Alvin E. Roth
Encyclopedia
Alvin E. "Al" Roth is an American economist
Economist
An economist is a professional in the social science discipline of economics. The individual may also study, develop, and apply theories and concepts from economics and write about economic policy...

 currently serving as the George Gund
George Gund (philanthropist)
George Gund II was an American banker, business executive, and real estate investor who lived in Cleveland, Ohio in the early and middle part of the 20th century...

 Professor of Economics and Business Administration at Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School
Harvard Business School is the graduate business school of Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts, United States and is widely recognized as one of the top business schools in the world. The school offers the world's largest full-time MBA program, doctoral programs, and many executive...

. Roth has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory
Game theory
Game theory is a mathematical method for analyzing calculated circumstances, such as in games, where a person’s success is based upon the choices of others...

, market design and experimental economics
Experimental economics
Experimental economics is the application of experimental methods to study economic questions. Data collected in experiments are used to estimate effect size, test the validity of economic theories, and illuminate market mechanisms. Economic experiments usually use cash to motivate subjects, in...

.

Biography

Al Roth graduated from Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 in 1971 with a degree in Operations research
Operations research
Operations research is an interdisciplinary mathematical science that focuses on the effective use of technology by organizations...

. He then moved to Stanford University
Stanford University
The Leland Stanford Junior University, commonly referred to as Stanford University or Stanford, is a private research university on an campus located near Palo Alto, California. It is situated in the northwestern Santa Clara Valley on the San Francisco Peninsula, approximately northwest of San...

, receiving both his masters and PhD in Operations research there in 1973 and 1974 respectively.

After leaving Stanford, Roth went on to teach at the University of Illinois until 1982. He then served as the Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Economics at the University of Pittsburgh
University of Pittsburgh
The University of Pittsburgh, commonly referred to as Pitt, is a state-related research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. Founded as Pittsburgh Academy in 1787 on what was then the American frontier, Pitt is one of the oldest continuously chartered institutions of...

 until 1998, when he left to join the faculty at Harvard
Harvard University
Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 where he has remained ever since.

Roth is an Alfred P. Sloan fellow
Sloan Fellowship
The Sloan Research Fellowships are awarded annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation since 1955 to "provide support and recognition to early-career scientists and scholars". This is distinct from the Sloan Fellows in business....

, a Guggenheim Fellow
Guggenheim Fellowship
Guggenheim Fellowships are American grants that have been awarded annually since 1925 by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation to those "who have demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts." Each year, the foundation makes...

, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
American Academy of Arts and Sciences
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences is an independent policy research center that conducts multidisciplinary studies of complex and emerging problems. The Academy’s elected members are leaders in the academic disciplines, the arts, business, and public affairs.James Bowdoin, John Adams, and...

. He is also a member of the National Bureau of Economic Research
National Bureau of Economic Research
The National Bureau of Economic Research is an American private nonprofit research organization "committed to undertaking and disseminating unbiased economic research among public policymakers, business professionals, and the academic community." The NBER is well known for providing start and end...

 (NBER) and the Econometric Society
Econometric Society
The Econometric Society is an international society for the advancement of economic theory in its relation with statistics and mathematics. It was founded on December 29, 1930 at the Stalton Hotel in Cleveland, Ohio....

.

Work

Roth has worked in the fields of game theory, market design and experimental economics. In particular, he helped redesign mechanisms for selecting medical residents
Residency (medicine)
Residency is a stage of graduate medical training. A resident physician or resident is a person who has received a medical degree , Podiatric degree , Dental Degree and who practices...

, New York City high schools
New York City Department of Education
The New York City Department of Education is the branch of municipal government in New York City that manages the city's public school system. It is the largest school system in the United States, with over 1.1 million students taught in more than 1,700 separate schools...

 and Boston primary schools
Boston Public Schools
Boston Public Schools is a school district serving the city of Boston, Massachusetts, United States.-Leadership:The district is led by a Superintendent, hired by the Boston School Committee, a seven-member school board appointed by the Mayor after approval by a nominating committee of specified...

.

Case Study in Game theory

Roth's 1984 paper on the National Resident Matching Program (NRMP) highlighted the system designed by John Stalknaker and F. J. Mullen in 1952. The system was built on theoretical foundations independently introduced by David Gale
David Gale
David Gale was a distinguished American mathematician and economist. He was a Professor Emeritus at University of California, Berkeley, affiliated with departments of Mathematics, Economics, and Industrial Engineering and Operations Research...

 and Lloyd Shapley
Lloyd Shapley
Lloyd Stowell Shapley is a distinguished American mathematician and economist. He is a Professor Emeritus at University of California, Los Angeles, affiliated with departments of Mathematics and Economics...

 in 1962. Roth proved that the NRMP was both stable and strategy-proof
Strategyproof
In game theory, an asymmetric game where players have private information is said to be strategyproof if there is no incentive for any of the players to lie about or hide their private information from the other players....

 for unmarried residents but deferred to future study the question of how to match married couples efficiently.

