Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that “plagiarism” farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul—let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances—is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing.

From the wonderful Letters of Note.

how attack advertisements win elections. Political adverts cost millions and they now increasingly focus on the opponents weaknesses through nasty and personal attacks. Drawing on both laboratory experiments and the real world of America’s presidential, and congressional races, the authors shows that negative advertising drives down voter turnout, and the political consultants intentionally use adverts for this purpose. Among the authors conclusions are that negative adverts work better for Republicans than for Democrats, and better for men than for women. Negative adverts also work better than positive ones, so attacking has become nearly universal. The authors also argue that as independent voters are driven away by all this negativity, the voting public is increasingly reduced to partisan extremes.

Any Martian visiting the economics blogosphere, …, could tell you that most of micro is a more or less manageable topic, whereas macro induces economists to start thinking of each other as idiots and fools.

In paired kidney exchanges the transaction involves multiple pairs of patients. Each pair consists of a kidney patient who will receive a kidney, and a donor, typically a family member, who will give one. Each pair is incompatible: because of a blood-type or tissue-type mismatch the patient would reject the donor’s kidney.  The exchange works by creating a cycle of patients and donors who are compatible. For example, patient A’s wife donates her kidney to patient B whose husband donates his kidney back to patient A. Even longer cycles are possible.

As a rule all of  the transplantation operations in any paired exchange are carried out simultaneously and in the same hospital. This acts as a guarantee to each donor that they will give their kidney if and only if their loved one also receives one. If some donor along the cycle becomes ill or gets cold feet, the entire cycle is halted before it begins. Such a guarantee surely makes patients more willing to participate in the exchange but it also limits the size of the cycle since there is a limit to the number of surgeries that any one hospital can support.

Then there are the chain exchanges. Here, without any paired patient to receive a kidney in return, a good samaritan comes forth and offers to donate his kidney to any compatible stranger.  This good samaritan is going to save somebody’s life. And through the power of exchange, possibly many more than just one life. Because instead of just an arbitrary compatible recipient, the kidney can be given to a patient paired with a donor whose kidney is compatible with another patient paired with a donor whose kidney is compatible with…  That is, the good samaritan can activate a long chain of transplants that otherwise could not be completed by paired exchange because the chain of compatibility did not cycle back to its beginning.

The kidney exchange economists noticed a subtle difference between paired and chain exchanges. And based on their observation they convinced doctors to relax the rule on simultaneous surgeries in the case of chain exchanges. The ever-increasing record length chains of kidney transplants are only possible because of this.

Why were doctors willing to do sequential surgeries for chained exchanges while they insisted on simultaneity for paired exchanges? It’s not because they have any less concern that the chain would be broken before all patients receive their promised kidneys. It’s not because extending the size of a cycle is any less of a blessing than extending the length of a chain. The difference that the economists noticed can be boiled down to an esoteric concept known to mechanism designers as individual rationality.  

When a paired exchange cycle is broken because one surgery along the line is not carried out, one patient is necessarily made worse off than he would have been if the exchange had never happened.  Because that patient’s loved one has given her kidney and not only has the patient not received any kidney in return, but his donor no longer has a kidney to give. The patient has lost bargaining power in the kidney exchange market going forward.  The anticipation of this possibility would make patients and donors reluctant to participate in an exchange in the first instance.

By contrast, when the sequence of transplants in a chain is halted, every patient-donor pair who gave their kidney to the next patient downstream in the chain already received one from the previous upstream donor. Yes the patients at the end of the chain do not receive their promised kidneys but they are no worse off than if the chain had never been planned in the first place. Without any threat to individual rationality there is no reason not to extend the chain of surgeries as long as imaginable capitalizing on the original good samaritan’s altruism as much as compatibility allows.

Tayfun Sonmez is here at Northwestern giving a mini-course on market design, here are his lecture slides including a lecture on kidney exchange.

During the last month, have you voluntarily hung out with people who were smoking cigarettes?

Answer this question and more and find out how culturally isolated you are.  The quiz is “is inspired by American Enterprise Institute scholar Charles Murray’s new book, “Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010,” which explores the unprecedented, class-based cultural gap in America. How culturally isolated are you?”

By a vote of 218-208, the House Wednesday night backed an amendment that would bar the NSF from spending any of its 2013 funds on its political science program, which allocated about $11 million in peer-reviewed grants this year. Explaining the amendment on the House floor Wednesday evening, Flake said that given his colleagues’ reluctance to slash the agency’s overall budget — the House defeated his earlier amendment by a vote of 291 to 121 — Congress should ensure, “at the least, that the NSF does not waste taxpayer dollars on a meritless program.”

In hunting for programs that the government should not spend its precious dollars on, Flake said, “I can think of few finer examples to cut than the National Science Foundation’s Political Science Program.”

Here’s a list of apparently less fine examples that will live on:

• Science of Learning Centers
• Science of Science and Innovation Policy
• High Risk Research in Biological Anthropology and Archaeology
• Economics

I can’t believe I hadn’t seen this already. Eddie also has a spiffy new website. His lecture is one in a series for the 20th Anniversary for the IGIER research center at Bocconi University in Milan.

Koellinger didn’t see it that way. Four year later, he is part of a group of young economists saying it’s time for their field to jump into the gene pool with both feet. In a series of papers, including one forthcoming in the Annual Review of Economics and another in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Koellinger, along with a team headed by Cornell economist Daniel Benjamin, David Laibson and Edward Glaeser from Harvard, Union College psychologist Christopher Chabris, Cesarini, and others, is heralding the arrival of a new discipline—“genoeconomics.” They say economists are missing something important by ignoring the genetics underlying things like risk-taking, patience, and generosity. If we could grasp how our genes influenced such economic traits, they argue, the knowledge could be transformative.

I saw David Cesarini last week present an introduction to Genoeconomics. From what I can tell Genoeconomics has made one major contribution already: demonstrating that so far there is no reliable statistical correlation between genes and economic behavior. The picture I got was some kind of Gresham’s law for p-values. Because there are so many genes, there is vast scope for data mining and so journals are insisting on significance levels of 1 – 10^{-some god awful exponent}.

Now check out how nonchalantly this chimpanzee does it.

I didn’t even know they could count. Note that the 5 numbers are random integers between 1 and 9.  So the chimp is processing a binary relation in short-term memory, not to mention reading at a super-human rate. There are more videos here.  I saw these at Colin Camerer’s talk last week at Arthur Robson‘s conference on the Biological Basis of Preferences.