16 Quotes by Alvin E. Roth

A lot of people are surprised economists are assisting with kidney exchanges. Exchanges are what economists are good at.

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

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

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

Often people expect I have some touching personal story about kidney disease, but it's actually the mathematics that led me to it.

Experimental economics is about conducting experiments: bringing economics into the laboratory or creating controlled conditions in the field that allow us to understand better what we are seeing in less controlled circumstances.

I gravitated to economics because I'm interested in how people coordinate and collaborate with each other. Economics studies all the ways people get along with each other.

I moved to Harvard in 1998, and in 2000 the first kidney exchange in the United States was done at a hospital nearby. I started to think, 'Gee, there might be a way where I could help organize it, make it easier for people to find kidneys.'

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.