Alvin Roth

Stanford University / Harvard University

Alvin Eliot Roth is an American economist at Stanford University who shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Lloyd Shapley for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. Roth transformed economics by engineering real-world markets to improve their efficiency and fairness. He redesigned the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP), which assigns medical graduates to hospital residencies, making it stable and strategy-proof. He created the New England Program for Kidney Exchange to enable kidney transplants for patients with incompatible donors by matching donor–recipient pairs in chains and cycles. Roth and colleagues designed the school choice mechanisms now used in Boston, New York City, and many other cities to assign students to public schools while respecting family preferences. His work demonstrated that applying matching theory and mechanism design to real institutions can save lives, improve education, and allocate resources more equitably. Roth coined the term 'repugnant markets' to analyze social constraints on what can be bought and sold.