Alvin E. Roth
Facts
© The Nobel Foundation. Photo: U. Montan
Alvin E. Roth
The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2012
Born: 18 December 1951, New York, NY, USA
Affiliation at the time of the award: Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA; Harvard Business School, Boston, MA, USA
Prize motivation: “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design”
Prize share: 1/2
Life
Alvin Roth was born in New York, where he also studied at Columbia University. He later continued his education, earning his PhD from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1974. Roth then began work at the University of Illinois and the University of Pittsburgh before moving to Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1998. He returned to Stanford University in 2012. Alvin Roth is married with two children.
Work
How to bring different players together in the best possible way is a key economic problem. Lloyd Shapley studied different matching methods theoretically and, beginning in the 1980s, Alvin Roth used Shapley's theoretical results to explain how markets function in practice. Through empirical studies and lab experiments, Roth demonstrated that stability was critical to successful matching methods. Roth has also developed systems for matching doctors with hospitals, school children with schools, and organ donors with patients.
Nobel Prizes and laureates
Six prizes were awarded for achievements that have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind. The 12 laureates' work and discoveries range from proteins' structures and machine learning to fighting for a world free of nuclear weapons.
See them all presented here.
