A Queens childhood in the age of Sputnik
Alvin Eliot Roth was born on December 18, 1951, in the New York City borough of Queens. His parents, Ernest and Lillian Roth, were Jewish and were both public high school teachers of secretarial studies, teaching typing and shorthand to young women who would go straight into office work after school. Roth grew up as science became fashionable in the United States after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957; one of his early memories is listening in his first-grade classroom to a radio broadcast of an American satellite launch. That, and his older brother Ted’s conviction that the two of them should become scientists, convinced him that science could be a career.
Following Ted, he attended Columbia University’s Science Honors Program, which offered Saturday classes to gifted junior high and high school students. He thrived there, and in the autumn of 1968, at 16 and without finishing high school, he entered Columbia’s engineering school. He spent many hours practising Shotokan karate, which taught him he could work harder than he had thought, and studied operations research, which promised to bring scientific methods to the organisation of human activity.
Game theory and experiments
After graduating from Columbia in 1971, Roth went to Stanford University, where he earned a master’s degree in 1973 and a PhD in operations research in 1974 under Robert Wilson, a future Nobel laureate. Inspired by a class taught by Michael Maschler, a visiting game theorist from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, he wrote his dissertation on cooperative game theory, the mathematics of how groups of people form agreements. Before leaving California he visited Lloyd Shapley, one of the founders of the field, whose ideas would shape his career.
In 1974 he joined the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. There, with the social psychologist Keith Murnighan, he began running laboratory experiments to test the predictions of game theory, developing experimental designs that are still used and helping to build the new field of experimental economics. At Illinois he also met his wife, Emilie, a cognitive psychologist, while folk dancing; they married in 1977. Their sons, Aaron and Ben, were born in 1984 and 1991. In 1982 the couple moved to Pittsburgh, where Roth became a professor of economics at the University of Pittsburgh.
Markets without prices
Around 1980 Roth became fascinated by a puzzle. In many important markets, prices alone cannot match buyers and sellers, because you cannot simply choose what you want; you also have to be chosen. New doctors and hospitals, students and schools, and workers and employers all meet in such matching markets. Studying the clearinghouse that had matched American medical graduates to hospital residencies since the early 1950s, Roth discovered that its procedure was essentially the deferred acceptance algorithm that David Gale and Lloyd Shapley had described in a 1962 paper. That algorithm produces stable matches, in which no doctor and hospital would both rather be paired with each other than with their assigned partners.
Roth showed why stability mattered so much in practice. Before the clearinghouse, competition had driven hospitals to make offers to medical students earlier and earlier, eventually two years before graduation, with exploding deadlines that left students no time to compare options. Roth documented the same kind of unravelling in more than a dozen other markets, and compared regional medical matching schemes in Britain, some of which survived and some of which failed, to show that those producing stable matches were the ones that lasted. This combination of theory, history, laboratory experiments and real-world evidence became the foundation of a new field: market design.
Redesigning the match for new doctors
In the 1990s the National Resident Matching Program, which places tens of thousands of new American doctors in their first hospital jobs, faced a crisis of confidence. Among the problems was the growing number of medical couples who needed two jobs in the same city, a situation in which, as Roth himself had proved, a stable match may not even exist. The programme’s director asked Roth to lead a redesign. Working closely with the matching expert Elliott Peranson, he developed a new algorithm that handled couples and other complications while keeping it safe for applicants to rank jobs according to their true preferences.
The match adopted the Roth–Peranson algorithm in 1997, and it continues to run the main residency match. It has since been adopted by many other clearinghouses, for more senior medical fellowships and for other professions, mostly in health care. Roth later helped gastroenterologists repair their own fellowship market, and studied markets as varied as law clerks for judges, eBay auctions and the job market for new economists, for which he helped design a signalling system.
