Alvin Roth · Philosophy & Social Sciences
Theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design
1951, New York City, United States
United States
Alvin Roth is recognized among Jewish contributors to Philosophy & Social Sciences — Theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design
Origins and early life
Alvin Eliot Roth was born in Queens, New York, on 18 December 1951, to Ernest and Lillian Roth, both public high-school teachers and both Jewish.
Work and career
He followed his brother into Columbia University's Saturday science programme for schoolchildren, and entered Columbia's engineering school in the autumn of 1968, aged sixteen and without a high-school diploma. His field became market design — the study of markets where price cannot do the allocating, because what is being matched is people. Medical residents and hospitals, children and public schools, and above all patients needing a kidney and donors who are willing but incompatible: Roth built the exchange that lets incompatible pairs swap donors, sometimes in chains of many people at once, so that transplants happen which otherwise could not.
The mechanism is now used by kidney exchange programmes and by school districts. He is professor of economics at Stanford and emeritus at Harvard, and was president of the American Economic Association in 2017. He shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012 with Lloyd Shapley, for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design.
Verify and go deeper with these external references.
Source: Jinfo.org / Nobel Prize Economics 2012
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Theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design
Source: Jinfo.org / Nobel Prize Economics 2012
