Al Roth

The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them—And They Shape Us

by Tim Sullivan  · 6 Jun 2016  · 252pp  · 73,131 words

seniors, until popular girls started getting invitations to join at the start of their junior, then sophomore, then freshman year. (According to market design guru Al Roth, one theory holds that the term “fraternity/sorority rush,” which today describes the process by which sororities and fraternities recruit new members, comes from the

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-life exchanges is an imprecise, iterative process in which many of us find ourselves as experimental subjects. The Complicated Job of Engineering Matches Market designer Al Roth likes to use a bridge-building metaphor to explain the contrast between his own work and that of design pioneers like Shapley. Suppose you want

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: something like one or two donor-recipient exchanges for every ten thousand cases languishing on the transplant wait list. The market lacked what market designer Al Roth calls thickness—the presence of enough “traders” at the kidney swap to make it worth searching for a partner. It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy

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gives to C, C gives to A—a set of swaps that still requires six adjacent operating rooms. (This might be enough: an analysis by Al Roth and his colleagues found that going as far as a three-way exchange may get you as much as 99 percent of the way toward

The Middleman Economy: How Brokers, Agents, Dealers, and Everyday Matchmakers Create Value and Profit

by Marina Krakovsky  · 14 Sep 2015  · 270pp  · 79,180 words

Bridge would, the Insulator steps in when it’s best to keep the two parties apart. These ideas about insulation are very familiar to economist Al Roth, who won the 2012 Nobel Prize for his extraordinarily practical work in applying game theory to the design of real-world markets. Roth says that

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Crabtree’s story from a young experimental economist named Lucas Coffman, an assistant professor at Ohio State University who had been a doctoral student of Al Roth’s. Coffman has more than a passing interest in sports. By his own account, he follows football and baseball and basketball more than he should

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up to brag on his behalf, mentioning his recent promotion. He came out looking not only more accomplished, but more modest, too. Similarly, the morning Al Roth won the Nobel Prize and Stanford held a press conference, it was not Roth who explained what made his work so impressive, but the department

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), 37–46. 6.William Finlay and James E. Coverdill, Headhunters: Matchmaking in the Labor Market (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2002), 33. 7.Interview with Al Roth, July 25, 2011. 8.Jeffrey Pfeffer, Christina T. Fong, Robert B. Cialdini, “Overcoming the Self-promotion Dilemma: Interpersonal Attraction and Extra Help as a Consequence

Automate This: How Algorithms Came to Rule Our World

by Christopher Steiner  · 29 Aug 2012  · 317pp  · 84,400 words

ARBITER OF LIFE Sitting in an audience in 2004, Tuomas Sandholm, the creator of poker algorithms, found himself riveted by a speaker and his topic. Al Roth, a Harvard economist, was talking to the World Congress of the Game Theory Society in Marseille, France. Roth was explaining the challenges facing kidney transplant

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creates more available matches, at least theoretically. But throwing thousands of pairs into a bucket and attempting to sort them out efficiently is complicated. Before Al Roth started tinkering with new methods for matching pairs, they were put together by hand with little more than a spreadsheet. If a match wasn’t

A Beautiful Mind

by Sylvia Nasar  · 11 Jun 1998  · 998pp  · 211,235 words

possible coalition. To be eligible to win, however, the coalition partners had to commit in advance to a given division of the winnings. According to Al Roth, a leading experimental economist, the experiment yielded two insights that proved highly influential.18 For one thing, it drew attention to information possessed by participants

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speakers represented two generations of leading game-theory researchers, mostly theorists and experimentalists, among them John Harsanyi, Reinhard Selten, Robert Aumann, David Kreps, Ariel Rubinstein, Al Roth, Paul Milgrom, and Eric Maskin. The topic? Rationality and Equilibrium in Strategic Interaction. Most of the participants took it for granted that they were performing

The Elements of Choice: Why the Way We Decide Matters

by Eric J. Johnson  · 12 Oct 2021  · 362pp  · 103,087 words

one of the first localities to use school choice for public schools. In 2003 it reached out to Harvard University economist (and future Nobel laureate) Al Roth. Along with Atila Abdulkadiroğlu and Pathak Parag, he designed a system intended to encourage families and schools to make good choices and to get kids

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have done interviews by phone and email with several researchers for background and to test out ideas. These include Irwin Levin, Gerald Häubl, Rick Larrick, Al Roth, and Scott Halpern. These conversations added clarity and color. I have tried to highlight the contributions of co-authors of my prior work throughout the

Cogs and Monsters: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be

by Diane Coyle  · 11 Oct 2021  · 305pp  · 75,697 words

more or less free-to-use National Health Service (NHS), agree. Here, though, the difference between values and processes is relevant. Economics Nobel Prize winner Al Roth—someone who has given much thought to what he describes as ‘repugnant’ markets—designed a kidney exchange; no money changes hands, yet it is organised

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Marketplace, people are able to satisfy highly specific individual needs or preferences. In some cases, no money is exchanged, not only in the case of Al Roth’s famous kidney exchange described earlier, but also now the numerous, non-profit sharing economy platforms exchanging unwanted goods or sharing equipment, or dogs. As

Markets, State, and People: Economics for Public Policy

by Diane Coyle  · 14 Jan 2020  · 384pp  · 108,414 words

big platforms, the potential improvement in economic efficiency from these technologies—smartphones, pervasive broadband, and algorithms—could be significant. Box 2.9. Matching markets Economist Al Roth won the Nobel Prize (along with Lloyd Shapley) for his work on algorithms for acceptance markets. The best known is the deferred acceptance rule, which

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General Richard Green (2005), “Electricity and Markets,” Oxford Review of Economic Policy 21, no. 1. John McMillan (2002), Reinventing the Bazaar, W. W. Norton & Co. Al Roth (2015), Who Gets What and Why?, William Collins. Jean Tirole (2018), Economics for the Common Good, Princeton University Press, chapters 13, 14, and 16. CHAPTER

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions

by Dan Ariely  · 19 Feb 2007  · 383pp  · 108,266 words

mistakes of judgment can aggregate in the market, sparking a scenario in which, much like an earthquake, no one has any idea what is happening. (Al Roth, an economist at Harvard, and one of the smartest people I know, has summarized this issue by saying, “In theory, there is no difference between

Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness

by Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein  · 7 Apr 2008  · 304pp  · 22,886 words

because of it? The Boston system is still in place around the country, though not in Boston. In 2003 a group of economists led by Al Roth at Harvard pointed out these problems to initially skeptical Boston school administrators. After letting the economists poke around in the internal data, the administrators became