Fairer school choice
In 2003 a call from the New York City Department of Education brought Roth into public schools. New York’s system for assigning tens of thousands of students a year to high schools was congested and chaotic, and many students ended up at schools they had not chosen. With Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Parag Pathak, Roth adapted the deferred acceptance approach so that families could safely list their real preferences, without having to guess and game the system. New York adopted the new design, and Neil Dorosin, who implemented it, went on to found the nonprofit Institute for Innovation in Public School Choice to spread it to other cities.
Boston followed. Working with Abdulkadiroğlu, Pathak and Tayfun Sönmez, Roth helped show that Boston’s old system rewarded parents who knew how to manipulate their rankings, at the expense of those who simply listed what they wanted. After public hearings, Boston adopted a strategy-proof deferred acceptance system in 2005. Similar designs are now used by many school districts in the United States and abroad.
Kidney exchange
Roth’s most life-saving work began with a classroom example. In teaching a famous model of trading houses without money, he started calling the goods “kidneys” to explain why money could not be used: buying and selling organs had been illegal in the United States since 1984. Many patients who need a kidney have a relative or friend willing to donate, but the donor’s blood or tissue type is incompatible. If two such pairs are each compatible with the other, they can swap donors. The first kidney exchange in the United States took place in 2000 at Rhode Island Hospital.
In 2002 Roth, his former student Utku Ünver and Tayfun Sönmez began designing an algorithm to find such exchanges among many patient-donor pairs, and to link them with donors who had no particular intended recipient. Their paper appeared in 2004. Of the many surgeons who received a draft, only one, Frank Delmonico of Harvard, replied, and Roth helped him form the New England Program for Kidney Exchange. Roth and colleagues, including Itai Ashlagi, later worked with other networks such as the Alliance for Paired Donation, founded by the surgeon Michael Rees, to develop long chains of transplants started by a single altruistic donor, the first of which was reported in 2009. Kidney exchange has since helped thousands of patients receive transplants, and Roth and Rees have championed exchanges across national borders.
Roth has also pushed kidney exchange beyond national borders. With Michael Rees he proposed exchanges between patients in different countries, the first of which took place in 2015, and in 2021 he was involved in a kidney exchange between patients in Israel and the United Arab Emirates. Alongside this work he has studied how to persuade more people to register as organ donors, since the number of people waiting for a kidney keeps growing.
Nobel Prize and public voice
In October 2012 the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences to Roth and Lloyd Shapley for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design. The Academy said Roth had recognised that Shapley’s theory could explain how important real markets work, had confirmed it in experiments, and had helped redesign institutions matching new doctors with hospitals, students with schools and organ donors with patients. The call came at 3:30 in the morning, shortly after he had moved from Harvard, where he had taught since 1998, to Stanford University.
Roth has written for general readers in Who Gets What and Why (2015), which explains how matching markets shape everyday life. He has explored why people find some transactions repugnant, such as paying organ donors, even when both sides might benefit, and with Judd Kessler has run studies on how to encourage more people to register as deceased organ donors. In 2017 he served as president of the American Economic Association.
Roots and legacy
Roth is the son of Jewish parents in Queens, and Marquis Who’s Who in America lists his religion as Jewish. His own account of his life focuses on teachers, students and the problems he has worked on rather than on religion. Among the honours that followed the Nobel, the one he found most unlikely was an honorary seventh-degree black belt from the Japan Karate Association. His sons both became professors, Aaron in computer science at the University of Pennsylvania and Ben at Harvard Business School.
Market design has become a field of its own, taught in economics departments and used by governments and hospitals. Its most moving results are human ones: doctors placed in jobs through a fair and trusted process, children assigned to schools by rules their parents can understand and trust, and thousands of people with kidney failure who received a transplant from a stranger because a well-designed system found a match that would otherwise never have happened.
Sources & further reading
Alvin E. Roth, Biographical, NobelPrize.org · Press release: The Prize in Economic Sciences 2012, NobelPrize.org · Jewish Nobel Prize Winners in Economics, JINFO.ORG · Alvin E. Roth, Wikipedia · Researched from the sources above and checked against them. Spotted an error? Tell us.
A life 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.