Alvin Eliot Roth (born December 18, 1951) is an American academic. He is the Craig and Susan McCaw professor of economics at Stanford University and the Gund professor of economics and business administration emeritus at Harvard University.Al Roth's Game Theory, Experimental Economics, and Market Design Page (accessed 2013-27-04). He was president of the American Economic Association in 2017.Past Presidents
Roth has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics, and is known for his emphasis on applying economic theory to solutions for "real-world" problems.Susan Adams, "Un-Freakonomics: A Harvard professor uses economics to save lives, assign doctors and get kids into the right high school." Forbes, August 9, 2010.Leon Neyfakh, "The Matchmaker: The Harvard economist who stopped just studying the world and began trying to fix it", The Boston Globe, April 3, 2011.
In 2012, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design".The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2012, Nobel Prize official site (accessed 2012-10-15).
Biography
Alvin Roth was born in the New York City borough of Queens to Ernest and Lillian Roth, who were both public high school teachers and Jewish. Roth followed his brother Ted Roth in attending the Science Honors Program at Columbia University, which offered classes to junior high school and high school students on Saturdays and entered Columbia's engineering school in the Fall of 1968 when he was 16, without having graduated from high school.
Roth graduated from Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1971 with a bachelor's degree in Operations Research. He then moved to Stanford University, receiving both his Master's and PhD also in Operations Research there in 1973 and 1974 respectively.Niklas Magnusson and Josiane Kremer, Roth, Shapley Win Nobel Economics Prize for Matching Theory", Bloomberg.com, October 15, 2012.
After leaving Stanford, Roth went on to teach at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, which he left in 1982 to become the Andrew W. Mellon professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh. While at Pittsburgh, he also served as a fellow in the university's Center for Philosophy of Science and as a professor in the Katz Graduate School of Business. In 1998, Roth left to join the faculty at HarvardAlvin E. Roth Biography Faculty and Research. Accessed on June 6, 2008 where he remained until deciding to return to Stanford in 2012.Katherine Mangan, "Stanford Lures Alvin Roth and 2 Other Economists From Harvard", The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 18, 2012. In 2013 he became a full member of the Stanford faculty and took emeritus status at Harvard.
Roth is an Alfred P. Sloan fellow, a Guggenheim fellow, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation R Fellows Page . John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Accessed on July 6, 2008Members of the Academy of Arts & Sciences (October 2007). American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Accessed on July 6, 2008 He is also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Econometric Society.Fellows of the Econometric Society (March 2008). Econometric Society. Accessed on July 6, 2008Alvin E. Roth. National Bureau of Economic Research. Accessed on July 6, 2008 In 2013, Roth, Shapley, and David Gale won a Golden Goose Award for their work on market design. A collection of Roth's papers is housed at the Rubenstein Library at Duke University.
Academic work In October 2012, Roth was the co-recipient of the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, together with Lloyd S. Shapley, The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences stated that it awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize jointly to Roth and Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design."
The citation went on to say:
Market design Roth made several fundamental contributions to market design since the 1990s on topics including kidney exchange, school choice, medical residency match, entry-level job market for economists and other markets. Describing the dynamism of market design, Roth suggests that "As the conditions of the market change, the behavior of people change and that causes old rules to be discarded and new rules to be created."Alvin Roth. https://www.ubs.com/microsites/nobel-perspectives/en/laureates/alvin-roth.html in UBS Nobel Perspectives interview, 2012.
Roth is also an active blogger on topics related to market design: he manages the Market Design Blog.
Kidney exchange
Roth did foundational theoretical work on kidney exchange along with Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver, and later on with Itai Ashlagi and other co-authors. Roth, along with Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver, were one of the first to note the similarity between kidney exchange and one-sided matching described by Lloyd Shapley and Herbert Scarf. They adapted David Gale's top-trading-cycle algorithm to allow the one-sided matching with waiting-list options, and proposed efficient and incentive-compatible chain selection rules. The same team subsequently showed that efficient outcomes with good incentive properties can be found in computationally efficient ways when only pairwise kidney exchanges are considered.
New England Program for Kidney Exchange
Roth is a co-founder of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange, a registry and matching program that pairs compatible kidney donors and recipients.
