Alvin E. Roth facts for kids

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Quick facts for kids Alvin Roth
Roth in 2012
Born	Alvin Eliot Roth (1951-12-18) December 18, 1951 (age 73) New York City, New York, U.S.

Institution	Stanford University Harvard University University of Pittsburgh
Field	Game theory, market design, experimental economics
Doctoral advisor	Robert B. Wilson
Doctoral students	Muriel Niederle Georg Weizsäcker Parag Pathak Fuhito Kojima
Contributions	Market design
Awards	Frederick W. Lanchester Prize (1990) Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (2012) Golden Goose Award (2013) Member of the National Academy of Sciences (2013)
Information at IDEAS / RePEc

Alvin Eliot Roth (born December 18, 1951) is an American professor. He teaches economics at Stanford University. He is also a professor emeritus at Harvard University. In 2017, he was the President of the American Economic Association.

Roth has greatly helped the fields of game theory and market design. He is known for using economic ideas to solve "real-world" problems.

In 2012, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He shared the prize with Lloyd Shapley. They won for their work on how to create stable matches in different markets.

About Alvin Roth

Al Roth giving a lecture in 2012

Alvin Roth was born in Queens, New York City. His parents, Ernest and Lillian Roth, were both high school teachers.

Alvin was very smart from a young age. He joined a special science program at Columbia University. He started college at Columbia's engineering school when he was just 16. He did not even finish high school first!

Roth earned his bachelor's degree in 1971. This degree was in Operations Research. He then went to Stanford University. There, he earned his master's degree in 1973 and his PhD in 1974. Both were also in Operations Research.

After Stanford, Roth taught at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. In 1982, he moved to the University of Pittsburgh. He became a professor of economics there. In 1998, Roth joined the faculty at Harvard. He stayed there until 2012, when he returned to Stanford. He became a full professor at Stanford in 2013.

Roth has received many honors. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research. In 2013, Roth, Shapley, and David Gale won a Golden Goose Award. This award was for their work on market design.

How Markets Work

In October 2012, Alvin Roth won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. He shared it with Lloyd Shapley. The prize was for their work on "stable allocations and the practice of market design."

The Nobel committee said that Roth understood how Shapley's ideas could help real markets. Roth studied how different markets worked. He showed that "stability" was key to their success. He also used experiments to prove his ideas.

Roth helped redesign systems for matching people. This included matching new doctors with hospitals. He also helped match students with schools. And he helped match organ donors with patients. These new systems used ideas from the Gale-Shapley algorithm. They also considered special rules and ethical limits.

Designing Better Markets

Roth has made many important contributions to market design. This field helps create rules for how people trade or connect. He has worked on many different areas. These include kidney exchange and school choice. He also worked on matching doctors to jobs.

Roth believes that markets change over time. As conditions change, people's behavior changes too. This means old rules might need to be replaced with new ones.

Roth also writes a popular blog about market design.

Kidney Exchange Programs

Roth did important work on kidney exchange. This is when people who need a kidney can swap donors. For example, if a husband wants to give his wife a kidney but they are not a match, they might find another couple in the same situation. The husband could donate to the other wife, and the other husband could donate to his wife.

Roth and his team found that kidney exchange is like a "one-sided matching" problem. They created ways to make these exchanges work well. They also made sure the system was fair for everyone.

New England Kidney Exchange

Roth helped start the New England Program for Kidney Exchange. This program helps find matches for kidney donors and recipients.

The program often works with two pairs of people. Each donor is not a match for their own partner. But they might be a match for someone in another pair. This allows transplants to happen that otherwise couldn't.

For example, a wife might need a kidney. Her husband wants to donate, but their blood types don't match. Through the exchange, they can find another couple. The husband donates to the other wife, and the other husband donates to his wife.

Because of laws, these surgeries must happen at the same time. This means four operating rooms and four surgical teams working together. In April 2008, a large exchange involving 12 people happened.

Global Kidney Exchange

Roth also helped create the idea of global kidney exchange. This is when kidney exchanges happen between patients from different countries.

This can be very helpful. In richer countries, dialysis (a treatment for kidney failure) is very expensive. A kidney transplant can be cheaper in the long run. Global exchange can use these savings. It helps people in richer countries who need a transplant. It also helps people in poorer countries who need a transplant but can't afford it. The first global exchange happened in 2015.

Roth continues to work on the ethics of these exchanges. He also helps design how they can work in practice. In 2021, a kidney exchange happened between Israel and the UAE. Roth and his team played a big part in it.

School Choice Systems

Roth also helped improve how students are matched to schools. He worked on systems for New York City high schools and Boston primary schools.

New York City Schools

Roth helped design the system for matching New York City students to high schools. Before, students would list their top five schools. Schools could see if they were a student's first choice. This meant students sometimes hid their true preferences.

Roth and his colleagues suggested a new system in 2003. This system was based on the "deferred acceptance algorithm." It made sure students could honestly list their choices. The school board accepted this new method.

Boston Schools

Roth worked on a similar system for Boston's public schools in 2003. The old Boston system gave too much importance to a student's first choice. If a student didn't get their first or second choice, they might not get any school on their list. They would then be assigned to a school with empty spots.

Some parents knew this and tried to work around the system. In 2005, Boston adopted a new system. It was also based on the "deferred acceptance algorithm." This made the process fairer for students.

Matching Doctors to Hospitals

Roth's work also improved the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP). This system matches new medical graduates with hospitals for their training.

