Alvin E. Roth
Alvin E. Roth
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Full Name and Common Aliases
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Alvin Eli Cohen Roth is commonly referred to as Al Roth.
Birth and Death Dates
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Born on December 18, 1951, in New York City, USA
Nationality and Profession(s)
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American Economist, Nobel Laureate
Early Life and Background
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Alvin E. Roth was born into a family that valued education and intellectual pursuits. His father, a lawyer, and his mother, an accountant, encouraged Alvin's curiosity from an early age. Growing up in New York City, Alvin developed a keen interest in economics, which would later become the focus of his academic career.
Major Accomplishments
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Alvin E. Roth is widely recognized for his groundbreaking work in game theory and experimental economics. His research has had a profound impact on our understanding of market mechanisms, auction design, and matching markets. Some of his notable contributions include:
Developing the concept of "kidney exchange" to increase the number of living donor kidney transplants
Designing the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) in the United States
Creating a framework for evaluating the efficiency of market mechanismsNotable Works or Actions
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Alvin E. Roth has authored numerous papers and books on game theory, experimental economics, and auction design. Some of his notable works include:
"The Shapley Value: Essays in Honor of Lloyd S. Shapley" (1988)
"Two-Sided Matching: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis" (1992)
"Who Wants to Marry a Rockefeller? Experiments in Pure and Applied Game Theory" (2005)
Impact and Legacy
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Alvin E. Roth's work has had far-reaching implications for various fields, including economics, medicine, and education. His research on market mechanisms has informed policy decisions, improved auction design, and increased the efficiency of kidney transplantation. As a result of his contributions to game theory and experimental economics, Alvin E. Roth was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2012.
Why They Are Widely Quoted or Remembered
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Alvin E. Roth is widely quoted for his insights on market mechanisms, auction design, and matching markets. His work has been featured in prominent media outlets, including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and NPR. As a Nobel laureate and leading expert in game theory and experimental economics, Alvin E. Roth's quotes and opinions are highly regarded for their depth of understanding and relevance to contemporary economic issues.
Quotes by Alvin E. Roth
My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student.
When you're doing kidney transplants, you have to find out who can exchange kidneys with whom, doing blood tests to make sure it's true. You can't just work on the preliminary data. Then you have to organize the logistics.
The simple model of a bridge is great, and you could not build a bridge without understanding it well. But if you're actually building the bridge, you need to know the site. A lot of economics is like that: When prices go up, demand is gonna go down. You can't forget that and run your economy. But it's not the only thing you need to know.
Some say economics has all kinds of good tools and techniques, but it has an absence of interesting problems. I look around the world, and I see all kinds of interesting, important problems we ought to solve with the tools we have.
My opportunity to design school choice systems began in 2003 with a phone call from Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education. He knew of my work on the medical match and wondered if similar efforts might help reorganize the dysfunctional, congested system then used to match students to high schools.
Maybe we could think of science as being like a nuclear chain reaction in which people and ideas bounce off each other, and if critical mass is reached, a new field is formed.
It turns out that a Nobel is also followed by other recognitions, and perhaps the most unexpected of these is that the Japan Karate Association in Tokyo has now made me an honorary 7th-degree black belt, something that, given my athletic abilities, is even more unimaginable than being an Economic Sciences Laureate.
In a paper called 'The Economics of Matching: Stability and Incentives,' I showed that there were not any mechanisms that would always both produce a stable matching and make it completely safe for all firms and workers to reveal their true preferences.
I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'
I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.