Alvin Eliot "Al" Roth (born December 19, 1951) is an American economist who is

currently a visiting professor at Stanford University as well as George Gund Professor of

Economics and Business Administration (on leave) at Harvard Business School. He plans
to take up a permanent position at Stanford at the beginning of 2013.[1]
Roth has made significant contributions to the fields of game theory, market design and
experimental economics, and is known for his emphasis on applying his economic theory
to solutions for "real-world" problems.[2][3]
In 2012, he won the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences jointly with Lloyd
Shapley "for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design".[4]

Contents

1 Biography
2 Work
o 2.1 Case Study in Game theory
o 2.2 New York City public school system
o 2.3 Boston's public school system
o 2.4 New England Program for Kidney Exchange
3 Personal
4 Books
5 Journal articles
6 See also
7 References

8 External links

Biography
Al Roth, a Jewish American,[5] graduated from Columbia University in 1971 with a
degree in Operations research. He then moved to Stanford University, receiving both his
masters and PhD in Operations research there in 1973 and 1974 respectively.[6]
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 until 1998, when he left to join the faculty at Harvard[7] where he remained
until deciding to return to Stanford in 2012.[8] In 2013 he will become a full member of
the Stanford faculty and will take emeritus status at Harvard.[1]
Roth is an Alfred P. Sloan fellow, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences.[7][9][10] He is also a member of the National Bureau of
Economic Research (NBER) and the Econometric Society.[11][12]

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,
New York City high schools and Boston primary schools.

Case Study in Game theory

Main article: National Resident Matching Program
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 and Lloyd Shapley in
1962.[13] Roth proved that the NRMP was both stable and strategy-proof for unmarried
residents but deferred to future study the question of how to match married couples
efficiently.[14]
In 1999 Roth redesigned the matching program to ensure stable matches even with
married couples.[15][16]

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 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. [17][18]

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.[19][20] 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.[21]

New England Program for Kidney Exchange

See also: Organ transplant

Roth is also a founder of the New England Program for Kidney Exchange along with
Tayfun Sonmez and Utku Unver,[22] a registry and matching program that pairs
compatible kidney donors and recipients.[23]
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, describes a typical situation,
[24]

Kidney exchange enables transplantation where it otherwise could not be accomplished.

It overcomes the frustration of a biological obstacle to transplantation. For instance, a
wife may need a kidney and her husband may want to donate, but they have a blood type
incompatibility that makes donation impossible. Now they can do an exchange. And
we've done them. Now we are working on a three-way exchange.
Because the National Organ Transplant Act 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.[25] 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. A 12-party (six donors and six recipients) kidney exchange was performed in
April 2008.[26][27]

Personal
Roth is married and has two children.[6]

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 Marilda 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.

Christopher Albert "Chris" Sims (born October 21, 1942) is an econometrician and
macroeconomist. He is currently the Harold B. Helms Professor of Economics and
Banking at Princeton University.[2] Together with Thomas Sargent, he won the Nobel
Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 2011.[3] The award cited their "empirical
research on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".[4]

Contents

1 Nobel Memorial Prize and lecture

2 Publications
3 References

4 External links

Nobel Memorial Prize and lecture

On October 10, 2011, Thomas J. Sargent together with Chris Sims was awarded the
Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. The award cited their "empirical research
on cause and effect in the macroeconomy".[5] His Nobel lecture, titled "Statistical
Modeling of Monetary Policy and its Effects" was delivered on December 11, 2011.[6]
Sims earned his A.B. in mathematics from Harvard University magna cum laude in 1963
and his PhD in Economics from Harvard in 1968. He has held teaching positions at

Harvard, University of Minnesota, Yale University and, since 1999, Princeton. Sims is a
Fellow of the Econometric Society (since 1974),[7] a member of the American Academy
of Arts and Sciences (since 1988) and a member of the National Academy of Sciences
(since 1989). In 1995 he was the president of the Econometric Society. He will be the
President-Elect of the American Economic Association in 2011 and then the President of
the American Economic Association in 2012.
Sims published numerous important papers in his areas of research: econometrics and
macroeconomic theory and policy. Among other things, he was one of the main
promoters of the use of vector autoregression in empirical macroeconomics. He has also
advocated Bayesian statistics, arguing for its power in formulating and evaluating
economic policies.
He also helped develop the fiscal theory of the price level and the theory of rational
inattention.
Translating his work into everyday language, Sims said it provided a technique to assess
the direction of causality in central bank monetary policy. It confirmed the theories of
monetarists like Milton Friedman that shifts in the money supply affect inflation.
However, it also showed that causality went both ways. Variables like interest rates and
inflation also led to changes in the money supply.[8]

Publications

Sims, Christopher (January 1980) [1977 (Working paper)]