The program was designed to operate primarily through the use of two pairs of incompatible donors. Each donor was incompatible with her partner but could be compatible with another donor who was likewise incompatible with his partner. Francis Delmonico, a transplant surgeon at Harvard Medical School, describes a typical situation,
Because the National Organ Transplant Act forbids the creation of binding contracts for organ transplant, steps in the procedure had to be performed roughly simultaneously. Two pairs of patients means four operating rooms and four surgical teams acting in concert with each other. Hospitals and professionals in the transplant community felt that the practical burden of three pairwise exchanges would be too large. While the original theoretical work discovered that an "efficient frontier" would be reached with exchanges between three pairs of otherwise incompatible donors, it was determined that the goals of the program would not be sacrificed by limiting exchanges to pairs of incompatible donors. A 12-party (6 donors and 6 recipients) kidney exchange was performed in April 2008.
Global Kidney Exchange Along with his long-time collaborator Dr Michael Rees, Roth introduced the idea of global kidney exchange. Global kidney exchange is kidney exchange conducted between patients from different countries. Such exchange is especially beneficial when the cost of hemodialysis in the developed world exceeds that of kidney transplantation by an amount greater than the combined cost of transplantation, subsequent immunosuppression, and medical follow-up for a donor–recipient pair from a developing world country. Roth, Rees and other co-authors proposed the implementation of global kidney exchange programs that leverage the cost savings achieved through earlier transplantation over dialysis for the developed-world kidney transplant candidates to fund the cost of kidney exchange between developed-world patient–donor pairs with immunological barriers and developing-world patient–donor pairs with financial barriers. The first such exchange was carried out in 2015.
Roth and coauthors have continued to contribute to ethical discussions and to practical operational designs that can facilitate global kidney chains. In 2021, a kidney exchange was conducted between Israel and the UAE where Roth and his colleagues like Dr Michael Rees and Itai Ashlagi played key roles.
School choice Roth helped redesign mechanisms for matching students to New York City high schools and Boston primary schools.
New York City public school system Roth later helped design the market to match New York City public school students to high schools as incoming freshmen. Previously, the school district had students mail in a list of their five preferred schools in rank order, then mailed a photocopy of that list to each of the five schools. As a result, schools could tell whether or not students had listed them as their first choice. This meant that some students really had a choice of one school, rather than five. It also meant that students had an incentive to hide their true preferences. Roth and his colleagues Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Parag Pathak proposed David Gale and Lloyd Shapley's incentive-compatible student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm to the school board in 2003. The school board accepted the measure as the method of selection for New York City public school students.Alvin E. Roth (2005). "The New York City High School Match" (or here ). With Atila Abdulkadiroglu and Parag A. Pathak. in: American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings 95. (2): 364–367.
Boston's public school system Working with Atila Abdulkadiroğlu, Parag A. Pathak, and Tayfun Sonmez, Roth presented a similar measure to Boston's public school system in 2003. Here the Boston system gave so much preference to an applicant's first choice that were a student to not receive her first or second choice, it was likely that she would not be matched with any school on her list and be administratively assigned to schools which had vacancies. Gareth Cook (2003). "School assignment flaws detailed: Two economists study problem, offer relief" In: The Boston Globe 2003-9-12. Some Boston parents had informally recognized this feature of the system and developed detailed lists in order to avoid having their children administratively assigned.Alvin E. Roth. (2007). "Robert Rosenthal Memorial Lecture 2007: What Have we Learned from Market Design?" Flash, Web Video. Boston: Boston University.Roth noted that the West Zone Parents Group at Yahoo Groups, among others, devoted considerable time and effort to estimating capacity for schools in the area and disseminated recommendations on the basis of those estimates. Boston held public hearings on the school selection system and finally in 2005 settled on David Gale and Lloyd Shapley's incentive-compatible student-proposing deferred acceptance algorithm.
National Medical Residency Match
Roth's 1984 paper on the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) highlighted the system designed by John Stalknaker and F. J. Mullen in 1952. The system was built on theoretical foundations independently introduced by David Gale and Lloyd Shapley in 1962.D. Gale and L. S. Shapley: "College Admissions and the Stability of Marriage", American Mathematical Monthly 69, 9–14, 1962. Roth proved that the mechanism used in NRMP was both stable and strategy-proof for unmarried medical residents but deferred to future study the question of how to match married couples efficiently.Alvin E. Roth (1984). "The Evolution of the Labor Market for Medical Interns and Residents: A Case Study in Game Theory" . In: Journal of Political Economy 92: 991–1016. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.