In the 1990s, Roth redesigned the matching program. He made it work better, especially for married couples. The new system helps create stable matches. This means doctors and hospitals are happy with their assignments. The NRMP adopted this new system in 1997. It is still used today. Other organizations also use similar matching systems.

Organ Donation Decisions

Roth has studied what makes people decide to donate organs. He looked at how changes in waiting lists and donor registration programs affect donations.

One important idea is that giving priority on waiting lists to those who have registered as donors can increase registrations. Roth also found that giving people more chances to donate and more information can help.

Job Market for Economists

In 2005, the American Economic Association asked Roth to help improve the job market for new economics PhDs. The goal was to make it easier for new graduates to find jobs.

Roth and his team introduced two new tools. First, job seekers can send "signals" to two employers they are very interested in. This helps employers find good candidates. Second, a "scramble website" was created. This helps job seekers still looking for jobs and employers with open positions find each other later in the process.

Studies showed that sending a signal greatly increased the chance of getting an interview. Also, many jobs were filled through the scramble website.

Market Timing

Roth has also studied when transactions happen in markets. He looked at how companies might make job offers very early to get ahead of competitors. He also studied how markets can get crowded when transactions take a long time.

With Axel Ockenfels, Roth studied bidding on eBay. They found that many bids were placed in the very last seconds of an auction. This happened because eBay's design, at the time, encouraged bidders to wait. They showed how this "sniping" could be prevented in auctions that end differently.

"Repugnance" in Markets

Roth introduced the idea of "repugnance" in economics. This is when people dislike certain transactions, even if everyone involved benefits. For example, some people might feel it's wrong to pay someone for a kidney, even if it saves a life.

Roth believes we need to understand this feeling better. It can stop certain markets from forming or working well. He has written a lot about the ethical side of kidney exchange. He also studied how different countries regulate transactions based on this idea of repugnance.

Experiments in Economics

Roth is a pioneer in experimental economics. This field uses experiments to study how people make economic decisions. He started doing this work in the 1970s.

Roth's experiments helped show how real behavior can differ from what economic models predict. He used ideas from psychology and sociology to explain these differences. The Nobel Prize committee noted that Roth showed how experiments can help make economics a better science.

Roth also helped design many standard experiments. He published all his data, which was new at the time. This helped other researchers and led to important discussions in the field.

Bargaining Studies

Roth and his colleagues studied how people bargain. They found that things like how much information people have and how they communicate affect bargaining outcomes. They also saw that fairness plays a role.

Roth also did a study on bargaining in four different countries: Israel, Japan, USA, and the former Yugoslavia. This was one of the first studies to look at cultural differences in economic experiments. They found that in markets, people in all countries behaved similarly.

Learning in Decisions

Roth and Ido Erev showed that simple learning models can predict how people make repeated choices. This includes games and decisions where there is uncertainty.

Market Design Experiments

Roth also used experiments to test market designs. For example, he compared different ways of matching new doctors to jobs. He found that stable matching systems worked better. They helped prevent problems where people would try to get ahead by making early offers.

This research helped the American Gastroenterological Association reintroduce a stable matching system in 2006. Roth has also used experiments to study how law clerks are matched to judges.

Game Theory Contributions

Roth has made many important contributions to game theory. This field studies strategic decision-making. He worked on topics like the Shapley value and matching theory.

Shapley Value

Roth helped explain the Shapley value. This is a way to measure how much each player contributes to a team or group effort. Roth showed that it can be seen as a player's "value" or "utility" in a cooperative situation.

Matching Theory

Roth has made many important contributions to the theory of matching. Here are some examples:

Housing Markets: Roth showed that in markets where people trade things that can't be divided (like houses), there's only one fair way to match buyers and sellers.
Rural Hospital Theorem: This idea states that the same number of positions are filled in all stable matching systems. It also says that the same people get matched. This helped show that changing how the National Resident Matching Program works would not change how many doctors go to rural hospitals.
Fairness in Matching: Roth showed that in some matching systems, it's always best for people to tell the truth about their preferences. However, he also showed that no stable matching system can make telling the truth the best strategy for everyone involved.

Roth also wrote a book with Marilda Sotomayor called Two-Sided Matching: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis. This book brought together a lot of knowledge about matching theory.

Teaching and Mentoring

Roth has taught many economics courses. In the early 2000s, he taught one of the first graduate courses on Market Design. This course brought together ideas about auctions and matching. It helped start the whole field of Market Design.

Over his career, Roth has advised many doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows. Many of his students have become successful researchers. They have won major awards in economics. Roth has also received teaching awards from several universities.

Personal Life

Roth is married to Dr. Emilie Roth. They have two sons. Emilie Roth is a psychologist who studies how people think and solve problems. His older son, Aaron Roth, is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. His younger son, Ben Roth, is a professor at Harvard Business School.

Books by Alvin Roth

Alvin Roth has written many scholarly articles and books. Here are some of his books:

1979. Axiomatic Models of Bargaining.
1985. Game-Theoretic Models of Bargaining (editor).
1987. Laboratory Experimentation in Economics: Six Points of View (editor).
1988. The Shapley Value: Essays in Honor of Lloyd S. Shapley (editor).
1990. Two-Sided Matching: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis. With Marilda Sotomayor.
1995. Handbook of Experimental Economics. Edited with J.H. Kagel.
2001. Game Theory in the Tradition of Bob Wilson. Edited with Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom.
2015. Who Gets What and Why.

Views on Economics

In June 2024, Alvin Roth and 15 other Nobel Prize in Economics winners signed a letter. They shared their views on economic policies.