- Person
- Alvin Roth
- Lived
- b. 1951
- Field
- Economics, market design
- From
- American
The story
Alvin Roth was born in Queens, New York, in 1951 to Jewish parents who were both public high school teachers. A game theorist trained at Columbia and Stanford, he spent decades studying matching markets, where prices alone cannot decide who gets what, and in the 1990s redesigned the clearinghouse that places new American doctors in hospital residencies.
Many people with kidney failure have a relative or friend willing to give them a kidney, but the donor is often incompatible because of blood type or tissue type. Buying and selling organs has been illegal in the United States since 1984. Roth had used kidneys as a classroom example of goods that must be traded without money, and when the first kidney exchange in the United States took place in 2000, in which two incompatible pairs swapped donors, he saw that the idea could work on a large scale.
In 2002 Roth began working with the economists Tayfun Sönmez and Utku Ünver on an algorithm that could search a pool of incompatible patient-donor pairs for the best set of swaps, and link those swaps with donors who had no particular intended recipient. Their paper was published in 2004. The transplant surgeon Frank Delmonico was the one doctor who answered their draft, and Roth helped him set up the New England Program for Kidney Exchange.
Roth and his colleagues then worked with other networks, including the Alliance for Paired Donation founded by the surgeon Michael Rees, to develop chains of transplants started by a single altruistic donor and carried out over time rather than all at once. The first such non-simultaneous chain was reported in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2009. Long chains can link many patients who would otherwise wait years for a deceased-donor kidney.
When Roth shared the 2012 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences with Lloyd Shapley, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences cited his help in redesigning institutions that match organ donors with patients. In his Nobel autobiography Roth wrote that kidney exchange had helped thousands of patients with incompatible donors receive life-saving compatible kidneys.
Why it matters
Kidney exchange programmes built on Roth's matching designs let patients receive transplants that their own willing donors could not give them.
About Alvin Roth
Economist who designs matching systems that save lives: kidney exchanges that have given thousands of patients transplants, the match for new doctors and fairer school choice. Nobel Prize 2012.
Sources
- Alvin E. Roth, Biographical NobelPrize.org
- Press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2012 NobelPrize.org
- Kidney paired donation Wikipedia
- Alvin E. Roth Wikipedia
Another act of tikkun olam. This is part of tikkun olam, the Jewish idea of repairing the world, and every one of us can add to it.