Alvin Roth

Alvin Roth is Craig and Susan McCaw Professor of Economics at Stanford University and a 2012 Nobel Laureate in Economic Sciences (shared with Lloyd Shapley). He is the founder of market design — the application of economic theory and mechanism design to build and improve real-world markets, particularly matching markets where prices alone do not clear the market. His most famous applied work redesigned the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), the algorithm that assigns U.S. medical graduates to hospital residency programs, making it stable and strategy-proof. He also helped design the Boston and New York City public school choice systems to make them more efficient and harder for participants to game. Roth's work on kidney exchange — designing multi-hospital systems that allow paired kidney exchange between incompatible donor-patient pairs — has helped save thousands of lives by enabling compatible trades that wouldn't otherwise occur. His book "Who Gets What and Why" makes market design accessible to a general audience. Roth also studies repugnant markets — transactions that many people find ethically objectionable even when economically efficient.