Alvin E. Roth

The simple model of a bridge is great, and you could not build a bridge without understanding it well. But if you're actually building the bridge, you need to know the site. A lot of economics is like that: When prices go up, demand is gonna go down. You can't forget that and run your economy. But it's not the only thing you need to know. ”

Maybe we could think of science as being like a nuclear chain reaction in which people and ideas bounce off each other, and if critical mass is reached, a new field is formed. ”

Market design is about understanding the details of markets in sufficient detail so that we can help fix them when they are broken. ”

I don't think I could have thought of any place other than Stanford to leave Harvard for. ”

It turns out that a Nobel is also followed by other recognitions, and perhaps the most unexpected of these is that the Japan Karate Association in Tokyo has now made me an honorary 7th-degree black belt, something that, given my athletic abilities, is even more unimaginable than being an Economic Sciences Laureate. ”

When you're doing kidney transplants, you have to find out who can exchange kidneys with whom, doing blood tests to make sure it's true. You can't just work on the preliminary data. Then you have to organize the logistics. ”

In a paper called 'The Economics of Matching: Stability and Incentives,' I showed that there were not any mechanisms that would always both produce a stable matching and make it completely safe for all firms and workers to reveal their true preferences. ”

My opportunity to design school choice systems began in 2003 with a phone call from Jeremy Lack at the New York City Department of Education. He knew of my work on the medical match and wondered if similar efforts might help reorganize the dysfunctional, congested system then used to match students to high schools. ”

I've always been interested in using mathematics to make the world work better. ”

My Ph.D. is in operations research. I was interested in making things work better and using mathematics to help do that. So operations research is what I studied as an undergraduate and graduate student. ”