In 1999 Roth redesigned the matching program to ensure stable matches even with married couples.

New York City public school system

Roth later helped design the market to match New York City public school students to high schools as incoming freshmen. Previously, the school district had students mail in a list of their five preferred schools in rank order, then mailed a photocopy of that list to each of the five schools. As a result, schools could tell whether or not students had listed them as their first choice. This meant that some students really had a choice of one school, rather than five. It also meant that students had an incentive to hide their true preferences. Roth and his colleagues designed an incentive-compatible
Incentive compatibility
In mechanism design, a process is said to be incentive-compatible if all of the participants fare best when they truthfully reveal any private information asked for by the mechanism. As an illustration, voting systems which create incentives to vote dishonestly lack the property of incentive...

 mechanism and presented it to the school board in 2003. The school board accepted the measure as the method of selection for New York City public school students.

Boston's public school system

Working with Tayfun Sonmez, Roth presented a similar measure to Boston's public school system in 2004. Here the Boston system gave so much preference to an applicant's first choice that were a student to not receive her first or second choice it was likely that she would not be matched with any school on her list and be administratively assigned to schools which had vacancies. Some Boston parents had informally recognized this feature of the system and developed detailed lists in order to avoid having their children administratively assigned. Boston held public hearings on the school selection system and finally settled on a modified version of the algorithm used to match New York City students.

New England Program for Kidney Exchange

Roth is also a founder of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange along with Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver, a registry and matching program that pairs compatible kidney donors and recipients.

The program was designed to operate primarily through the use of two pairs of incompatible donors. Each donor was incompatible with her partner but could be compatible with another donor who was likewise incompatible with his partner. Francis Delmonico, a transplant surgeon at Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School
Harvard Medical School is the graduate medical school of Harvard University. It is located in the Longwood Medical Area of the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, Massachusetts....

, describes a typical situation,
Because the National Organ Transplant Act
The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984
The National Organ Transplant Act , approved October 19, 1984 and amended in 1988 and 1990, outlawed the sale of human organs and provided for the establishment of the Task Force on Organ Transplantation; authorized the Department of Health and Human Services to make grants for the planning,...

 forbids the creation of binding contracts for organ transplant, steps in the procedure had to be performed roughly simultaneously. Two pairs of patients means four operating rooms and four surgical teams acting in concert with each other. Hospitals and professionals in the transplant community felt that the practical burden of three pairwise exchanges would be too large. While the original theoretical work discovered that an "efficient frontier" would be reached with exchanges between three pairs of otherwise incompatible donors, it was determined that the goals of the program would not be sacrificed by limiting exchanges to pairs of incompatible donors. Recently, however, a twelve party (six donors and six recipients) kidney exchange was performed in April 2008.

Books

Roth is the author of numerous scholarly articles, books and other publications. A selection:
  • 1979. Axiomatic Models of Bargaining, Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems. Springer Verlag.
  • 1985. Game-Theoretic Models of Bargaining, (editor)Cambridge University Press, 1985.
  • 1987. Laboratory Experimentation in Economics: Six Points of View. (editor) Cambridge University Press. (Chinese translation, 2008)
  • 1988. The Shapley Value: Essays in Honor of Lloyd S. Shapley. (editor) Cambridge University Press.
  • 1990. Two-Sided Matching: A Study in Game-Theoretic Modeling and Analysis. With M. Sotomayor. Cambridge University Press.
  • 1995. Handbook of Experimental Economics. Edited with J.H. Kagel. Princeton University Press.
  • 2001. Game Theory in the Tradition of Bob Wilson. Edited with Bengt Holmstrom and Paul Milgrom.

Journal articles

Roth has published over 70 articles in peer reviewed journals. According to Scopus
Scopus
Scopus, officially named SciVerse Scopus, is a bibliographic database containing abstracts and citations for academic journal articles. It covers nearly 18,000 titles from over 5,000 international publishers, including coverage of 16,500 peer-reviewed journals in the scientific, technical, medical,...

, the most widely cited have been:

External links

The source of this article is wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.  The text of this article is licensed under the GFDL.
 
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