do because otherwise no one would do them. And you can earn a decent living being a meatpacker. But that's one of the things that bothers people. They say, why should we allow a market that will be mostly - most of the participants will be in the lower parts of the income range? And of course, that isn't very sympathetic to people who are lower income, right? In other words...

CHILDS: Right.

ROTH: ...We need jobs that people with lower income can get. That's why they have some income - is that there are jobs.

CHILDS: Luckily, there is a really obvious, easy solution to this objection - just solve poverty.

ROTH: There'd be a lot less repugnance to monetary transactions if there was no income inequality.

CHILDS: (Laughter).

ROTH: If you wanted to sell me your kidney, but we all had the same income and the same prospects, it just might not be a big thing.

CHILDS: OK, failing that, Al mentioned another way to create a kidney market, a way to get kidneys only from people who aren't that poor - a tax break.

ROTH: People who are wealthy enough to benefit from tax credits on income tax aren't the poorest of the poor. So it might be that the way to start paying kidney donors is to say, we will give you a tax break on everything after the first $10 million of income in the year that you - you know, and then only hedge fund managers would donate kidneys, and that would be repugnant.

CHILDS: But there's a twisted logic to it because at least they could - like, should something go awry in the surgery or in the...

ROTH: Yeah, they'd be fine. They'd be fine. Yeah.

ROSALSKY: Perfect. Like, now we have a few ideas of how to make this happen without paying people for kidneys. We could resolve income inequality, or we could just, you know, do a tax credit and receive only hedge fund manager kidneys. And - right? - there's something a little goofy about all this because these solutions are trying to account for objections that are just hard to design around 'cause those objections are at least partly stemming from some messy human feeling or intuition that just won't let us exchange things in the normal way.

CHILDS: So do you think there'll ever be a U.S. market for kidneys?

ROTH: Well, I think we're not doing a good job yet and that we ought to find a way to be more generous to donors so that we have more of them.

CHILDS: And what that looks like - you're open to suggestion?

ROTH: I'm open to suggestions.

Thursday, July 13, 2023

Laurie Lee interviews me about kidney exchange, repugnance, and more (podcast)

 Laurie Lee interviews me in her podcast Donor Diaries.

https://www.buzzsprout.com/1748941/13094958?t=35 (You don’t have to log in; just click on “Listen Now”.)

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Here is her written description:

"Exchanging kidneys is a complicated process that involves multiple collaborations between kidney patients, living donors, transplant centers, insurance companies, airlines and more.  It’s truly remarkable if you stop to think about the number of people and organizations that need to come together to make 1 paired exchange possible.  We only started exchanging kidneys between non-compatible pairs a little over 20 years ago, so it’s a somewhat new process.  Have you ever wondered how this was made possible?

"Meet Nobel Laureate Al Roth who is an economist and Stanford University professor.  Al designs markets.  He’s one of the prominent players who has made kidney exchange possible.  In a nutshell, his work has revolutionized kidney exchange around the world by using economic theory to make kidneys more available.

"In October 2012, Al was the co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Lloyd S. Shapley, for “ the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."

"Al Roth is well known for his application of economics to real world problems.  In this podcast episode we touch a wide range of topics ranging from paired exchanges, prostitution, surrogacy, and more.  All of these markets are examples of repugnant markets.  Kidney Donation can be characterized as a repugnant market, and Al will tell us all about it! 

Links:

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Sorority rush: the paper and the podcast

 Years ago, my late student Sue Mongell and I wrote a paper about sorority rush:

Mongell, Susan, and Alvin E. Roth. "Sorority rush as a two-sided matching mechanism." The American Economic Review (1991): 441-464.
 
Just over 20 years later, you can listen to a short NPR broadcast about it on Planet Money (which leaves out a few of the details;-)

The economics behind sorority rush
October 5, 2022 by WAILIN WONG and ADRIAN MA
8-Minute Listen

"how do new recruits land at their sorority houses?

"The answer lies in a classic economic concept used in contexts ranging from organ donation to New York public high schools. Today, we're exploring matching markets"

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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I've had occasion to blog about Scott:

Friday, February 16, 2018

Sex work, Craigslist, and the law; podcast with Scott Cunningham

Here's a link to an interview with Scott Cunningham, whose work on sex work I've blogged about before. There's a surprising amount of discussion about causal inference and differences in differences. (I always suspected that econometrics was sexy, but this is the first time I’ve heard a podcast about that.)

Wednesday, August 30, 2017

The accidental experiment with legal prostitution in Rhode Island

A scholarly paper and an easy to read-or-listen-to NPR report recount the period in which indoor prostitution was legal in Rhode Island.

Thursday, April 14, 2022

#122 Game Theory and Market Design. "Unsiloed" podcast about Who Gets What and Why

I'm interviewed by Greg La Blanc, on market design generally, using my book Who Gets What and Why as a takeoff point.

  

Friday, February 4, 2022

Kim Krawiec interviews me about repugnance on her podcast Taboo Trades

 Kim Krawiec interviews me on her podcast Taboo Trades:

She writes "Al Roth and I discuss hitmen, drugs, kidneys, paid sex, and other repugnances. We’re joined by co-hosts Madison White and Alex Leseney (both UVA 3Ls), with appearances from UVA 3Ls Thalia Stanberry, Caitlyn Stollings, Jackson Bailey, and Autumn Adams-jack. A good time was had by all!"

The podcast starts with a cold open, drawn from the body of the interview, in which I ask her co-hosts to help me hire a hitman to rub out a negative referee.  But mostly we talk about transactions that have no easily measurable negative externalities, yet that third parties nevertheless object to.


Tuesday, November 16, 2021

Freakonomics MD on deceased donor organs for transplants

 Freakonomics MD has a podcast focusing on the scarcity of deceased donor kidneys for transplant, and why recovered organs are sometimes discarded. They interview (separately) Dr. Sumit Mohan at Columbia, and me. (I was in fact interviewed by Jessica Wapner, not by the narrator, Dr. Bapu Jena, using a fancy microphone which they FedExed to me beforehand and I FedExed back to them afterwards...so my snippets probably sound like me...)

You can listen to it right below, or at the link...

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Why Do So Many Donated Kidneys End Up in the Trash? (Freakonomics, M.D. Ep. 11)

LISTEN NOW:

Every year, thousands of people in the U.S. die while they’re waiting for a new kidney, yet thousands of available organs get thrown away. Bapu talks to a kidney doctor and an economics Nobel laureate about why this happens and how the system could improve.

Follow Freakonomics, M.D. on Apple PodcastsSpotifyStitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Saturday, October 9, 2021

Peter Lorentzen interviews me about market design (podcast)

 Peter Lorentzen interviews me about market design, and my book Who Gets What and Why. (We have an interesting conversation on market design and my career, not closely related to the book...)

"In our interview, we range far beyond the examples from the book to discuss the implications of his work for the design of tech’s market-making “platform” businesses like Airbnb, Amazon, Lyft, or Uber, the challenges he faces when countries or people view some kinds of transactions as “repugnant” or morally unacceptable, and the reasons why San Francisco’s school district (unlike Boston’s or New York’s) chose not to implement the un-gameable school choice plan his team devised for them.

"Host Peter Lorentzen is an Associate Professor in the Department of Economics at the University of San Francisco, where he leads a new digital economy-focused Master's program in Applied Economics."

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